Lets go down the waterfall

It's 2009! I'm laying in bed right now listening to Radiohead, in order of the most played. I can't believe it, 2008 is over. It's all over, I can put everything behind me and step into this new year with a clean slate, I can do that. I am doing that. A whole new year, and I don't know what's going to happen.

Some thoughts on my 2008, before I leave it completely...

Favorite movie of 2008: Brideshead Revisited
Favorite book of 2008: The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie
Favorite Song of 2008: Videotape, Radiohead
Favorite album of 2008: its a tie between Cat Power's Jukebox and Radiohead's In Rainbows (that's no shock, I'm sure)
Favorite musical discovery of 2008 (not a new musician, but someone I got into): Cat Power
Favorite (overall) asana of 2008: Pigeon pose (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana)
My artistic fixations of 2008: time, birds, the apocolypse, Harlequins, Pierrot, maps, apples
Coolest thing I did in 2008: I went to London, and I started to take yoga classes
Band of the year (not new band, but band that I listened to the most and whose music backdropped my life): Radiohead



"You must reach completely outside the box, past your apparent limitations, to find the tools that will allow you to sustain growth and realize your fullest potential." That's from my horoscope for 2009.

So, it's less than a month until Florence. Am I freaking out? YES. I've been having some crazy dreams...last night we ended up going to an extravagant party, then going to a musuem that opened up to a beach, all before we got to our housing. I've had a few nightmares about it too...getting lost, etc. I am quite excited though. I'm tired of waiting and making lists and planning, I just want to pack and be there.

I've been, as usual, listening, watching, and reading about Radiohead. They really can get me started. I want to start playing around with animation, video, sounds. I've always been interested in film, I love digital photograpgy, and I feel like the things that I'm interested in right now (time and my relationship with it, birds and what they represent, the fall of Rome (of a western way of life), maps and the idea of being both big and small and interconnected) could all play well and be explored more by taking them beyond painting. I want to incorporate what I already do and love (painting), but take it further. Meshing all of these things is difficult. Thom Yorke said in an interview I watched recently that "if you know something will work, you also know it won't work", and I think thats completely true. I have a desire, a need to create, to push things out and onto paper, to express. I love painting, I love the process of it, I love seeing where it will take me, I love oil paints and turpentine, how they smell, how they feel under your fingers, how they dance across surfaces, but lately I've been wating more. More texture, more depth, more than just a surface. They work, but they also don't work.

I've been struggling for the past year on how to reconcile the fact that art, paintings, are just things-they're objects that are hung on walls then discarded later. They don't function, they don't do anything that serves a needed purpose; they basically become waste that is thrown out. And with our huge problems with waste and what it's doing to the Earth, I often have a hard time justifying to myself that my career choice is not only financially possible (lets face it, art is a luxury, and in a world going through a huge financial crisis, art is a luxury that people cut out first), but that the choice to try to become a painter is even an ethical thing to do. In the process of painting I create a lot of watse, as much as I try to reduce and reuse, and my product in the end will eventually become trash. I love art, I love painting, but really whats the point. It's just stuff to fill space on walls. This fact gets me down sometimes.

Anyway, where all of this is leading is that I need to create art that is present, that deals with this existential crisis I've been having, but that also is of our time. I don't want to take away the imortance of a painting, of the traditional forms of art-they are the most important and most valid. I hate the idea of being different just to get attention and I don't like the idea of avant-garde. I think taking the time to look a physical piece of art is important-it does something to you and it is a very real thing. I think there is nothing wrong with painting just to paint. But I also think that in this day and age, it takes more than looking to communicate and have a conversation with most people. Digital multimedia can do that. I can talk about life now, using the tools and the mediums that make life now what it is.

In Limbo

Well, I'm getting ready for bed. It's my last night at ONU until next year. It's an odd thing to think about. I'm so excited to go to Italy, I want to be reborn there. I was looking at a tree, watching the leaves fall from it a few weeks ago, and it occured to be that I was doing the same thing. I was dropping my leaves, shedding my skin this fall. This winter I will burrow in at home, then in January I will be born anew. The spring will bring rebirth. Wonderfully enough in the same place where there was a rebirth of culture and art-Florence. It's all so fitting, so beautiful. I'm so nervous about leaving, so excited, and also so sad. I'm sad to leave all of my loved ones behind, my lovely friends and family. It's strange to think that everyone's lives will develope here, without me being able to participate and experience things with everyone, to grow with them. Of course I'll change and grow, but it's like I'm going on a pilgrimage; I'm going so far away and will have such little contact with everyone, and because of all of the things I will be experiencing, it's like I will be in a different world. It's all so hard to grasp still, but every day I can taste it more and more. Right now though, I'm just waiting. Missing my friends already, excited to leave, I'm in a strange place.

This is one for the good days

I've been listening to Radiohead's "Videiotape" over and over again today. I've actually been listening to it on repeat for the past few days, and have been listening to Radiohead exclusively for the past two weeks. Its a strange song, full of emptyness, with a hint of longing. Its the perfect song for an ending, whether you needed or wanted the ending to happen.

The album, I've read, is about relationships. Relationships at first seem like rainbows, beautiful, perfect, enchanting. But as time goes on, you come to see that being in a rainbow is to be in a thin veil of water droplets, just as in relationships you learn there are flaws, problems; that this enchantment is nothing but an illusion of prefection, of beauty. It will disappear in time; the rainbow, the euphoria, the relationship.

So then, the question begs asking, why bother?

When I’m at the pearly gates

This’ll be on my videotape

Mephistopheles is just beneath

And he’s reaching up to grab me

This is one for the good days

And I have it all here in

Red, blue, green

You are my centre when I spin away

Out of control on videotape

On videotape

This is my way of saying goodbye

Because I can’t do it fact to face

So I’m talking to you before

No matter what happens nowI won’t be afraid

Because I know

Today has been the most perfect day I have ever seen

What we do to the Earth we do to ourselves

A new wave of conciousness exploded upon me today.

It started last night during my run. It was dark out, and as I ran by a pond I noticed how brilliant the stars were-more so than usual it seemed. And so I sat on a bench near that pond and took it all in. I experienced it. And in those minutes,I happened to notice flickering, twinkling planes which on first glance looked like stars. But no, there were planes littered across the sky-at least 10 of them. People up there, looking like stars. Which made me think of a quote I heard earlier in the day: "We are all stardust." And so I sat there, taking this all in, marveling at it all. And this strange feeling crept up inside of me, and I knew that I ws nearing something.

What I was nearing on is what happened today. As I sat in on an Art History class (that I've already taken I just liked it so much I want to do it again-yes, I'm a nerd), the topic of discussion came to prehistoric art, and how the people of the time were not just close to the Earth, they knew they were a part of it, unlike people today. Then we watched a video by biologist David Suzuki, where he explores that idea, and then goes on to explain that thinking we're separate from the earth is not only silly but suicidal. We're connected to the Earth and to each other, he explained, through air, earth, water, and fire. For example, we breathe in argon atoms, then breathe them out. A scientist traced them from one of his breaths, and a year later 15 of the same atoms he breathed in again. They don't just disappear, so really, we're breathing atoms that dinosaurs, pharohs, our neighbors have breathed as well. Breath, air connects us to the past, to the present, to the future, to each other.

But now, in our own man-made environments, and consumer driven culture, we're unaware of that connection to one another and the Earth. So we're acting in ways that hurt not only ourselves in the long run, but others, and the planet-which is our home-as well. And because we're not connected to the Earth, we have a loss of cummunity(one that perhaps we're filling with consumption, I think), and because we're forgetting where we come from, we have a spiritual hole in us. We face huge dilemmas right now: the environmental crisis, the econmic crisis, overpopulation, etc.

So what do we do? I don't know know, but I think that to start we need to recognize that we're the Earth, that we are each other. As I did yoga after class, I began to feel, not just recognize, in an entirely new way how interconnected everything really is. It wasn't just a moment, it was an experience. We are all one. We must get back to nature, to our spirit. To ourselves.

"What you do to the Earth you do to yourself"

After its all over

"To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders." Taoist saying

Today was a difficult day, for reasons I won't go into here. But suffice it to say, it was draining. At the end of day, as I was coming home with my mom, we saw an amazing sunset. It was searing, bold and vibrant. And later, when I was out running, I could feel it, looking up at the stars, unusually bright, through the whisping clouds. I could feel the kosmos, the interconnection. I'm sorry if I'm getting a little to Bill for anyone here, but I really could feel it. Nothing, for those brief moments, was separate.

I can't often fall asleep

Yoga. I love Yoga. It has literally changed my life-transformed it. I started practicing seriously last summer, and finally decided to take classes this summer. What a great thing that was. It has taken my love, my ability level, my confidence, and passion for it, to a greater depth than I thought possible. But now classes are over and I'm struggling to create my own home practice. This is something I want, something that is very important to me to create, to have, to be a part of. I think once I'm not in limbo anymore, once school has started and I'm not at home all packed up, that it will get easier. I am having a hard time creating routines I guess you could say, and then making them lengthy. I don't want to rely on books and videos. I want to learn how to create a flow, and I guess thats what I will be teaching myself over the next 11 weeks.

Sometimes I get very discouaged. One moment I can go from being so confident in myself, in my art, to the next being completely distraught, as though I'm left on the side of the road with nothing. And that is why I cannot sleep tonight.

Today

So I thought I might try a blog out. I mean, I've tried myspace, facebook...I'll probably lose interest in this eventually, like I did with those other two, but maybe I won't. When I'm overseas later this year, though, I thought this would be a good idea.

My yoga classes have ended for the summer, school will be starting in a week....things are a bit crazy right now.

I have finally started to get some juice, find that spark inside of me. It's beautiful, its wonderful; I'm so happy about it. I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I've been waiting a long time for this. I want to start dealing with identity, with the transient nature of people. I spoke with someone today who pointed out that we are as much a part of our past as we are of our future. I've always felt this way-that we are constantly changing, evolving, and that we are a part of that past, as well as the future; that the present moment we are always in is both those things at once. How do you show that? How do you portray that? More importantly, how do you deal with that some days. How do you deal with this constant change. I've always found that letting go and letting it happen, just accepting it and embracing it is the best thing to do. Be a part of the flowing stream, as opposed to fighting against the current, fighting against your own nature. Then you are alive, you are experiencing life, which is this moment, to the fullest potential. But that's easier said than done.