art is good.

today, seeing as we were no longer under a tornado watch, I headed to brooklyn with a friend who had mapped out the studios of several artists taking part in Go art brooklyn or Go brooklyn art...anyway, this painting is called Empire and was in Jennifer Delilah's studio along with some very cool drawings of crows and very odd paintings of half-bird/half-humans doing nasty S&M type things to each other. All very cool. We visited 10 studios total before we were just too tired. It was my first extended trip to W'burg in ages that didn't involve a rock show or someone's party.  Lots of glass/ugly modern buildings going up (same as the E.V.) and lots of cool spaces for making art.  I could never live there - can't imagine what it would be like there at night or in winter. Some of the art we saw was wonderful, some not.  I really liked Gary Mellon's wood work (garymellon.com), Lynda White's masks arts.lyndawhite.com & her VERY cool skeleton king sculpture, Ryan Scully's paintings (ryanscully.net), and Clark Goolsby's  big puppet man (clarkgoolsby.com). Overall it was a great "field trip" and it was good to see so many people making things in this city full of people who mostly seem to just be about how much money they can make and how much stuff they can amass.  Last weekend a friend described me as a "stuff" person & looking around my tiny apartment I guess that's true. The stuff in my life though is made up mostly of books, things people have given me (rattlesnake skin, horse skull, hand made pottery, pieces of art), and then I have some shoes and some clothes (though not many for a woman living in NYC), and lots of cups to put tea in.  Most other things are in storage or sold or given away.  Seeing all these artist's spaces I see how much different and how similar my little space is - lots of odds & ends & photographs & stones from hikes & shells from the ocean & whatever else will help me make stories.  I'm not a painter so I don't have all their tools but that same need to have more than the basics, more than bare walls and a few pieces of furniture.  Of course, if I had a house, it would seem very empty indeed.  These are the things all this viewing of art has made me think about.  That and the description (somewhat inaccurate) of me as a "stuff" person.  Most of the artists we met were very nice people - some awkwardly charming, some trying hard to be hip, and some just nice people making good art.

heading into another heat wave with all the attendant stench & air-like-sludge.  at work today the air is rife with construction detritus but at least the a.c. is on.  soon I'll be out of this town and on to better (?) things for a while. not long enough but then I wouldn't want to miss NYC in August now would I? things I'm interested in right now: sly & the family stone (redux), ciaran carson's new novel (out this fall), the politics of archiving & the ethics of memory (on which I'll be writing a paper this summer), the sixteen syllable line, poems that begin with "or," whether or not "glove" shoes work better on NYC pavements, just what those numbers in the sweetriot cans are actually for, dublin street maps, maps in general, just what that banging sound is on the roof, why white men over 40 are so f***ing angry (I mean really guys - don't you already run the world?), werewolves (enough with the Zombies already people), and something about the way the city light turns everything gold at a certain time of day. 

I used to make vast lists of New Year's resolutions but though I often kept at least some of them, as I grew older, I gave up on this folly. Sort of. This year, I have a few and they are: travel more (tough to do while this broke but I'll figure something out), read more (I slacked off on the reading some this year - to my brain's detriment), send out more writing (I'd put "write more" but I'm already writing plenty), teach more (even though teaching = staying broke since in this wonderful country we pay teachers less than people who work at Starbucks), stop putting up with the dead weight (and I don't mean the fat versus lean muscle ratio - though I'm continuing to work on that). Dead weight = all those many people in my life who ask and ask and ask for favors and suck up my time and never ever ever give back. I mean, sure, giving isn't about receiving but really? it is. And that's a lesson I learned, yet again, in 2010. Oh & more shoes. I only bought 3 (?) new pair of shoes in 2010 and that's just plain wrong. I don't care how broke I am. A girl needs shoes.

a little less than 2 wks and 2010 will go out with a whimper. if I get around to it, I'll be posting top 10's of pretty much everything. if I can come up with 10 books/records/movies/etc. that came out this year that I actually paid attention to. the problem with being so immersed in grad school from '06 - '09 is that I spent a lot of this year trying to get my life back. as in, having a social life again (one that didn't revolve around classmates/readings/etc.). I also spent a lot of the year avoiding even mildly challenging reading. watched a whole lot of TV though. and some decent enough movies. and spent a lot of time outside walking/swimming/climbing things. now that it's 8 degrees outside (and I can't find anyone to learn how to snowshoe with me) I guess I have time to catch up on my reading. and listening. I did write a novel. so that's something. In one month (Nat'l novel writing month). And I did write a poem a day since April. Those will come out in a little chapbook shared with my friend MES - probably by April of '11. And I think I did a whole lot of other stuff in there too but that will just have to wait for the list portion of things. maybe this weekend. while it snows. meanwhile, there's this.