The days since returning to Philadelphia are hard to characterize. I am at least alone, which is better than with subversive company. I have some guilt about winter break. I spent much time watching YouTube videos, and reading Reddit. I meditated and slept in all the time and regrounded my drawing practice. The big thing that went undid was ‘serious’ reading, specifically The DuBois Africa book, which is biblical in its lists of tribe names, and a reading from CJ at PAFA that regarded enlightenment thinking in the shadowy wake of the holocaust (The Dialectic of Enlightenment). I did get back into Ulysses on tape (this might be my fourth listen?) and was able to keep pace with Joyce for longer stretches than previously. I found a good YouTube Series about Joyce’s Ulysses called The Omphalos Cafe, and the ‘cafe’ owner, really has anti-academic take, which is fresh and refreshing. Among other things, he quickly touches on why Joyce ‘needed’ to bring in Bloom so soon, what he couldn’t do with Stephen, and how Bloom is the scientific to Stephen’s poetic. Bloom is suggested to be an Uber mensch. The host of the video series touches on Bloom in fact not being Jewish (how rich, for so much speculation rides on this assumption; and it represents an anti-Semitic booby trap for the academician!). Stephen is suggested to a be a young buddha-to-be, and Molly (though not stated by the host of the video explicitly, is a fully realized god being!)
I grew both closer and more distant to my parents. I became heated one night, and kind of fumed thinking about how I look forward to moving all of my things out and being alone and not needing to interact with them. They look forward to the same things. I must admit a projected audience for this blog is kids or grandkids, to sort through. I want to polish it up at some point, leaving in the ideas, while leaning up the verse. I don’t know who with or when if I were to reproduce, but it’s not in the foreseeable future. I can be rude when questioned about it by my parents. It would seem older parents make better parents, and art parents make the best parents. My career it would seem is not copacetic with settling down at all, so I’ll have to postpone until later on. I’ve got about ten grand in the bank now. I’ve whittled down an inheritance over the past seven years; made it stretch, and grow a bit, then plugged into and paid for four years of art school. I’ve seen some real mouth breathers get employed, and I love teaching painting, so I think getting out I might have a shot at getting some real money flowing back in in under ten years. I don’t think I want to sell my paintings yet. I think I want to collect my own paintings, and have them viewable digitally. I’m glad I gave away all of the paintings that I have, but there’s a time an a place, and my inventory is what I’ve traded my bank account for, and my time and years, and all that. My knees are a little bad. I’ll have trouble later on.
Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama is not that good. I don’t think she has a thorough understanding of drawing in relation to the structures of the face. I looked up a handful of British painters today; the group I’m a little familiar with is that outlined in a book called Edward Bawden and his circle. I would like a copy of that book someday later on. I’m all about the Brits when it comes to painting, what a fresh group.
When I got back to Philly, I went to school, not to my apartment. I spent the night there, and took out a couple paintings, and resumed, after the two weeks intermission in Florida, working on them. I was fresh and lucid. The break did me some good.
Also on the break I watched this godawful video called why Hitler hated the Jews. There was antisemitism throughout and large sections from Mein Kamf, but very informative. I hope to read Mein Kamf on my own. Probably there’s a PDF online. Suffice to say Hitler was delusional and the Jews to him were a scapegoat, and the Jewish people and the Romani and all that. Many have traded knowledge and understanding of the holocaust for blissful ignorance, but for some reason I found it very enlightening his inner turmoil nightmare-trip-coming-of-power thoughts. Media literacy; same with reading DuBois. Also on the topic of the holocaust, I’m reading Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil, Eichmann in Israel, which is a blessing in its clarity and force. Famously, this book got Arendt in trouble, and later she regretted the word choice of the title, which she surrendered caused her much unnecessary stress.
I’ve got his neighbor who has a baby with colic. It wails for hours. I feel bad for him; poor kid too.
My drums have yet to arrive in the mail. They are three days late tonight. I should call the service number.
Trump has shut down the government and I don’t understand the situation in full, but we’ve been largely desensitized culturally at this point, myself included. I find it not wroth pursuing, which is how Trump I feel is so capable of moving along in his unique way. It’s divide and conquer, and seems to come naturally to him, in addition to his cultivating it. We have something similar to interwar Germany in disenfranchised and economically unstable populations. Our hegemonic dominance can collapse from within, and with Trump at the helm, it’s ever more plausible. Trump and the majority of his entitled generation are the toxic top of this country, bastards all of them. All I care about is plastics, and I don’t even care enough about it to change my life around avoiding them, I’m part complacent. Hitler blamed the Jews for bringing in basically smut and globalism. Of course I don’t think Jews are the problem. it’s funny about Hitler because what’s his beef but his fellow countrymen buying porn, and taking out loans and buying into individualism. “History is a nightmare I am trying to awaken from”, says Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses.
I’m on this big painting now. Ten feet by eight. It’s a snake on a garden bench. nice painting. People like it. It’s all acrylic, super flat and absorbent. I’ve spent the night with it twice, working in long 14 hour spurts, then a 4 hour sleep, then another 4 when the natural light of the sun comes up, then I’ll go home and cook and shower and sleep for 12 hours and repeat. School starts tomorrow and I won’t be able to do this routine (though I might be able to get in four hours in the morning) The painting might need some body in the form of heavy-body acrylic, and oil has been suggested too. I went in a direct painting approach, and I like it better than if I had projected up a big drawing or something like that. If I paint tomorrow, I’ll not do much, mostly look at it, maybe get supplies and mix a few colors and put them down in shapes. That’s painting I guess. Friday I might have some time on it, and spending the night would open up a long session on Saturday, and spending another night would do Sunday too, and I hope to finish it by then. I’ll have a critique on Monday and it would be cool to get it critiqued.
I got a handful of cartoons that I’m really pleased with. Small and outlined with a rapidograph pen. Good ideas. One’s an old motif of a clown towing his little circus behind him, except in this rendition he’s on the edge of a cliff and doing a hailing a cab gesture. The hail is also like a heil, so I gotta acknowledge that; like, that I’m interested in being bad, like Philip Guston. Sad clown hailing an unseen cab standing on the edge of a cliff, and there’s another clown behind him too, with the same motif, and his little thumb sticking up like a hitchhike, also on the edge of a cliff. I stood on the edge of a set of cliffs in Iceland. It was windy and the ocean in that latitude is wicked. You can tell even from a couple hundred feet up. The grass and rocks beneath our feet were wet with rain and we took pictures by a cliff side. What’s the difference between that and towing around a bullshit ideology? That’s what keeps me up at night.
Actually, that’s really the only good cartoon. I kind of got preoccupied with making a series, and ran out of sparkle I think, but I have eight inked drawings in total.
In Florida I made a few collages, some inked drawings, some mock-ups of business cards, (I think I’m going to do the business cards on the school copy machine, zine style, and gluing a front sheet to a back sheet. I have nicely inked drawings for them, and I think the shitty/hand touched aesthetic will actually represent me and the work that I do much better than if I were to send off my drawings digitally to a company to be printed and cut etc. I’m accustomed to hand-done production- it’s my thing, so that’s the card). I worked a tiny bit on some essays for scholarship consideration, but those need much more work. I compiled a list of over 150 ‘after school’ plans as a project and I now feel free as a bird that they’re annotated. I might publish them here on the blog, because I think it could help out another artist, or might just be funny or interesting to some readers. That’s most of it! Wish me luck on a good semester!
