Conception

I want to be a victim, ready for abduction.

You’re from a whole other world
a different dimension
you open my eyes,
now I’m ready to go, lead me into the light

Girl, you’re an alien
You’re just so far away
You’re supernatural
Extra-terrestrial

Infect me with your poison
I want to be a victim
Ready for abduction.
-ET by KP

God, why am I awake? I should be in bed, sleeping the sleep of the damned >:P
But i haven’t posted in a while…

So… I wanted to draw something for Illustration Friday (prompt: Perennial) and this is what I came up with. …as you can see, it has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with perennials. Or perenniality. So I can’t enter it for IF….But I liked it–it’s ink on my Canson paper, and it felt good to work with ink again on this particular paper; they just fit so snugly, like bacon and fat people.

What am I saying–bacon is not just for the fat, it is for everyone.

Anyway, I wanted to draw a reward-picture (ie, a picture where I’m not trying to learn a new skill and being like OMG OMG, I hope I don’t fuck up after I spent all this time…. )But a comfort picture to celebrate the fact that…

Ahem.

My book is apparently getting a favorable review.
::leap!::

And all is well otherwise: (–) is going through the “that shit is going RIGHT IN MY MOUTH” phase. Today he even started sucking on… the table…. during choco-croissant Wednesdays. And I have a monster toothache. All of the processed meats I’ve been doublefisting today have found the Hot Gates… this horrible hole between two of my backest teeth. Now I feel like a sadistic leprachaun is stabbing me in the brain with a little needle. With each stab, he
shrieks: Where’s me pot o’ gold?!

Where is it indeed?

I wanna feel your powers!
Stun me with your lazers and goodnight!

An Abomination Is Born

I'll let you rape me if you make the tea....

I haven’t posted for a while… because of the kids. With wrenches.

This pic.. (that amazing title was stolen by the way from a Mr. Danaghie. I hope he doesn’t mind, but I simply could not name this picture anything else. Check out his blog here….) Anyway, so this pic makes me wish I could stop on a picture as soon as I see that the paper I am using is utterly unsuited to the medium. But it’s impossible >:P The objective was to work on detail in pen, which I’m not good at due to the proto-palsy I have in my hands… I love drawings with fine detail, be it beautiful, complex hair, or leaves/branches/twisty vines/tentacles/tubes/little animals/doodads, but drawing such things requires patience (not much of that here) and a steady hand… practice, practice, practice…

(Face and pose taken from GQ’s cover-girl this month, the wonderfully symmetrical, cat-eyed, laudanum beauty of Adriana Lima!!)

In other news, (–) is getting so big… my little Nazgul is growing up. Soon, I’ll be chasing the girls off of our porch with a shot-gun… He’s already made one lady fall off of her bicycle and I’m sure there will be more to come. In the meantime, I feel like him and I have really gotten our shit together, like we’ve dropped our suspicious pretenses and are ready to let each other live and let live. Yes the bonding and all of that, but they are still strangers in the beginning and not being able to talk doesn’t help. The older generation bawls: Let them cry! The current generation urges: Pick them up! and you (I mean me) just stare at the kid sometimes, thinking: Who are you? What do you like? What do you want? It took four months, but at least those questions are now answered: you’re my son. you like to sleep in our bed. you want food. Food. and more food.

My other baby is coming along too–Talked to my publisher (!) on the phone (!) last week… he sounded like a very sweet guy <3 which is good. I’m a ball of nerves about the whole thing as it is, and feel like each step is uphill, but it’s slowly… slowly…. coming together. Weee!

Ok, it’s really late. Goodnight moofies and have a great week =)

Mayday Mayday – Willi Hoppe Exhibit

Sadly, I am hobnobbing with the in-laws this weekend, but I wanted you all to know that my very good artist friend W is having an exhibition starting on this Saturday here in Munich. I’d like to wish him a big turn-out and every success!

The exhibit is called ‘Mayday Mayday’ and the opening party is on the 9th of June at 7 pm. (Tomorrow, Saturday).

I met W earlier this year when I was irredeemably pregnant and he needed a model to brush up on some life-drawing. Since then, we’ve become such good friends and I’ve had a bazillion awesome chats with him about books, art, drawing, painting… he’s inspired and pushed me in my own drawing, introduced me to some great other artists here in Munich (like Stefan Heide) and has made me hundreds of delicious cups of black coffee. He is a dedicated artist and a shyboy at heart.

About his art: W paints and draws emotion and the body; the psychological and erotic connection and tension between us and our own bodies and the bodies around us (note: this is my personal interpretation of his art, not necessarily his!); and the no-doubt extremely complex relationship he has to his own body after what he’s been through because of it. His work is psychosexual and spontaneous; disturbing and playful. You can look at some of his newest stuff here. The exhibit in this private gallery will feature both his drawings and paintings.

W. Hoppe – Mayday Mayday
10/7 – 17/7
Open Sat-Sun 2-6/ other days, by appointment
Atelier Casati
Schiltbergerst. 1
81667 Munchen Haidhausen

Opening night (that I sadly can’t attend) will have music; a speech by Mr. Heide and wines and cheeses–I will be going next weekend, not this one– if anyone who reads this and knows me would like to attend with me, just drop a line!^-^

W, congratulations and I wish you a great opening night!

Freedom – A book review

Freedom: A Novel By Jonathan Franzen

Review time!!!!

Honestly, when I was younger, I would’ve rather shoved a potato peeler up my ass than leave a book unfinished once I’d started it. Even if by page 400 it became readily apparent that it was written by a retarded Bonobo on LSD out to warp my immortal soul, no, by God, I would huff and puff through that mofo, cursing every word, but determined to make it to the bitter end, and I would, I always did….

Which means I have logged hundreds and hundreds of hours reading football-fields of prose that left me absolutely cold  and one thing turning 30 has taught me, oh this long decade, is?

That life is waaaay too fucking short. If a book is torturing you–don’t torture yourself back.

Put it down.

At 100 pages, give or take a few, I am putting J. Franzen’s ‘Freedom’ down.
I will not torture myself anymore.

Supposedly, the book received a lot of lit. hype. Supposedly, some people who know books claimed that this was a Tolstoyean epic of our time. I don’t read high-profile NYT book reviews, so I can neither confirm nor deny these allegations, all I know is that I’m past page 100 and I have yet to meet a single character who I don’t want to shoot point-blank in the face with a Kalashnikov.

The characters are every American you’ve ever met crushed under their bourgeoisie guilt and their baggage and their baggage and their sucky, sucky life. If an alien picks up this book in 1000 years to use as some window into the soul of our current society, they would conclude that life in America is nothing but a slow, steady march towards inevitable disillusionment and auto-destruction. A lifelong dog-paddle before inevitable drowning in a sea of douch-bags.

What I hate about it most is how Franzen forces you down that path–Neither you nor his characters are allowed respite.

It would be one thing if the characters he mutilates are at least interesting or sympathetic, but he hates them, which makes me hate them, and reading about these hateful people when I was not being forced to made me hate myself. I thought: Moof. You signed up for the Bataan Death March with some of the most banal and unpleasantest folk you ever had the pleasure of never contacting again after high school.

There is no joy in ‘Freedom’.
There is no beauty in ‘Freedom’.
There is no love in ‘Freedom.’
There are some pretty words and pretty sentences, but getting tazed is getting tazed, even if your torturer has access to a good thesaurus.

::runs screaming into the safe arms of Phillip Roth::

 

Niko Niko

Watcha talkin' 'bout, Willis?

Free Nazgul sweet little baby boy to good home.
Please feed him plenty of fresh souls warm milk.
His name is (–).

Yeah, we almost wrote that note last week…but then it was raining… and once we found the appropriate spot for abandonment, we realized we didn’t have a pen… and it was early, so the people passing us in the park were joggers and you know how joggers never carry a pen…::sigh::

So we ended up bringing the little Nazgul back with us. He glared balefully from his carriage; gave a few lusty screams before we tucked him into his bed…

It was his 3 month birthday last Saturday. And yes, sometimes I have evil fantasies about abandoning him in a park to return to my life of loose men and crack cocaine, but I suppose you could say he’s wormed his way into my heart… I’m getting soft in my old age.

This pic is commemorating three months with Thomas Mann. It’s called Niko Niko or Smile and it’s incidentally also the first page of my new Moleskine. Yup, the last few weeks without that creamy paper were sad weeks for me… I’d gotten other paper, but there is something about working in a sketchbook that is a lot of fun. You get to flip through the old pictures and be like OMG, who’s the idiot who designed this web-page?!

God, I’m going wonky. Have to hit the sack.
By the way Hazel–there’s an identical Moleskine waiting to meet you the next time we get together! It’s got a firetruck red cover… wheee!