A beautiful animation by Betsy Dadd for Rachael Dadd. Both the Dadd's are endlessly inspiring! Below is a short written piece I did a couple weeks ago for my Essay class. The assignment was to write about something outside the art world that has influenced my work. Naturally, I chose Britney Spears.
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Young.
The word would be yellow, were it a color. For some reason it would have the texture of cat fur and would smell like new books or grass stains or salt water. I guess you could say I was young once, but I don’t know when that stopped. Something has been lost in the transition between being small, curled up inside my dad’s open guitar case and being big, squeezing zits in the bathroom mirror and thinking “I’m probably too old to be doing this still.” Too old? I actually thought it. Opening drawers in this apartment that has my name on the lease, that realization: I own measuring cups and a broom and a gallon of laundry detergent. When did this happen?
JD Salinger died a few weeks ago; he was the first person to make me feel like a phony. It’s not that I thought Britney Spears was some kind of God or anything, rather that she was strange and interesting, like a shiny bug on the sidewalk. I guess I was eleven years old, awkward in the charming way all kids are before they hit the greasy, painfully self aware part of adolescence. Britney paraded down the hallways of her fictional high school in pigtails and a mini skirt, singing about romance and reality in a way that would scar me for life. Oh baby, baby, how was I supposed to know?
I memorized her lyrics, sang them in the shower, and fantasized about the way life would someday be for me, doing cartwheels into the arms of faceless, basketball playing gentlemen who would teach me all the things I didn’t understand about love and sex. I took Britney at her word back then. But it only took a year or two before I was slinking about in school hallways of my own, with stringy hair that was chopped into a regretful bowl cut. No, this wasn’t right at all. Where was my entourage, where was the sunshine of beautiful, self assured happiness? I could say what everyone does about how angry I felt, or the betrayal of pop music, but I wont. You know the story all too well. They lied to us, infecting the world with blatant, hideous delusions and, to be frank, really bad music.
Coincidentally, or perhaps not so much, I find myself obsessively incorporating my own pop song covers into the work I produce. It is as if, by singing them myself, pulling apart the formulaic structure of the original tune, and presenting it in addition to some kind of visual aspect, I can somehow confront the alien-ness of the song, and coax it into becoming something more human.
But it’s more than that, isn’t it?
Memories, yellow youth, the ruthlessness of time and how it pushes us into the present ceaselessly. Britney shaved off her long blond hair and attacked an SUV with an umbrella; clearly I’m not the only one so terribly confused.
I'm working on a little animation for my Aesthetic Theory class (pictured above is one of the many drawings I've made for the piece!). In other news, there is a possible snow storm headed towards New York. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited for the possibility of a day off from school! Hey, a girl can dream, can't she?
Standing on the work table in my studio. This is a still from a video I took of myself as motion reference for Goodbye Sorrow! I've got a new animation in the works for Open Studios in the spring, as well as some other goodies. The days are too short, I tell you!
In other news, Charlie has been especially truculent lately. Each morning begins with tail fur up my nose and an impatient paw tapping on my eyelid.
Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), Adolphe, First Chapter
"My feeling of constraint with him had a great influence on my character. I was as timid as he but, being younger, I was more excitable and kept to myself all that I felt, made all my plans on my own and relied on myself to put them into effect. I considered the opinions, interest, assistance and even the mere presence of others as a hindrance and an obstacle. I developed the habit of never speaking of what I was doing, of enduring conversation only as a tiresome necessity and enlivening it by perpetual joking which made it less wearisome to me, and helped to hide any real thoughts. Hence a certain reserve with which my friends reproach me even today and a difficulty in conversing seriously which I still find hard to overcome. From the same cause sprang an ardent desire for independence, a considerable impatience, with all ties and an invincible terror at forming new ones. I felt at ease only when quite alone and such, even now, is the effect of that disposition that in the most trifling circumstances when I have to choose between two courses of action, a human face disturbs me and my natural impulse is to flee in order to deliberate in peace. However, I did not possess the depths of egoism which such a character would seem to indicate. Though only interested in myself I was but faintly interested. Unconsciously I bore in my heart a need for sympathy which, not being satisfied, caused me to abandon one after another every object of my curiosity. This indifference to everything was further strengthened by the ideas of death, an idea which had impressed itself upon me when I was very young. I have never been able to understand how men could so readily cease to be fully active upon this notion."
. Sometimes, when you need to write something real, it helps to let your fingers type up someone else's words for a little while.
It may be the Valentine's Day fever talking, but I'm in love with this little comic by Anna Claire Bongiovanni on Flickr. Sometimes I wish my mind worked in a more logically narrative way. I've been feeling the urge to make a little story, but when I sit down to write...POOF, my mind buzzes blank and I end up drawing a big cat or something.
Speaking of cats, I wish I was one. Felines don't have to go to work or fret over empty bank accounts. Bleugh.
Curled up watching Star Wars: Episode VI because I'm secretly a 12-year-old boy. Of course I can't just watch, I have to obsessively screen cap. But, come on! Look how beautiful this is! How am I just now getting into Star Wars? Who has been keeping this from me? I demand a pillow stuffed with Wookie hair.
