Whenever I think about Santa Cruz (my homeland, even though I've never been a resident), I think about the monarch butterflies that migrate there in February. I think that particular tribe (nation? butterfly nation?) splits its time between South America and Northern California. But this photo of the day from National Geographic (::loves her iGoogle widgets::) makes me homesick. For a place I've never lived less than an hour away from.

See the monarch summit

From the Artist a Day widget on my iGoogle, Edwin Ushiro:


The image above is actually a bit different from (the first image of his work that I saw) but shares the same dreamlike, flowing quality combined with realistic representation of the human form. Now that I think of it, there's an anime quality to what little I've seen of Ushiro's work. What initially struck me about the image, though, was that it provoked questions: Are those two girls pressing up on each other? (As someone who delights when I find representations of queers in the media I hoped the answer was yes.) Does the difference in color palette between the two indicate that one is "real" and the other a ghost or astral projection? Turns out I read the artist's intention about color correctly. This is what he says in his artist's statement:

Vietnamese, Hungarians, and Zimbabweans all share this common story of a Pressing Ghost. Usually occurring when one awakes from sleep, is the sensation of limbs & legs going numb, heavy pressure felt near the chest region, and the helpless victims inability to move. The Hawaiians believed this to be the result of "Pule Ana 'ana," a sorcery chant that includes praying someone to death. Such conditions can also be medically explained as a delay in chemical release in the nervous system.

Ushiro's bio says that he was transplanted from Maui to California, and by his last name I'm guessing that he is at least part Japanese. He mentions in his bio that he has experience in the film industry; I wonder if this experience has influenced his work, or whether I am right about his heritage and that his connection to Japanese culture has influenced it as well. Of course, I know plenty of anglos, myself included, whose work has been influenced by elements of Japanese culture, including anime.

Ushiro also shows a degree of technical savvy not apparent in other artists: he has a drawing blog as well as a stand-alone website.

In other news, a friend sent me this link to a fun little Shockwave app, just in time for spring: Go here and click and drag your mouse all over the screen. Yay flowers! Yay springtime! If they wanted to make it a Boston-style flower garden, they'd have to add some snowflakes once the flowers had sprouted. So far this year, no snow on tulips. But the tulips aren't up yet, and, you know, global warming...

Via the Artist A Day widget on my iGoogle, Marty Burns:


Description from AAD website:

The above piece is Marty’s MFA Thesis Exhibition. It features a customized steel coffin, silicone cast, handmade costume, uncounted number of red roses, prayer cards, etc. In the piece a fictitious war comes to a decided end with the death and presentation of the corpse of "the general."

Linky to Marty Burns's website

I think Marty's bio might have something in common with my LJ profile, but then again, truth is stranger than fiction. This is what s/he has to say for him/herself:

In the early spring of 1982 my two gypsy parents found a small child in the crook of a tree, that child sustained my family for 8 weeks until the snow thawed and we were able to make our way to a nearby encampment. My mother, a crystal healer and palm reader by trade, bartered with the locals for provisions and supplies. In the meantime my father seduced the locals with soapbox tales of a mystical herb he called "Lawry's seasoning salt." My brother and I amused ourselves with games of chance until my family was well enough to move on. We crossed the desert, two oceans, and a very large termite mound until we found ourselves passage on a Nantucket Whaler headed for the Galapagos. The trip was ill-fated, and here we remain, adrift.

The Wind, The Sea, The Golden Pear
Long Island, Quincy, MA
Winter Solstice 2003

He said it was a wind
that blew in the glass of office-boxes.
He said it was a wind
he must make space for.

For me, it is an ocean:
a landscape you can never predict,
not by the day or the season or the hour—-
don't turn your back on it.

Beyond the oceans are dunes
and beyond the dunes, the green forest,
the New England forest, with its glaciated boulders,
laid there by some giant hand.

When he spoke of the wind,
he reminded me of a journey I took once by boat,
and the golden pear I couldn't choose
the golden pears I couldn't pick.

I wonder whether he is one of the pears
or the wind that shook it from the tree.

— Frances Donovan
2003, 2004, 2008

Via Boingboing. Awwww... makes me ALMOST want to go to Burning Man.

The Steampunk Tree House, a 30-foot-tall interactive sculpture created by a group of artists i Oakland, CA, and assembled for the first time at Burning Man. More than 60 people helped to create it.

http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/01/24/steampunk-tree-house.html

Adrienne Rich has been a great inspiration to me ever since I first discovered her in high school. Even before I came to embrace my own feminism and radical nature, her work evoked those deep-seated beliefs I'd held since childhood--held and been shamed out of. Later, I wrote my B.A. thesis at Vassar about her, exploring her own journey from a conventional wife and mother to radical lesbian.

The poem "Orion" has always spoken to me because of the way it evokes that connection with the strange and powerful force of creativity. The part of a poet that forces her to write is not reasonable, not sane. It is like a myth or a constellation. The constellation of Orion as a symbol of this force is particularly apt because it rises in wintertime, when the life force that can aid in creativity is deep and buried. And yet the burning remains.

The impulse to write, to create, burns even when we don't want it to. It burns in spite of all the other demands on a poet's time and energy--especially a woman who is a wife and mother. In order to be an artist, one must "break faith," find some way to keep others from eating the crumbs of one's life. An artist must be cold and egotistical, must create the space necessary to produce her work. In a society that encourages women to nurture, not to create, the act of writing, of creating, becomes an act of gender rebellion.

Orion

Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you're young

my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won't give over
though it weighs you down as you stride

and the stars in it are dim
and maybe have stopped burning.
But you burn, and I know it;
as I throw back my head to take you in
an old transfusion happens again:
divine astronomy is nothing to it.

Indoors I bruise and blunder,
break faith, leave ill enough
alone, a dead child born in the dark.
Night cracks up over the chimney,
pieces of time, frozen geodes
come showering down in the grate.

A man reaches behind my eyes
and finds them empty
a woman's head turns away
from my head in the mirror
children are dying my death
and eating crumbs of my life

Pity is not your forte
Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow's nest,
my speechless pirate!
You take it all for granted
and when I look you back

it's with a starlike eye
shooting its cold and egotistical spear
where it can do the least damage.
Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall.
it's with a starlike eye
shooting its cold and egotistical spear
when it can do the least damage.
Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall

1965
Adrienne Rich
From Leaflets, 1969
Reprinted in The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984. Rich, Adrienne. Norton. New York: 1984.

The gift
moves through you
but no one accepts.

Stifled, it cries inside you,
piteous. Milk fever.
It subsides.

But the memory remains.
The dry hills cry
for the memory of water.

Frances Donovan
Jan 15, 2008

From the Artist a Day widget on iGoogle, two artists with very different styles. I like them both.

1. From Somerville, MA (one town over from me!), Scott Listfield paints well-executed oils of an astronaut exploring bizarre tableaux in a modern landscape filled with pop icons, corporate logos, and sci fi referances, such as At the Laundromat with Boba Fett. He says, "the astronaut in my paintings is simply here to explore the present."
   
   He's also the author of a collection of photographs documenting the adventures of a plastic dinosaur named, appropriately enough, Dinosaur. Here he is riding the T in Harvard Square, and here he is wearing the Sydney Opera House as a hat.
   
   His website is, appropriately enough, AstronautDinosaur.com. Clearly, directed toward 20somethings who can read tiny print.
   



2. From L.A., Chris Anthony. Some folks appear to see him as "too commercial," but the Red White Black & Blue photo series I found especially powerful. The site is framed, so I can't link directly to the series. Go here: http://www.chris-anthony.com/, click through the entry page, and select Photographs, then Red White Black & Blue. Images that particularly gripped me:
   
   
   
   
   

Via The Artist a Day widget on iGoogle, "the girls"

"The Girls" are London-based artists Andrea Blood and Zoë Sinclair, aged 31, whose award-winning collaboration began eleven years ago while both were students at Central Saint Martins. The Girls colourful surreal art consists of staged, often multi-layered, portrait photography of women, including self portraiture. The Girls have previously exhibited in group exhibitions at The National Portrait Gallery, London, The Photographers" Gallery, London, The ICA, London, and the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. They are currently working on their first book.

Original link: http://www.artistaday.com/?p=981

Mermaid eating fish & chips (questionable whether it's okay for me to post here, but I want you to see how fabulous their work is and then click on it):



See also, woman as cake, bosom buddies, and the embodied soul (now with extra cleavage!)

The Arab from Tunis

Naked but for a headscarf
that might be a kuffiyah but draped flat,
not wrapped and tied—one adorned hoop
as large as your fist, one band of gold
four fingers thick around your upper arm,
and the bangles, thick and complicated
about your ankles.

You turn from the camera, column of your spine
in a half-twist, ambiguous, a vase and a long panel of mosiac
witness to the smooth expanse of your
back, buttocks, legs, flawlessly smooth
and half in shadow.
                              Light catches the side of your body:
ankle, shin, thigh, the jut of the pelvis—the word is flank, like a horse:
the architecture of your skeleton so beautifully obscured
and yet present, present like the pear shape of your breast
profiled in sharp relief against the darker wall,
the cradle of your arms against the rough stone,
cradling just half your face: the hooked nose,
your hooded eye fixed someplace between me and you,
and your mouth, the enigmatic mouth.

It's not seduction in your mouth,
not an enigmatic smile, but almost a pout,
almost a smoldering of outrage.
Is it anger in those eyes, at the man with the camera,
perpetrator of this transgression against the Prophet?
Did he ask you, wheedle you, make love to you?
Or was it an order? Did he buy you in the marketplace,
with the vase and bangles?

Do you scoff at the way he draped the cloth
over your hair? With your hair hid,
does the cloth of nudity protect you
from the wrath of Allah? From your father's wrath?
Or is he behind the shutter's eye?
Are you Muslim at all, or do you follow an older path?
Are you my sister, captured here forever,
crossing all this distance, crossing the miles, the years,
one whole century, an ocean, and a people?
This only I know,
this, sister.
My sister.

Frances Donovan
September 3, 2007

What is it you contemplate,
Maiden Mother of the infant God?
Breastless, red-draped, half-paused
at the door between this world and the next?
The angel's face in rapture as you finger
the strands of wheat, the grapes of wine,
the baby, fat and solid, holding up a tiny hand
in benediction. Whose world?
Neither. Both.
You are the doorway between.

Frances Donovan
April 2005, January 2007
Note: This poem was inspired by Botticelli's Virgin and Child with an Angel, which sits at the end of the long gallery on the third floor of the Gardner Museum in Boston. It's a painting of special significance to me; it reminds me of transitions, innocence, experience, and the time I scared off the docent with my Goddess-centered interpretation of the painting.

cheqyr and dr_bibliovore were supposed to fly up from D.C. to visit over Labor Day weekend. Ernesto, however, threw a monkey wrench in our plans. By dumping lots of rain on their home. After the June debacle, I can hardly blame them for staying home and sandbagging the basement.

It does mean, however, that my lifelong dream of taking a Boston Duck Tour has been foiled again.

Instead, technogoddesss and I had dinner at the awesome Arlington restaurant Prose and then used the room that our dear guests had reserved at the Governor Brackett House. The house itself was a work of art. We stayed in the Emily Dickinson room, and slept soundly after our big meal. Until about 6:00 am, when what sounded like an electric generator started churning outside our window. I thought my apartment got a lot of traffic noise, but it was nothing compared to the hubbub we heard in that room.

We spent the afternoon at the MFA, looking at the Americans in Paris exhibit. I finally got to see Sargeant's famous portrait of Madame X, although I was not, unfortunately, able to see the underpainted evidence of the shoulder strap that was once, scandalously, painted as having slipped off her shoulder.

Other notable canvasses in that exhibited included Whistler's Mother and Isabella and the Pot of Basil. There were lots and lots of Mary Cassats, and looking at them has firmed up something I long suspected even back in middle school: I just don't like her work. I don't like the way she draws faces, the way she paints. In fact, looking at these paintings made me realize something pretty profound: in general, overall, I'm not a big fan of the school of Impressionism. Sure, I know why it was an important movement, yadda yadda yadda. But my favorite paintings are those that evoke the way that light falls on objects and figures, calling out a clarity of line, color, and form. The Dutch Masters. The Pre-Rafaelites. There are exceptions, of course. I love Van Gogh's work and am very fond of Cezanne and Gaughin. Degas I appreciate too, but mostly, I believe, because he continued to emphasize good draftsmanship in his paintings. What I appreciate most about the Impressionists was the fact that they brought brighter, more vibrant colors into use.

There were two artists in particular that this exhibit made me aware of: Childe Hassam and Cecilia Beaux. Hassam is responsible for that painting of the edge of the Boston Common at dusk in wintertime. And Cecilia Beaux, well, I suppose she didn't become as famous a name for two reasons: (1) she was a girl; (2) her canvases were pretty traditional. I was totally blown away by Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance, which they hung right next to Whistler's Mother.

After finishing the exhibit, we headed downstairs to look at some other stuff from the collection from around the same time period. In the next gallery, they had all these lovely stained glass windows by La Farge. Overall, a great visit.

That evening, we met up with andtruth to see Demonslayers at this teeny tiny little theater in Fort Point. Overall, it was about what you'd expect for a $10 ticket, but highly entertaining. As the name might suggest, the play's plot closely resembled that of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The star also happened to be the show's fight choreographer and an apprentice in the stuntmen's union, which pretty much sums up the play's main strengths. Excellent comic timing made for a nice counterpoint to the fight scenes and (implied) blood and gore. The playwright somehow managed to pack into two hours every major plot point from at least four of the Buffy seasons.

On Monday, technogoddesss and I took a long hike from my house to the Fresh Pond reservoir. We did a complete circuit, and then I bought groceries at Whole Foods and carried them home. Way to live sustainably and get some exercise at the same time.

So, after living in Boston for seven years, I finally made it to Somerville's ArtBeat, this big street festival arts thing they do every summer. It was fun and funky. It was hot as hell. I rode my bike from Arlington to Cambridge around midday, creating a nice breeze as I went, did some errands around Harvard Square, and then headed over to technogoddesss's house. The walk from her house to Davis Square is not unsubstantial, but it's too close to drive, especially when you factor in (a) the environmental impact (b) the waste of gas and money and (c) the pain in the ass it would have been to find parking.

So I found myself in this bizarre conundrum: happy to have a sweetheart to walk to ArtBeat with, but regretting having to drag my body through the hot, humid air instead of coasting along nicely on my bicycle. It put me in mind of something a friend of mine mentioned in a recent post about accepting limitations and boundaries as a means to achieving prosperity. Or, as they might say in one of the 12-step fellowships, accepting life on life's terms. I've become aware of one of the ways I haven't been accepting life on life's terms in terms of my relationship with technogoddesss. It's a fairly easy mistake to make, a trap that lots of couples fall into. Instead of appreciating her for who she is and reveling in all the reasons I fell in love with her to begin with, I began to notice small tics and and annoying habits. Psychologists call this process "habituation." Another well-known writer calls it the "magical magnifying mind." And what I've realized is that picking at her for her faults is not going to help matters any. It's only fair; she doesn't pick at me for mine. What'll keep the relationship healthy is appreciating the good things about her and accepting that she's not perfect. If she manages to love me in spite of my many imperfections, I think I can do the same.

*edit: expanded information about ArtBeat below*

There were a ton of performances going on for ArtBeat. They set up about four or five different performance spaces throughout Davis Square. The main stage was at Seven Hills Park, the little patch of grass behind the Davis Square T Stop that I've ridden by on the bike path many times -- so named because of the sculptures representing each of the seven hills in Somerville. Then there was a sort of roped-off area next to the Someday Cafe, which recently lost its lease. technogoddesss isn't sorry to see the Someday go, since she has apparently witnessed lots of heroine being bought and sold in that establishment. I'd always just thought of it as a kind of funky coffeeshop, but I do have to say that I have difficulty rallying up enough righteous anger to sign a petition to get the landlord to let them stay there. I just hope they don't put in a Walgreen's— or worse yet, a Gap. I didn't really see performances at either of those spaces, although I did notice that the Subversive Choppers Urban League (SCUL) were displaying a rather bizarre collection of bicycles at the area over by the Someday.

Two performances that I absolutely didn't want to miss: The Boston Typewriter Orchestra, which performed at Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway, a tiny little basement theater that was actually the location of my last gig as a theater techie (some friends of mine run Another Country Productions). By the time we got there, the place was absolutely packed—partly due to the act itself, I'm sure, but partly due to the fact that Jimmy Tingle's is AIR CONDITIONED!

In spite of the total packed-ness of the theater, I somehow managed to score a front-row seat and stayed for about one and a half "numbers." Here's the deal with the Boston Typewriter Orchestra: young guys with a sense of rhythm dress up in white shirts and ties and sit down with manual typewriters, and make a kind of music with the typewriters. Sometimes they answer phones and say funny things. It was mildy amusing, especially the bit where they kept transferring the complaint back and forth between two phones. But for someone who's seen STOMP! performed, it wasn't the most exciting thing on the planet. Sure, it was neat to see some complex rhythms being tapped out by six or seven guys with typewriters. But the execution was far from perfect. The air conditioning was nice, though.

I appreciated DJ Joey Daytona's remix of a Gertrude Stein poem a lot more. The setting was a bit bizarre—midafternoon on a wicked hot Saturday in July—and therefore not very conducive to dancing, but the content itself was definitely appropritate for ArtBeat's theme this year (reCycle/reNew). Plus, Gertrude Stein is really only bearable when set to phat beats and whipped up and down on the one's and two's a few times. That girl had one sweet, sweet gig, writing stuff no one could understand and therefore no one could critique. Plus, she had Alice B. Toklas to keep house for her.

technogoddesss and I met up with Red, a friend of hers whom I really enjoy, and we walked around seeing the sights with him for a bit. Eventually, we ended up at the booth for the Somerville Garden Club, talking with this very nice English woman named Janet. I told her about the garden I made back in Brookline, how I'd dug up the ground in that strip of sidewalk in front of the house and made a sort of spiral pattern with the earth before planting the seeds. "Are you an artist?" she asked.

And I paused, took a breath, thinking how to answer that question.

"Oh, you are," she answered.

"She's artsy," said technogoddesss, but I knew that wasn't the right answer. That demeans what I do. Yes, I suppose is the answer. Even though it's not what I do for a living. A trip through The Artist's Way taught me that much. And 22 years' worth of journals, and a career that took a right turn from programming into design taught me that much as well, I suppose.

It's good to get that kind of validation from time to time. When I take my own creativity more seriously, I think it allows me more compassion for others' creative processes. Like poor cheqyr, whose studio was trashed during the flooding in D.C. recently. So sorry, cheqyr!

So, I was thinking about urban landscapes this morning, as I walked from technogoddesss's house to my client's office. It was bright and early, just a little after 9:00 am, and the sun was shining. It was almost warm, with a hint of spring in the air, and reminded me of all the times I used to walk home from school in Stamford. Down Strawberry Hill Avenue, then past the cinema and shops on Summer Street, pasat the public library and the slightly raggedier shops on Atlantic Street, past the Palace Theater where I ushered, past Memorial Park where the buses came and went.

And here is where the paths would diverge. One way, the simple way, was to continue down Atlantic to its intersection with Tresser Blvd, where the 19th-century facades, the old Woolworth and the rug shops gave way to those monolithic corporate headquarter, all of them built by F.D. Rich & Co. Champion International had its headquarters just across from my housing project, and they also had a satellite branch of the Whitney Museum in their lobby. Some woman from the PR Department had organized this big urban renewal project to help the poor disadvantaged children living in those big cement buildings across the way, which resulted in the building of some new jungle gyms on the second-floor cement deck, and in the planting of some new annuals in the huge, triangular planters. Of course, they all died that winter and went back to being patches of dirt the next year. And Champion International went back to being Champion International and we went on being kids from the ghetto. Except for me, since I was weird and fat and a "momma's girl."

Being a momma's girl wasn't really a problem for me, though. At my babysitter's in the suburbs, I hid out at the library, a little branch that had been a woman's house until she deeded it to the town as a place for lonely elementary school children to sit and read after school. Later, in high school, I hid out in the auditorium after school, smoking desultory cigarettes in oversized windows or off the fire escapes before making the trek down Strawberry Hill to our sooty apartment on Tresser Boulevard -- in the opposite direction of most of the kids, who lived up in the North side of town, with green yards and trees and things.

On weekends and sometimes Thursday nights I would usher at the Palace Theater. It was up in the balcony, perched on the red-plush-carpeted steps, that I first fell in love with the symphony, with all the rows of black and white and good brown wood arrayed in a kind of fan out from the flashing tails of the conductor. The myriad violins, the fatter violas, the sweet cellos and the deep and mysterious double bass. I developed a crush on a long-haired double bass player. I was never closer to him than the balcony, but it was a deep and abiding crush, a loyal one.

I developed definite tastes. I preferred the Stamford Symphony Orchestra over the Stamford Chamber Orchestra, because the first got right down to the business of playing music while the second would constantly interrupt itself for self-congratulatory speeches. A podium had no place on a symphony stage. And I preferred Brahms to Beethoven.

It wasn't until I was older that I realized the value of some of the other performances I got to see. The jazz musicians I saw live, not just for free, but for a small stipend: Ella Fitzgerald, Art Blakey, Herbie Hancock, and who knows who else whom I've forgotten?

All this from being a momma's girl. And then, after the performance was over, after the crowds had filed out, after I had flipped up the seats and picked up all the abandoned programs, I would walk through the seldom-taken routes, the crooked streets to my monolith of a tower home. Finding the precious cul de sacs of my urban landscape.

A 77-year-old Frenchman spent a night in custody after attacking a plain porcelain urinal with a hammer.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4587988.stm

The urinal? Artwork.
The hammer? Performance art.

I think Duchamp is laughing his ass off.

Look what I found!

Iron Circus

By iron_spike. Her style reminds me of Terry Jones (?), the guy who does Strangers in Paradise. But I just figured I was dealing with a guy comic, like all the other guy comics on the face of the earth, except maybe Roberta Gregory and some of those other arty chix you find in the adults-only section of Million Year Picnic.

But no! Not only is she a girl, but she's cute! And apparently knows how to code in PHP. ::pant::

Of course, she's also young enough for.... too young for me to looking at her like that. And no one can defeat the mojo of technogoddesss. Still, good comics. Good mojo. And someone's gonna be that lucky artist's bitch someday. Man or woman, they're gonna be that woman's bitch.