“You could ask me, ‘Why do you do it this way?’ There’s absolutely no way I could tell you. It takes me a month with a piece of lead on a table. And day by day, it gets folded or bent. And that becomes this underlying, hidden piece that you barely see.”
“Decoration in this folk sense is a kind of culturalized representation of nature. It’s closest to the raw elements that reflect a very specific geographical location in historical time. The importance of it for me is that I can have these circumstances of time and place in crystalline form, and I can feel those realities, feel the history that they inevitably speak about in this natural cultural sense.”
“If the beats ain’t right, you ain’t right. But I can take a little bit of one thing and make it big. You can give me anything and I’ll know what to do with it.”
“The characters that I create have to create their own happiness or search for their own happiness. It’s not given to them. They’re happy people, but they have to fight for that happiness.”
“A lot of discoveries can be made within the idea of storytelling by just subverting that whole idea of what has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
“The only way to deconstruct an idea or a viewpoint is to start with some kind of archetype, then you invade it with different readings.” James Wines
“I know the ball walkers aren’t “feminists” in the politically correct sense of the term, but what they are doing is innately feminist. A boy becomes a girl—gender is a learned thing, and these people chose to be women despite the American social convention that to be a man would be the preferable choice.”
“I feel that I have made a career at doing what I’ve been told.”
“I need some element of hedonistic surprise—that’s a little perverse—to fool myself, to surprise myself, and yet, at the same time, I need to maintain control.”
“I think that emotion as we know it comes into the world the moment we take on language. Your emotions are known to you through language.”
Poem for His Divine Grace, Swami Prabhupada, Founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
It was shortly after Maggie learned to drive the enormous car she bought for less than it cost to fill the tank from a Chicano on Sunset and La Ciénega that we met.
The thing Mary thinks about, clemently and even more than her husband, the thing she really remembers—not because it has some revelatory seam, not because it matters all that much, but just because she does—is her lawn.
The letters looped lackadaisically, loosely tumbling into and out of configurations of words, some times legibly, some times not.
I’m in flight, I’m delirious, I’ve shed my urban chrysalis.
The first thing I think when I wake up in the morning is how much I love school.
DON’T TOUCH ME
I am sleeping in the middle of a desert
on sackcloth, on hot sand
Five oil and wax on canvas paintings, Austere, Ostracism, Grace, Lisle, and Cease by Sean Scherer.
Two photographs of metal, grid-like structures, In Abstracto and In Abstracto #15 by Ariane Lopez Huici.
Two mixed media and enamel pieces on canvas, When Worlds Collide and Running Figure by Taro Suzuki.
This article is only available in print. However, you may purchase a pdf of the issue in which this article appears, here.
Several “black and white studio portraits of pairs—people connected by blood marriage, social, business or other ties,” Mixed Doubles by Teri Slotkin.
Two drawings from the Jane Creep series, and mixed media piece, This is a Letter Bomb, You Will Be Dead in 15 Seconds by Karen Kilimnik.