The light different each morning as I emerge from my meditation. Bird saw now, Ethiopian jazz. L texting last night as I knew he would, as he always does, Sunday evenings and full moons. I feel deep affection for him, clean, clear, & yet I don’t care to respond. Can’t he feel my body feeling it all?
“Your goals will take as long as you give them.“ A bit of a smack to my senses. When did I develop this posture of waiting and call it maturity? And in the meantime, I’ve developed this entire fantasy life and my mind that has nothing to do with reality. The perfect “other” living space. The perfect “other” erotic life. And no connection to my living now. Dangerous. I realize perhaps it’s just time to move again, & imperfectly. To relate again, & imperfectly. To shake things up. New context, less superstition. Less overthinking. Just be in the flow of life again.
Deep love for mom this morning. No fear of being close to her & which so often consumes me. How very wrong the end to Joe’s story… How easy it is to fall out of our destiny, to let it all slip through our fingers.
A deep feeling for cycles, seasons… transfixed by this remapping of time through my body. Of living an entire life cycle by the moon and my blood.
I feel on the precipice of cracking open some deep truth of how I work, how I create…
“Apollonia, Apollonia“
(filming self? Now understanding this instinct…)
Creative leave…?
Nearly 2 PM. Still teaching prep. Still work “to do.” But my body is demanding my attention. And I want to trust the life I want to live, the woman I want to be is on the other side of that pull… The work of this year, the monster’s work, is choosing the urgent pull of my body above all else, again, again…
*The thing about a monster is that it is an opposition to the world. Alienated, misunderstood. Ferocious, powerful being. Asher says: it is society job, too… Parentheses? And parentheses. I’ve been in a slow death of accepting that truth, me, chasing after a fragile, fleeting piece. Slowly, taking off the mask
Mastery – time & focus
“Art Monsters”
White Goddess/reference in Red Comet
“Lady Lazarus”
Voice
Rekindling desire
01/15–01/16 Dream: Planes to Paris & back. Train (Lillie, Westley). The train station in Philadelphia, transferring luggage (& before packing up luggage with my travel companion? an old woman). A wintery road crossing somewhere in Pennsylvania where a crossing guards/guide knew to anticipate the sudden cars and motorcycles. In a theater with Travis, a kind of after-rehearsal conversation.
Very restless sleep, waking sleep, not deep. And when I woke up that same upper corner had an energy? light? The same shape & size & space as before. Not black. This time, flipping on, off, on, off, glowing white. I tried to determine where it could be coming from, the street?
I wake up to a photo of L’s cock, always hard, always perfect. “Need you.”
Apolonia, Apolonia:
Glob found herself drawn by the gravitational pull of Apolonia’s personality, a forcefield of charisma that attracted many into her orbit. “I don’t know if I captured Apollonia with my camera, or if she trapped me in her theater or something like this,” Glob says. “I still don’t know.”
“Apolonia’s budding art career took her to New York and later to Los Angeles. It was in L.A. that she appeared on the verge of falling into the clutches of Stefan Simchowitz, an art collector and “art adviser” (to wealthy clients), who has been described by the New York Times as “the art world’s patron Satan.” In scenes that ripple with suspense, “Simcho” looks to colonize this young talent for his own pecuniary benefit.
“There is a moment where I’m actually really trying to sell out,” Sokol admits, “trying to make it, create a name.”
Things came to a head in 2016 during an art fair at the Paramount Ranch, a place outside Los Angeles where (as W magazine wrote) one could observe an unusual sight: “Paul McCarthy’s inflatable butt plug nestled in the cheeks of the Santa Monica mountains.”
In a spontaneous attempt at self-liberation, Sokol — who felt Simcho and people like him choking off her life force — stripped to the nude and assumed an arching, gymnastic pose next to the giant green butt plug. Glob captured the moment, which precipitated Apolonia’s break from Simcho and return to her native environment in Paris.”
01/17: I open Stigmata to a random page. “There’s love, says the story.“
Rage this morning. Rage because of feelings of self loathing. Self loathing not because of that environment and it’s demands but because I continue to put myself beneath it. That is beginning to eat away at me – is already eating away at me – in an unbearable way. This morning, the rage is so intense it’s all chaos, blinding. What is the spell? To go deeper into my body. To use the evenings. Not dogma but anarchy. Sovereignty. The monsters also a queen and she is ruthless. Black queen.
(Let the chaos reign. Keep going anyway. Ride with it…)
530 Hewitt #532 352 (it’s becoming clear to me that I desperately need to move)
8/1 home on 1/8 day
01/18, Thursday
Hours on the phone with Derek last night, my wonderful Derek. How delicious to break my own routine, to be infused with a kind of freshness, his & mine & ours and combination. The first we’ve been able to speak, since he started at Juilliard. Him in New York now. He’s in the kind of rigorous training experience I always wanted but also never really wanted. Little silly flares of jealousy that disintegrated as soon as I picked them up, meaningless. In fact how similar our experiences in different ways, now. How profoundly we could cut straight to the most urgent center: our art & how, our souls & why. He shared things it feels silly to write here & yet which are true, undeniably, I know them in my bones, and here again, like with my reading with Asher, they are being spoken to me, externalized in a crucial way. Things: you are an artist first and a person second, everything you do is art, I feel like I’m only now beginning to be able to comprehend the way you speak about art and your spirit, etc. Asher: daemon, wild, monster. Here I’ve been my whole life dancing around this edge, the perimeter of artist, terrified of it in the way one can be terrified of miracles, or love. And something is happening now – an alignment with destiny, that destiny, accepting the truth of the creature I am and the responsibilities that go with it. Demolition days, the burden of now. Killing off the angel and for good. Tearing out all the things I’ve planted and tended over the years to keep myself from that very calling, destiny, responsibility. And so it feels like chaos but I’m realizing the chaos is a good sign, like life-saving smoke signals, and I need to run towards it.
Thursday, 1/18
Donuts for Bake-Off
Campus, planning & initiating
10:30 AM Bake-Off
Film tonight
(see… These list, let it go. This is what my brain wants, needs, is tied to “outside.” Listen only to my body & take it moment by moment)
BLKSTR8
One thing, one focus. Choosing what is most important, That is the work of now.
I keep having memories of the drive back, our night in Dallas? Houston? Houston. The tension headache I had the night we arrived, severe. 12 hours of sleep. Waking in the early hours, new dawn, opening the sliding glass balcony doors in my hotel robe, perhaps only 6:30 AM and already obliterating humidity. How I sprinkled the bone smacked ashes secretly over the ledge. Hotel valets. So green. New day. These memories live with such intensity in my body. It is beyond my ability to explain, moth to some kind of flame.
1/19 Friday
I wake up hazy & soft, linger in bed, my body warm, supple, diffused. What morning peace… in that state I think, yes, I should move, why not. Make a change, mix it up. Break the trance. That seems the most important of all.
Art Monsters; Lauren Elkin
Carlee Schneemann “Monster theory“
Tony Morrison
Hélène Cixous
Anne Carson
Clarice Lispector
Virginia Woolf
References, reading, research:
“Professions for Women”; VW
“The Obscene Body/Politic”; CS (revisit)
The Mad Woman in the Attic; Gilbert & Gubar
Don Quixote; Kathy Acker
Joan Jonas, Adrian Piper, Mierle Laderman Ukeles ?
Three Guineas; VW
Hannah Wilke, Helen Chadwick, Maria Lassnig
Powers of Horror; Julia Kristeva
The Monstrous Feminine; Barbara Creed
The Newly Born Woman; Cixous and Clément
“Why have there been no great women artist?”, Nochlin
The Promises of Monsters; Donna Haraway
Between the Acts; VW
Angry Women
Performance art, feminist art, fluxus
DICTEE, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
”Self portrait as monster”, ML
“Pink, electricity/electric self portrait”, ML
“Eye body: 36 transformative actions for camera”; CS
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
Blue tape (film); Kathy Acker
“The monster is something extraordinary, or a natural; an amazing event, or occurrence; a prodigy, a marvel, though the editors note this usage is now obsolete.” pg. 17
“… And more [a question] of letting the body speak through art.“ pg. 30
Hannah Wilke: “I’m sick of ugliness! I’m sick of going into a room at a gallery opening, and feeling more beautiful than the work!” pg. 33
“Before using [catharsis] in this sense in Poetics, Aristotle employed the term katharsis to refer to the release of katamenia, or menstrual fluid, from the female body.” pg. 57
Woolf scrapbook/notebook for Three Guineas…
“Throughout Woolf’s life as a writer, it was physical feeling that drove her to the page – often sudden, unexpected, feeling, like a ‘shock’, which would then be followed by the desire to ‘explain it all.’” pg. 149
“Sappho – a priestess in the cult of Aphrodite…” pg. 160
“Stop worrying about big deep things. You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you’ll be able to do.” Sol Le Witt to Eva Hesse
“Instead of oil paints she wound up using her industrial materials as if they were paint, utterly against the way they’ve been conceptualized…” pg. 222
01/20 Saturday
Beautiful, quiet rain. Slow & slower still. Matcha now over on Temple to get myself out & into the world. Independent/interdependence Double of my car parked two spots up. All white & silver boots. On the phone the other night, and I said to Derek: I know it’s time to leave/to change, but I feel like I keep saying I know it’s time & receiving nothing but silence and return. Derek was thoughtful for a moment and then said, when I pray to god and god is silent usually it’s because it’s not his choice to make. He will support me but I have to decide. Even in micro: the café now, rain and limited seats. For here to go, the girl says with a smile. For here, I say, I’ll be brave. Be brave! she giggles approvingly. Out I walk, one seat only, half in the rain, so be it, & as soon as I sit the couple at the covered table beside me rises to leave, left because I sat down, making it clear both my desire to stay and that it was time for them to go. All energy dances. This morning, letting myself feel into the softness of my body, letting myself watch videos of Paris, of women, strong & soft & sensual. Firming up in my body wisdom: it’s time to act, it’s time to be decisive, it’s time to break the trance, kill the angel and all her paralyzing manifestations, present, frozen, future “perfect.” I’ve been looping in stasis, glitching, and it feels so clear in my body now the only medicine is momentum, that it doesn’t even really matter what the momentum is, or towards, that the energy has its own intelligence, and will right, but I have to move, decide, break, break break.
The monster embodiment reigns, female sovereignty, creative majestic. And also: – double my income, $200k – cultivate relationships that are real, I want to love her in my bed again, I want dinner parties again, small pleasures, I want to be able to say again, and mean it: how I love the people around me, how grateful I am.
Gloria Noto (the female, creative monster can take mini shapes & should never need to involve shaving off true desires)
Cixous: “Reading the Painting“ and writing it – possible?
video/poem 1: everything you do is art
Saturday evening & clear from my body: BIGGER. The monster literally cannot be small. It’s time to get bigger.
Alexis saying: you have to take the money and buy property & move into nature, you have to be able to touch the earth. And I thought, nope. That’s part of the angel’s fantasy and the angel must die.
Evening TM: Breast-feeding in big sunglasses & leather jacket, very chic. Meditating me became conscious of the baby, & so vision me smashed it (gently) to the ground where it transmuted into pink iridescence that I bent to lick (?) up
18/38/58 - rainy loft, closing in on that reality? And next?
01/21 Sunday
Janus. January, always misty, always somber with your gray light tinged in gold.
I walk the streets late afternoon, listening to the stars. “Dramatique.” The sunset shadows a shade of yellow that’s almost green. My body is already saying goodbye, all instinct, to all the too too familiar charms along the bracelet of this recent being. I turned down the heat, a blooming headache from the hot/cold. As I walk up Santa Ynez my body recalls like a rhythmic chime: January last year. His car obliterated out on the street & then back again & again, more issues. It’s funny that at the time I couldn’t read what, in retrospect, is now so potently clear. The mirroring of the loss of him, of course, but also that it would not be a year of momentum, progression, etc. That we would stop, pause, eventually release.
Monday morning, 01/22
I wake up to the sound of rain and with 22 minutes exactly until my alarm. A night of restless sleep, not stress-sleep but like my body wasn’t even tired. Mostly I wake up and I meditate and I begin to notice anxiety, anticipation, a certain unpleasantness seeping into my body, captivating my body. And it occurs to me for what feels like the first time that is a choice – that is how I play along, how I cooperate with my own effacement. Instead – I feel in my bones the day & fresh week like the gift that it is, like the life that it is, there is no denying that. Today there can be music and film and literature and pleasure in my body and the sound of rain and texts from my mother and a favorite blazer and time in the experience of my body. I’ve always thought the way to survive was to compartmentalize self from the consumer of the self… But what if I see each day as equally potent, equally available. Yes, today certain places to be, certain things I’m expected to do, but the day, the life, is mine.
01/23 Tuesday
Rain drenched, sun sparkling, bird song. I thought I would be off-campus today but here I am having to force myself to not rush up, get ready, go. Stomach pains & regulating digestion from the swerve off of caffeine. And this morning all I want is a delicious coffee. So much to share. Where to begin. I got the loft! How desperately I’ve wanted – needed – a change of context, urgently, for years now, the move into #302 satisfying but not, the work with Megan an important process but now how tiresome at all feels. Killing the angel. Breaking both trance & fantasy. Years of a “house in nature“, a fantasy that I’m not sure was ever really mine? Yes, GO’K. Yes, Frida. Yes, Coco Gordon. Yes, a woman in nature with her art & great focus is a beautiful thing. But I’m not there yet. And I think some stagnation arose from this assumption that I would leap from here to there, maiden into crone, & miss crucial middle chapters. There’s so much now to say & do & harness for the change. What I feel: essentialism, a reset built on the energy of a context shift, & a kind of masculine heat & desire. A little cave. Cave/uncave. In between. Now. Beautiful conversations yesterday with Edgar Fabian Friás & Cedric Tai. And of course it dawned on me in the midst – this, conversing, connecting, learning, taking inspiration – is more art monster than work life. And on a Monday, the dullest day. And on the morning that I opened myself to the possibility of another kind of experience. Stealth intervention. And of course, this is why CalArts too: because my work life too is, can be, art. Every professional choice I’ve made has been to keep myself in close approximation & observance. Which is part of why the resistant feels so frustrating – like I’m retreating “in here”, within, but within is only part of the equation.
It occurred to me this morning (certainly not for the first time): maybe I’m too focused on the day-week rhythm when what I should be looking at is the seasonal rhythm, how the interdependence and responsibility actually flows.
Maintain daily writing/reading/body
Weekly deeper creation, weekly rest
Project now – recreating womanness
The work of now is also to live, to have fruit for my imagination to feast on
From Cedric:
choose your own adventure artist talk
“a more compassionate to do list”
01/24 Wednesday
Beautiful, bright, pink sunrise. The whole room briefly aglow. Me on the balcony filming. Mom: “at the airport” and a heart. Espresso again. Now the sky sort of peachy and light blue.
01/26 Friday
Deeply resonant teaching days. I realize, I’ve developed a substantial and at times masterful teaching practice, and that is the monster, too. And when the monsters is welcomed into the teaching space… Very powerful. The peak of energy output for my week out there, Tuesday into Wednesday into Thursday… This morning, first, the glow of the full moon still in the sky. Revisiting follicular notes & words. Re/rhythm.
womanness writings – lessons #1 – time & focus, stealing time, loss of time, time stopping, Aesir, the line of experience from July until now #2 – creation cycle
MacArthur Park? Passing on my drive to Culver City, 9 AM Graveyard – drug zombies, how it hunches & stumbles the body (I think of Joe) Son & mother? An older woman, smaller, wider, trying not to let go of him. Him, wiry, hunched, at one point folding in to embrace her. They walk off, briefly hand-in-hand The girl with the thick eyeliner, piercings So much trash
Thinking of Travis yesterday re the Institute: “but there’s no crisis,” a manufactured crisis… A light expanding in my consciousness, how I’ve allowed that illusion to distract me, to suck me in…
A small book again? Learning that a cycle may be too quick to move through a notebook, a sense of being unrooted…
Studio tomorrow: Write womanness draft #1 lessons in monsters. How to sort out ideas for site? Content research archive… Reading
Anarchic and legendary and daemonic in my claim of new space and domicile
This must be the door through which every step of the process is determined
What I choose to carry forward vs release How I honor and reset my current place How I move/ment/travel Where and how I root in the new
*lease begins on the first birthday of Aesir post-death *ends on Valentine’s Day The journey of this space, from ancestry/legacy/loss rebirthed into the romantic heart
“That’s where we got our vespers”
“Just another day in this paradise”
Fridays, Freya, to fuel the studio (remembering how my dinner with Peter in September led me to 8 hours of paining the next day, that’s what I desire)
One thing too many in my focus, when distraction seeps in, essentialism
01/27/24 Saturday
Something about this January has me deeply fixated on time, cycles, progression, how a multidimensional being interfaces with multidimensional time and space. “My body keeps the time,” my body said to me. And so I am making a deep effort to remove all obstacles to the alignment of my body‘s time. 28 days, blood clock like the moon. And the discoveries of that alignment? That we are an annual cycle of 13, not 12. The beautiful gift of a 13th month, an interlude, a rest. I’m noticing that my body wants to encounter one thing at a time, & completely. And so this week I felt compelled to look at the seasons in combination. A season that aligns with, welcomes & supports each desire? Inherent changeability. And in combination, a very complete year. Vs. what requires daily attention, a daily practice? In truth, I think only my body. My body as source and instrument. “An intensive daily physical practice.” Compelled towards the somatic. And so perhaps the notebook really isn’t even the practice anymore. Still linguistic assumptions. Digital archive and research space in axis with an uncontainably ephemeral practice, literal embodiment. I’m trying to pay attention in these January weeks to what my body absorbs effortlessly as its own: namely, poetry out loud with each morning. Anything too regimented, too “intellectual” seems not to be sticking. I’m being called to a deeper place, a dream state.
I want – need – to go radically deep on a few things that matter the absolute most to my life now. I want to invite the full power of my attention & presence. I want to align fully with the given season.
From Daniel’s essay:
you never doubt bessie smith's voice. i cd not say to you, that's chaka khan singin empty d blues. not cuz chaka khan cant sing empty bed blues! but cuz bessie smith sounds a certain way, her way. if tina turner stood right here next to me & simply said "yes" ... we d all know/ no matter how much i love her/ no matter what kinda wig-hat i decide to wear/ my “yes" will never be tina's "yes." and that's what i want to discuss with you this evening - “takin a solo/ a poetic possibility/ a poetic imperative," Shange. 1978.
01/28 Sunday
I wake up with Swan Lake in my head after watching Black Swan before bed (how different my ability to understand genre & also… how much more I understood the film than the first time I watched it, how much more of a living, teaching fable for art & specifically female artist it seemed this time). I wake up from dreams of trying to get an apartment & running into terrible situations, and then coming to lucidity & remembering my loft. I wake up from dreams of someone, being murdered, a girl under a bed.
I seem perpetually in a state of clarifying, organizing, refining. And I am deeply, deeply examining the circumstances of my life, the impact of my 30s, my desires – my absolute must – & my responsibilities. What matters, what doesn’t. I am making concerted effort to move more deeply into alignment with my body, & while the body loves delight, reverence, it cannot tolerate excess, distraction, that which has no meaning… My physical body inclusive of mind & spirit can, will only, encounter one focus at a time. The courage of determining what is most important…
Sunday evening, final days in Santa Ynez. Over eight years ago, blood moon, third box. Now candy pink sky. Now spiderwebs in the window frames. Now vegetables roasting even though my stomach is full. So much that was lost in the time I called this building home. But also life, destiny harnessed. Cheers now from the street.
01/29, Monday
Strong espresso, the lamp moved the table now, so I can write. Deep deep, thinking this weekend, refining, visioning. I don’t want to live in that place always, apart from action, apart from experience. But for the past few years, I felt as if I was without vision, without a sense of my selfish, progressive, growing, changeable, still with so much material of life to work with. What do I want? What do I desire? What am I moving towards? I realize now, as I’m writing that even the initial gestures towards moving, have unlocked some formerly stuck & vital energy, just as I wanted, needed it too. I can’t see far forward, in my map of the year even autumn is essentially?. Towards the future, that is feelings, colors, gestures, jewel, light, pre-verbal in a way, but I am learning to harness the seeds of those visions, to plant them, to sit with them. I keep staring at the page, unsure quite what, and how to articulate. The seeds of a plan for my own becoming feels like a precious gift, however, nascent. Ambersand, I feel myself guarding it, not from the page, but from my hyperactive mind, which can so quickly become critical without meaning to. I feel as if I have been banging my head against these “realities“ of time and energy for so many years now, so punishingly, that I have cracked open, a kind of living philosophy this weekend that is based on my lived embodied, experience & not intellectual ideas… It feels delicate and exciting. tender new seeds. The sky now a flat vast plain of such a particular blue. What I think I’m realizing is that building things, anything takes time underlined. Really no more than one artist book per year. In my seventh year now, with Woman, more really, and for five of those it was just an idea my head. What medicine it was to pull back & look at a full year underlined realize/remember that in five, 10, 20 years, it will be impossible to remember, specifics, the specific daily and weekly will be washed over with time. But a vision of essentialism harness is something enduring across time. Creating the loft, creating the Woman site, solid foundations, both, I will remember that. Practicing a ritualized ceremony of interdependent, artistic creation… Observing the nascent signs of those ceremonial grooves, and making a focused decision to nurture and accelerate them… To let that be underlined the soul focus of my time will also accounting for other commitments, other ways, I must still be in of the world… I feel something profound is occurring within me.
“Love, love.
I have hung our cave with roses“ SP
Maria Lassig:
animation films
Baroque statues, 1970 to 74
Iris 1971 chairs 1972
Self portrait 1971
Shapes 1972
Art education 1976
Maria Lugg Kantate, 1992
Wednesday: pink, striped robe, pink, striped sky, glow of orange. Home beginning to grow a soft mold of mess.