Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Emerging from the cocoon, the domestic male ties his apron strings


I'm starting out 2010 self employed. I'll just go ahead and say it, unemployment. Someone told me to say it the first way, and I'm not afraid to say what this really is. I have ample time to re-configure my life, I exercise, and I cook. What can I say, I'm in training to be a house-husband. I prefer to call it my emergence as a fully mature domestic male.

I've started a new blog where I explore this aspect of my life. It's been happening more and more over the past few years, but when I show up to a potluck with freshly cooked food, people call me domestic. At first I would laugh, then I got used to this label, and now I'm embracing it. As I said, it's a new lease on life having a month or two to re-group. I'm building a new website, acting as a new media intern at a local museum, finding amazing jobs that I would have never known about otherwise, and reaching out for residencies and shows in ways I never would have had time for.

To top it off, I feel that since leaving academia, I have a clear view of my work like I've not had before. Things have boiled down to key issues, to key words, and the ideas I have now are more easily executed. Proposals spin off my finger tips like never before, and I feel like I owe this to traveling, and to taking time to think. Traveling around India for the fall allowed me to not make anything for a solid amount of time and to think about what I have done in the past four years. What I do next will be different, it will be more complex, and the ideas will be simpler in execution and more fluid in the way they are seen and interpreted.

To read about my recipe experiments on my new blog, where I take random starting points from my kitchen and build meals around them, check out the Domestic Male.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Cornel West Reacts to Jung's Red Book


from Red Book, by Jung. Dragon illustration.

I've been considering my dreams today. Not just a daily thought to what happened last night, but more the reflection on recurring dreams that I've had over the past few years. I can't draw conclusions except for personal assumptions based on the metaphors that my dreams have presented to me over time. What got me thinking so deeply about it is a short audio interview with Cornel West. During a lecture series titled "The Red Book Dialogues" Dr. Cornel West and Dr. Ann Belford Ulanova discussed one of the folio images from Jung's Red Book which I'm finding is a fascinating book, as is Jung. As one reviewer put so well on Amazon:

The Red Book is not "personal" as we use that word now. It is "personal" in the sense that it details one individual's very unique experience of coming into relationship with what Jung termed the Self, and in prior times was referred to as God, but it is at the same time very impersonal, and actually universal, in cataloguing the drama inherent in any person's formation of that relationship. The book is at home with The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Goethe's Faust, and, as much as anything, The Red Book is Jung's response to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and to Nietzsche's proposition that for modern man, God is dead. The response is that God is neither dead nor to be found in outer religious, national or political containers, but is to be discovered and struggled with in the living of each individual life.

A not uncommon dream is of stumbling upon a previously unknown addition or wing of one's dwelling, which addition is found to be many, many times the size of the existing structure, and to contain objects and treasures of previously unimaginable value, interest and numinousity. One is filled with awe and wonder at the new found wealth and possibilities. The experience of encountering The Red Book after spending 30 years in Jung's existing body of work is equally stupefying. That there could be so much more that Jung had to share and communicate about the human soul seems not just improbable, but impossible. Yet The Red Book is that much, much larger, more nuanced and tremendously numinous structure that is behind, under, around and the foundation for all of Jung's subsequent ideas, theories, publications and works. Extraordinary.
By: B. Hill of Pasadena, California


It's an expensive book to own, though it would be something great to view it in person, but it's also another addition to the base of knowledge we have on Jung. Since contemporary times seem to be divisive, I wonder what our dreams might tell us about the larger world we live in? How might my dreams reflect the outer world, where people staunchly differ in opinion, beliefs, and things only seem to get more divided?

Friday, February 12, 2010

20th Aniversary of Voyager Looking Back on us

It was not that long ago really, but it gives perspective that I find valuable. We need more of this viewpoint, and if we had it, maybe we on this planet wouldn't be so divided. We have so much in common despite our culture, language and religious differences.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
-Carl Sagan

Monday, February 8, 2010

I-Oh-Wha?

Yes, I've been rifling through perfectly preserved remnants of my old Iowa life. You know, that old junk that you stored in your parents basement years ago, and then you failed to retrieve it, so it's become obsolete, yet there are a few buried treasures there? Yep, you have that somewhere I'm sure. Well, what I found was a lot of pictures, old sketchbooks, and some of my old musings when I had plans to be a wordsmith. I never really did consider writing, but then again, it's no more realistic than visual art, though I feel much more adept at the visual side of things. Still, I dig some of these old poems. Out of each, there's about 1 line that is really good, so I'll do a few more, omitting the rest of the words.

Seizures are in my ears
Oddly melancholy
When things are gone the tan line mocks me
Auras exploding
Lips floating
Voices travel from no one's mouth
The middle man is always the wind

I just know that you smell, taste like shit, make me and millions of others feel like shit...
and I love you.
And in your eyes I'm weak.

Solitude lends itself to concealment

That's all I can glean from the He-Man notebook. I'll put up more, maybe an excerpt from my old incomplete novel Oblivion.

[Get By] by Nick Naughton circa 2001

Ferrari zooms by, no wait it was a Fiat
Breaths of fresh air pass by outside
Our air is regurgitated
Is it funny?
Who loves what?
Sperm.
Leaves.
Not vibrating, fluttering
Talk can be cheap
Some people's words are priceless

Death is tough
but living through it is tougher
Become stronger

"2 crit or not to crit" by Nick Naughton circa 2001

It's very rude to eat during critique;
it's rude to be writing during critique.
Don't say whatever about your work.
Meet deadlines.
Dogs bark at odd times.
I'm not sure I like when people talk about their own
We can tell 'em only what we think in their world, the world of origin
Eaters chew slowly and quietly/except when it's popcorn;
no words offered
I don't like the word tangible
Simple is better because you make deadlines.
Or is it.
Varying too much on the original idea scores no points.
Some aspects are a must
Cursive writing is hard to read when you cut it
When it seems like you and only other hardcore potheads like your work,
maybe it's a sign.
Thunder can be an empty threat
Some people
When talking about one person's work don't look at someone else's.
Rude
Straightforward when you mean to zigzag is an insult
There's nothing wrong with it, I heard.

The mascara giveth, and the mascara taketh


Matt, whose last name I forget, sporting a brilliant look.


Mathew Clark, asleep or reaching nirvana?


Mary Hill owning that faux facial hair.


Anya Liftig, somehow not surprised that we're giving her a fake mustache on a random night.

Is there something masculine about the addition of a fake mustache to a face? What about in the case of a woman? Let the firehouse decide...

Futility



Trying to draw a mustache on the face of an already bearded man.