Like a Zoo in Slow Motion …

Listening again to Luigi Russolo’s Risveglio di una citta, I am reminded of the macabre of the imagination of the Futurists and how this effects me now as I listen to this Intonarumori. Luigi Russolo-Corale 1921 (Classic Industrial Noise/Experimental Music)

There is a baseness to the piece of experimental music, this “Art of Noise”, since there is an instant and direct physical, emotional, and psychological response to it. The title translates to the “Awakening of the city” and its ghostliness is at once unbearable and hard to move away from.

The sounds begin to sound like a zoo … the sound a zoo would make if it began to walk, to be, in slow motion … sad elephants winding down into a melancholy slowness, a lion yawning for minutes straight, cages rattling, locks breaking, freedom a slow-motioned heartbeat away.

Odd that despite the Futurists penchant for violence, speed, and riotous action, this sedate and meditative piece of music would emerge. It is an ode, a love letter to their new world of speed and metal, machines and transport, their world deepening like a drain, the world suddenly so close.

Another Finally …

Finally, after years and years of being a fan of Blonde Redhead and wanting to see them live, it finally happened on October 23rd. The show was amazing, ranking for me with other amazing shows such as Sonic Youth and Nick Cave. It was worth the wait indeed.

They played an array of songs, old as well as new, and had two encores because none of us were ready to say goodbye. The lighting and effects on stage only added to the ethereal sounds that make their music truly unique and captivating in a fast world.

At one point just after the opener while I as standing in line for another beer at the bar, Kazu Makin (the lead singer of Blonde Redhead) walked right by me, smelling as if she’d been rolling around in tuberoses, it was a lovely second and a half. I found it interesting, too, that I seemed to be the only one who noticed her walk by, leading me to wonder as I often do at concerts, if people go to shows because they are fans or just for something to do. Either reason is fine, just something I often wonder about.

Kazu wore a mask during the show the draped down over her face with blonde hair. She wore this only during certain songs, the slow and melodic songs that were rife with meditative musings.

This mask added to the otherworldly quality of the show and their music, as well as the unique mystique of them as a band in general.

paper & ghosts

After a full and wonderful weekend in Kalamazoo, Michigan seeing my love, best friends, and paying tribute to my dearest Herbert Scott in a reading punctuated with tears and ending with PBR at The Corner Bar, I came back home to Chicago to my empty room. I spent Sunday reflecting on a lot of realizations I had on the streets in Kalamazoo, while swimming in the Kalamazoo Athletic Club’s wonderful pool, and seeing my dearest psychotherapist. Out of these reflections came a drive to create again.

Living the Life in the Air First by Carrie McGath, 2010

Sometimes, writing poetry comes out of creating visuals first. My favorite art media is working in paper and ghosts. So on Monday I walked to my local antique mall in Chicago, a place I frequent to sit on the floor and peruse drawer after drawer and box after box of old photographs of strangers looking happy. A glowing woman holding her new baby, a child beaming while he stands next to Mickey Mouse at Disney World, damage to a ceiling that was likely captured for insurance purposes after some disaster. I make three piles on the floor next to me: ones I cannot live without, ones that seem a bit haunted with emotion, ones I am inexplicably attracted to in their inherent weirdness. Then I choose the ones I will buy to use in my art-making or my poetry writing.

These pieces I created last night while I listened in the dark to sounds from the alley below me, and the barely-there howl of the El a block away from me, these were pieces that were to help me to understand the fears I have been experiencing in my new city. Thought I would have been over it all by now, but I am well on my way today.

The Struggle by Carrie McGath, 2010

When I moved to Chicago, everything new, tackling another Masters degree among people younger and seemingly happier than myself, I was experiencing odd and terrifying fears. I was becoming quickly reclusive and compulsive, feeling the door, the walls, and floor for signs of fire every night before I would go to sleep.

The last words from my psychotherapist in Kalamazoo was for me to do something “courageous.” With that, I went to bed last night without feeling for fires, instead listening to the night feeling satisfied and whole again in my Self from creating something. In the lakefront night, words and imagery rolled through my mind like ribbons.

Not my most serious artwork to date, but it’s still creating …

Don is my Knight in Shining Armor ... so I made this for him today ... *swoon*

So after so much-needed purging and cleaning of my tiny nostril of an apartment, I decided it was time to make my sweet Dove, Don a little gift for when he arrives tonight. We are the lovely nerdy couple who love our Sci-Fi and pulp as only true nerds would … so, the inspiration for this piece.

In preparation for the move from my nostril-sized studio to a one bedroom in a new neighborhood of the city, I have begun another purge of possessions … going all-out minimalist as my sweet Don is an all-out minimalist … with the exception of books … those are for keeps. So in purging I found my art supplies I have not seen in months, a very needed thing now that I am on a break from class …

Visual art helps me put things in order among my constant inner and outer disorder … so the purging will also help me to finish my new chapbook, due out in August, called Doll Work. Keep checking in on www.carriemcgath.com to be updated on the release of the book, as well as readings throughout the Midwest including my new city of Chicago and my old city of Kalamazoo.

Happy, creative summer, everyone!

Notes to Nonself at Hyde Park Art Center: The Interview

Detail, Notes to Nonself by Diane Christiansen and Shoshanna Utchenik

When I first met artists Diane Christiansen and Shoshanna Utchenik, it was quite by chance. I was initially at the Hyde Park Art Center to see another exhibition in order to write a review about it. But I smelled the bright and rife beauty of paint and went to investigate.  A woman came out of the gallery, sensing my allure to the space, and asked me to enter. This would be my first of two face-to-face meetings with the artists responsible for the heady and pleasing installation Notes to Nonself in the Catwalk Gallery of the Hyde Park Art Center. Our official in-person interview was after their very well-attended opening on Sunday, February 7, 2010. Then our discussion continued through emails, and the odd little irony here was that our subsequent written discussion was an extension of Notes to Nonself’s original medium — the written word.

Detail, Buddhist Prayer Flags, Notes to Nonself by Diane Christiansen and Shoshanna Utchenik

Carrie McGath: The exhibition, Notes to Nonself, on view at The Hyde Park Art Center through April 25, 2010, sprawls throughout the largest gallery. It is a beautiful exhibit that gives a viewer a feeling of exploration. Could either of you elaborate on the exhibit itself, its title, and its notions of self-exploration?

Diane Christiansen: I think of it as the octopus of relational attachment. Or maybe just a giant octopus with notes relating to the relationship attached to it. This show grew from Shosh and I making friends when a curator suggested that I hire her to help me make a giant 3-D cartoon character. We had an immediate connection as we built that thing. Anyhow, the idea for the exhibit grew after she had moved to Slovenia. She emailed me and asked me if we could Skype and have a long-distance friendship.

Shoshanna Utchenik: The exhibit is a metaphoric landscape for the activity of the mind. The show evolved out of the recurring themes of our notes to one another, especially this struggle against chaos and groundlessness we both experience as a call to courageous faith. The Buddhist notion of “no-self” speaks to this primal awareness of the interconnectedness of all beings and actions.

CM: Since Shoshanna was out of the country most of the time this project was coming to together, when the two of you as friends and artists were physically separated, how did this effect the work?

SU: I had moved to Slovenia with my one-and-a-half-year-old son and Slovenian husband after living in and loving Chicago for twelve years. Everything fell apart. Instead of just solving practical issues the move revealed the nature of some personal issues. I reached out to Diane as someone I didn’t know very well but felt a connection with, and we began Skyping and then note mailing. Through the course of the project we both had big stuff come up that got folded into the notes. In many ways pain was released through the notes.

DC: Since our friendship really developed through notes, we realized that to work on something this gigantic, we needed a lot more processing time. Think of all of the details of how those clouds were made, then transported, then hung! And the giant octopus and the clubhouse. All created with a minimum of us talking together in one room. And I got cancer last summer right before she was coming to work on this with me, so I was in the hospital and she was working with The School of the Art Insitute of Chicago interns she had never met! So in a way the distance kept us dreaming and thinking huge.

SU: The biggest struggle with the distance was that there were stretches of time when Diane had resources available to carry out construction that I would have been more comfortable and confident to do, but I wasn’t there so she had to just plow ahead. And I had to let go. But everything was collaborative in this process.

Installation View, Notes to Nonself by Diane Christiansen and Shoshanna Utchenik

CM: Diane, you are a practicing psychotherapist and Shoshanna, you have expressed having had profound experiences as an educator in the arts while also being an artist. Considering these aspects within each of you, can you both talk about the exhibit’s psychological elements such as The Ego Forest and The Relationship Bardo represented in the octopus?

DC: The octopus was my idea born out of this one drawing Shosh did regarding a relationship. I wanted to make a giant octopus covered with notes about attachment and when I got out of the hospital after having various girl parts removed. Talk about attachment! Shosh had built the damn thing as I think a kind of gift for me. I cried and laughed. This giant octopus in my studio for over a month and me almost unable to walk. Really the best funniest gift. In the show it is a kind of dragging notes all about attachment not only to relationships but also to my own girl parts, youth, and so forth.

SU: And this object is a humorous metaphor. Even attachment to the idea of Self gets kind of clingy and miserable. There is this simple and painful truth that we must let go if we are to really experience the fullness of anything or anyone. This gigantor octopus is a kind of non sequitor distraction, attraction, and obstacle in the middle of the space. As in life.

DC: Being a psychotherapist informs my work in pretty much every way. It infuses both my deep gratitude for my own relationship with my husband and friends and my knowledge of how rough it is to be human in a body trying to figure things out!

SU: Teaching forced me to essentialize my communication. I became better at recognizing and articulating my intentions and questions. I was satisfied to see kids running through the woods and tramping into the clubhouse alongside adults stooping to contemplate our notes. I hope that there’s beauty and a physical experience of opening and closing as viewers pass through, as well as the more specific content that’s available. I think that I value generosity in art even more since teaching.

ITALICS at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Now through February 14, 2010

Maurizio Cattelan, All

Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968-2008 is on view now through February 14, 2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. This exhibition is reaping with revolution and rarity, ushering in art from Italy that has never or rarely been viewed by a North American audience. In the exhibition catalog, Italics curator, Francesco Bonami writes, “This country blessed with so many exceptional talents has trapped them in an invisible box” (28). Many of these talents are revealed in the exhibit, and this is what makes Italics stirring even as an idea, even before entering the MCA’s exhibition.

Upon entering the exhibit, the first visual encounter is the epitome of violent revolution with Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture, All from 2008. Unlike much of his other sculptural work, this one is somber and sobering, not satirical. It is a meditation on mass murder as well as a meditation on creation itself. There is this mortal / immortal quality in this piece laced with an intensity his other pieces do not possess. It is as if this is the truth, the piece with most meaning to Cattelan and to its timeless context. Mass murder has been around for eons and marble is the perfect medium to portray the immortality of this mortal narrative, acting also as an allusion to Italy’s art tradition.

Walking through the galleries, I felt a very real feeling that this was the “moment” that so many Italian contemporary artists had been waiting for, and really had to wait for thanks to political turbulence in Italy. Returning again to Bonami’s catalog essay about Italics: “Just like large sections of Italian society, Italian art was for some time ‘hi-jacked’ by a political fundamentalism that choked even the strongest and most lively international instincts” (26).

Carol Roma’s 1970 sculpture, Presagi di Birnam conveys a heavy, choking sensibility in her minimal-but-not piece of a hundred or so deflated bicycle inner tubes that hang limp over a harsh and sturdy iron trestle. This piece conjures up a reeling array of emotions and associations: I feel a deep terror in seeing a violation, the dead inner tubing as little bodies slung over something cold and rigid; I feel a sadness seeing it after learning of the possible autobiographical allusions to her father’s suicide after his bicycle business failed; and finally, I feel a general emptiness, just like the inner tubes, now limp memories of a vehicular excitement with a past of enthralling numerous bicyclists on sunny days on Italian streets.

The documentary photographs of Letizia Battaglia  show the sinister realities of Palermo in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her photographs focus on the Mafia in Palermo, but also on the people of Palermo who suffer from poverty and the daily reality of bloodshed in their neighborhoods. Unlike the somber sculptures of Cattelan and Roma, these photographs have surpassed somber and advanced into the starkness of death. These are not representations of murder as Cattelan conveys in All, or the metaphorical expression of death as in Roma’s Presagi di Birnam. Battaglia’s works are absolute reality, and have an interesting home in the gallery hanging nearby Simone Berti’s Senza titolo, a photograph of a well-dressed Italian family in a grassy area posed within a contraption. This contraption at first reminded me of a jungle gym from a park or playground and then I was reminded of tool or a hinderance for mobility. Berti’s photo discusses play and familial love, so its proximity to Battaglia’s disturbing “crime scene” photographs further illustrate the complexity of Italy and this exhibition.

The claustrophobic and erotically-charged snapshots of Carlo Mollino have a careful beauty in the risque and classical poses of the women and in the photos’ unavoidable feel of the private meeting the public. His Untitled photos from 1968-1973 appear to be snapshots, photos that do not have the grandeur that classic art photographs would possess, but instead have this beautiful but seedy color and dreamy quality only able to be captured this authentically on a portable, mass-marketed pocket camera. This only adds to the layers of intrusion these photos exude, a private eye moment with a peep show element in tow.

Pietro Roccasalva’s painting, Skeleton Key III from 2007 has a motion that brings Francis Bacon’s oils of heads to mind, namely the one that appears to be the head of a bishop. Roccasalva works with intersections, literally playing with and blurring lines between genres of art, as well as human history. The subject in the portrait is difficult to identify with the Baconian focal point of motion in the piece, a fleshy additive in the face that seems to be playing with motion and its intersection with the subject. In this work, I see revision, a desire to start again and the result is the ultimate intersection of Classical portraiture and Modern Expressionism.

Margherita Manzelli’s small paintings N from 2002, Q from 2005, and T and U from 2007 sit quietly on a wall in one of the galleries. Perhaps because Manzelli may be one of the only Italian artists who is known outside of Italy, her inclusion here is noiseless in its very white canvases with her trademark tiny ladies emerging from it as if from a curtain call. Standing out among them is U from 2007, where the figure is surrounded by a drawn floral pattern that does not desire to be wallpaper, but almost a bursting forth of the woman in the piece who is the focal point. It has a goddess quality, but the subject’s white dress that looks to be stamped with five globules of red, possibly blood, make this another sinister contradiction as a theme rife in contemporary Italian art.

Every exhibition has a “strange room,” a gallery of weirdly placed delights and in Italics this room was undoubtedly the space where one will find Roberto Cuoghi’s photos documenting the decomposition of human faces. These are immediately startling pieces but are gently so in their earthy sepia browns and grays. And these are not just random faces found in varying stages of decay, but they are men the artists knows personally, one being his wealthy collector, David Halevim. Cuoghi takes a cast of the face of his subjects, lets it “stew” in his garden for about six weeks before burying it, ultimately achieving a very real and deeply starling record of decomposition and death. Cuoghi, like so many of the artists in the exhibition, plays with mortality as he plays with contradiction.

Roberto Cuoghi, Senza titolo

The role of contradiction and intersection is constant in this exhibit as it is in Italy, its history seeming to take a strange turn in the 1960s and now, in 2009, Italy it is really just beginning to come out of its microcosmic hangover. From Cattelan portraying the constancy of mass murder in the immortal medium of marble, to Cuoghi’s immortalizing digital photographs documenting something as impermanent as decay, speak to the main theme of contradiction and its intersection, an overlapping, and its inherent revolution in Italy and its art from 1968-2008.

The Arte Provera movement is addressed in much of the exhibit since many of the artists were a part of this radical movement in Italy against what Bonami mentions in the catalog essay: “the political family, the religious family, the organized-crime family, the bourgeois family, the industrial-tycoon family, the terrorist family, and those of the ‘extra- parliamentary’ political movement” (26-7). This was a movement created by the artists of Italy for the artists of Italy, if you will, another “family.” Much like avant garde movements in the beginning of the Twentieth-century, this movement in the later 1960s has the rich history of renegade exhibitions, namely those by art critic Germano Celant, and in turn an exposure contemporary Italian artists simply could not experience. And by extension, here in Chicago in 2009, this exhibition is significant on an array of levels, layers of meaning and emotion that is evident in each artwork on view now in this exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Italics is undoubtedly an exhibition not only worth seeing, but an exhibition one must see. The sheer talent of the artists in the exhibit is a definite draw, along with the fact that these artists are barely shown in North America. But there is another reason why this exhibition in not to be missed and that reason is the opportunity to see an Italy that is rarely seen but is now visible in these very real artworks. It is an exhibition that does not leave the mind or the heart after exiting the museum, but it is one that will surely stay with you, inadvertently following you like a stranger who becomes a part of your daily habits. Something throughout your day will remind you of these artworks. Something will remind you of the turmoil and the ultimate declaration of freedom these artworks represent. Something will remind you of the power of numbers and passion, giving you something more to strive for while you move among your daily habits. And to quote Francesco Bonami again, “You could call Italics a kind of epiphany” (31). I would aptly agree.

Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968-2008. Chicago, Illinois: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008.

Visit the MCA’s ITALICS:

http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/exh_detail.php?id=192

Buy the Catalog:

http://www.mcachicagostore.org/main/item_detail.php?pid=1184&cat=1

Eavesdropping in the Modern Wing of The Art Institute of Chicago

A bit over a week ago, I found myself in the same weird room of contemporary art in The Modern Wing. In this little gallery room is this Lisa Yuskavage painting, Angel; Margharita Manzelli’s Dopo la Fine; Peter Doig’s Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre; and finally the Lucian Freud Sunny Morning–Eight Legs. And since it is such a weird and wonderful room, it is ideal for eavesdropping. I did not spend over an hour in this room to eavesdrop, but was in there reviewing the Manzelli painting. The eavesdropping realization was just icing.

I have always been very fond of eavesdropping in museums. I spent endless hours in many museums doing just this while I sucked in the art around me. But this day, with my intent being very great on my review for my class of the Manzelli painting, pondering reviewing the Yuskavage painting pictured above, it was a wondrous eavesdropping day.

Yuskavage’s painting I have pictured here is titled, Angel. This is very tame for Yuskavage whose use of porno pastels further creeps out her luscious canvases of nude female figures in various narratives of dire straits of physical deformities. Abnormally large breasts and bulbous bellies that seem inhuman, so this one … tame in comparison.

Picture this: In comes a couple in their 60s perhaps, they walk into this odd room where the eye first spies Manzelli and Yuskavage. They stand before Angel in complete silence for almost 5 straight, uninterrupted minutes and then she says: “That’s no angel!” She seemed angry, irritated, quickly leaving it for the Manzelli, while her male companion, maybe her husband, continued to stare at Angel as if she were the most gorgeous and real woman he had ever seen. He was very taken by this woman on the wall in porno pastels, and I am thinking perhaps this is what upset the woman, most likely his wife (they acted married, long married).

Later I caught them near  Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #88, and this same woman was empathizing with the visibly melancholic woman on the wall while this same man gazed into Mike Kelley’s wonderful downpour waterfall of stuffed animals, Eviscerated Corpse. It was a fascinating afternoon in the museum with a very fascinating couple.

Now, I am interning in the Art Institute with Express Talk tours and look forward to this journey with my museum guests … their words, their faces, so significant. If the Curators of museums don’t already do this, I think they should spend loads of time eavesdropping on their museum’s guests. I can’t wait to open my ears to any and all of the observations of everyone in that space there for a common reason — to see art, even if their agendas are different.

Eavesdropping in a museum … I recommend it highly.

rediscovering sHApE with Xiong Yu at the Chicago Cultural Center

One of the main (of many) things that draws me to certain works of art — Shape. As someone who often experiences tricks of the eye, seeing the world around me as a series of shapes rather than things, I deeply appreciate another’s take on the shape of the world. And to say today that I merely appreciate Xiong Yu’s take on shape is an understatement; I not only appreciate it, I feel it wholly, it is a gutshot.

Through the end of August, the Chicago Cultural Center (across from Millennium Park) hosts the profoundly important exhibition, The Big World: Recent Art from China. In this deep and moving and shapely exhibit, one artist in particular took my heart and eyes: Xiong Yu.

The above painting, Riders in the Forest and the work below, Falconer, still reside in me … the shapes of me day today, a day later …

In Riders, the amazing complacency of the eyes and necks of both the riders and the horses lends an odd variety of summoned imagery to me: Aeon Flux of MTV animation infamy, as well as the strangely “proper” and profound bone-structure moments in one a favorite Western painting of mine, Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage(1434).

The muted use of color that is a punch in the orbitals even while it is muted. This is an immediate recognition to me, van Eyck and Yu, hitting me in the vertebrae and shooting me with the odd feelings that maybe I am crazy to put these works side by side. But then maybe I’m not crazy. Shape … the texture of the human machine manifested by artists like Yu, is the driving force of love, hate, peace, and discontent.

The technique in Yu’s paintings show the truth of the great human truths as much as the narrative therein does. Everything will be fixed in moments of time if we’re patient enough, everything being a reason. A reason for something steadfast and absurd, slow and steady winning an impossible race.

And, dear readers, if you get to the Cultural Center by the 30th, do also see the sculptures from modern China in Millennium Park.

I know I  must go to China to study and to feel the fingers of humanity on my impatient Euro-American skin, see the beauty in the rebirth from decay like a falconer summoning a lover in a mad hunt for the ultimate happiness in the shapes of humanity.

Modern Art will always Have my heart, but Hans wants me to hear him …

Just yesterday I wrote here about a painting I came across very much at random, a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger titled Lady with a Squirrel. Then, today, again semmeingly at random, a Holbein painting was the artwork on my daily calendar I change religiously. So for today, Friday, June 26th … Holbein is on my art calendar. I cannot help but believe there is something in this beyond the haphazard coincidence. So now, I am going to begin my research of this man … get a book to add to my collection, this book having the added appeal of having this odd little message perhaps.

I think this message may have something to do with TRUTH.

Bizarre Visions of Squirrels in the Midnight : Father’s Day Reflections

Usually, I am attracted to Modern and contemporary art because it is a deep and wonderful anguishing to me and how I am feeling in my odd little modern world. But sometimes, very old art like this painting titled, A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling by Hans Holbein the Younger (circa, 1526) and writings like Margarey Kempe’s Autobiography of the Madwoman of God will give me great meaning to my modern world. Since my dream last night, I am walking through a mundane Thursday afternoon  when suddenly so much again seems sad, heartbreaking even. Now is one of those days when the smallest thing can send me into tears, those large, gasping tears, tears  like toddlers have when their hearts break over something mundane, like an exploded balloon and a lost Barbie shoe.

Last night, I spoke to my parents on the phone, and my father told me he brought 2 dead squirrels from the road outside their house, buried them in the sideyard garden, made them headstones, naming one Step and the other Fetch, placing an American flag between them. To anyone who does not know my father, have a past with him, would find his behavior bizarre (and it does have its kooky quality for sure). But to me, I see the reasonable truth in this ritual, loving my father as much for his humor and sweetness as I do for his stupors of sadness.

He is the child of the sad Irish … photographs of he and his sisters from babies on up depict a sadness in their very rare, if ever, smiles. And they are not just bored, serious. They are sad knowing life is still waiting outside that camera shutter, Pennsylvania and Ohio starvation, darkness, furniture and carpeting covered in long draws of plastic always and forever. Their home constantly covered in plastic as if they had already left their living room, their living, but didn’t, just simply stuck in a room as complex as a turbine engine or Morning Glories.

And two squirrels dead in a street, still full of tap water and love from a yellow bowl. My father leaving water out for the squirrels in their yard, gallon by gallon, day by day. Patiently I have been waiting for a poem about my father to tap me in my dark and it did last night, tugging at me today. I know it is coming. It comes in small little nibbles. And I see and feel always a small house.

After the conversation with my father about the squirrels and about my mother’s anxiety about me moving to “the big city”, I shared some lovely hours with my love, Don and my great friend, Gina. And lying there last night with Don, medicine taking me gently away from the heat-steeped outside where sleep had been alluding, I slept in love another night in my life. And I was lying with a man who genuinely loved me back.

So why were there terrifying dreams when I wonder why I feel like a squirrel lying dead and decapitated in a street, driven around and laughed at by the engines of motorcycles? I was being drug into a house to help the faceless man (that usual man in my dreams I think — the bad man) embalm animals, me standing there vocalchordless, unable to help myself or anything or anyone else around me since I was being led around by the bad man’s thumb as if I were on a conceptual leash, a magnetic field of rebellion in the most intense manner possible in the modern world.

My modern world. And then today, this painting just comes to me in a book I arbitrarily open. She is scared, too. And just like me, I don’t know what really scares her.

So I start putting that black eyeliner around my eyes again looking for my inner Shirley. She has stopped talking to me. But I feel certain this painting is one that will get us talking again like two schoolgirls shoplifting in our little sockhops loving men who love us, arriving to save us.