Today was pretty bland and, for lack of better word, frustrating. It started off with me waking up to realize it was 10:40 and the charger that i plugged my phone into the night before was unplugged resulting in the death of my battery leading to the failure of my alarm going off. So this wasn’t the end of the world and i get up to throw my clothes on and i become so lightheaded that i stumble and hit my head on my bedpost. Awesome. Just what i needed. I then go to the bathroom and brush my teeth, the combination of the lights being too bright and their terrible droning buzz coupled with my recent head trauma gave me the worst headache ever. As i went back to my room i felt like throwing up so i sat down in my chair and immediately fell back asleep. It was at this moment i remembered how i once heard you could die from falling asleep after a concussion. Waking up 10mins later i stood up and felt completely fine, but i just really didn’t want to go to class now because i was afraid that i would fall asleep again. If that were to happen there would be no point. So here i am i read the entire book for the week and didn’t eat anything all day. I did drink an entire thing of iced tea though.

Free Write:

Int. Halloween party – night

Gibson stands in the corner of the living room at Asha’s house next to a fruit punch bowl. The room is filled with twenty or so high school juniors and seniors, an awkward sophomore here and there.

Gibson looks around the room at the various group socializing.

She takes a sip of his drink, just punch in a red solo cup, unlike the vodka-punch mixture that is so common amongst her peers.

A boy, Trevor, taps Gibson on the shoulder and starts talking to him.

As they talk Gibson looks away and when he looks back her mouth is covered in blood and an arrow is sticking out of her shoulder.

Gibson feels sick at the sight of Trevor “dying” and heads for the bathroom.

Int. bathroom – CONTINUOUS

Gibson enters the bathroom and turns around quickly to close and lock the door. Gibson sighs in relief and closes her eyes. She hears a rustling sounds and opens her eyes.

Gibson notices that she’s standing in front of a couple of teens who are half naked, entwined in eachother’s arms, obviously drunk, and staring at her.

Gibson unlocks the door, opens it and leaves but not before glancing back at the couple and seeing them and the bathroom covered in blood.

Int. Hallway – continuous

Gibson walks out into the hallway, sweating and anxious looking. She rushes past a couple talking and leaning against the living room entrance and accidently knocks a partygoers drink over which spills onto her shirt, appearing to be blood of some sort. Gibson walks faster and begin to run and exits the house.

Ext. backyard – MOMENTS LATER

As Gibson enters the backyard she notices that her shirt is not covered in blood but in vodka/punch. To Gibson, the backyard is even more crowded and suffocating than the living room of Asha’s house.

Gibson turns back to the house but the sliding doors leading inside are covered in blood, with the blood slowly seeping onto the pavement beyond the door.

Gibson covers her face and enters the house in a rush.

Int. kitchen – CONTINUOUS

Gibson rushes through the kitchen, towards a flight of stairs near the hallway. All around Gibson there are half alive partygoers covered in blood talking to eachother and to him.

Ext. Rooftop – MOMENTS LATER

Gibson pushes through a door leading to the rooftop of Asha’s house. Everything stops. The world is quiet and she can breathe again.

Gibson lays down on the roof and stares up at the sky. She falls asleep.

Ext. Rooftop – morning

Gibson wakes up to Asha standing over her with a cup of coffee. Asha offers a hand to Gibson and helps her up. They enter the house.

Int. kitchen – MOMENTS LATER

Asha sits Gibson down next to Davey, another party goer who spent the night, and offers her a bowl of cereal which she begins to eat.

Asha sits down next to Gibson and asks her about the party.

As Asha is talking Gibson looks down at her bowl of cereal to find that the cereal has turned into a bowl of intestines. Gibson begins to look sick and spits out some of her cereal, which also looks like chewed up intestines.

Davey asks if she’s alright

Asha dismisses this for Davey having a hangover but suggests that Davey gives her a ride to school.

(my dreams become so vivid at the start of spring)
((i thought this posted yesterday but did not go through to the right place))

She gives birth to quadruplets with perfect painted skin and

they glow and coo with her stepmother upstairs while she

carries on with life. Downstairs, bottom of stairs there is the

spindle table, today with a silver platter instead of bouquet.

Four praying mantises arrange themselves on the platter

reaching up with their arms worshipping, their faces following her

movement across the room. Confused by their human countenance

she lifts the platter and they wilt curl crumple fall to floor

dead husks now sorry. She puts down the platter and it echoes through

the  hallways and there is nobody to witness but she fears reprimand

and leaves through the front door. Outside the sun has set and dry

land stretches and rolls into deepening sky. A gathering on the horizon,

she sets out towards it and is joined by others with the same destination.

They come out of nowhere and fall into pace with her and she starts to cry.

The procession mourns together walks together towards the mountain. Near

the base, hired nymphs emerge from tall grass.  They will lead them through

the mountain, they skip ahead and be merry and naked and pure just as

practiced. She wonders what the point of that is. These are not nymphs they

are young girls and the night is too cold for them to shed clothes and she would

rather not see the bruises on the backs of their legs as they limp, scamper ahead

through the tunnel through the mountain through the sewer. More tears.

This is a rough draft of material to use for an article thinking about art that I want to write from this base. I’m going to change some things, and put some insight and new ideas I’ve gotten from some videos, the book Art&Fear and some other sources and notes eventually. But a work in progress that started with Thursday’s discussion.

Both my parents are artists, but very different kinds. My father is a writer, a photographer, a filmmaker, and he’s told me that he considers video advertisements a form of high art. You have thirty seconds to make someone do something that they otherwise wouldn’t have before they saw that advertisement. It’s very difficult to do, and it definitely requires meaning to be made from it. My mother draws, she’s a painter, and most of her work is abstract. I was taught from a very young age, not to put meaning in her work where there wasn’t any. Don’t try to make it into something when it isn’t suppose to be anything. Just appreciate its beauty, absorb it, and feel what it makes you feel when you look at it. It can mean something to you, but it won’t mean that to everyone else. Hold the meaning it gives you for yourself, don’t take the chance that you might ruin the meaning it has for someone else with your interpretation.
So I grew up knowing that art could take many forms, and that all of them were valid in their own way, and that you could make whatever kind of art spoke most to you. You can make art that works for social change, that provides commentary on the times, you can make art that means something, or you can make art that makes you happy simply for the reason that it makes you happy, that the colors are beautiful or that you want to capture that moment of beauty or decay.
Both kinds of art can exist at the same time without discounting the other. They can exist within one artist, and that artist can have vastly different reasons for making one piece of art than for making another.
That artist’s intentions when they’re making that art are important, but only so far as they are important to the artist. Because once what they have made is passed on to the audience, it doesn’t matter what their intention is, the audience might see a different intention in their interpretations. The artist can’t control how the audience responds to a piece of art. Those response for the audience, are just as valid and meaningful as the intentions the artist had when they were creating it, and as long as everyone understands and respects that these interpretations and responses and intentions can exist at the same time without lessening each others meaning, they can exist at the same time.
The artist makes their art for their own reasons, whether that reason is because they want to or because they want to create meaning. The audience sees and reacts to the art for their own reasons, through a political lens perhaps, or through the lens of appreciating art without thinking about its context. All of these have merit, and all are valid, if they are true to self.

The ground rules, they established, were just that they weren’t going to drug him. Beyond just that everything else could be considered fair game with the bendable, overarching appreciation for consent. Following this ground rule worked easily enough because if one of them lost their head in a passion fit, the other of the two could bring them back to a workable rationale. To date, this dynamic had always worked but the concern still lingered in the backs of their minds that if the day came when both felt too captured by their own moaning siren song like Medusa’s own reflection, caught in the whirlwind of their own ploys, things would get quick and bad. 

More of a pressing concern than going too far was actually starting to go anywhere and doing something that wasn’t only nailed to the walls of their imaginative minds. They needed to learn how to fish and start dropping hints like lines in the water. Using bait seemed too insidious because instead of trapping him out of his own obliviousness, they’d rather him come by his own volition, swim up to some reflective lure and be shown the way in. Rubbing legs under the desks in school and inviting him out when he’s alone to get him away from his friends were all things they’d already initiated with the hope of sending a message in a bottle down a stream of the juices they wanted so badly to get flowing.

Even though they’d only known him for less than two months, they had big plans, even though they’d only be seeing him for a few more weeks until the start of summer. Who comes to a new school in April anyway? How can someone like that give the blessing of their presence to a group of unfamiliar folks for not even a dozen weeks? It, their fantasy and planning, was all rather innocent but no less pungent than the noticeable shits their heated lusting had caused in the pheromonal smells found not deep into their armpits.

After falling asleep again at 7:00am I dreamed of walking with two little girls along a street, in a nice looking town, lined in large old houses with tidy yards. From the looks of things it was spring, because the grass was lush, most trees had barely produced a bud, and there were blossoms. Suddenly I see a man hanging from a tree in someone’s front yard. The proper authorities already seem to be present and looking into it, so I quickly take the girls back in the direction we came from. As we turn away I realize there is more than one body hanging in the yard on this beautiful morning and they all have black bags over their heads as if executed. In our calm but brisk retreat the smallest girl chants to herself, “we are to young to se that.” We come across another house with a beautifully unkempt garden, over-run with mud and moss and pink blossoms. Cutting through this yard we find, to my dismay, another faceless body swinging amidst the falling petals.

Nothing to do but to hurry forward.

Then we come across two unconscious bodies, a man and a woman, on the covered porch of the house. I tell the 4 or so children to wait… have they been multiplying? I climb the paint chipped steps to check the bodies’ pulses and then the dream decides to play a trick on me, the unconscious bodies snap awake with electrical whirring sounds. Somehow I know that they are robots, despite their fleshy appearance, and I tell the kids to run. I try to lead the robots away by dashing around the house and up a gravel alley. The man is hot on my heels but where’s the woman? I wake up.

Is this a nightmare? I guess so. But what stays with me is the vivid fidelity of a quiet town bursting with the liveliness of spring. I only remember the invading insertions of horror as if I saw them out of the corner of my eye.

It’s the end of Week 7, and I have to say that this wasn’t a particularly easy week for me. I actually really didn’t enjoy Grace Paley’s Collected Stories for the most part. There were a couple of the stories that I did enjoy, but really overall I just wasn’t a big fan. I did really like the film for this week, My America, and I think that that is what I will do for my close viewing next week. I’m mildly stressed about getting that done, but I’m still feeling okay about it, since I still have about a week until it has to be done.

The biggest issue that I had this week was with my project. I’ve really been trying to stick to a schedule of doing one piece of my project every day, and for a while there it was working, but I hit several days this week where I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Maybe it was that the words just weren’t coming to me, or maybe I was just too lazy, but either way I didn’t get as much done as I had hoped.

Also, this week was my biggest moment of doubt so far in the quarter, where I was just disappointed with how my project was so far and questioning everything I’d done. I’m still not completely over that, but I’m past the worst of the doubt, I think. I am worried that my project won’t turn out well, or at least as well as I’d hoped, but I’m trying not to let that interfere with my working on it.