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update

susie — Wed, 02 May 2012 06:02:28 +0000

i love this song. i played it about a million and four thousand times today. somehow perfect for this weather — dense, heavy airs, foreboding thunderstorms, lovely atmosphere.

three zines. ROOTS and DRYADS are mine. TRAGOPAN is a collaborative scrapbook of drawings, photographs, and writings by me, carrie, and erika. TRAGOPAN is available at erika’s etsy shop for purchase. she sells other great zines, that talented bitch.

we sold those three and other curiosities at mocca-fest, which was a long, tiring, and ultimately rewarding experience. everything i post on this stupid blog is a passion project done for myself, but sometimes i feel sad that i am working in a vacuum. the feedback at mocca cheered me. one girl carefully studied our zines with a little smile on her face, and i could tell she was excited to see the work; then she said she’d bought two of my dolls last year. that made me feel happy. like i have worth. mocca was great in other ways, too… i bought a monty python shirt, traded zines, and talked to some cool people, including a guy who showed me a photo of a taxidermy pangolin and two-headed pig fetus… i was also excited to discover nick sousanis, who writes and illustrates amazing comics… too tired to explain, but there is something of the polymath in his work, and i recommend you check it out….. last but not least, here is my table. i was trying to look especially casual and nonchalant in this photo…

& “the anal lady,” erika,

& erika’s handmade and non-anal mushrooms…

& i just saw this photo of me and carrie on the anal lady’s facebook, and i love it, so i am stealing it to post it here.

by a dark reason

susie — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 08:51:19 +0000

two sets from my small square zine comprised of ten pairs of drawings. i wanted to draw in a simple way. black and white, different styles for each visual couplet, no funny business.

posting at 3:37 am. insomnia. i think i can’t sleep and feel so thirsty because i am all dried up from crying so much today! i cried all throughout WAR HORSE (the puppet play, not the shitty looking movie), and then i cried reading THE CHILDREN’S BOOK by a.s. byatt. it’s not even one of her better books! but one character seemed so familiar to me that i hoped he’d make it out of the story alive; of course he didn’t, and of course his mother loved him more in his passing. why does it seem easier to love someone in death than in life? lack of foresight, cowardice, selfishness when it comes to the living? i don’t want to believe that. maybe it is that memories transform under the high pressure of grief. like carbon becoming diamond. you start condensing all your memories into this one hard ball of pain that you keep turning over and over in your mind, rolling it in the palm of your reason, eroding it with your ceaseless handling until all the rough patches you shared together have become a single shiny surface. that is the small part of a person you own. you can’t ever own a whole person, know one entirely in all his infinite facets; but you can hold this gem of a person. and depending on how you hold it: can be a lens or a prism, can cast a shadow, can be a mirror in which you may study and learn about yourself.
i just remember a conversation from long ago.
someone told me about buddhist monks cleansed in fire after death. skin, hair, bones, all gone. but in the ashes are stones. sometimes just one stone, sometimes a few tiny ones, some clear, some colored, some shiny. so i think loved and loving people leave many stones in many individuals’ memories as some monks leave their stones in ash. when i go i will not make any stones, instead i will make a little soil to be food for flowers; that is how i want to go… and that is how i will go to sleep now, imagining myself dreaming in a field of flowers.

vocalise-étude

susie — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 06:55:06 +0000

page from an old zine i reprinted. i lost the file and then had to redraw most of it, because i threw out my old drawings in my usual way. i have one test copy, which you can have for free by emailing me at susie000 at gmail.com. otherwise i’ll be selling copies at mocca-fest. my writing is worthless, but the illustrations are nice.

here is one illustration for a zine my friends and i are putting together. it’s a scrapbook of our adventures. the finished product will be very nice.

i hope i can paint with watercolors this week. it’s been a little frustrating. but i discovered that i am good at drawing in a tiny way on jellybeans. i made a jellybean art called “my faces that are not good.” the faces are all my feelings, of which i have many, like dread, terror, fear, horror, etc.

milonga picaresqee

susie — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 06:14:09 +0000

wrote a ghost story on post-it-notes tonight on the el train back to gravesend and wished butoh performances were not so rare. so here’s a photographic memento of the night i saw hoichi the earless. such a memorable performance, the stark stage occupied by a lute player, a singer with her biwa, and one dancer. i could’ve done without the lute player, because the minimalism was compelling, superior to the spectacle of opera (though i enjoy opera). a good story requires only a strong voice to sustain it. embellishments and special effects are easily dismissed as vanity and gimmicks.

i’m always wishing for foggy nights like this. love the way the water molecules transmit (transmute? translate?) the light, expanding the fields of color. definitely thought of dan flavin’s work (his atmospheric sketches + neon installations = atmospheric fog + neon street lights) as a study in meteorology and light. but i’ve been thinking about flavin a lot since i saw an exhibition of his drawings at the morgan library. it was the most thoughtfully curated and surprising show i’ve seen in ages. i expected his clean, simple lighting plans, but his loose sketching style? nope. the way he rendered an architectural or human form in a few wild smudges? nope. but then i thought i should not be so surprised since it’s apparent in both his installations and his sketches: he was a man who understands the value of a mark. no wonder that calligrams and the works of hokusai interested him.

(or maybe it’s because hokusai is the only “old” asian artist westerners seem to know… kind of strange since hokusai was inspired by western art himself? rinse, recycle, repeat?)

anyway i can only dream of drawing like that. and here are my drawings to end the post. charcoal sketches drawn from dioramas at amnh… including my failed moose battle drawing, i’m forever bitter at my failure. the last three sketches are exercises in “dressing” skeletons. i love sketching from skeletons! better than drawing from bloated furballs. loving the mechanical and somehow musical structure, i can’t help but perceive the skeleton as visualization of piano music… maybe something to do with the ivory keys and the way the joints are like high notes? i have no idea. or i have ideas but they make no sense.

ain’t no grave

susie — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 06:11:00 +0000

i live with the ghost of my secret intentions. she is ill but has no will with which to strike a killing blow. so she skulks in the peripheries, claiming every right angle for her own. the dust rises from a corner of the room, and i know she is there. i know the faint fingerprint on the mirror is hers just as i know the footsteps i hear right now are not mine. now and then, like any poltergeist worth her salt, she throws a tantrum; she rushes from room to room and trails a maelstrom of leaves in her wake. she stirs up all the dry pages and the origami characters that line the corridors and banisters, and she scatters the paper paraphernalia that holds up my walls. she knows my house is a flimsy thing made of mismanaged passages and words lifted out of context. a huff and a puff might bring the whole thing down.

i hate to admit that the structure’s been blown down more than once, and each successive time it takes me slightly longer to rebuild it. of course some things are lost forever. little things like the sentiments expressed in romantic poetry — i’ll never get that back again. they have become the ghosts of memories of thoughts, discarded in some forgotten corner to gather dust.

there is something else i do not like to admit. and that is my belief that some things are pre-written. let me explain. during a seance, my phantom roommate’s grip slipped from the planchette to my hand and she made me spell out my own future: someday soon my house will come down for good. the destruction will be so complete that i will lose any will to restore it. i will let the printed type that defines my identity fade into the soil, and i will watch the ink run, turning my cursive into mud to fertilize the curses that will germinate and bear fruit in my name. i believe this is a certainty scripted not by a higher power but written by my own betraying hand; the foregone conclusion to a series of life choices all delineated by the wiring in my brain.

a breeze carries a page from my favorite book to my shoulder.
i read the familiar words.
“there is no language without deceit.”