Friends don't let friends blog drunk

On Monday night I trotted home after a long day of work, including last minute execution of a freelance project with unfamiliar materials. Ali was generous enough to invite me to dinner with her boyfriend. While she was preparing some amazing bacon-wrapped shrimp, I concentrated on peeling Catskill apples in rotary fashion without letting the skin break, for a seasonal crisp. We opened a bottle of wine.

An hour later we opened another bottle, and I sat down to catch up on my blog since I'd received a few emails checking that I was alive in my absence of publishing. Below is the evidence of that evening's decision. I am not going to delete my entry in order to persuade others not to blog while drunk—like those smashed up cars displayed in front of public high schools by MADD.

I am not sure what I was trying to communicate below except that I think I've been living in my own head for the last month or so and I feel like I've started having conversations with myself. This is not an attractive social trait. Yet, despite the fact that I've felt like a bit of a social mutant I've been having some nice nights with friends lately, talking about creative process, or about Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, whatever seems appropriate.

Two weeks ago I went to see "Falstaff" at the Metropolitan Opera with David and I met a very nice boy. This may seem like an unusual place to meet someone, but I assure you it is actually an excellent venue as the ratio of people under 40 years to over 60 is approximately 1 to 10. The opera was amazing, the set in the third act actually convinced me of a depth of about 40 feet, there was a unicorn involved and each and every voice was so full of personality. I'm pretty much a philistine when it comes to choosing words about opera or theatre, so there you have it.

I usually opt out of writing about dating in my little corner of the internets here, but I'm becoming more and more aware, that that means leaving out a lot of the good stuff. After all it's often the most relatable if not comical. I'm realizing after my disastrous diarrhea of thought below, I'd like to say that in the thick of what feels like a creative-mid-life crisis I am really happy that I live in this city and get to spend the time I find with friends, seeing opera, or painting watercolor postcards, or cooking after too many glasses of wine. I am happy at the thought of stumbling on new people along the way even in endless rain and looming deadlines.

A word is elegy to what it signifies

I’ve had no time to think about words lately. I’ve been spending every waking minute, and the majority of my sleeping minutes thinking about my drawings. The creative process is a strange animal, and one that I still can’t really wrap my mind around. I have been waiting for weeks, making drawings, greasing lithography plates and wiping down etchings, just waiting to turn a corner in the body of work I am putting together. In my mind I knew that I had to keep making bad drawings to get to the good ones, but I haven’t tried to wrestle and pin a conceptual idea down to paper since my BFA thesis. The ambiguity was beginning to weigh me down.

I’ve had a hard time translating words lately because I’ve been so invested in the weight of the lines I am making and figuring out why I am committed to a certain color palette, why I want to keep drawing the same shapes, and when it is a good time to stop asking questions and just put it down. The effort of stringing words together as they chase after experience is something that I’ve been obsessed with for quite a while. When I first read Robert Hass’s Meditation at Lagunitas I was struck by the clarity of his words—the way he articulated and made shape of something that had always been slightly out of reach for me—
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.

I’ve been able to take a few deep breaths lately, because I think I’ve turned that corner. Suddenly my marks are making sense, and while I certainly don’t think I’m going to change the world with my drawings, and I’m not even sure other people should be spending time with them, I’m happy that I’ve found a familiar yet ambiguous visual vocabulary again.

On my train ride home from work today I reread a Dave Hickey essay, and I found myself again happily in the middle of this dialog; feeling the inadequacy of words—
…even though a visible artifact must necessarily predate the language that described it, the artifact itself, as we stand before it, is always newer and more extensive than any word every written about it—newer and more extensive, even, than the visual codes incorporated into it, because whether we like it or not, we always confront works of art as part of that selfless, otherless, unwrittable instant of ordinary experience.

Right now, I am living for this unwrittable ambiguity.

iJoined the iPod army

Last week I inherited an iPod. After a few quick operation lessons from my coworker, I was off to join the iPod army of the five boroughs of New York City. On my first commute I became absorbed in turning the "wheel" and browsing through the extensive music collection at my fingertips— Everything from Justin Timberlake to Philip Glass oh my! Suddenly I realized that I had accidentally boarded a G train and was sucked 4 stops down the line into the bowels of Brooklyn. I was 45 minutes late to work.

On my evening maiden commute the same day I learned the art of navigating the subway platform with a personalized soundtrack following me at every step. For the first time, I noticed all the like-minded, white-earbudded individuals in every nook of the F train. It was like an initiation into a not-so-secret soundtrack-of-life society. I left my work behind at 23rd street with The Album Leaf escorting me home. Everything began to fit into the beats in my ears— the woman nodding to sleep across from me, people bumping off eachother as they streamed out of the train, a three-year-old getting spanked at the corner of the Gowanus Houses and my block.

The last few days my iPod has turned into a portable M. Ward player. I've become completely obsessed with his latest album, Transistor Radio. Sometimes it seems that albums are like mini-relationships. Often the most affecting ones don't catch your attention at first. Then suddenly you are thinking about them all the time and humming the intro to your favorite track at work. They make you see moments of your day in a completely new light and accompany you right before you go to sleep. Then eventually the tracks that don't seem as sympathetic begin to get under your skin and you realize you've overplayed the album, longing for the days when you first gleaned the lyrics from a new chorus.

For now, M. Ward is coming with me everywhere in this city. As Pitchfork wrote—"Heaven knows you don't build cred or a reputation as a trend-breaker boosting a guy like M. Ward to the rafters with acclaim, because he's not one of those musicians who bothers with belonging to a movement or a trend. He's just going on with that beautifully flawed voice of his (a high, hollow tenor with a fringe of grit) spinning melodies that remind you that, though you're weary of the world, you're not alone."

For now I'm still in the honeymoon period.