by moonlight
Sep. 9th, 2017 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yamamanamaEven without Ashley around, this week has been a real fucking nailbiter. And I swear, every time we're in the clear with one of these hurricanes, a new one shows up. I'm glad Jack picked a better time than this to be in the Virgin Islands.
Alexa has black hair now and glasses and socks with various constellations of the zodiac on them. She said she had blonde hair, not green, but maybe it was the lighting or it had faded to green. She provided context, which is nice: she was with her friends Hong and Erica and she thinks it was in the autumn. Spoiler alert: it was spring. Unless you're in Argentina or Rand McNally. If you're in Rand McNally, light colors are subtractive and paint colors are additive. Because the last time I met Alexa she kept moving around, I wasn't super-satisfied with my drawing of her.
I'm amazed she remembers me. This is not déjà vu. Déjà vu is when you remember something happening when you're experiencing it for the first time, like how I felt when I played Fantasy Zone for the first time. Holly would use serendipity to describe things like this.
Alexa doesn't have any pets but wants a cat.
A man has a tiger and bird amongst flowers on one arm and an octopus holding an anchor on his other arm. Another man was a tattoo artist and his arms were covered in tattoos, including a peering eye.
I'm disappointed that a woman I drew wasn't reading My Education by William S. Burroughs. Nay, she was reading Susan Choi's My Education, which is not about dreams but about a graduate student who has an affair with a professor's wife. A woman who reminded me of Julianne sat down and read her book.
Outside Out of the Blue was "all these strange pieces came together to create this beautiful image. as humans, so can we."
There was a rock spirit from Princess Mononoke sticker above the graffiti wall.
I'm not going to rank the Thai restaurants of Boston and its satellites because it's not like I only order one thing at every Thai restaurant. At Pepper Sky's, I got the Tom Kar Mor Fire, which is a hot pot with coconut cream, lime juice, galangal, chili peppers, mushrooms, herbs, squid, shrimp, and the biggest mussels I've ever seen. At Pepper Sky's were the requisite fishtanks and a brochure for a play called Constellations, about Marianne and Roland who meet at a party and fall in love or maybe they don't as there are infinitely many possibilities.
The houses aren't as stately as the ones on the way from Porter Square to the park where Julius Caesar was held and the gardens and yards are more overgrown.
I got there an hour early and I thought "I don't like the symbols on the ground. they look like the Zodiac Killer made up the art show to lure people here."
I decided to check out Inman Square, which is a happening place despite being far away from a T station. There's a panel in the ground that says
today is the day
and this is the spot
to dance a little
or to dance a lot
just try it once
and see how you feel
if a smile breaks out
when you take this chance
then you've been touched by
the power of dance.
Some graffiti over a cleaning service was impossible to read and mostly just misspelled ramblings.
I found that coffeehouse but no art by Emma, and Emma told me that the mural is elsewhere. She used a street name to describe the location but I tend to think of Boston/Cambridge/Somerville/Newton/Brookline not in terms of streets but in terms of T stations. The art's cool (by a fellow named Benjamin Styer) but they have another location a short walk away from the Central T station, so I don't know why I wouldn't just get a pastry there instead. The barista had green hair and black lipstick. Christina's Spices, or maybe it was another store, had a sign with the Sesame Street yip aliens saying "compassion" in unison. There was a mural in a sewing store that welcomed refugees and had a memorial to Heather Heyer.
I met Charlie, who's half papillon and his job is to sit around and be petted. "Ah, to be a dog," I said.
Trace is about what we leaves behind and how we respond to what is there. We do things, or in life, we see a lot of fucked up shit and live around it.
The word has two meanings: to draw around something that already exists and the remnant of something that happened before.
There are other meanings but they aren't important.
Emma started this creating large backdrops for Atlas Lab and solo shows, in which she's trying to use as much space as possible while also using as little material and time as possible. So she'd dilute paint to a water's thickness and drop it from a height. Nothing splatters gracefully but she found it mostly graceful. So she felt the need to trace over the splatters with vivid colors and she doesn't really think about that.
They're grouped by colors: there are some red ones and some blue ones, and some record cases from the 70s that someone threw away.
She says that she feels uncomfortable with one of them because it looks like blood and she doesn't like the way it's balanced. And sometimes the splatters come out looking phallic and that wasn't her intention.
She says that records are a renewable resource and she wants to do something with the vinyl itself.
The first one started as a thing for a condo and that fell through, and she used "illusion of choice" to describe what they were really advertising. She had this 100 dollar canvas sitting around and she needed to do something with it. Not everything is done on canvas, there was part of a desk that pulls out and it's heavy, there's one painted on a whiteboard, there's one painted on a cutting board, there's one painted on a shower curtain and surrounded with LED bulbs and nearby is a light cord that was meant for a stage she'd play music on and which I thought was meant to say "Solei," there's even one on a brass serving plate. The sticker says the thing can last forever if you take care of it and the previous owner ignored all the instructions. She painted around all the rust on it.
She says that maybe she'll have art at the MFA or ICA when she's 75.
One thing she's never done is taken paint and mashed the boards together.
There's a mural in the bathroom: a green splotch and a mandala face chain. I like how it's more organic and not perfectly symmetric.
She says she wants to create a building-sized splotch if only she had unlimited resources, and started noticing splotches around the city, including one she made when the can of paint broke open, spilled out on the street, and cars ran over it.
Leanne says that Bandcamp can't be run from a shared office. She says the third and fourth floor is just offices but the fifth floor is amazing because there's a laboratory.
The gallery has some couches, some mustard yellow chairs, and a lamp that's held together with yellow tape and a wooden floor. There's a room with a refrigerator covered in science fictiony magnetic poetry. There's a door that leads to advanced something something and Leanne says there should be something like "intermediate" or perhaps "n00b."
Emma was wearing a shirt she made by spattering ink on a circle of fabric. It looked like the far side of the moon.
Emma put a star next to each painting she sold, because otherwise, they'd just be languishing in her closet. I said that maybe she'll get them confused and then I said that maybe she should just have a fixed rate for paintings and the recipients won't know what the painting will be. She was selling prints and said that the colors didn't come out as vivid as she'd like them to and I'm sure that it's because you can't get certain hues when subtracting the colors in cyan, yellow, and magenta ink.
Emma was listening to Moonchild, a mixture of trip-hop and jazz and r&b (and apparently they're from LA), and Hiatus Kaiyote, a future soul quartet from Melbourne and the word kaiyote is a portmanteau of peyote and coyote, and Dorothy Ashby, a jazz harpist who also played koto. I'll have to tell Ashley about them.
Emma asked who doesn't like jazz and I said that maybe people from the 1600s don't but that's only because they've never heard it. But I'd like to hear their interpretation of jazz given a rough description.
This was a burning question I had a long time ago.
One of the members of the band Mnemonist was there. A mnemonist is someone who remembers things and Emma (I almost wrote Ashley here: after all, they do have a lot in common) says that she loves the word numinous, from the Latin word for "divine will" or "nod." I didn't learn anything new except that mnar stones may or may not be a reference to the game Prisoner of Ice or possibly Alone in the Dark, in which it is a protective charm made from a heavy material inscribed with the sigil of the most ancient gods and is named for a place in Lovecraft's The Doom That Came To Sarnath.
Emma keeps calling her friend Cassie, even though it's not. I can't remember what her actual name is. It was a fairly common name and they didn't start with the same letter. I told Emma that I kept calling her Ashley. Not to her face but I'm occasionally like "Ashley has an art exhibition" or whatever.
She says that maybe Ashley finds me overwhelming because she can and I certainly find my own thoughts and things I need to say overwhelming. And yeah, I only get to talk to her once or twice a year but she hasn't seen the other people there in over a year too.
By the time she did the talk, there were a ton of people there. Literally. It's kind of off in nowhere, in a place that used to house shelves of obsolete technological junk, which, incidentally, is like a dream Emma had, although I think she was just sorting them and not using it to build a machine that transmogrifies objects into carrots. She had a dream involving yellow spots and wants to use that in a music video.
Katie mentioned someone who takes stock photos and hides copyright information on it and puts tracers on the images and then sues people who use them. Katie says that the people I draw look angry and she asked if it's because they're musicians.
One of Emma's friends is colorblind and found this out when they were showing him these images with a number in a different color and he just thought they were trolling him and saw the red paintings as brown instead. I brought up how some languages don't distinguish blue and green and he says that it's because there isn't much blue in nature aside from the sky (Emma adds blueberries and blue flowers and her friend adds whales) and the sky isn't always blue and in Greek literature, nobody actually describes the color of the sky.
While a few like Russian, Romanian, and Hebrew distinguish light blue and dark blue, and Hungarian and Turkish have multiple words for what we would just call red.
Holly said that if she had a superpower, it would be to understand every language.
The singer of Miss Geo was there and I've heard of them but can't remember where. Maybe Emma told me about them. I thought it may be Vanyaland but she's surprised to know that fact so maybe not. And I've never actually heard them live. I think she's Abby because she mentioned Paz by her name.
Her arm was tattooed with a cross that transmuted into a Chinese number 7 - 七 - when she bent her arm.
Melissa has a wolf made from a smattering of curves tattooed on her shoulder
Holly (not the same Holly) was born in 1995. I know this because she has the number tattooed on her hand, along with a word that I can't remember. I said "oh wow," and she says she gets that a lot. I don't mean that she looks younger or older, I mean that there are people born in 1995 who are old enough to drink alcohol legally.
I asked Charity the same thing I asked Cassia: like in the Starbridge Chronicles? No, she hasn't read that. Charity is doing something with augmented reality and has a jeweled nose ring.
burning question: Who is to be apparisoned in the hue of doves?
Alexa has black hair now and glasses and socks with various constellations of the zodiac on them. She said she had blonde hair, not green, but maybe it was the lighting or it had faded to green. She provided context, which is nice: she was with her friends Hong and Erica and she thinks it was in the autumn. Spoiler alert: it was spring. Unless you're in Argentina or Rand McNally. If you're in Rand McNally, light colors are subtractive and paint colors are additive. Because the last time I met Alexa she kept moving around, I wasn't super-satisfied with my drawing of her.
I'm amazed she remembers me. This is not déjà vu. Déjà vu is when you remember something happening when you're experiencing it for the first time, like how I felt when I played Fantasy Zone for the first time. Holly would use serendipity to describe things like this.
Alexa doesn't have any pets but wants a cat.
A man has a tiger and bird amongst flowers on one arm and an octopus holding an anchor on his other arm. Another man was a tattoo artist and his arms were covered in tattoos, including a peering eye.
I'm disappointed that a woman I drew wasn't reading My Education by William S. Burroughs. Nay, she was reading Susan Choi's My Education, which is not about dreams but about a graduate student who has an affair with a professor's wife. A woman who reminded me of Julianne sat down and read her book.
Outside Out of the Blue was "all these strange pieces came together to create this beautiful image. as humans, so can we."
There was a rock spirit from Princess Mononoke sticker above the graffiti wall.
I'm not going to rank the Thai restaurants of Boston and its satellites because it's not like I only order one thing at every Thai restaurant. At Pepper Sky's, I got the Tom Kar Mor Fire, which is a hot pot with coconut cream, lime juice, galangal, chili peppers, mushrooms, herbs, squid, shrimp, and the biggest mussels I've ever seen. At Pepper Sky's were the requisite fishtanks and a brochure for a play called Constellations, about Marianne and Roland who meet at a party and fall in love or maybe they don't as there are infinitely many possibilities.
The houses aren't as stately as the ones on the way from Porter Square to the park where Julius Caesar was held and the gardens and yards are more overgrown.
I got there an hour early and I thought "I don't like the symbols on the ground. they look like the Zodiac Killer made up the art show to lure people here."
I decided to check out Inman Square, which is a happening place despite being far away from a T station. There's a panel in the ground that says
today is the day
and this is the spot
to dance a little
or to dance a lot
just try it once
and see how you feel
if a smile breaks out
when you take this chance
then you've been touched by
the power of dance.
Some graffiti over a cleaning service was impossible to read and mostly just misspelled ramblings.
I found that coffeehouse but no art by Emma, and Emma told me that the mural is elsewhere. She used a street name to describe the location but I tend to think of Boston/Cambridge/Somerville/Newton/Brookline not in terms of streets but in terms of T stations. The art's cool (by a fellow named Benjamin Styer) but they have another location a short walk away from the Central T station, so I don't know why I wouldn't just get a pastry there instead. The barista had green hair and black lipstick. Christina's Spices, or maybe it was another store, had a sign with the Sesame Street yip aliens saying "compassion" in unison. There was a mural in a sewing store that welcomed refugees and had a memorial to Heather Heyer.
I met Charlie, who's half papillon and his job is to sit around and be petted. "Ah, to be a dog," I said.
Trace is about what we leaves behind and how we respond to what is there. We do things, or in life, we see a lot of fucked up shit and live around it.
The word has two meanings: to draw around something that already exists and the remnant of something that happened before.
There are other meanings but they aren't important.
Emma started this creating large backdrops for Atlas Lab and solo shows, in which she's trying to use as much space as possible while also using as little material and time as possible. So she'd dilute paint to a water's thickness and drop it from a height. Nothing splatters gracefully but she found it mostly graceful. So she felt the need to trace over the splatters with vivid colors and she doesn't really think about that.
They're grouped by colors: there are some red ones and some blue ones, and some record cases from the 70s that someone threw away.
She says that she feels uncomfortable with one of them because it looks like blood and she doesn't like the way it's balanced. And sometimes the splatters come out looking phallic and that wasn't her intention.
She says that records are a renewable resource and she wants to do something with the vinyl itself.
The first one started as a thing for a condo and that fell through, and she used "illusion of choice" to describe what they were really advertising. She had this 100 dollar canvas sitting around and she needed to do something with it. Not everything is done on canvas, there was part of a desk that pulls out and it's heavy, there's one painted on a whiteboard, there's one painted on a cutting board, there's one painted on a shower curtain and surrounded with LED bulbs and nearby is a light cord that was meant for a stage she'd play music on and which I thought was meant to say "Solei," there's even one on a brass serving plate. The sticker says the thing can last forever if you take care of it and the previous owner ignored all the instructions. She painted around all the rust on it.
She says that maybe she'll have art at the MFA or ICA when she's 75.
One thing she's never done is taken paint and mashed the boards together.
There's a mural in the bathroom: a green splotch and a mandala face chain. I like how it's more organic and not perfectly symmetric.
She says she wants to create a building-sized splotch if only she had unlimited resources, and started noticing splotches around the city, including one she made when the can of paint broke open, spilled out on the street, and cars ran over it.
Leanne says that Bandcamp can't be run from a shared office. She says the third and fourth floor is just offices but the fifth floor is amazing because there's a laboratory.
The gallery has some couches, some mustard yellow chairs, and a lamp that's held together with yellow tape and a wooden floor. There's a room with a refrigerator covered in science fictiony magnetic poetry. There's a door that leads to advanced something something and Leanne says there should be something like "intermediate" or perhaps "n00b."
Emma was wearing a shirt she made by spattering ink on a circle of fabric. It looked like the far side of the moon.
Emma put a star next to each painting she sold, because otherwise, they'd just be languishing in her closet. I said that maybe she'll get them confused and then I said that maybe she should just have a fixed rate for paintings and the recipients won't know what the painting will be. She was selling prints and said that the colors didn't come out as vivid as she'd like them to and I'm sure that it's because you can't get certain hues when subtracting the colors in cyan, yellow, and magenta ink.
Emma was listening to Moonchild, a mixture of trip-hop and jazz and r&b (and apparently they're from LA), and Hiatus Kaiyote, a future soul quartet from Melbourne and the word kaiyote is a portmanteau of peyote and coyote, and Dorothy Ashby, a jazz harpist who also played koto. I'll have to tell Ashley about them.
Emma asked who doesn't like jazz and I said that maybe people from the 1600s don't but that's only because they've never heard it. But I'd like to hear their interpretation of jazz given a rough description.
This was a burning question I had a long time ago.
One of the members of the band Mnemonist was there. A mnemonist is someone who remembers things and Emma (I almost wrote Ashley here: after all, they do have a lot in common) says that she loves the word numinous, from the Latin word for "divine will" or "nod." I didn't learn anything new except that mnar stones may or may not be a reference to the game Prisoner of Ice or possibly Alone in the Dark, in which it is a protective charm made from a heavy material inscribed with the sigil of the most ancient gods and is named for a place in Lovecraft's The Doom That Came To Sarnath.
Emma keeps calling her friend Cassie, even though it's not. I can't remember what her actual name is. It was a fairly common name and they didn't start with the same letter. I told Emma that I kept calling her Ashley. Not to her face but I'm occasionally like "Ashley has an art exhibition" or whatever.
She says that maybe Ashley finds me overwhelming because she can and I certainly find my own thoughts and things I need to say overwhelming. And yeah, I only get to talk to her once or twice a year but she hasn't seen the other people there in over a year too.
By the time she did the talk, there were a ton of people there. Literally. It's kind of off in nowhere, in a place that used to house shelves of obsolete technological junk, which, incidentally, is like a dream Emma had, although I think she was just sorting them and not using it to build a machine that transmogrifies objects into carrots. She had a dream involving yellow spots and wants to use that in a music video.
Katie mentioned someone who takes stock photos and hides copyright information on it and puts tracers on the images and then sues people who use them. Katie says that the people I draw look angry and she asked if it's because they're musicians.
One of Emma's friends is colorblind and found this out when they were showing him these images with a number in a different color and he just thought they were trolling him and saw the red paintings as brown instead. I brought up how some languages don't distinguish blue and green and he says that it's because there isn't much blue in nature aside from the sky (Emma adds blueberries and blue flowers and her friend adds whales) and the sky isn't always blue and in Greek literature, nobody actually describes the color of the sky.
While a few like Russian, Romanian, and Hebrew distinguish light blue and dark blue, and Hungarian and Turkish have multiple words for what we would just call red.
Holly said that if she had a superpower, it would be to understand every language.
The singer of Miss Geo was there and I've heard of them but can't remember where. Maybe Emma told me about them. I thought it may be Vanyaland but she's surprised to know that fact so maybe not. And I've never actually heard them live. I think she's Abby because she mentioned Paz by her name.
Her arm was tattooed with a cross that transmuted into a Chinese number 7 - 七 - when she bent her arm.
Melissa has a wolf made from a smattering of curves tattooed on her shoulder
Holly (not the same Holly) was born in 1995. I know this because she has the number tattooed on her hand, along with a word that I can't remember. I said "oh wow," and she says she gets that a lot. I don't mean that she looks younger or older, I mean that there are people born in 1995 who are old enough to drink alcohol legally.
I asked Charity the same thing I asked Cassia: like in the Starbridge Chronicles? No, she hasn't read that. Charity is doing something with augmented reality and has a jeweled nose ring.
burning question: Who is to be apparisoned in the hue of doves?
