new zine, seven loves, the end of the world and dancing bears

So spring is in the air, almost just peeking it's way around the corner and I am R.A.C.I.N.G. to get as much drawing done as possible. I find winter very insulating in a creative way. Maybe incubating would be a better word? Anyway, I'm actually a little sad to see the snow start to go... it was my blank canvas, a little bit.

This latest project is my newest zine... I haven't found a name for it yet, although this morning as I was curled into an unpleasantly morphing nauseous ball after a night of wayyyyyy too much whiskey, two names did float through my head that could start the chain reaction towards the correct title. "i don't really believe in the apocalypse" or or "sweetest sun". Something like that. (sidenote: don't you just love the gracefully random things a subconscious can bubble up in the throes of hypnagogia?)

It isn't necessarily about the apocalypse. It's definitely planetary though, a bit epic. Probably a lot more about growth and seeds, evolving, creation myths, all tied together with the idea that it will end and it's all ended before. But it's not heavy! Actually! Maybe it's the page made up entirely of adorable snack food? Snack food is kinda a theme, too, because it's MY zine suckers. :P

I've also been nominated for the Kreativ Blogger award by the luminous and fruity K from Apricot Belly! I am supposed to list 7 things that I love, and then pass this award onto 7 other bloggers. I... don't really know 7 other art bloggers, and thusly I'll make this a little mission to find a few, how's that? Here goes!

"What are 7 things you love?"

1. Life! I think it's juicy and confusing and never boring and even when it hurts it's kinda funny in a horrible way. And it keeps improving, how is that? age 80 is going to ROCK SOCKS.

2. Making things with my hands (and my heart and brain). Making things in general. Give me a void and some tools to fill it and I am a happy happy girl. I kinda leave trails around wherever I go... ^^;

3. My experience of the divine. It's been there like an extra halo of radiance on everything since as long back as I can remember. (I will divulge that the white circles that are allll over my work are probably very very related to this).

4. Dancing like a moron. Dancing like a flower. Visualizing the earth coursing up through my ridiculous giant Canadian Winter Boots as I cyborg-prance at crazy parties.

5. The city of Montreal. It done me good. It made me a woman! I'm not even kidding.

6. Waking up at 4 in the morning to make myself an elaborate bowl of oatmeal. Nurse said oatmeal for 2+ hours reading whatever thick and conceptual book I've managed to find lately. Drink piping hot yerba mate alongside. Finish said breakfast. Then Go Back To Bed. Love it.

7. My kitty!!!! Okay, and every single one of my friends. Especially my oldest ones. I have really really really rad friends. Loyal and strange and beautiful, all of them. My family too. "my friends and family"? Well DUH I love them!!!!

Enough mushiness though. Here's some impossible band playing at the Sala Rossa's Japanese Night coming up March 4th. I'll be there! You should be too!

tamagoléoptera
Oh right! Almost forgot (and okay, so I do know some artsy bloggers):

1. Bettina @ Inside the Artist's Studio
2. Michelle @ My Zoetrope
3. Evan @ Bjorked Off
4. Evan @ Swan Fungus
5. Olivia @ Olivia Ew
6. Amelia @ Chibi Amelia
7. Angie @ Angie's Amazing Adventures

Go! go forth and love things! I'm out.

happy heart day!

"
I saw two necks, male velvet strong, lamplit mid-keyboard swell in a freeze frame embrace, the air smokey and sweet with the smell of youth and january hope... remembering for a moment that we all will die. one's dress shimmered silver and silk, his beard wrapped around a nightlong grin and beer bottles clattered like softly tossed snow around the room. There were promises flourishing everywhere, between the languid and the crazed, the blind and the violent, the yogi, the yoni and the star, because - for the most part - we were young and youth is designed for grasping of all kinds.
"

ps. painting custom patches is fun! :)

Performance #2: Persona Literata

"Dear Diary,

today I woke up and I was a ghost. How strange! made of lines, eleven years of words and promises and opinions and stories. boys and mistakes and doodles and heroes and days. I am having a hard time creating words. Right. Now. They are so permanent and so wrong... and just who am I now anyway? I walked up and down the street, fingers numbing in the cold and my mind numbing too... a Self dimming and fleeting to leave just the skin. So in a way it's a shell with no soul. OR is it a soul bared completely with no body to recognize? As much as a soul can be summed up in an A B C kind of way, and just how WAS your tuesday? Dear diary, I never wrote dear diary at all. Who was I talking to? It wasn't me. I haven't found a ME definitive enough to be the fulcrum of these words yet. There is a good story I'm wearing, it's a one-of-a-kind couture made from the hundreds of voices that all went by E. Ranger (except that phase where I wanted to be called - wait for it - Willow Moon, and I really don't count her as part of the Me-ish canon at ALL, what a chimp!.... <----- Artistic license). Like a relay race of my own name... with no prize and no finish but apparently a decent uniform and oh there's unlimited graphite!

ANYway. I hate reading my own writing. The End."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I consider this my first real performance. I had to psyche myself up all morning to go outside but I needn't have been so reluctant. This was exhilarating!!!!!!!!

I only walked. That's it. I walked slowly and at one with the Persona. Cars slowed down, people did double and triple takes. My hands felt like they would crack right off in the sub-zero weather, but I kept going, vision at once blurred by the pantyhose and sharpened by the contacts and pure creative high.

Seriously, this is like my dreams coming true. Literally. The fantasies I lost myself in as a kid, the strange characters that I still draw... stepping off the page and into YOUR TUESDAY MORNING. What the hell??? I love life! I'm wearing this suit again.

"i am sick" zine finished!

/\ also a drawing inspired by sky gardens, dante's hell, and the letter w

I made a zine last week and finally got it printed today! I don't know why I always end up making these things in a whirlwind flurry - this took me an evening and a half, and it came out pretty naturally. The naturalness might be due to being feverish and wonky the whole time I tremulously held that gluestick, but I wouldn't have it any other way. In fact I stopped when I felt better enough to leave the house, which left me with exactly 16 pages of ranting and diagrams and love songs to lozenges.

I'm also partway started the next issue of Underwater Cigarettes, which might get a name change along the way, but it's still looking to be the same sort of structure, that is crazy pen drawings leaking onto stream of consciousness writing and so forth. I would give my teeth for a typewriter or a printer! But I would also settle for giving away my jaw. I have killer TMJ right now. Not that anyone cares, but it hurrrrrts. :(

Okay, okay... montreal art. I saw a movie at Articule last Saturday called La Grande Bouffe. Oh my goodness it was fabulous!!!! It was about these four frenchmen who decide to eat themselves to death, which naturally requires hiring prostitutes to notch up the decadence. We're talking feast after glorious feast after ridiculously mindblowingly rich and rare feast, with greasy roasts and vats full of "puree" and always always these strange over-iced gateauxs. Oh, and it was funny as well. And there was a love story. And the funniest bits were so horrible. It won at Cannes in the 70s and I'm of course recommending it from the tippiest bits of my curling-in-horror toes.

I suppose the important bit is that Articule needs a new floor though. It really is the sweetest little artist-run center that ever existed 4 minutes away from my house. I hope they make enough to replace it, and if they continue these events with the movies and vegan squash soup + toasty almonds on top (and grilled cheese that I couldn't eat but smelled nice) I think they will.

with a pretty bow, we take a bow

This could sum up the tune in my head these days very well.

"Lately - and I think this is a cultural observation - I've replaced the post-romantic metaphor with one of a knot. I see individuals now as knots, in say, the piece of lace that one of Vermeer's lacemakers is making. Things go through us - the genetic code, the history of the nation, the language or languages we speak ... the constraints that are put upon us, the people who are around us. And if we are an individual, it's because these threads are knotted together in this particular place, and they hold. I also have no metaphysical sense of the self, and I see this knot as vulnerable; you could cut one or two threads of it... or you can, of course, get an unwieldy know where somebody has had so much put in that the knot becomes a large and curious, and ugly object. We are connected and we also are a connection which is a separate and unrepeated object."
-- A. S. Byatt (1987; 26)

Last week we had our first taste of actively doing some performance art together for class:



There were other things done too - that black circle of tubing was filled with hundreds of downy pillow feathers that we sent cascading through the big glass sleekness of the new art building. Multiple times. I don't think the janitors were even chagrined! We also carried a couch into the big maintenance elevator and had a little hoedown in there, hoping that this time maybe we would get more random people to join us... and of course Kathy Kennedy (sound artist/professor extraordinaire) shows up with her sound class along with some guy eating takeout noodles and the place goes wild! The video's too long and unedited to show right now, but I may later when I get the final piece.

In other news I AM SICK. Oh woe, to have a head so full of gak! I'm probably not communicating very well if blog-land is anything like real-land, but you're bearing with me if you've gotten this far and that makes me happy enough to keep going.

Notably at the end of that class some of us got randomly invited behind the glass gallery of the FOFA to take part in a real (that is, meaningful) performance piece - Angela Silver's Accrétion where she takes outmoded pieces of writing equipment and gives them new life in contemporary ways. In this case, basically, she was wacking a wall full of carbon paper with a typewriter ball over and over, making strange partial constellations of letters and signs all over the wall. You also had to walk through Amelie Brisson-Darveau's jungle of knotted-up crimson fabrics to get to the action. (I think that also had to do with re-purposing objects - turning old clothing into measuring tools, borders, social nets, et al)

It was fairly neat, and a good denouement on feeling healthy I think. 30 minutes after this I was horking and trembling like a big 'ol microbe, but up until then... art. As it should be. :)

The next assignment for Perf. Art is to take on a different persona for a whole day... I was just thinking of switching gender, but now I think I might go a little wilder in concept. Any ideas? Mythical beasts, muses, barons and superheroes are kinda the wildness I'm aiming for. Moustache wearing is a highly amusing plus!

graar! I come from a swamp... to look fashionable at you

Went to a wig-making workshop today. Can we say fabulous? I wasn't even allowed to go and then I get an email saying I'd been pushed up from the waiting list to the list of lucky stars who got to take glue guns to creepy hair weaves for an afternoon. Improvement of situation, yes!

It was pretty cool, not terribly informative or mindblowing, but a neat craft session. It got me thinking actually about making shaman masks or wigs later on. Hearing Kali's name so often in my religion class that came right before must have informed the black disaster I'm so expertly modelling up there, and I kinda wish I'd had a whole head of the stuff to work with, you know, really push that crazed medicine woman primal tresses thing. I can see a series with this...

Oh yeah, and in other news people don't hate my watercolour work. Neat buckets!

I thought they were disparate as hell but no, apparently they're all quite equally strange and loveable. :)

(if you click on the picture you can see them close up on my flickr set)

on lizards, and wizards

"All that I made before the age of 65 is not worth counting. At 73 I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At 90 I will enter into the secret of things. At 110 everything -- every dot, every dash -- will live."
- Hokusai

I've been feeling inevitable lately. Full of piss, vinegar, and only slightly sick from the intense effort of living to the fullest. I even managed to sleep last night! Finished 10 watercolours for draw studio, which I'll post later for sure. My performance art class is also looking to be that class that actually teaches something about art (there's always one, if you're lucky). I skipped ahead in the online syllabus and found some links to Miranda July on Youtube, which made me squee, because gosh darnit I think she's adorable. Yeah, I know, whatever, she's a privileged art-heiress, but I think her work is actually really sweet, and anyone with eyes so freaky crystal blue just has to be good, right? Of course.

Keep watch for some performance art going down over here, too... I've got ideas up the wazoo, which actually surprised me but I think I might take to this like a fly to jelly, so to speak. It's just too ripe for, well, anything. I will not mail you real spam in the mail, though, I promises. :)