Anatomy Of A...

 

collage on paper.

I'm lost on the spectrum of socio-political ideology in this country, except for the fact that I know exactly where I am. But where that is won't neatly fit where others would like it to be. In our last episode I outraged the "social justice warrior" (in which social justice mainly boils down to nitpicking over semantics) contingent by having the audacity to speak up and say I've heard the word "bossy" applied to men as well as women, and was not about to be silenced by it. (Not that I get called bossy, really. Plenty of other things, including "spicy" and "fiery" more than that. But who gives a fuck?) Tonight? I've bothered a bunch of rich white transplants, friends of a friend, or clientele, can I really say? Hear hear to the small independent shop owners. I stated that I'd most certainly experienced harassment on the street from upper class white men, so much as any other kind, while they were all trying to maintain that this is only done by poor brown people. They didn't take kindly to hearing that yes, it happens. I noticed an interesting defense being invoked repeatedly by the rich white kids though -- well, if you find projection and speculation interesting. They kept insisting that rich white men were all good and above perving on women, but other men weren't, and kept insisting that anyone who didn't agree was simply "afraid" to say so. Ultimately, in this very solipsistic defense, there was nobody that disagreed with their worldview. Only people who were afraid to admit it. So there you go. Racists who claim to be mind-readers. Both types, the SJW's and the reactionaries who talk as though their racism/classism is something new and daring, are two unaware sides of the same shiny, high-market value coin. But only one side seems to need to believe that their view is the only one so badly, that they'll try to convince us all that any dissenters are just lying out of fear.

Or maybe they just know that fear is such a powerful control mechanism for so many people, it's hard to imagine life without it?

Pencil drawing of a plague doctor mask done today in art therapy group. Would like to do a whole art series revolving around modern plagues, Eric is thinking possibly as an Astral Knife project.

Hallucination vs. Vision (I Really Don't Care)

 

 Today I was finally able to get a scanner that is compatible with Linux, and configure it in just two hours. I don't know why it looks soft focus though. I scanned this at 1200 resolution. I'm sure you're riveted to know that. So here you have it, another "hallucination"/vision-based image, another pandrogyne figure, but so much more than that. On the other hand, "hallucination" implies things aren't really real because they're not perceived by everyone in Assiah-level, hard world reality. Ultimately though, I just like the way "hallucination" sounds, a roller coaster word that makes me think of "imagination" "hallowed" "lucere" "lux" "luz" "lucious" "sin".

Mailer Daemon

#inktober, plus trying to get the idea flow going for this piece...it'll be mixed media, ad it's for a book cover...but I want the piece strong, overall. No, those postage-stamp sized Gunter Brus images aren't part of it. I just glued them in my journal.

I try to be productive. I try to be productive. I try to be productive.
                         Is the sin wasting time or the shame tied in
                          with this incessant need for self-validation
                            in proving I got something done, not
                             a couch potato mouth breather
                              fallen back into fugue state
                               depression hours days
                                weeks lost before you
                                  know it self care stacked
                                   against programmed disdain?

I know in part I'm compulsively making up for lost time, due to my mother/stepfather's non-artistically-oriented life decision making processes when I was a child, and later in my life, my own self-sabotaging self-medicating self-destructive dysfunction. Which is only an "artistic temperament" when it's backed up with talent and vision.

I sank into a pit of despair, a sense of failure the other day when I didn't hear back either way from a gallery I'd gotten an open submission call message from. Beating myself up that because I need to wait for my next check to get a scanner that works with this new Linux thing, I sent my submission as a digital snapshot, it was that or nothing, so unprofessional. such unprofessionalism didn't merit a simple yes or no answer. About 2:30 in the morning after the registration deadline, I got one of those "mailer deamon" emails saying the thing had bounced back from their system, never even been seen. I really need to chill the fuck out. Take a pill. No really I do need to take a pill, it's time for my nightly medication. Here's something I saw today:

Dogcatcher

NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                                        (howls of rage at moon's reflective
                                                                               glare)
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                                      (a dogcatcher swathed in velvet and
                                                                           silver)     
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                                     (whore in white starch knifes whore
                                                                        in stilettoes; )
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                                 (she's buried somewhere near the  
                                                                      edge of page 11. an 8 lined
                                                                           paragraph.)
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                              (just the ones in the streets who are self-
                                                                aware; the rest all think the game brings
                                                                   them theirs.)(someday.)
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                         (the dogs lap at poisoned meat in the alley,
                                                              the crustaceans yearn to crawl back to
                                                                  the sea.)
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                            (dogcatcher licks hisher lips in anticipation
                                                                 clutching a blinding veil a snare)
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                               (or even if they are, the populus too
                                                                  ensnared can't remember how to see
                                                                       it. )
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                            (Dogcatcher-saboteur to memories of this
                                                                  way)

Taina Punk

As Inktober rolls along, here's a drawing of a Taino woman expressing my thoughts on a national celebration of rape, torture, and genocide. But I probably can't explain it as nauseatingly as Columbus does in passages of his own diaries, along with a particularly brutal account from another of his crew of beating and raping a Carib woman.

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/10/14/8-myths-and-atrocities-about-christopher-columbus-and-columbus-day-151653#.VDtC3w6_tTs.twitter

So reading these things I'm only left with a sense of mourning.

*

Inktober drawings made in the past few days:

Last night was joyful, a celebration of creative life, friends, and much to see and do and talk about, both at the (S)he Is Still Her(e) art show and at Tommy turner's film screening. I feel grateful for the way my life is presently, the people and ideas in it. It comes naturally to me to rant, and not quite as much to gush, but  I really feel like I'm in a shimmering translucent bubble that's existence at the moment. It will burst at times and reappear at others, because the Universe is constant flux. But right this second, 12:26 am, I'm content with what is before me.

Alchemical Marriage/(S)HE IS STILL HER(E) art show

This piece,complete, mounted, framed, and ready to go to this art show, in honor of Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge:

https://www.facebook.com/events/698102706933903/700849903325850/?ref=notif&notif_t=plan_mall_activity

Inktober Posts Interrupted By A Psychotic Break

But they're here now.

 Drawn from memory: photo of a Chicano immigrant teen in a zoot suit, 1940's Los Angeles. Seen on a documentary on Spanish PBS regarding Mexican immigration in that time period. Oddly though, it didn't seem to go into the Zoot Suit Riots which you'd think would be a key event in discussing the subject. Or maybe it was in a different part of the program that I missed?

Women with the heads of pigs were once a recurring motif in Irish and English folklore. The stories would be a gender-flipped version of "Beauty & The Beast": woman (or her first-born daughter) is cursed to have the head of a pig, usually for acting mean to a beggar who's actually a sorceress or whatever in disguise; eventually the love of a man breaks the curse and she's transformed into a beautiful woman. Except I drew this one playing atop the corpse of a corporately manufactured pop-star. Don't ask me which one, they all look and sound alike.

If only the power to turn classist jerks into pigs actually existed. Then I bet gentrification, poverty, homelessness and hunger wouldn't. Price me out of my neighborhood? BAM! Now you literally are a capitalist pig.

Rainbow Razor, Primordial Ego Consciousness

Got in very late and very exhausted last night, having joined a dinner party for a friend in town from L.A. So I'm posting two #inktober drawings.

This is in one of those Smash Journals with pre-designed textiles and graphics on some of the pages, so to be clear, I didn't do the rainbow clouds or the writing, the it definitely played into what I decided to put on this page.

Envisioning ego-consciousness separating from subconsciousness as amoebas dividing. Imagine all this occurring in a petri dish called the Universe.

So...is there a term for it when someone you've already written off for mean-spirited actions or say...racism (she typed as if there weren't someone specific in mind) out-does themselves in obnoxiousness and you get word of it? And...although it's still despicable, instead of anger you just feel you have to laugh, not because that's funny, but because they've pushed it to the point of hyperbolic self-parody?

Tempus Fugit

10/3 #inktober drawing. From memory of life, a woman I saw peering out from the back of a subway elevator.

They're tapering down my klonopin. I break the pills in half. I don't mind; it hasn't thrilled me the way it did when I first started with it. With my self-imposed moratorium on self-medication (at least for three months,I'm just riding with no preconception as to where this will lead to.

Inktober

I just found out about #inktober, the challenge to do one ink drawing for every day of October. So here's the first:

Though I've finally found time to write after midnight, meaning it's time to think about a new ink drawing. Artist fun.

Thinking of the phrase "radical acceptance" and wondering if "accept" necessarily means "be passive before". Or is it to sit and observe fear and disgust as though they were on a microscope slide, pondering the anatomy of each without recoiling or charging, and finding the best ways to dismantle and reconstruct them?

October 1st

Something was begun today, in addition to October:

Excerpt from something in progress, which I expect to have finished in the next day or so, as it isn't large.

My father comes into Abuelita's apartment right as dinner is done, with a small blue glass bottle of some sort of flavored sherry that makes me really wish I hadn't self-imposed another 90 days of sobriety on myself last week. I have to explain as much to him when he offers me some, and he sort of looks at me sideways as if I had just told him I was a purple unicorn. But he doesn't push the issue.