do me do me do me, part II

evolution and revolution

After the Franzen lecture last night I killed my telephone by dropping it into a toilet. Last night, after paper toweling it extensively, all it would do was vibrate when I touched the keys. Last night I shut myself in the apartments bathroom and aimed my housemates blow dryer at it until I fell asleep with my head resting on the ledge of the bathtub. It was 1:30 and time to give it a rest. This morning it turned on, miraculously, but then while I was scrolling through missed text messages it flashed its last little Verizon screenshot of life before turning off. It has yet to resurrect.

Most of all this bothers me because I was supposed to interview my parents over the phone today. But it also just feels strange to not be able to call people up or be able to be called. There's also some sort of deep-seated distrust that I can't imagine my friends to be motivated or creative enough to get in touch with me in other ways. Sadly friends, we are living in a time where people don't just stop by and ring the doorbell to see if you're in, not many people can find the time to draft a postcard (let's not even talk about actual letters....) and most of my friends sweat at the idea of making plans more than a day in advance ("how about we just... call each other?") . It's a sad era and sobering to realize that I am a contributing member of it.

But, I am also the fortunate friend of many well-meaning revolutionaries. I got a 3-part letter from my friend Maggie Starr on Wednesday that made me feel really special. A fellow student, Lauren Marsden doesn't have a cellphone in order for her schedule to be more intentional and less distractable. Occasionally I enter my studio and find love-notes on my desk from my friends. Certainly, this intentionality, this trying and this persistence are gestures based in love, and love is revolutionary. This is not to say that I don't wish my cellphone would get its act together and start working (ugh!). But it's nice to be humbly reminded that the way my life is right now often contradicts the values that I hold dear. It's nice to be reminded that even though my life feels hard, it's not actually that hard, that it could be harder, that it's been harder in the past and that I can try harder, too. Viva la revolution!

Heartstrings

Tonight I went to a reading with Jonathan Franzen (put on by the CCA Graduate Writing Program), who wrote a book of essays called How to Be Alone, which I've read from and really enjoyed. That particular book has some really beautiful passages about the science of memory woven into the context of Franzen's father, who suffered and passed away with Alzhiemers. Tonight he read from his memoir a woven analysis of global warming, birdwatching and his own failed marriage, which was funny and sad and relatable for me as someone who is also paralyzed and horrified by the environmental apocalypse looming within my lifetime, the nature it will inevitably erode, the personal relationships and understanding of my own purpose that get put into question in the face of such a disaster--- it hit some of my heartstrings.

During the Q&A, after some miserable attempts from the audience, someone asked one of the greatest questions, which asked Jonathan Franzen what he, as a memoirist who writes about extremely personal and incriminating subjects, would not write about (as in, where he draws the line). I mean, I guess his answer was sort of appropriately dodgy-- saying basically that he didn't write about whatever he didn't wind up writing about. The question, however, led him to talk about what issues he confronts as a storyteller, which I found really interesting. He told a story about how he once recieved a letter from the mother of a friend who has passed away, saying that she did not recognize her son in his description of that person, and the sadness it made him feel to think that his story had failed for someone.

This was the real heartstring for me of the evening, and something I think about a lot with my work, with my story telling, with my collection of anonymous photographs showcased in this blog. When my grandparents died I felt such a need to tell their story, to encapsulate them in my words, to record their presence, their stories, their mattering. Of course, through the drawings that materialized from this pursuit I realized that the stories I was telling about my grandparents were less about them and more about myself-- of their identity as my grandparents, as the parents of my parents, of the 20 years I knew them and not about the 60 that preexisted me. When I consider what I am really accomplishing with my work I feel panic and sadness over how inappropriately equipped I feel to be responsible to be telling their stories with all of the inevitable inaccuracies that are bound to happen. Franzen said it tonight-- the problem with being a storyteller is less that you are stealing someone elses story and more that you are stealing their ability to tell their own story.

I borrowed a recorder from the Media Lab today and scheduled separate telephone dates with each of my parents for tomorrow-- my mother at 8:00 am, while she is at work, my father at 3:00pm, after he has finished his Fed-Ex run. To some extent, their stories will always be told by me as if they were my own, but their own vocalization is also incredibly important to me too. Once I told my mother how I feared that I was warping their voices with my own and she told me that I had to remember that to some extent my voice was a product of theirs. This made me feel really good and less like the lying-theiving-good-for-nothing daughter that I had felt like before.

It was so nice to go to this reading tonight because even beyond the solemnity of Franzen's ideas and the lovely weft of his words was just the fact that it is so nice to hear someone tell their story, to have someone read to you, to have your heartstrings unexpectedly twanged, and to be reminded that stories, my friends, are important.

do me, do me, do me

I did this yesterday and today but am going to change the colors a little bit. It's on a stained peach-colored pillowcase. All of the words will be crossed out except "do me do me do me" which has become something to say instead of "hello" between some of my friends and me.

really really really

I made this drawing today. The text repeats, "do you love me do you really love me do you really really love me."

Progress Report

Here's all what I have got going on right now:
list drawings-- all our pets, all our ages, all my partners
drawing of sweatshirt stains
book of every craigslist response/ad i have ever written
zine of my 27 Portland housemates
redo drawing of the back of photographs
shadow drawing
drawing of TWS/LMS labels
ceiling stain drawing

Here are things I'd like to do/start:
drawings of Salem Drive rags
drawing of my parents bowl
drawings of my parents' differing stories of the bowl, how they met eachother, etc
drawings of childhood crushes (Keith Haring, Mr. Popaduik, Danny Meagher...)
more drawings with words
drawings about my name
more book covers
pick up some embroidery projects
rubbings
drawing of TWS mix cds
drawings of google stains
drawings of unsent postcards and letters
zine about getting diabetes
more actual writing in general about memories

Homage to My Hips

My friend Melanie gave me a photocopy of this poem when I was feeling pretty low about my self and thesis during our senior year of college. I put it up in my studio and Adina and I thought it was pretty empowering. We proceeded to both finish our theses, find men and spin them like tops-- good times! Anyways, the poem has been on my mind, because I was thinking about writing and poetry and some new embarrassing poetic experiments in my journal. The problem was, I couldn't remember what this particular poem was called or who wrote it. My search engine words (top+ big hips+poem) pulled up allllllll sorts of interesting things, but I found it today. I love this poem.

Homage to My Hips

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

Lucille Clifton

Square One

The semester began yesterday and already I'm swept into the torrent. I had two classes yesterday, both exceptional-- a drawing practicum with Keith Boadwee and Queer Theory class with Tina Takemoto. I'm excited for both and scared for the second-- it's going to be tough. I went to Oakland today for my office hours and bought a bunch of new paper. Now I'm sitting in my studio and trying to do anything I can but draw on it. I've always known that I take a long time to do anything, and over the break I got used to just waking up, coming to the studio and spending the whole day here. Now that my schedule is punctuated with work and class and the distraction of 199 other grad students running around it's hard to keep my concentration pointed and efficient.

I like this picture for the first day of the semester. I remember how awful and amazing it felt at the beginning of every school year at Wesleyan-- so much stuff being carried around, up stairs, into rooms, unpacked. A guitar case that would never be opened, shower kits put together by overbearing mothers, black steamer trunks bedecked with bumper stickers of previous identities. In many ways I'm just continuing with what I've done before-- but the beginning of a semester is always exciting-- a good time to reevaluate projects and priorities.

San Francisco the Impossible

I finished my book, The Heart Line by Gelett Burgess last night. Here is its melodramatic finale:

They walked, arm in arm, to the summit of the mountain, and sat down upon a rock to gaze at the city, far away.

There it lay, a constellation of lights, a golden radiance, dimmed by the distance. San Francisco the Impossible, the City of Miracles! Of it and its people many stories have been told, and many shall be; but a thousand tales shall not exhaust its treasury of Romance. Earthquake and fire shall not change it, terror and suffering shall not break its glad, mad spirit. Time alone can tame the town, restrain its wanton manners, refine its terrible beauty, rob it of its nameless charm, subdue it to the Commonplace. May Time be merciful--may it delay its fatal duty till we have learned that to love, to forgive, to enjoy, is but to understand!

rags, riches

I forgot how cranberry extract makes seltzer water do crazy things and had a foamy explosion in the doorway of Maggies studio. This sent me flying down the studio hallway where I discovered an unfortunate shortage of paper towels. This unfortunate shortage, however, very fortunately caused me to remember all of those rags I brought back to San Francisco with me from my parents home in Ithaca. I picked the least interesting one and made it more interesting by using it to sandbag the cranberry flooding happening in Hooper One. This picture is of one of my favorite rags, I think the pattern is so gorgeous and will be fun to draw. I'm buying a ton of paper tomorrow in Oakland and this eradicated towel will probably be the subject of the first drawing I'll start on for the semester.

Instant Relatives

At Really Good Stuff, the estate sale store I worked at in Portland, there was a drawer full of photographs (one of many) that had been labeled, "instant relatives." I thought this label was so transparent, almost mocking. It made me think about what I was doing there, that my collection was made possible by other peoples loneliness and fueled by my own desire for the feeling of family. I like pictures of people because they feel like people. Certainly this is why markets like porn are successful, because pictures stand in for something real, and certainly have the ability to quench some real desires. Last week I was showing Georgia how I've been trying to catalogue photographs by subject, for example, babies, still-lives, landscapes, homes, young women, women, old women, etc... She laughed at how creepy it would be to come across these albums and boxes and told me that if it was almost anyone else but me she would think the owner was ill-intentioned. I'm not completely sure if what I'm doing is not creepy, but it's at least a good thing to have in mind as I continue doing what I've already been doing.

I'm thinking about putting together a show proposal called Instant Relatives for Playspace (the CCA graduate gallery), or maybe somewhere else if they wont have me. I asked Brigid if she would put some of her drawings and paintings in-- she works from family photographs with a nice tweak of nostalgic gunfire and I think her work is awesome. I think that it would be interesting to have some sort of participation-- where people could bring in photographs to put up, maybe leaving with others (trading relatives). I think it would also be nice to make some sort of store situation, where visitors could acquire instant relatives for $3-$5 (buying relatives). I think in this way I could get a supplier like The Apartment, The Magazine, or maybe the photo booth guy at the Bernal Heights Flea Market involved.

I keep retelling the story about the drawing that got destroyed (missing still, perhaps somewhere flattened in the streets of San Francisco). I still feel so dumb about it, but the story is turning into something mythological. This sense of loss is certainly a soapbox to talk about how objects and images and words are critical to our sense of being. When I think of that drawing, most of all, I think about the week I spent making it, and the dissatisfaction of being reminded that there is nothing to be shown for that small but important duration of my time. We are a culture where worth has to be proved-- if you don't have something to show for your time, how can you believe or be believed? I've been thinking about this a lot recently, especially in the context of my friend Adrienne's writing about New Orleans and home-space, and my recent conversations with a few queer mothers and soon-to-be-mothers in Portland about how their queerness stirs the pot of what family, heredity, and mattering mean.

Across a table

I drove back to San Francisco yesterday after a great weekend of eating with friends in Portland. I picked up a craigslist rider on my way out of town, an old-soul transwoman who had as loose a tongue as I do. She talked about her experience coming out as trans as a 14 year old, having her first kid when she was 19, working in the sex industry, co-parenting and home-schooling of two small kids, what it means to be dating for a queer mom, how Portland seems like a safe place where all of these things can occur.

I'm back in San Francisco feeling floored with classes starting again tomorrow. Sean and I talked and it seems to us like the event to be working towards is Open Studios, happening this year on Sunday, April 5th, 12-5pm. Apparently all sorts of awards (read: tuition money for next year) are decided then. I'm glad to be back but realize that I didn't ever leave a time for me to catch my breath. It's been forever since I just lounged around all day, doing nothing for nobody. The time I spent in Portland was lovely because I got to eat across a table from lots of friends. I like this vantage because it focuses your attention-- you get to really look at and speak to the other person while remaining autonomous from them.

End of the trail

I've arrived in Portland, land of Lewis and Clark, bicycles, rain, beer and doughnuts. Yesterday I did the big drive from San Francisco with three craigslist passengers named Brock, Bochay and Marta. It was a great trip, but began with a fair amount of tragedy. I picked up two of the people at the corner of 16th and Mission and while we were reorganizing the trunk I put a rolled up drawing on the top of the car. We finished packing and got into the car and drove away. It wasn't until the tires hit Oakland that I realized that the drawing was no longer in the car. I was horrified and called every person I knew that could have been within 20 blocks of that corner-- but really, it could have fallen off anywhere. My friend Georgia biked there three hours later, and Anna texted me and said she took a walk down the street too. No drawing. I told Marta, Brock and Bochay that we needed to just not talk about it for awhile. Three songs into the car ride and, surprisingly, I was over it. I guess I figure that everyone suffers losses so much more serious than this one. It was a drawing that I had spent a lot of time on, but it was also just a drawing. I can make another one, and maybe I can do it better. I'm attached to the objects that I make, but I'm also in school right now-- the whole point of school is the making of things. The things aren't so important until later. I'm pretty sad about it, but at least it will be a good story. Maybe I can do a drawing of what I imagine happened to the drawing.

I'm in Portland now and finding it hard to find computers to write on this blog, but am busy-ing around with quick friend visits. It was misting this morning, a typical Portland morning. I woke up, picked up Kerst and we returned cans and bottles at Fred Meyer. We made 5 bucks and then went to get some lunch with our steep earnings on Hawthorne. Randi and I met up and went to the bins, where I got a lot of really great small plastic animals including a small army of anteaters and aardvarks. I went over to Maggies house and had tea and gossiped for awhile. Sally and Heather came over, we cooked a delicious cornmeal-crust pizza and took a walk to get some icecream for sundaes. I went to Kerst and Lydias house where we gossiped more and relayed updates. I'm at Emmets house now, where a feverish game of Taboo is being played. I'm exhausted and made a pathetic attempt at playing-- on my turn I only made one point (I got stuck on the word "wind-chill"). It's time to lay my head down.

PDX-capades

Oh my god I love this photograph so much. I wish I was having this day-- champagne-of-beer, snack, RV camper, sun, and party frock. I spent my day learning how to use my computer and it was raining outside. Bor-ing. I noticed today that the photographs I'm working with on this new drawing about the photographers shadow are pretty much all black-and-white. I wonder if the formal techniques and tactics of picture-taking (in this case, having the sun behind the photographer, causing their shadow to cast into the foreground of the composition) started getting forgotten with the advent of color photography.

I leave for Portland for a few days on Wednesday. I'm pumped. The last time I was really there was way back on the first day of June, right after boxing up and liquidating my apartment and flying to Vermont to teach Quaker kids swimming lessons for the summer. On New Years Georgia and I hugged eachother into 2009 and she asked me, "Would you have ever thought, 5 months ago in Vermont, that this is how we would be spending our New Years?" I'll be honest, there's at least a little apprehension about going back to Portland-- I left really quickly and a lot has changed since then. Kerst and Lydia have reported the demise of Steak Tuesdays due to extensive friend-cest. Emmet quit the farm and moved into Emma's house. Randi's dating someone new and got fired. Emma and Jessi and Dannyand Maggie moved away. Maggie and Holly and Kerst moved back. Everyone seems to be unemployed. Actually, a lot of my friends spend their days doing a lot of the actvity illustrated by the picture above. Regardless, I look forward to a Bins date with Randi, to visiting with the Liz Leach gang, to checking out Jeanine's new gallery, to getting burgers at a strip club with Candice, to cooking extravgant meals with Emmet, to shooting the shit with Annie and her dog Tasche, and going on walks and getting doughnuts with Maggie, and so many other things.

On materiality

Here's something to think about from Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart in the introduction of their book, Photographs Objects Histories: On the materiality of images.

"...a photograph is a three-dimensional thing, not only a two-dimensional image. As such, photographs exist materially in the world, as chemical deposits on paper, as images mounted on a multitude of different sized, shaped, coloured and decorated cards, as subject to additions of their surface or as drawing their meanings from presentational forms such as frames and albums. Photographs are both images and physical objects that exist in time and space and thus in social and cultural experience. they have volume, opacity, tactility and a physical presence in the world and are thus enmeshed with subjective, embodied and sensuous interactions. These characteristics cannot be reduced to an abstract status as a commodity, nor to a set of meanings or ideologies that take the image as their pretext. Instead, they occupy spaces, move into different spaces, following lines of passage and usage that project them through the world. As [the chapters of this book will demonstrate in various ways], thinking materially about photography encompasses processes of intention, making, distributing, consuming, using, discarding and recycling, all of which impact on the way in which photographs as images are understood."

Girl props

I started a new drawing yesterday of some sort of epic best friend charm necklace thing. I'm trying to plan less with this one to see what happens-- hopefully something surprising. I did a little bit of research though, to check out what those best friend charms look like these days. When I was small I was the recipient of many of these-- little broken halves of hearts which sized up with the ones owned by my friends. I think it's weird and funny how little girls are trained to be romantic with their best friends-- I mean really-- those necklaces implied that my heart could only be whole in the company of my friends. What kind of message is that?! Last night I read a section in the book I'm reading where two women (both enamored with and by the same man) encounter each other on a boat and prove their friendship to one another with the most outrageous flattery and flirtery. My favorite part is when Fancy Gray tells Clytie Payson that her eyes are the most beautiful she has ever seen, a compliment that Clytie trumps by saying that her eyes are never as beautiful as they are when a little picture of Fancy Gray is being reflected in them. To be honest, I think this kind of flirtation is so amazing and I miss it a lot in this newish city. Remember when valentines were made for everyone in your class? This kind of friend romance seemed so much easier in Portland, land of huge house co-ops, where cheap cost coexists with high quality of living, where sleepovers abound, where bicycle gangs commingle and bad hair often means surprisingly-good-at-snuggling.

When I was looking for images of these girly best-friend pendants I found a bounty of them supplied through a commercial website called www.girlprops.com. Girl props are self advertised as appropriate for girls of all ages. I think this is interesting because the word 'prop' implies a theatrical stand-in for something else, something that mimics reality. So, if you check out this website and all its glittery wares for discount prices you might start to wonder what reality these props are standing in for-- womanhood? Under the "Necklaces...Love" section you'll find a bunch of really great selections including a silhouette of a kissing boy-body and girl-body (called... "Kissing Cousins"-- what is that all about?), of a two-part necklace (one, a key, the other, a heart with the engraving"He who holds this key can unlock my heart"), and a chrome double charm, one saying "Always" the other saying "In touch." So, the thing about these gendered necklaces is that not just any boy child is going to wear a dainty-chained key around his neck. Let's talk about it. It just occurred to me that the website is also using the word "prop" to allude to the word "propaganda," which is also pretty interesting. Essentially, this overtly pink website is channeling Judith Butler and is a textbook example of contemporary post-feminism.

I love this picture-- there are more like it. Someone had this kid pose doing lady-jobs, here, doing the laundry. In others she is tending to a baby brother. Having grown up the oldest daughter I have to admit there has always been a sort of mothering impulse for my brothers. When I was a teenager I started to reconsider this impulse having become self-conscious when pushing my youngest brother around in a stroller lest someone think he had been born from my own 12-year old loins. This was encouraged, of course, with my own girlprops (mostly supplied by my grandmothers)-- dollhouses, small strollers, play kitchens and plastic food. This morning it was beautiful in the Mission and as I biked by the soccer and church crowd at Precita Park I saw a small gang of tiny-stroller-pushing children. One of them, I'm proud to report, was a boy. A couple of the girls were using their strollers to enact a demolition derby.

On mattering

I took a nap on our buildings roof this afternoon and thought about the word 'matter' and all its many meanings. Matter, as a noun, is the word for any quantity of physical mass or volume, literally anything one atom or larger. It can also refer to a vaguely specified concern (to have several matters to attend to) or a problem (what's the matter?). Matter, as a verb, means to have weight or importance. So here's an odd tangle of the English language that equates significance with stuffness... interesting. I think about this word a lot, considering what it means for a person to matter and what a person would have to do to not matter. I think it's interesting that I equate mattering with trying, but realized today that a lot of mattering happens without trying and viceversa.

Certainly the fear of not mattering serves as a catalyst for many, especially amongst my MFA peers, to try things. But for such an aggrandized word, it leaves room for interpretation, which is comforting. This non-specificity implies there's more than one way to matter, and that one of those ways may be just right for me. As far as stuffness goes, maybe this can be opened up to interpretation too. Maybe stuffness can include memory, which seems to me a pretty good way to matter in other peoples lives. This is not an original idea, to equate memory with stuff-- the best example is obviously "Mara Baldwin? That girl has got baggage". I spent most of the day nursing my eyes, which have been marinating in smokey bar air the past few nights. I tried drawing this morning but had to give my corneas a rest for the day-- lesson learned: my vision matters. The reason why I've been hanging out in bars is because my good friend Sarah has been in town the past week and drove back to Portland this morning with her girlfriend, Alex. Sarah Lipkin matters. Here's a picture of some matter.

Book of Shadows

I'm getting ready to make a new drawing about the photographers behind anonymous snapshots using pictures like the ones above, where the shadow of the photographer is present in the composition. An advisor, Glen Helfand, told me there was a publication called The Book of Shadows that showcases a personal collection of similar photographs to the ones I've been gathering together for the past year. I spent an hour in my studio today catching up on all my notes from past advisor visits, figuring out all the books that I should have read over break, but haven't (Bahktin's writing on chronotopes, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, Heideger's The Thing, and on and on and on). Long story short, when I looked up "Book of Shadows" I got a million results, but none that fell under Glen's description-- we're talking millions and millions of really serious Wiccan texts.

So I started looking for books about shadows and wound up thinking about witches, and then started thinking about magic, and then fairies, and then how one of my girl scout camp counselors (named Tucker) had a Tinkerbell tattooed on her leg, and then about Peter Pan who, of course, has a little altercation with his shadow in the beginning of that fabulous story. Everything always comes around full circle. I like how Peter Pan's shadow is this feisty autonomous character who needs to get sewn back onto the bottoms of his feet. I don't like how, in the cartoon at least, Peter's feisty shadow (who eventually gets tamed) is female. I do like that Peter Pan is played by Julie Andrews in the 1976 musical production.

When I look at photographs, I feel like I'm seeing through the same lens that the photographer did. To some extent, I suppose this is how the audience is always engaged when looking, as inquisitive, as the author of their own opinions of what they're looking at. To some extent, I suppose, it's really different-- I'm looking at a piece of paper and the photographer was looking through a glass lens. I can never experience the noise of that photograph, the weather, the mood, the back story. But the actual composition, the choice and view of the person taking the photograph-- the cropping, the light, the depth of field, the focus, etc-- are all there in the image that I'm looking at, and I feel invited to pretend that I was there (or am there) too. What I like about these photographs with the photographers shadow is that the photographer is so present-- I hate how there's an inherent clinical approach to looking at photography that omits the authorship of the photographer. I'm a drawer, so I love that my hand is so obvious in the things that I make. But I also recognize that my hand is just a tool for my head, that a photographer has a head, that our heads make choices and that choices are what makes us unique and what makes us authors.

The shadow also seems to open the composition up-- way back when as a freshman in college looking at quattrocento Florentine altarpieces, John Paoletti repeatedly pointed out how the compositions were painted to imply a window or continuity between the 'real world' and the painted one. I like the shadows in these photographers because it's like they are mine. I especially like that my dress changes-- sometimes I'm wearing a top hat, sometimes with long hair or a flippy bob-cut, sometimes there is someone standing next to me. For the drawing I'm about to start I'm still troubleshooting over what medium to use (pen, watercolor, pencil, etc...) and also trying to figure out how much information to render and how much to omit. For now, I think I'll just draw the shapes of the shadows, the lively/ghostly/feisty/solitary shapes that they are-- and really, because I think that shadows are cool enough to stand alone. Fuck Peter Pan and his unintentional chauvinism. Our shadows are the silhouetted shape of how the moving sun is shining around our moving bodies as we stand on a moving earth, dependent upon us, but also defiant and autonomous, often unflattering, always moving, unreproducible, fluid.

Forecast reads: grayandgrey

Once when I was heartbroken the person who was causing it put the flat of her palm in the middle of my chest and told me to pretend it was a glass Mason jar, and to push my heart inside of that jar, and to seal it and the whole time, through my crying, I remember thinking how cold the lip of that glass jar felt, how pushable my heart felt and how thankful I was that someone was telling me what to do.  I found my heart feeling pushable today and thought about that memory on my walk through San Francisco on the first day of the year.  I'm still not sure what really happened when I pushed my heart outside of myself.  Where is the jar, the heart, the heart in the jar?  What did that really mean?  Were those good directions?  I'm unsure, but have used this imagery, of pushing my heart into jar after jar, countless times anyway having not figured out an alternative yet.  It was a pretty gray first day 2009, and I celebrated by working on a pretty gray drawing.  Walking around this morning, this afternoon, and this evening, it seemed like the whole neighborhood was in the same sort of mood-- hesitant, hungover and whispery.

this is me, and this is me, and this is me

I once flipped through a book of Cindy Sherman's work and was drawn to a project she did long before her Untitled Film Stills and explosion into fame. She had taken a family album and had written under every picture with her in it "this is me," "and this is me," "and this is me," and on and on. Of course, this is the refrain when anyone shows pictures of themselves to someone who hasn't seen them before-- it seems like a pretty good explanation without so many words: "this is me." Sherman's project (which, of course, I can find no documentation of on the fabulous World Wide Web--how can this be?) included imperfect family snapshots-- pictures where just her arm, cropped out of the picture frame was circled ("this is me") and pictures of teeny tiny people on faraway bleachers with one small head circled ("and this is me"). It certainly invites speculation over her identification with the images and the consistency of her narrative.

I like looking at photographs with my family because there always seems to be these absurd moments that happen-- when my youngest brother claims to remember an event that happened before he was born, when I will see myself being held as child by someone I don't recognize, where my parents can't remember the names of friends they have their arms around. Pictures, even more so before the digital era, feel oddly essential and distant to my identity. The expression"a picture is worth a thousand words" should really be "a picture confounds our words." Over and over I look at pictures for guidance, I picture how things once were, and I make pictures of pictures, too.