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life
Less Doing, More Living
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2009 was an expansive year for me… I had work featured in the finale of the major local runway fashion show this spring, styled models in my own fashion show segment (ok, only three outright, the other two were “borrowed” and I didn’t do their hair/makeup, but it was still a lot of concepting and manual labor!), founded an art collective that’s produced four events this year, celebrated 1 year of blogging on Tu Scene, was a featured interviewee in several newspaper articles, on two long-format radio interviews, one television interview and joined my first board. Whew!

Not that I felt I bit off more than I could chew though. This growth was a necessary and long-overdue character-building experience. The past couple of months though, I’ve felt borderline burned-out. Or just in need of a break that lasts longer than a three-day weekend. In need of time to relax with my family (husband and dog), with myself, work on my own artwork outside of group collaborations, re-focus on Tu Scene. The dayjob has been going in high-gear since October, and every time I’ve seen a potential break on the horizon, it eludes me with the infliction of some new task for work. It’s not that I’m not up to the challenge, but I keep finding myself double-booked, overpromising and underdelivering. And while I can take criticism of the results of my work, I hate being the flake in the inception of a project I’ve committed to. That irresponsibility, that unreliability is so not “me.”

In the vein of a break to pursue personal work, I also feel like I need time to get to know people. I’ve been blessed to work with so many talented, brilliant, kind artists on various projects who also just happen to be amazing, fascinating individuals, but feel like I haven’t been able to get to know them as friends so our relationship could continue outside of mutual goals. Part of that is my own choice. Work is a protection mechanism for me. If I keep the relationship mostly professional, I don’t risk the personal entanglements of navigating a friendship. The other part of it is that I sincerely do take a great deal of pleasure in simply realizing a dream, especially one that’s been built with others. (I also wonder, with anyone I’ve worked with, if the feeling is mutual [not reciprocated, but shared/understood]?) But it’s gotten to the point that I’ve almost forgotten how to just be with people, to spend time with them, pursing interests that don’t have to have any accomplishment on the other end, i.e. “hanging out”, “chillin’ “, whatever you want to call it. So my motto for 2010 is “less doing, more living.”

Not that I’ll stop being an overachiever, as I always have been, but realizing that I need to just back off when being tapped for a project. As an early Virgo (born August 28) leaning more towards Leo than Libra, there’s a stuck-up Leo side to my natural community-serving, genuinely concerned Virgo-ness that wants to look good and take credit for things, feeding into the negative self-critical aspects of Virgo if I pass something up. Maybe that’s why I enjoy my Libra family and friends so much, they ground me away from all of that and help find a balance. At least until the point where we start driving each other crazy, like my cousin and I. Childhood best friends all the way through much of our 20’s, born 6 weeks apart, we’d need space when she felt like I was being controlling and harsh, and I felt that she wasn’t sticking up for herself when she had every right and credit to her accomplishments as an individual to do so.

Part of this is also motivated by my husband. Ironically, he’s the one who has the knack for maintaining long-distance friendship. When I was a child, my best friend from 4th grade and I continued to write letters for four years long after I’d left the school after just one year. I always had long-term pen pals, one from Germany, one from Australia. My husband, on the other hand, moved around a lot more than I did and never kept up contact with any friends he made in school. Now, it’s the opposite! He keeps in touch while I make excuses for letting things slide. It’s not that I feel jealous of his strength, what I feel is more admiration and respect, much like the other things he’s good at that I simply could not imagine myself doing, like teaching everything from first grade to ex-con adult education. The way I witness him doing it is through correspondence, being more open about himself as a person than as a writer/artist, and through spending time with others for a movie, coffee, drinks, exercise. Things that I just said I seem to have almost lost the understanding of. (And to be really self-deprecating and completely honest, an understanding that I’m not sure I ever had. As a naturally shy person who was not taught or had the expectation of practicing basic social skills by my parents like answering the phone or shaking hands, I’ve spent my entire life since leaving home at 17, almost 18 years old, studying/analyzing for myself the basic courtesies of various social situations.) For me, it all rose to the surface when we visited Austin for four days in December, after almost a year and a half of being gone from the city we made our home for 10 years. I was genuinely happy to meet up the longtime friends I was able to, and still happy to make contact with those I didn’t get to see in person. But the experience was eerily like my sophomore year at collage: all the people I felt I knew in high school and formerly spent a good deal of time with, I realized had not actually been friends. And since there’s a chance we may be moving out of Tucson later this year, I’m determined not to let that happen again, because a piece of me will always be here that will never find a home anywhere else.

In 2010, I’m trying to keep those long-term life experiences in scope and in balance with continuing to build my mission as an artist through less doing, more living.
life
Mind & Body
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A couple of weeks ago, I happily finished two new paintings within a few days. Then my time got sucked up by the excitement of major (fortunately, positive) changes at the day job and my new board position. I felt “keyed-up” and had trouble sleeping both weeks, but the point of stress was different. When I was painting, I felt it in my gut: constantly nauseous, no appetite, etc. With the job and board duties (amongst the blog, family, and everyday stuff), my head and heart/chest were constantly pounding as though I’d been running, pursued. I’m passionate about creating art and community, I just find it interesting how these different foci would produce different physical localities of stress within my body.
culture, life, observations
Equations
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I just had my first ever television interview on the local PBS station’s news magazine, Arizona Illustrated. I was really nervous because although I love to talk about art, I tend to clam up when put on the spot, particularly when questioned by “authority” (art institutional types, administrators, posh curators or artists, academics, media), so I rehearsed some thoughts as I walked my dog yesterday. With exercise, the repetition of movement jogged my thought process as well. I think I finally started making some mental progress comparing/contrasting Austin and Tucson, after over a year of living here in Arizona.

When I mention I’m from Austin to people in Tucson, their eyes bug out and glisten with anticipation, as though I were some prophet who’d seen the Promised Land and returned to deliver a sacred message. THERE IS NO SACRED MESSAGE. I repeat: THERE IS NO SACRED MESSAGE.

Quoting from a particular document from the mid-90’s about a day in the life of a person living in/near downtown Tucson, as projected in 2010:

“It’s 7:00 a.m., January 12, 2010. The sun is beginning to rise overhead; and as you step outside, you feel the comfortable, cool breeze of a Tucson winter. You walk the one block from your home to catch the shuttle, which arrives just a few minutes later at the City’s intermodal transportation center, the old Amtrak Station.

Strolling across the plaza, you glance at the kiosk and see that there’s a new show opening at the Temple of Music and Art. You’ve already made plans for dinner at Cafe Magritte, if it’s not too busy, and then you are going to catch a live jazz show down the street. Maybe Tuesday you’ll see the new show at the Temple.

As you weave your way through the outdoor dining area at Hotel Congress, you step up to the take-out window and wonder if you’ll get everything done today. Another busy Saturday. Normally, you’d sit outside at a table for breakfast, but today you grab coffee and a muffin to go, and begin your walk down Congress, past dozens of stores teeming with local and regional goods. A new gallery catches your eye and then the bookstore next door which has recently doubled its size. Didn’t it just open a year ago?

You walk past the main library, stopping to grab two loaves of French bread from a cart vendor. They have bread at the Farmer’s Market, too, but you’re not sure you’ll have time to get there today. As you walk under what used to be the old Pima County Courthouse and is now part of the Museum of Art…”

“It’s 7:00 a.m., January 12, 2010. The sun is beginning to rise overhead; and as you step outside, you feel the comfortable, cool breeze of a Tucson winter. You walk the one block from your home to catch the shuttle, which arrives just a few minutes later at the City’s intermodal transportation center, the old Amtrak Station. Strolling across the plaza, you glance at the kiosk and see that there’s a new show opening at the Temple of Music and Art. You’ve already made plans for dinner at Cafe Magritte, if it’s not too busy, and then you are going to catch a live jazz show down the street. Maybe Tuesday you’ll see the new show at the Temple. As you weave your way through the outdoor dining area at Hotel Congress, you step up to the take-out window and wonder if you’ll get everything done today. Another busy Saturday. Normally, you’d sit outside at a table for breakfast, but today you grab coffee and a muffin to go, and begin your walk down Congress, past dozens of stores teeming with local and regional goods. A new gallery catches your eye and then the bookstore next door which has recently doubled its size. Didn’t it just open a year ago? You walk past the main library, stopping to grab two loaves of French bread from a cart vendor. They have bread at the Farmer’s Market, too, but you’re not sure you’ll have time to get there today. As you walk under what used to be the old Pima County Courthouse and is now part of the Museum of Art…”

I came across this text as I was researching raw material the Field Guide to Downtown Tucson Master Plans booklet and Pop Up Spaces’ ±92 exhibition. In my experience with gentrification in Austin (Tucson is sooo not even close to using “gentrification” as a bummer-buzzword in polite conversation), what struck me was how much this lifestyle was crammed down the throat. But it’s not for everyone. It’s not inclusive. Yet people see this ideal as the big success story of Austin as a 21st-century national cultural center. What outsiders don’t realize and what many Austinties take for granted is that Austin was a segregated city for generations. African-Americans and Mexican-Americans resided and maintained business communities within separate pieces/peaces of the city (East Austin, Clarksville, South First/Cumberland a.k.a. at Casa Diaz as Cumbialand, et. al.), in some areas for over 100 years. What people think of as “downtown” Austin (not central Austin at large) has been/is largely influenced architecturally, spatially, culturally by Anglos. It is homogenous. Tearing away all the highbrow festoons, it’s still leisure centered around the gut and the eye. What is this person doing? Consuming.

What I have learned as a part of coordinating ±92 is that downtown = history = identity.

Tucson’s identity, history, and landscape is much different than Austin’s: Mexicans, Native Americans, and Anglos. The desert and mountain landscape is an identity, an entity, in itself. It’s all in yo’ face. And yet it’s not (just drive to South Tucson and you’ll see chain-linked fenced, concrete lion-adorned barrios similar to my in-laws’ y tios’ y tias’ neighborhood just off the farthest reaches of Southmost Blvd. in Brownsville, TX, el Rio and that abominable wall less than a mile away [slicing through orange groves and reedy marshes buzzing with grasshopers, locusts, crickets {you cannot cut Twilight}], then traveling a few miles Highway 77, up to north Brownsville, up to the primos’ y primas’ garage-enclosed suburbs, it’s all the same here, as if you mixed the Valley and San Anto, minus the Gulf-breeze green).

The master planning exhibition I helped facilitate is not about how sad it was that buildings and roads were not built, because identity is at the heart of it all. People constantly argue over what downtown Tucson should and should not represent. The truth is, there is something there for everyone. There are services for the people that need them: homeless, Veterans, Native Americans (Indian Affairs), Mexican Nationals (Mexican Consulate). There is fine dining. There are bars for bros, bars for hos and bars for hipsters. There are coffeeshops and casual dining and sushi and sandwiches and Sonoran hot dog stands. There are theatre, film, art, music shows. There are places for children and families. There are places that celebrate the outdoors. There are houses of religion, there are suppliers for the spiritual, pagans, wiccans, curanderos. There are spots for people who drive; there are lanes for people who cycle. People can work in banks, government administration, convenience stores, food service, clothing boutiques, schools, upholstery shops, arts, social services, car repair, real estate, bicycle sales, furniture and appliance stores. There are fancy-schmansy condos, there are single-family homes, there are residences affordable for students and artists, there are barrios, there are alleys.

This day-in-the-life-of story took up 3 single-spaced pages. It reflects the identity of a 60-year-old retired U of A professor. It reflects the identity of one demographic. And really, a lot of positivity is crammed down the throat in the name of cultural understanding, political correctness, mental safety. That’s not fair either. But it seems that people don’t like about downtown Tucson is not about the space, it is about the people using it. If you have a gripe with the cultural/business/service/food offerings and architecture downtown, you might need to dig deeper into your prejudices about history, skin color, family, age and financial status.

There is something for everyone in downtown Tucson. And it is beautiful.
digital, life, www
Houses I’ve Lived In
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All the houses I lived in through childhood via Google Street View & Google Maps.

1980-1984

1985

1986

1987

1988-1992

1989-1990

1992-1993

1993

1993-1997

1997-1998
ideas, life, observations
Semiotics of Relationships and Memory
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I saw Easy Rider (one of my favorite movies for tragicomedy, fashion, weirdo characters, editing, music) in a movie theater last week. This scene stuck with me, I think because of the friends I saw the movie with. I started thinking about relationships, and how it’s not about who are what you are, it’s about what you represent to the other person in any sort of relationship. It always goes back to the Self. Ultimately, we cannot interpret each other, no matter how strong the connection, because it’s impossible to know what is going on in someone else’s head, looking through their eyes. We can only wonder why a person responds a certain way. It is because of what one represents to the other individual, categorized, referenced in their own personal semiotic taxonomy.

Memory is the same way. It’s not about what a memory is, or who was in it, or re-living what transpired. It’s about what those things signify/represent to you about yourself, classified, providing a map to navigate your inner and outer world.
life, words, www
You’ll ruin your eyes
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Since beginning The Outside World links lists on Tu Scene, I’ve peeked into whole new art worlds: the state, national, global art arenas. Frankly, I find it incredibly daunting and rather confusing. One reads so much about so many things, it morphs into a viral canon about what’s hot and what’s not at the moment. Instead of informing one’s thought and aesthetic through one’s unique filters, it only serves to make it bend to an unseen peer pressure. Keeping up with it all also takes time away from doing Real Work. I admire writers who manage to blog incisively on a local scale yet seem to be in touch with a wide range of web presences. Maybe it’s because, as a graphic designer, I instinctively feel set against RSS feeders like Bloglines and Google Reader. Same thing with Twitter. Although I know they may make my internet life easier, experiencing the aesthetic of a particular site helps me understand where the writer is coming from.

Some of this questioning also comes from being honest with myself about my sphere of influence. I’m an emerging artist and don’t necessarily aspire or expect to be famous (at least, not in my what is currently the last year of my 20’s, or into my 30’s). Establishing myself on a local scale is a main goal, so that is what I look for in my regular reading about nearly anything. I do keep in touch with several Texas sources, since that’s where I’m from and have many friends, but that’s about it. I haven’t lived here long enough to even touch Phoenix, or anywhere else in Arizona for that matter. Since I’m still peeling back the onion that is Tucson, I don’t feel I’m ready to approach those areas.

There’s a real tension between honesty and growth. Being honest with oneself and accepting limitations and inclinations, and growth through nurturing technique and expanding one’s realm of thought. Growing isn’t easy, it’s just plain annoying/frustrating and potentially painful. Here’s an example: for me, asking questions seems more important than finding concrete answers. Yet, if I don’t push myself to really think about possible answers, have internal debates and tête-à-têtes with friends, I’ll never know myself. And acquiring self-knowledge is a form of honesty.

Blogging confounds this even more. Not as a blogger myself, but as a reader, in reading a piece and then following the thread of comments therafter. It gets so tangled! You could say this about a lot of literature and journalism, actually. Two books I read this year, Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory and Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, are broken up to the point that you wonder what the hell is going on a lot of the time. But in the case of blogs and reading articles on the web, the private conversation between the writer and you is disrupted. I take this to heart because reading inspires me so much as a visual artist. I don’t mean I create things that interpret what I read, but I like to read things I attempt to express through art, yet only seem to come out properly in words. (I admit, I’m pretty insecure, although I’m not fishing for praise here).

It seems like every other week there’s something circulating in various media about the death of the newspaper and publishing. What they need to realize is that there’s a new form of reading taking shape on a massive, sweeping scale that I’m trying to grasp, that feels more natural someone 10 years younger than me. The sooner they understand this and try to change instead of forcing/marketing obsolete methods, the better chance they will have to survive. Am I nostalgic? No. I’m sure somewhere down the line, a simulation of consuming printed media will return, not a straightforward fake like the guys hawking handbags on the side of the road, but a sur-reality, the way fashion has been regurgitating the past since the 1970’s, the way suburban shopping centers are designed to look like urban cores, the way “found objects” (both real and reproduced) and crafts in interior design steal the soul of the original. Who knows where this is all going.

All I know is, right now, I feel like I’m looking for some answers. I need some answers. But the questions have slipped my mind so I don’t have much motivation to figure out where to look.
cross-ref, life
Living in the present
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Instead of being diligent and using my time off wisely doing constructive things, I totally slacked for two weeks over the holidays, reading, eating, sleeping, waking up, watching bad TV, eating again, reading, sleeping again. I can’t say I enjoyed it, in fact, I was bored most of the time, but in retrospect I can see it was much-needed. It was the first amount of time I’d taken off more than a week since I was a college freshman 10 years ago. And the last couple of years, after nearly utterly burning out at end of the spring and fall seasons at Pump Project I’ve wanted to take time off to simply relax, but it never happened. Most of all, the break gave me some time to process moving 1000 miles this summer; how I’ve changed since struggling with being so far away from home for the first time to now, where I’m working on amazing projects I never thought I could do and making some great new friends here in Tucson. I’ve come to the conclusion that this move is one of the best things that’s happened to me in quite awhile.

I guess everyone has reflections about last year, and predictions/goals for the year ahead. I don’t. I’m enjoying the present and letting that intuition determine what I do next. What I’m feeling a pull towards in the near-term future is something I’ve been too caught up in work to focus on: building steady acquaintanceships into solid friendships. And fixing my hair more.

Here’s some other stuff that’s happened recently.

I was looking for an image of their next show to use on my Tu Scene art blog, when I discovered that I am not merely a General Artist, but a Featured Artist on local gallery/boutique PLAY’s website. Wow, thanks, dudes! Now if I could finish some actual work…

This was forever ago, but Ms. Tricia at bitsandbobbins.com and founder of the wardrobe_remix community on Flickr featured yours truly as a remixer of the week late last year. It’s always such an honor to be chosen that I just had to put this up! The original post is here.
life
Creative Anxiety
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Creator Class. Found this term coined on PSFK – a blog I haven’t read since it Piers Fawkes started it back in my Adholes-lurking days about 4 years ago (myspace for advertising/design/PR/copywriting geeks) about an emerging demographic within, or perhaps separating itself from, the Creative Class. Inspirationally-monikered graphic designer Gabriel Amadeus writes:

“[Creator?] Hey, that’s me! Not that I am successful at it or anything, but I much prefer to be a jack of all trades instead of specializing in “vector illustration”, “interactive flash”, or “band posters”.

“In the past week I’ve designed flyers, banners, screenprinted shirts, welded a homemade bakfiets (dutch cargo bike), organized a scavenger hunt, planned a freakbike booth at the Oregon Manifest, and applied for a bunch of design jobs.

“None of which I got.”

What’s the difference? While the job roles may essentially be the same: being involved on some level – professionally or underground – in making new things, ideas, systems, the Creative Class still possesses a bourgeois, consumerist mentality. The Creative Class is still able to kick back and appreciate the finer things in life like slate bathrooms, organic buttercream vegan cupcakes and antique hoosier cabinets, as defined in David Brooks‘ hilarious and thought-provoking Bobos in Paradise; whereas the Creator Class equates or, more like, substitutes consuming with creating. I certainly feel that has been my paradigm, unconsciously for some time. This year, I’ve become much more self-aware about it. Now I feel I don’t even know how to relax anymore. When I was a kid, reading, drawing, painting, dressing up, making up my own typography, writing poetry, listening to music and playing piano were leisure activities. I spent the whole summer after 8th grade copying the artwork in Deeelite’s Dewdrops in the Garden, obsessing over The Beatles and playing Mozart sonatas for grins. Now, I plan outfits like science experiments and write equations to explain art projects to myself. Hell, I can’t even read a book without thinking how I might work the ideas into some new artwork, review it for this here blog, or recommend it to some other artsy type and if we’re drinking, talk about how we might collaborate around its central themes. Maybe some of it stems from guilt, knowing that my generation is the last-ditch effort to save the planet through recycling, vélocouture and hoeing around. For every 5 pieces I bring home from Savers, I grab a 6th to make something new for my Etsy shop. Parental Baby Boomer guilt aside, in short, my work and play have become so entangled and enmeshed that I frequently have trouble sleeping at night or enjoying a simple walk around my neighborhood.

It’s all about letting go, I guess. And yet, it’s kind of fun. At the lengthily-titled Tucson Emerging Leaders Creative Conversation: The State of the Arts I attended last week, a panelist posited, “We can figure this [problems within the local arts scene] out. Artists are crazy. We’re the only people in the world who invent problems for ourselves and then set about how to solve them.” This anxiety, this drive, makes me nuts but it’s also my main fount of inspiration. Anyone else feel this way about your work/play relationship?