Dear TARP Wife:

Oh boo fucking who for you, my dear.

Let me play my teeny tiny violin.

You're struggling with reduced finances. Your hubby's portfolio is down 95%. You think you understand why we poor plebeians are so mad that some of us are picketing the homes of banksters.

You haven't faintest idea. Your shame about not being able to spend like you used to is not the same as our desperation. We cannot feed or clothe, or house, or educate our children. You eat macaroni and cheese and think it's virtuous. We eat ramen noodles because macaroni requires milk and butter, ramen just needs water.

You're worried about your husband's health. I bet that if he started having chest pains, you have the health insurance to take him to the hospital. We don't have the luxury. Instead we use homemade remedies for alleviating an abscessed tooth while hoping and praying that it doesn't lead to death, like it did for that poor boy in Baltimore.

You snipe about unworthy borrowers, but don't have the brain power required to consider where they come from. 30 years of stagnant wages while men like your husband rail against minimum wage increases plus the loss of traditional pensions and skyrocketing education costs mean that the only way for average Americans to get ahead and send their kids to college and retire in some form of comfort was through home ownership and equity. Those who you call unworthy were doing the only thing they could to give their kids a chance at a better life. They were doing exactly what they have been told to do by society, by the government, and by people like you. And when that fails (and fails in a way which this semi-educated poor person had been predicting for years) you have the gall to say "no one saw it coming". Everyone saw it coming, but the rosier-viewed among us thought it could be put off a bit longer.

So pardon me if I don't find the details of how tastefully you choose to celebrate your husband's birthday or how you duck into society events after the cameras are gone, humanizing. Forgive me for not having an ounce of empathy while you shop in your own closet, as I had to buy my kid thrift store shoes when his last pair become more aerated than a colander. And excuse me for my absolute lack of pity. You are the worst of America. And those poor people now populating the Hoovervilles (or Nicholsvilles as we call them here) would gladly trade their problems for your anyday.

Things I have learned

watching PBS' version of Dickens' Little Dorrit (damn that seems like a shit ton of apostrophes)

There are only a few methods the rich use to fuck over the poor, but we keep falling for them. Over and over and over and over. In Little Dorrit's case, I smell a Victorian ponzi scheme in the making.

Also, Victorians like Dickens and Gaskell use the term "speculation" with a snear, the same way southern women use the word "cute". At one point the main character wants to invest in a bank that is doubling people's money in a year. His partner snears "Isn't that speculation?". Main character assures him that it's not, it's "investment". Same thing, new word. Not unlike "mortgage backed securities".

Cause I can't be hateful forever

And cause I haven't done an "art that rocks the casbah" piece in a very very long time- here's Monika Grygier. She's a Polish artist who lives in Spain. Other than that, i don't know much about her, but her painting warm the dark little corners of my heart.

Sunday at 6:30 in the city

I love love love her paintings. I want to live in them even more than I want to live in a Morris Lewis painting. They are urban and organic and minimally luscious.

And speaking of luscious- I am also all a flutter for Pat Kagan. There is a perfect balance between fluidity and contrast in some of her works. She captures movement in a very pure way, making you feel every swirl and dip of the brush.

A new kind of meme

I'm in a horrible mood lately. The kind of mood where you give up drinking cause you've just become a sad drunk. The kind of mood where living in a shack ala the Unibomber starts to sound attractive. So I'm not writing much (obvs) because my normally charming and erudite self has decided that endless reruns of cops shows with tough chicks are preferable to being just another poor sad slob on the internets.

But.......

In my botomless pit of negativity I've decided to do a new meme. There is nothing nice about it. I want to hate loudly. So here are a few things I hate sooooooooo much that I'd rather tear my eyes out and puncture my eardrums with an icepick rather than ever have to see or hear about them again.

1. The idea of "honor". Honor gets other people killed, usually women. Honor is this outdated and stupid idea that another person has the ability to diminish you through actions that have nothing to do with you. Better to be diginified, to have integrity, to be ethical or loyal or kind. We don't need to end honor killings, we need to end the idea of honor all together. Honor they mother and thy father? Fuck that if your parents are horrible horrible people. The idea that a young woman or girl can dishonor her family simply by leaving the house. Fuck that.

2. If god helps those who help themselves, then either god is an asshole or it's just an idea that the selfish and greedy use to justify their success. I don't want to believe in a god who isn't there for the helpless. I think that would be the sole reason to believe in god if there was one, some omnipotent being there to help the lowest and most harmed. But everytime I read the news I get further proof that either god doesn't exist or if he does, he's not a god I want anything to do with.

3. Trite and boring art showcasing women as objects. You think that advertising and fashion are horrible, then you haven't ventured into the artworld my friends. I like drawing from sculptues. It's a good cheap way to practice abstracting figures. So I've been crusing modern art websites checking out their sculptures for intersting things. It goes something like this: headless female torso, headless female torso, female reclining in submissive position, boring mother and child sculpture, headless female torso, headless female torso with back view, reclining female, horse head, headless torso, female dancer, blah blah blah. It is very rare to come across just a female bust (clothed) or a male nude. I think I've seen 2 nude male sculptures out of hundreds (and I am not counting the one that was male except for his missing penis. Seriously artists- it's just an appendage, like a finger or a toe). At least the Greeks gave their women heads and let them stand. At least the Romans weren't afraid of a little male nudity. I'm going to go dig through my photographs and go back to drawing from ancient sculptures rather than try anything new.

4. I hate that moms in commercials always have families full of assholes. I thinking of you, Roll over minutes mom with your dipshit son. And the mom in that fancy home phone commercial who is making pallella and your son is a complete ass about it. Maybe it's just moms and sons in commercials? Do daughters get to be assholes in commercials? I dont think I've ever seen that.

So dear readers- if you are still out there, what do you hate hate hate? Vent away!

It's spring! Art is in the air.

Forgive me peeps, this is going to be an untethered ramblefest. But at least the links will take you to pretty pictures.

Somewhere last week someone (might have been Jezebel) was writing about muses. Why are they always young women musing older men? Do women artists have muses? I certainly have a reappearing character in my paintings who looks very much like me. Does that make me my own muse?

I was talking to Ruth this weekend. 13 years ago, when i left the kid's dad and dropped out of college the first time, I was studying art. I figured I couldn't be a broke ass artist and a single mom and that I needed to study something more practical. Now I live the life of a starving artist anyways, but without the portfolio to show for it. Irony is kicking me in the ass.

And good lord I am desperate to paint. All of my brushes were lost in the move. My good set of Kolinsky sable brushes will cost nearly $500 to replace. To say nothing of canvas or paints or pallets or palette knives. Even my drop cloth is gone. That ugly old paint stained sheet had lived through numerous cross country moves and 15 years of paint and red wine.

I guess I will have to make due with my $5 colored pencils and grocery store sketch pad. The real problem is the size. My work is usually big, 48" x 48". On such a small scale as an 8" x 11" sketch pad it looks cartooney and I can't get proportions right. So instead I've been drawing trees and trying to get myself to break the abstract barrier. Mondrian started his abstracts with trees. Then he got to the graphic colored boxes we all know so well. Lemme tell you that there is something incredibly happy making to the eye when you put down a bright primary color next to a hard black line in a negative white space. It's like jazz music for eyeballs. Klee and Miro and Kandinsky and any of the New York School abstract expressionists for examples.

But at the same time that I am trying to break out of figurative painting into abstraction, there is an idea (well two actually) that have been fermenting in my head for a good long while that are more traditional. Well, tradition tuned on it's head. I'm back to the muse and thinking of the male gaze and women as objects. I want to take a series of master paintings like Ingres' Odalisque or Picasso's Women of Avignon and turn the woman's body into negative space. What happens when we're just left with a woman shaped hole in the pieces we've been taught to admire? Do we realize that women in art are objects just as much as a piece of fruit in a still life?

Or what if we turned the nude woman idea around. What if it was two well dressed ladies having a serious discussion about philosophy while a nude man posed for the artist, instead of the way Manet saw it? And wouldn't it be a much more profound commentary if Annie Leibovitz made fun of her own photo of Tom Ford (a man who spends his life clothing people) and two naked actresses by making the clothier the naked and vulnerable one, instead of stuffing 3 grown men into body suits?

That is what I want to create. I want to make art that asks questions like that.

But I am stuck with crayola pencils and a real starving artist budget. Que sera sera.

What's the difference

between Carl's Jr



and PETA



Not a god dammned thing when both of them treat women like pieces of meat.

(BTW- every time I see a "I'd rather go naked" ad I want to wrap myself in chinchilla and knee high crocodile boots and eat a heaping plate of veal and fois gras. PETA message fail!)

Harry Potter Vs. Twilight

Today at the Seattle Public Library there is an actual, old fashioned debate about which is better- Harry Potter or Twilight.


As I said at Random Babble a few days ago- Harry Potter may have its issues, but no one ever almost died of a fucking papercut in the Potter series. And papercuts should NEVER be a serious plot point.

Besides, if it wasn't for Harry Potter we wouldn't have this thing of beauty.



(Yes I've posted this before. No I don't care that it annoys you.)