“I dislike intensely even the concept of artists in this day and age… The whole concept of being an artist is somehow outdated today. There is only one place left where you find artists: the circus. There you can find the trapeze artists, the jugglers, even the hunger artist… I truly feel that in the world of the painter or novelist or film director, there are no artists. This is a concept that belongs to earlier centuries, where there was such a thing as virtue and pistol duels at dawn with men in love, and damsels fainting on couches.” — Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog

“Artists are dishwashers with hobbies.” — Me, just saying

Three years ago, I slapped this piece together on a salvaged board, using palette knives, UV-reactive paint, patterned tissue paper, and acrylic texture gels tinted black. At the time, I had intended it to serve as some bold new direction in my work, and it garnered a few, “Well, this is certainly colorful/I can see a duck’s head” comments. Eventually it became a reminder of all the bad juju going down when I made that painting. The new and improved life I was supposed to be leading that August had a few false starts. I can see a duck’s head, but I can also see old frustrations and humiliation. When I moved in with Daniel, I shoved the painting in the garage, to be dealt with some other day.

Some people like to compare making works of art to having biological children, but I find you can’t genuinely extend that metaphor. I have no children but still rest comfortably assured that it is far easier to make a painting than it is to give birth and raise a person into adulthood. More importantly, I can hate and disparage, disown and discard my art, without provoking any outrage or being locked away for inhuman negligence.

This morning, in the spirit of uncluttering, I gave my husband the blessing to put the painting out on the curb. A little while later, he had looked outside between putting out the trash and the arrival of the sanitation truck and noticed that we were minus one colorful, blotchy painting. Somebody had salvaged the painting.

I’m wondering who took it and where it’s gone, what the trash pickers have planned for it. Maybe it’ll hang in a room in a scrubby college house for years. Maybe someday I’ll walk into a local coffeeshop or dive bar and come face to face with Oh God My Life Sucks So Much Right Now, 2007, Mixed Media on Wood.

My fear in knowing that someone has taken my painting isn’t what they’ll do with it — perhaps put a wiggle eye to better define the duck’s head — it’s the fear that the work lives still, that it might try to find me and hold me accountable.

Good thing I didn’t sign it.

• Avoid derogatory mental labels.
• Default to courtesy and respect.
• Discussion, never confrontation.
• Popularity is a distraction.
• It’s not personal.

Some people let their looks go after getting married.  Me, I’m letting my taste in music go.  I no longer need to win friends and lovers with an impeccably cool and expensively current music collection.  I’m going to listen to Hall and Oates if I want to, and no threat of being unhip will deter me.

The Hall and Oates rotation began a few weeks ago, when D. and I were going out to dinner, and “Private Eyes” began playing on the local ’80s station (described in my previous entry).

I told my husband my stock story about Hall and Oates, which is that my mother used to try to connect with a younger version of myself by finding some common cultural ground.  Frequently, she would remind me, up into the late ’90s, “I like some of your music!  I like Hall and Oates! I love ‘Private Eyes’!”  She would never mention other lame contemporary music she enjoyed, like Air Supply or Christopher Cross; she knew those artists weren’t my style.  But apparently, she could readily imagine Darryl and John hanging out with Morrissey and Johnny and thought I had Big Bam Boom stacked between Loveless and Disintegration.

When my mother was alive, this was a hilarious story about my clueless mother.

Immediately after she died, it was a tragic story about an ungrateful daughter who built walls over matters as petty as taste in music.

Eight years later, it’s a gentle compromise between both perspectives.  I was young and snotty, she was well-meaning but naive, and neither of us knew that there would be a point arriving — too soon — when we couldn’t discuss Hall and Oates.  I had no clue then that I would have a husband she would never meet.  I had no clue that I would be in my 30s and unable to tell her about what’s happening, what I’m thinking, how my opinions and tastes are changing.  I cannot tell her that I thought of her while riding in the car, listening to “Private Eyes.”

For a moment, listening to that song, though, I felt like I could tell her, like I could introduce her to the important new people in my life over the past decade, like I could put my head in her lap and demand the sympathy I had craved for the break-ups and breakdowns of the last eight years.  The same song that made me roll my eyes in my teens sounded like it could heal every moment during that time when I hated needing her but not having her.

My mother had no intention of doing so, but her repeated insistence that she loved Hall and Oates made the music hers.  When I got home, I acquired an MP3 of “Private Eyes.”  And then “Kiss on My List” and “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” and “Sara Smile” and “Rich Girl” and even the really cheesy ones like “Method of Modern Love,” because she liked that stuff, too.

My favorite ritual of late is to take a moment on Friday night to unwind with a glass of wine and my Hall and Oates playlist.  This was the time, nine years ago, when I’d call my mother and fill her in on the details, tell her about people she never met, about my job and my love life and the things troubling me.   That final year, we had broken through the old walls and needless drama, and become people who respected and even liked each other.   It made the loss extremely hard; we had started a new relationship, and I hadn’t been allowed to enjoy it long enough.  The playlist isn’t a perfect substitute, but it fills a mother-spaced shape for a little while.  And that’s the best I can hope for in this life, so I’ll take it.

I’ve already had a friend or two sneer about my newfound Hall and Oates fandom.  I take it in stride; I don’t expect people to understand my conversion.

But there’s a part of me that thinks, “Hey, that’s my mother you’re talking about!”

Be it by design or accident, by dint of robot or human, this radio station plays Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight” (feat. Ronnie Spector) almost daily.

I have heard this song on this station so many times since I moved here that I have successfully pried it from my previous associations (fading impressions of fifth grade; the time I walked into a CD store in Sierra Vista in 1995 and the young man behind the counter put this song on for me and said, without irony, “This is a classic.”).  There’ll be a day when “Take Me Home Tonight” will remind me of this period of my life, particularly commuting to work and running errands.

…

There is another college station with human DJs and a vast array of music I know and music I don’t know.  But I find that rather than trying to challenge and expand myself by listening constantly, if I’m not immediately engaged with whatever’s playing on the college station, I leap to the other end of the dial.  Some of today’s pop producers are having fun with synthesizers, to the point where it reminds me of the pleasure I felt when discovering electronic music in the 90s.  It’s more product than art, more accessible than daring, true, but there are fun sounds to be found.  When I have to go to the grocery store, I want to hear bass and beats, even if they are accompanied by lyrics like Honey got some boobies like wow oh wow. (Really, Usher?)

…

Ke$ha has a new song that references the 808 drum machine.  I would say the 808 is now depleted of indie/hipster cred, which would have been the case had this happened in the ’90s, but we live in more postmodern times.  I only see a few die-hards espouse the notion that there is a morality inherent in shunning or hating mainstream pop music.  I think about how I wound up living left of the dial and it was a combination of popular music being part of a culture in high school that I’d met with mutual rejection and the fact that, in my heyday, the pop music was largely, in and of itself, terrible, mostly guitar-driven and inspired by the fake notion of “grunge.”  I still can’t stand modern music that is largely driven by guitars.  If the three-digit radio station cuts from a Britney track to some man grunting over his electric guitar, I immediately slip back into the low 90s.  And then I hear some man whining over his acoustic guitar.

And then I turn back to the robot-powered college radio station, and Eddie Money tells me he can feel me breathe, he can feel my heart beat faster.

I can now use my rudimentary Korean to take my sad bunnies to a whole new audience.

The project inspired by my past was interrupted by the present.

In previous relationships, I talked incessantly about love theory: what a perfect love entailed, what it meant, and how it should manifest.  The pair in this idealized and unconditional love would transcend the mundanity experienced by couples content to live with a blah, cliched love.

Two years ago, I decided to try a new approach:  love action, not love theory.  We would talk about topics other than what we thought we were supposed to be feeling for each other and how we should act upon them.  We would use that time spent talking about love to do things.

In my thirty-first year, I learned that I was not as intelligent as I had believed about love.  I could talk BS about love, but so can anyone.  I had no inside knowledge, merely the hubris of a young person.

I couldn’t even articulate what it was I thought I used to want.  Fireworks and a choir of unicorn angels over the bed; flaming, visible auras surrounding us, so that instead of doing lame things like holding hands in public, people would see our halos and understand that we were soulmates; a relationship so amazing that to look upon it would inspire other people to love one another?

I had to let go of my groundless theories and my nebulous visions.  I still had my standards and dealbreakers, but what I wanted became attainable, specific, smaller: getting up early on a Saturday morning to buy berries at the farmers’ market or have breakfast at a vegetarian restaurant, coffee on a sunporch,  leisurely road trips, inside jokes, snuggling under blankets, time apart to pursue separate passions, time together unburdened by process, and plentiful cuddles.  I wanted less dissection, discussion, and debate  about perfect love.

If you demand a perfect, cosmic love, chances are good you will look at your imperfect partner and think, “No, this person is not ready for this.”  You might even speak it.  Everyone is lacking when you demand Perfect Cosmic Love.

I may not be ready for Perfect Cosmic Love, but I’m more than ready for Real-World Love, with its imperfections and occasional failures to become One.  In Real-World Love, you have to say what you’re thinking because, as close as your partner is, he or she can’t pick up on your vibrations.  You have to go to work, pay the bills, clean the house, and suspend resentment that a life together is sometimes boring and earthly.

I still don’t know much about love; you’re not taught the secrets when you marry.  I’m fumbling and experimenting like everyone else.  And I like it.

Spotted while waiting to get my marriage paperwork processed.

My self-esteem was feeling unusually high lately, so I decided to teach myself pattern design from a book published in 1903. The prose is predictably convoluted and dry, and the instruction was written for artists who were likely to find themselves carving wood or stone, but I decided that I’m lagging in fundamental concepts of pattern design and my software skills are sharp enough.

Maybe. I’ve started off with simple patterns, as seen above, but you can see I was getting tripped up by some unsightly hairlines when I try to fill with my new swatch.

Pattern design is a good lesson in using your transform palette as a drawing tool, and in developing patience when you click on your newly-loaded swatch AND WTF AGAIN THOSE HAIRLINES! I’VE ALIGNED AND RESIZED AND REALIGNED AND SNAPPED TO POINTS AND SNAPPED TO GRIDS AND AUUUUGH I SUCK WHY AM I TRYING TO DO THIS AGAIN?

And then, somehow…

I AM AWESOME!!