Category: artiste

the after-sideyard:

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mostly just this

mixed in with this

(thanks kaz)

and frankie’s feeling it too

and misha sold four prints

and there are flowers all over the house, even by the sink and right here on the desk

and there are four dollars in “20,000 words” which means at least 2 people have my chapbooks

and maybe, maybe, some sort of art scene to remember is getting going in san diego, but even if not, even if we’re all just smartpeople in a yard for a party, it feels good to remember how many  good people there are in this city, and that with some wood and tacks and trashbins-turned-to-tables and the help of farmily, art can happen right next to where we live, and even though no one on the east has seen this thing we did and made, we will bring it wherever we bring our selves, sideyard or sideporch or sideacre of a plot of land…

On erotic power (Lorde).

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Audre Lorde, from her essay ” The Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power”:

For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

It feels very good to read something that reverberates so strongly in my bones.

Quotation & photograph (Patti Smith).

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Patti Smith, in Interview Magazine, on art and Robert Mapplethorpe:

But the artist has to struggle beneath that canopy, just as we struggled beneath a different canopy—though ours wasn’t as overwhelming. I think that true artists just have to keep doing their work, keep struggling, and keep hold of their vision. Because being a true artist is its own reward. If that’s what you are, then you are always that. You could be locked away in a prison with no way at all to communicate what’s in there, but you’re still an artist. The imagination and the ability to transform is what makes one an artist. So young artists who feel overwhelmed by everything have to almost downscale. They have to go all the way to this kernel and believe in themselves, and that’s what Robert gave me. He believed in that kernel I had, you know, with absolute unconditional belief. And if you believe it, you’ll have that your whole life, through the worst times.

And here’s my favorite picture of Patti Smith:

Read “Just Kids,” people. It is very, very good.