Thomas Prior via all the mountains.

late blooms

a new painting. this one felt like memories and the night. more details here.

Oh Paris.

“Your father wants you to go, but I don’t”. She does not mince words, my dear mother. This was the “talk” we had before we went to Paris together. And as a result of her sentiment—coupled with my own residual teen angst at age 23—we had a remarkably terrible trip.

It was the spring of 2002. September 11th had happened. We lost dear friends. And we lost the arrogant, ignorant certainty that everything was going to be generally, ok. The feeling was that it now, wasnt. I was too old to be traveling with my parents and their cronies. But I went anyway. We were not of the jet-setting set, so this trip was big for us and I knew it.

I was working as an intern at Milton Glaser’s studio, growing increasingly smug and haughty for no good reason. Milton made you feel that way, that to be in his midst you were somehow superior to the average schlub. The truth was that I was a particularly pathetic schlub, getting paid peanuts, wearing Aerosoles and living at home with my parents, and now 50% of them didn’t want me in Paris.

I get terrible jet lag. I slept like a french rock in my hotel room. The room had white shutters inside the windows and a sage green comforter on the bed. In the morning, my Dad would pound on the door trying to wake me up to go sightseeing. I hated almost all of it. I dragged my feet at the Louvre. I remember feeling particularly lethargic and “over it” at the Musée d’Orsay. This polar bear sculpture was the only thing that moved me. I felt the food was heavy and like I was being choked by a butter monster until I could no longer breathe. Looking back, my degree of ennui was criminal. Although maybe its just a cliché that everyone should have a lovely time in Paris. I should have gone with friends and we should have stayed out all night at clubs and smoked cigarettes and flirted with some sleazy guys.

I was disgusted with my parents by the end of the trip, as they were with me, no doubt. It was too bad. They both speak French and my Dad even wrote my Mom little missives in French when they were first dating, which she still has in a private stash in the back of her closet. It should have been romantic for them. Instead I was there, the ultimate bratty buzzkill.

I brought back some cookies from Maxim’s to the studio in New York. I handed them to Milton and told him that I liked Paris but that it was particularly nice to go to Monet’s Giverny, you know, to get out the city for the day, I said. Even Milton laughed at me with a downward gaze. Who did I think I was wanting to get out of Paris for the day? I was young.

other moon

My latest painting called {other moon}.

When I paint I begin with no plan, it is glorious. I just see what emerges from layering the materials on one another. In the end, this one seemed otherworldly to me.

click here for more details.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

I have a terrible memory. I sometimes realize things that I already knew. Its getting worse with age, which is making for a bizarre and unpredictable intellectual and emotional narrative. I probably need help, but instead I just keep trying to make my own version of sense of things.

I am in my 5th year in a PhD program, yet I am still not convinced that this is indeed, it. for. me. I always, always do this. I wont fully subscribe to anything. To be wholly engulfed by a singular ethos is to be blind. I am on my way to becoming a scientist. But I still sometimes choose to see the world in a typeface-loving, Adobe Illustrator-knowing, color-theory touting graphic designer way. This vision is my safety net. Well, the net is made of air and tiny rainbow-colored bubbles and illusory polka-dot guinea feathers. And it sure as hell won’t catch me if I fall.

I recently tried to design a logo and I remembered how difficult it is. Not only is it difficult to dream up the concept and execute the design, but its difficult to convey to your client that your visual idea is good. Everyone who can see has an opinion on design. Its the most subjective thing in the world. Every color reminds someone of something; grandma’s blanket, the couch from goodwill, toothpaste. And even the very same color is very literally perceived differently by different people. My client kept saying the blues I chose looked grey. They were not at all grey in my eyes. Also, sometimes people who do not identify with being “creative” have a hard time understanding all the work that goes into designing a logo. They think you can whip it up in a few hours. They are wrong.

My old boss, who designed “I heart NY”, had some very wise words for keeping clients in check, “You can’t have it fast, cheap and good, you can have two of those things, but never all three. If its fast and cheap, it wont be good, if its good and fast it wont be cheap, and if its cheap and good it wont be fast”. He is, most of all, a superb businessman-as-designer. One has to be an advocate for the art. And you have to find a vernacular to describe those intangibles that the designer captures. You have to tell an aesthetic story that makes clients feel good. Through that, you can teach them to see what you see.

These recent difficulties made me relieved that I am not a full time designer anymore. I can’t tell you what to see. I don’t want to tell you what to see. In fact, I don’t even want to tell you what I see, because my vision is certifiably littered with personal artifacts, secret references and illusions of illusions.

sans café

Today is the fourth day. It began, by coincidence, on Holy Wednesday. I unceremoniously stopped and I already feel different. I have been tapering off as I age. Because although it was my lifesblood—and an integral part of my New Yorkey/overworked-ish identity—it is never good to overindulge. It dehydrates, it creates a buzz that ultimately gives way to a slump and to be addicted is to be weak.

I imagine that this is what it feels like to be on anti-anxiety medication. The mornings feel tranquil and promising. I am sure spring-time has something to do with it. I am sleeping better. I am drinking more water. I don’t know where this is going because I am not entirely clear why it began.

My body is rejecting coffee and I don’t even know who I am anymore. My brain no longer craves it. I am scared of what will happen to me. Will I be healthy and self-actualized and calm soon? Will I start putting up posters of kittens all over my bedroom? Will I start juicing kale? My life is virtually unrecognizable without some form of anxiety and darkness. Could it really be the coffee?

Maybe this is how most habits naturally conclude. Not with a hard lined vow, instead, they just fall away. I can already literally feel strange “happenings” slashing across my brain, maybe its portions of my brain recovering or maybe they are atrophying. I am craving sugar more, so I may have to put a stop to this, for the good of my dentition.

Although, on this lovely Saturday morning, I awoke before 7:00 and I drank a cup of earl grey instead. and I liked it.

To give you an idea of how addicted I was: read this and this #11.

a handful of words

{For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.}—Jhumpa Lahiri, New York Times, “My Life’s Sentences”.

This little opinion piece in the Sunday Times by Jhumpa Lahiri, resonated with me, and reminded me of these two old posts:

1) The Sentence in the Soil

Editing your own writing is hard. When I am writing I often become attached to sentences, even if there are too many commas or too few periods.

And I have learned that good writing comes from wanting to say something, not just from wanting to write anything.

But I find that one often knows when things are not quite right yet in writing, that more adjustments have to be made, even if it is a difficult truth to face.

It is easy to think that the soil of words is tilled perfectly and you are ready to plant your seed which will grow roots in this very spot. But sometimes you have to go and get a sturdy shovel and be honest with yourself and plunge it into the ground and turn the soil over a few more times until you see the nutrient rich sentences rise to the top.

And sometimes it will turn up. The sentence to end all sentences. The one that can only exist after several failed attempts have gone, the one that splits your heart into two with its razorlike clarity and then melts the two halves with the warm hearth of humility.

The kind of sentence that when someone else reads it they will think to themselves, “Wow, that is really great I wish I had written that.” And you will know that they could not have and not only because they didnt, but because you did.

2) Slow Wri-ter.

I wrote something truly terrible today. So astoundingly bad, that I had to write about it. Because I have a thing, with words. I have a little superficial stylistic, aesthetic respect for them and their placement and sound and interaction and oh yes, meaning. I want each sentence to be a tiny whirring machine that stirs. However, this is not always possible, or necessary.

I have a student who always stays after class to catch up. She has talked to me at length about how her lecture professor goes too fast with the powerpoint slides, and she is unable to keep up. I let her see my slides and we talk about the material. The other day, I noticed that her handwriting was insanely neat. She is probably 40 and looks like she may have another job, and a child, or two, or something. I watched her painstakingly copy the information from my slides into her notebook. Each letter was perfectly spaced from the next and unbelievably rounded. Her penmanship showed the kind of meticulous detail that is abandoned shortly after you learn to write in script, on thinly lined paper, with a pen. Its the kind of conscientiousness that is just not conducive to well, writing. I wondered if this was actually her problem. But then I wondered about the connection between speed of comprehension and speed of handwriting. Is there one? I dont know, but I wondered.

Which brings me to today. I was writing an exam myself. Because I am still at the hypocrisy inducing stage of graduate school where I teach, enforce rules on others, tell them how to improve, wonder what is holding them back, think like a professor, play dress up and then turn around and screw up royally in my own classes wearing sneakers with holes in them. Its almost ridiculous and certainly humbling. I began writing my exam very neatly today, although I was very nervous, so little, uncharacteristic flourishes emerged from my freshly shaky hand. I was not writing particularly physically slow. but. I. kept. stopping. to go back and read what I had written. I did not only want to convey uninspired lists of information about these astounding creatures. I wanted to convey how much I respect and understand the concepts and words that encircle them. This, incidentally, was not possible. I left out one whole question because I ran out of time. Twenty points, gone. And I had planned on using the word gestalt in my essay somewhere, but that never happened either.

And I must admit on this blog I go back incessantly and edit and re-edit and re-re-edit. It would be too embarrassing for you to know how often I actually do that. Because its also narcissism in this case, but thats kind of a good word too.

P.S. This was also an interesting piece in today’s Times on what parts of your brain light up from reading particular words, or handfuls of words: Your Brain on Fiction.