Archive for the ‘self portrait’ tag
Fifty, as in fifty
I’ll be honest – There has always been a good part of me that has not expected to live to see 50 for whatever reason.
I’m glad I have, thanks to coffee, bourbon, cigars and scurrilous living.
Now I can start being the old coot I always dreamed of being.
Tags: birthday, daily photo, happiness, self portraitRelated posts
Here you go BearPawly…
Every year Bearpawly on LiveJournal asks his friends to post a picture of themselves in a Santa hat on the 15th of December. Here’s my contribution this year.
Tags: daily photo, santa hat, self portrait, subwayRelated posts
I love you, Big Dummy…
I’m going to take a minute to love my screwed up brain. My brain that, once confronted with the notion that it has to get to work, immediately looks around my environment for something to change. My brain that says stuff like “I can’t possibly work until I:
Download a new version of eeebuntu to install on my net book. and a version of virtual box to run on my mac at work so that I can build the usb stick to put the new system on.
Completely clean and wipe my desk down.
Make the phone calls I meant to make days ago but forgot to do so because the numbers got buried in the piles of paper on my desk which I have just dislodged in order to clean said desk.
Drink third cup of coffee of the day.
Back up files on the eepc in anticipation of new system install.
Glimpse at Feedly, then fall down a browsehole tracking down links about productivity and writing.
Think about buying a book on writing tips from the Paris Review, so that I can be inspired by other writers talking about their struggles to write.
Root through my pockets and bookbag to find any flashdrives I have on my person.
Think about buying a new big flashdrive that will contain all the files I have scattered around my many other smaller flashdrives, thus giving me one thing to worry about keeping track of.
Wonder what I did with the last big flashdrive I bought that I now seem to have misplaced, luckily before I had consolidated all my other flashdrives to it.
Forget about all flashdrives and worry about how hard it is to write in google docs, as opposed to a word processing program.
Open gmail to open google docs to start a new doc for a post.
Attempt to brain storm.
Get up and get a pint of filtered water.
Check Gmail, freak out about number of unanswered mail messages, start responding.
log on to Twitter, tweet about being distracted. Curse twitter for eroding my capacity to concentrate.
Pee from all the coffee and water (actually it was my bladder, not my brain that told me to do that)
realize that I need a picture to go along with this post and haul out my camera to get one. Shoot picture and edit in photoshop.
Upload picture and glance again at Gmail, freak out again.
Talk with student about work, and be shown the link to index.org. Stand on edge of biggest browsehole ever, and slowly back away.
Read interview with Harry Matthews on the Paris Review site, because HM is a favorite writer and is also the author of “20 lines a day”, a book that has helped me write in the past.
Resolve to get back to writing twenty lines a day.
Worry about how to determine twenty lines when there is no fixed screen width on my browser.
Look up vintage portable typewriters on ebay – note that the Hermes Rocket I used to have is available.
Remind myself that I don’t have enough money to be buying portable typewriters that I will never use again.
Decide that I’ve probably done twenty lines or so and feel that I can now sit down to really write about what I meant to.
Oh brain, where would I be without you, you crazy lug.
Tags: anxiety, browsehole, daily photo, self examination, self portrait, writingRelated posts
Howdy from Paris!
Actually I was only there a scant hour or so.
My Travel day stated almost 24 hours ago with me waking up at 4 am Hamburg time (10 pm Brooklyn time) to catch the S-Bahn to the airport. I had a three stage flight to look forward to but after the first leg that broke down, so instead of Heading to Stockholm for a flight to Newark I ended up getting sent to Paris for a flight to JFK. Now at last I’m sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, which is more than I can say for for my big duffel bag, which did go to Stockholm and is now sitting there some place. Supposedly we’ll be reunited tomorrow or Monday.
This is by no means the worst air travel experience I’ve had, but it has been one of the more arduous ones.
There’s a lot more to add, but I don’t have the energy for it now. As it is, I’m hoping to have the energy to change the sheets and then crawl into them.
Tags: airline mess, daily photo, frustration, self portrait, travelRelated posts
Yesterday’s drawing…
…always looks slightly strange to me. Alien. The things I’ve made contain memory, sure, but it’s not released in the way that might seem logical. I can remember certain things about drawing, while I’m drawing, and not otherwise. A memory that resides in the hand, not the eye. So scanning what I’ve done is always a surprise.
Similarly with writing: I revisit things from years ago and can’t believe that I was able to put the words together, even though I remember the particulars of sweating it out, the strain of writing, or rather the strain of not writing, of trying to force the confrontation with the computer screen. That memory comes easily, but the fact that I got something done and that this is the sequence of words that arose? It seems far fetched.
I’ve been going over the drawings I’ve made here and a bunch of journal entries that I’m adding tags to and the effect is far from flipping through a scrap book. I’m often perplexed. And that is why the cultivation of these habits is so important. The memory that resides in the hand, the ability to connect one day’s thought to the next through making certain gestures that lead to marks, that daily caress is the first thing to disappear in my usual daily assault of media consumption.
I wrote last month about needing a blank space to project work into, and earlier this month about needing a cascade of images to prime the pump. Here’s another ting I need to get to my true working place, the daily feedback of limber up, move the pencil, start again lines and choices about lines catching thought, moving thought forward in the ways that eyes can’t on their own. When that is happening every day, the drawings can go deeper and become fuller. The next day’s surprise is that much more welcome. When the gap is too long, that gap simply becomes a measure of how alienated I’ve become from my own process.
That’s three needs, and I’m sure that are others. They are not unreasonable things to ask of myself. And not hard things to provide. The reminder that they are there, and that they don’t go away, the laying bare of what’s required, truly, for me to do this thing, that’s the most important outcome of this month. I’m setting this down so that It can serve as a refuge and an accusation to me when I lose the way.
Tags: artists' retreats, daily photo, drawing, making art, notes on practice, self portraitRelated posts
1983-2008…
Twenty-five years! That’s the span between these two goofy studio shots. One was taken for a graduate school project of mine that was supposedly critiquing the late 70’s gay clone look. The other is part of the Richard Kern/Vice magazine shoot. By the way, that issue has been printed, and the interview is pretty funny, mostly about (ahem) sex stuff. You have to check around on Vice’s site for clues as to where to pick it up.
I’ve sort of gone from snippy queen to faux-bo (fake hobo).
This combo of pictures is my proposed announcement for the show I’m going to do in December, which is shaping up to be a small, eccentric retrospective of my smaller, more eccentric work.
Not a whole lot of that work is geting done in the studio these days, mostly because my time is so booked up with other duties. But I’ll get back to it.
Tags: art, self portraitRelated posts
New Frames….
Picked up my new frames from SEE. I’ve been struggling along with cheap store boughts for so long that it’s a huge relief to feel something solid on my face.
Ahem.
In other news, it’s still way too cold out. This was a very mild wintr interms of amount of snow, but now I’m ready for Spring’s onset.
Tags: daily photo, fetish, glasses, self portrait