fuck yeah san francisco
it's decorative gourd-duck season, motherfuckers
Sorry for the strong language, folks. It is entirely called for. Read on to see why.
As I mentioned in the last update, I’ve been doing a lot of auditing lately. An art practice audit of sorts has led me back to two of my all-time favorite artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, specifically the way they 100% funded their own projects exclusively through the sale of preparatory drawings, collages, and scale models. As an extension of this I also spent some time looking up their son, Cyril Christo, who is a writer, poet, photographer, filmmaker and animal rights activist. He, along with his wife and son, worked with Jane Goodall on the book Lords of the Earth: The Entwined Destiny of Wildlife and Humanity. Lysander's Song, a short documentary film about the interactions between humans and elephants, was released when their son was about 2.
Apropos of the above item, I think about how artists support themselves and their creative practices a lot, and I generally fall more on the team day job side of things (and somewhat by extension team gift economy) as opposed to trying to monetize creative projects, so it’s not surprising that this Freakonomics episode about time banking caught my attention (as so many Freakonomics episodes do). I’m not sure exactly how this would work for artists, but I think it has potential since there is effectively zero federal support for artists and the art market is clearly f*cked.
I found this recent KQED Forum episode about solo activities oddly comforting, I guess because I’m someone who appreciates and requires solitude from time to time, and I get anxious when I think about this personality trait in the context of the loneliness epidemic we’re apparently in. Every time I hear about how important relationships are to longevity I worry I’m surely going to die prematurely (I could say a lot more about the state of my friendships over the past 6 or 7 years and my general longing for community…but I’ll save that for another time and medium). It was validating and I guess a little reassuring to hear about the potential benefits of solitude, for a change, as well as its relationship to creativity.
It wasn’t the focus of the conversation by any means, and worth a listen for all those other reasons, but I love what Ta-Nehisi Coates says about traveling and communicating in a foreign country in this Fresh Air episode (it’s how I feel about much of my childhood, I guess, growing up mostly overseas, and then continuing my French studies in college, culminating in a summer working in Bordeaux). Terry Gross asks, “what was it like for you to spend a year in a place where you couldn't use your greatest gift, which is language?” And Coates replies it was “thrilling” (emphasis below is mine):
Anywhere in the world you are where you don't speak the language and English is not the predominant thing is like that. You go outside, and you feel like you're on roller skates the whole time, and everybody else is just walking normally. That is beautiful. That discomfort is - like, that's the stuff of life for me, you know?…and that's where I should be…I need to be somewhere where people don't care, where I'm falling over myself, where I'm not conjugating correctly, where I'm tripping because that's the place where I'm actually getting stronger.
My New Yorks, a show of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of New York organized by The Art Institute of Chicago, where the show debuted, will soon be on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. “My New Yorks takes its title from the affectionate nickname O’Keeffe gave her city landscapes.” Read more here. “Her husband, photographer/dealer Alfred Stieglitz, initially refused to exhibit them in his gallery, worried that their subject matter was too masculine—a criticism O’Keeffe would face on multiple occasions throughout her career.” O’Keeffe said about this body of work: “one can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”
The above article is written by Verity Babbs. I was intrigued by her bio, described in part as “the host of Art Laughs art-themed comedy events.” What a great idea for a podcast and fun to see how it’s expanded since the pandemic.
Nearly 11 months after moving back in to our recently renovated house, we are still getting things up on the walls! I recently redid what I call the mom/owls wall, a tribute of sorts to my mom, obviously, and her love of owls, which have since become one of my favorite animals, too (and because a lot of folks don’t know I have owl things around because they make me think of my mom, I tend to get more owl things which, for the record, I’m totally OK with!). The gallery wall is, for me at least, a hard thing to pull off, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
This is a test/proof sheet she created when learning how to paint in the folk art style of Bauernmalerei.
We voyaged to the blue planet with Weezer last night!
Not including Stern Grove Festival last year to see the Indigo Girls, which was fun but also chaotic, this is the first concert I’ve been to in awhile. I was surprised to see what a diverse fanbase they have age-wise, with tons of young folks there, including a group of maybe middle schoolers in front of us who knew the words to every song, old and new. I hadn’t seen it before, but Neal shared this SNL skit with me and it’s hilariously spot on. The Flaming Lips (and Dinosaur Jr.) played sets before Weezer came onstage and they were amazing.
The Oakland neighborhood walk finds have been primo lately. Fall cleaning?
I call it the 3 am brain, but 4:30 is close enough. From Mike Monteiro, a great answer to “What to do when you wake up at 4:30 am.” What do you do when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep?
