Today, I am in New Haven, Connecticut
in a coffee shop next to Yale campus, because M. is teaching his first guitar lesson
to his 6 and 11 year old students.

Yesterday, I went to West Hartford to visit K. in her misery.
Wednesday morning I woke up to a coughing fit in the guest bedroom at S.'s parents house in New Jersey.
S. knocked at my door at 7:45 to tell me he was leaving for work, and gave me a hug goodbye.
At 8 his mother entered the bedroom tell me that she had left towels out for me to shower.
Finally at 10:30 I found the will to leave his house. I thanked his father for the family's hospitality.
S. gave me a free lunch at his work.
Everything seemed like it had been before, except for the very obvious.

M. was depressed that I was staying at S.'s house Tuesday night.
Not out of sheer jealousy
but because it reminded him of how close I was to S.
and how he had inadvertently put an effective end to my past relationship with S.--
a good and special relationship, M. has inferred,
from the way I speak about S.
A relationship that M. wants to have with me, but he can't
because of my very present feelings that I still for S.
no matter how hard I try to swallow whenever I am with either of them.
So M. feels very outside of my life at this point
and I could not say anything to convince him of otherwise
because it was true
except for the fact that everything takes time, especially the good things.

This morning I woke up feeling like a stranger, probably because
I was with familiar people the night before, but I was out of place.
Then I drove to work
and sped mindlessly through empty streets towards downtown
(7:45 AM, no traffic because it was a holiday, I realize that now)
and I pretended that I didn't know where I was, or who I was,
because if I am an outsider, then nothing is familiar
except for the overcast skies and the damp, cool morning air.

Saturday night, Bert and I drank brass monkeys after work in his apartment
we had no place to go with our 40's and orange juice.
I spoke to him about my anxieties
about moving to New York, while working at a stupid restaurant in the meantime.
I had talked to Rachel earlier that day,
and she had complained to me about similar ailments that most art school graduates undergo
except that she also shared her outstanding efforts as well:
"I mean, I go to a museum everyday, and lectures whenever I can. And I am constantly meeting with my curator and artist friends to talk about art. but I can't seem to be making art right now, although I know this is just like, my process, I collect as much information and then regurgitate into art form."

somehow this was the appropriate response to my question of "how are you"
granted
perhaps she answered all of her doubts aloud to me because she was eager for congratulations
a pat on the back to tell her that yes, you are going the right way
and you are taking the right steps
to becoming an artist
and an intellectual
in New York
good job

A lot of struggling professionals at this age
seem to participate in this weird
sharing and withholding ritual.
that is, I am going to mention that I'm doing this and this, but I won't tell you how I'm doing it, because I don't really want you to succeed either.

It is the spirit of competitiveness
that shapes New York
and gives it its shine.
It scares me too.

while the intentions are vague,
most of the people who move to New York want something or the other
I mean, I want a studio and a new camera too. Just like she does.
And I too want to live in New York.

what right do I have to judge Rachel's intentions, anyway.

Okay
so she presented this information to me
to inspire admiration
and jealousy
on my part. right?
whether conscious or subconsciously
perhaps not at all, but this is how I responded.

I am worried about getting sucked into that mentality.
I am worried about "not making it."

Bert gave me some sobering advice
told me that good ideas take time
and eventually, if it is good, somebody will recognize it
and if it ends up not being good
then I have to settle for being mediocre.

It is nice
to be around people
who are willing to work
but are prepared to accept
the dreaded mark of "average."

I feel comfort, and I feel companionship out of that.

the saddest thing

by L. Morton

Assignment #40 from Learning How to Love You More

"This guideline is framed on a relationship of three years or so, and after living together, but it can be applied to other situations.

Remember: When you break up, it is as if someone, actually the person closest to you, has died. You no longer and will no longer know them like you once did. You will feel like you will never go on, especially if you had a spiritual connection with this person.
This is normal.

It will hurt. If you've never had anyone close to you die, this is what it feels like. What follows is grief.

The night it happens you will feel an unbelievable shot of pain, and you may feel nauseous. You may feel like you're dying. The best thing to do is find a close/best friend immediately. If your best friend is your girlfriend (or boy)--you may feel the need to be with them because you feel they are the only one who understands. If the breakup is mutual, this is okay. But you need to be around people that comfort you. It is not uncommon to seek help from the person who caused you the pain. they cannot be the one to get you through this.

There are many ways to let go. If you have a hard time letting go, make steps and stick to them. If you slept in the same bed, sleep in separate beds. Give yourself a week and no longer to do this! Then separate rooms, people's houses. If at all possible move out within one month. Only then can you start to grow apart from this person."

Girl, Minneapolis, Minnesota

On Self-Respect by Joan Didion

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a mater of misplaced self-respect.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did to make Phi Beta kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself; no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through ones’ marked cards the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who we are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

To protest that some fairly improbably people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one’s underwear. There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samara and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbably candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: “I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “It takes two to make an accident.”

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-yaer-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke out about it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnee.

In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my had in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult bin the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with ones head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

i can't figure out art's function

1. to reflect the zeitgeist of the moment? or more specifically, ~our generation~ (as if only a specific part of the population reflects culture at whole)
   
2. to provide an alternative means for communication of personal issues
3. to raise social awareness for sociopolitical issues that are otherwise marginalized
4. to add beauty (or highlight beauty that already exists in our world) that brightens our everyday lives
   

etc. etc.

occupying a space outside of pop culture

This weekend I had to go to New York City for a class.
It was my first time visiting Chelsea galleries. Someone thought I was kidding.
After four years of struggling and/or coasting through an art education, I am probably one of the last of my graduating class to have the standard Chelsea-art-tour. There were some good shows, there were a lot of bad shows, but there was just a lot of art. A lot of information that I had been missing.
Along with that revelation, this weekend I discovered that the IPhone is pretty cool, a revelation only two years late.
I still can't pronounce "Chick-fil-A" correctly, along with half the English dictionary.
Every time my friend nudged me when we passed a character on the street, I completely missed it. He said we weren't on the same wavelength. Another time he said I was living on a different world.
I've heard the adjective "oblivious" describe me more than often.

I think I'm missing the observant quality of being an artist. The amount of books and theory and cultural studies I've tried feeding myself still fall short. I don't watch enough TV. I don't read enough news. I don't see enough movies. I don't buy enough things. I don't get a lot of ironic jokes. I don't look around enough, especially before crossing.

I wonder if I had toured the Chelsea two years before, my work would have been different.
At least more accelerated.
I would've been exposed to more contemporary ideas in a shorter amount of time, at a younger age, and maybe I would have a fatter and smarter portfolio by graduation.
Or it would've fed this desperate need to stay "relevant" and encouraged me to vomit a whole mess of derivative art.

I don't know.

someone remarked that the Chelsea makes her feel like anyone can be an artist, because there's so much bad shit in there. Another said he felt like he could never be an artist, because there's no way in. I lean towards the latter sentiment. I feel blocked off by the high counters in the galleries, or worse yet, I feel casted outside in the rain, while staring at success through the glass windows.

It's really popular in art school to scorn the "art market," lament over its corruption, and essentially believe that it has single-handedly perverted contemporary art.

yeah, god selling art sucks. getting paid to do what you love sucks.

"outsider" "art"

although, I'm starting to believe that you can't escape commodification, homogenization, globalization, and whatever.
In terms of globalization, there is no more "outside" according to Hardt's & Negri's argument. I mean, no space outside where we can "critique and construct an alternative."

Fahlstrom's use of the map form points to the possibility that if global capitalism cannot be subjected to criticism from a space outside it, then perhaps the answer is to find spaces within it from which to question or undermine it.

Meaning there is no neutral space or utopia to where I can escape and make ~art~. We're all subjected to the same tools. It's whether or not we use them effectively.

So either you work it, or you don't, I guess. So much for living-in-the-mountains dream.