Wood Fire 2025

 

I don't know why I love this dithering tool  but I really enjoy putting photos into it and seeing it turn into a relic. Somehow it makes the photo feel authentic? Like it was in the paper? 

I'm back in Germantown, firing the anagama kiln at Oki Doki. This time the crew is Cor and Em, Lilian and Chala, and of course, me. Maybe it's being a small fish in a new pond, maybe it's having time away from my life to reflect on myself,  but every time I come up here I start to feel deeply useless. I adore Lilian but it's sort of the same feeling I have being around my brother- they are so charming and capable that I fade into the background. I've got this bubble that I live in at Gasworks, and I am used to being a source of information and knowledge. I'm used to being capable there, and needed. And here I am pretty ignored, and I try and show my enthusiasm for the process, but it's not as big as Lilian's and Andrew keeps giving her fun little things to do, or people turn to her for advice or conversation. I feel like a bug. 

It also doesn't help that I never know what's going on with kilns until I do it maybe 10 times.  It was like this in college, it was like this with the gas kiln at New Clay Studio, it's like this with wood. How Lilian retains the information when it's been 9 months since the last firing, I'll never know. It's the same with most processes, it just doesn't stick to my brain. It's like trying to stick a piece of paper to a dusty wall using masking tape that was ripped off a cardboard box- it just sort of doesn't adhere. I went to the firing last night jus to observe and it was like a dog trying to follow a phonics lesson. And it's frustrating- I seem to be asking the wrong questions or asking them badly; I feel like I have to ask the same thing over and over. 

I'm not feeling suicidal right now actually, which is nice, but I've had this idea in my head, this plan for years and years now that when I turn 40 I'll jump off a bridge. I don't see a future for myself, and this is sort of a way to keep one foot in front of the other. An out, but not yet. Anyways, I don't know which bridge, but there's plenty in New York. You know when you're getting to one when you see signs on the road promoting mental health hotlines. I've start a google spreadsheet as we were passing over a bridge yesterday. It's only got that one entry, but it's a good one. Walking path, low guardrail, feels like it's a mile high, right over the Hudson. The only issue with jumping is that I've heard you might change your mind on the way down.  enough time passes between the act of jumping and the moment of hitting the grounf that you have time to think about your choice. There's that guy who survived who said something like, "I realized that all the problems in my life were solvable, except the problem of me having just jumped off a bridge," and I don't want to experience that. I suppose the other issue with jumping is that you die. 

I brought way too many things to the woodfire, and I feel a little guilt about it, but also we didn't have enough work to fill the kiln. So I kept bringing out mugs and bringing out vases. It would be terribly embarrassing to fill the whole kiln to the brim with so much of my work and have it all look like shit.  But fuck it, I'm really excited about my mugs, and my vases, and my faces, and my apples. There's a lot of shinos and wood ash glazes, and an apple absolutely covered in woodash (in a way that might be problematic when I have to clean it up... time to invest in dremel bits.) 

Blue Tate, circa 2014

 

distance or time

 I saw a vintage car today, an old taxi painted white. I don't see old autos anymore and I wonder if that's because I don't live in LA anymore or because enough time has passed since childhood that those cars are no longer on the street. New York is not a car town, people have cars to go upstate, to do jobs. No on here is in it for the love of the object. But I find myself wondering that same thing sometimes- is this distance or time that has made this memory a stranger? 

Deserving

Many years ago now Adriene passionately delivered an address against the usage of the word "deserve". No, not just usage, but a belief in the concept of "deservedness" itself. To believe that someone deserves something, or doesn't, is dangerous. It projects your morals across a situation that may be more nuanced that whatever black and white belief system you've developed in order to simplify the world into a manageble bite. I find myself rearranging sentences in my head now as I'm thinking them: from "well she deserves it" into, "well, she's worked really hard- not only for this outcome,  but in many spheres of her life. When the opportunity came not only was she ready, but able. And, on top of all of that, I'm happy for her, but jealous, and that's okay." It's long winded, but it makes me reflect more? 

^ that example is actually what made me think of it today actually. Ester just got a new apartment, she's been approved and she'll be moving in throughout the month. It's more money than I would want to spend, and I have debts with the utilities companies and my taxes that paralyze me and make it feel impossible to strike out on my own. I want to live alone but I feel like a child. All I can really think, all that I continue to come back to repeat like a little horrible mantra is I don't deserve it. I can rephrase it too: "Because I ignore the responsibilities are required to live as an independent adult, and can barely keep one thought or intention in my head from minute to minute; because my savings are abysmal; because my credit is middling; because all of this and more, I do not deserve it. There is no world except for inside my maladaptive daydreams which are the only thing that propel me out of bed in the morning in which I deserve this life. " (The Dream: I win $93 million, pay back everything, hire the best accountant and a money manager, buy 4 houses or apartments for me, my mom, Adriene, and someone else, and then live comfortably for the rest of my life, drowning in ADHD medication and antidepressants) 

Camille Claudel

 I love Rodin. There was a small exhibition of his work a few years ago at the Brooklyn Museum, in the oft forgotten about gallery on the first floor, before you even get to the ticket area. They've redesigned that foyer so many times, shifting the gift shop into a gallery and then into a classroom, and back again, I dont know if the Rodin space exists anymore in that same form. Like my memory exists in a walled off room. 

It was poorly attended the two times I went, with maybe two guards, bored, with drifted gazes boring through the walls opposite their posts. So no one noticed when I touched the toes of a sculpture. It's maddening being so close to a sculpture and not being able to touch it. I can remember visually, of course, but memory through feel is so strong. I can remember how my dads face looks partially through memory of feel, running my fingers over his face, even as his shook me away in irritation. 

Camille Claudel is always a part of Rodin's biography. Usually a chapter, or an aside. As a model in one of his pieces, or sometimes they put her work in his show. I hadn't really looked at her as deeply. 

I'm reading some of Anne Carson's Short Talks. This one caught my eye and made me look again, or for the first time? at Camille Claudel: 

SHORT TALK ON SLEEP STONES
Camille Claudel lived the last thirty years of her life in an asylum wondering why, writing letters to her brother the poet, who had signed the papers. Come visit me, she says. Remember I am living here with madwomen, days are long. She did not smoke or stroll. She refused to sculpt. Although they gave her sleep stones—marble and granite and porphyry—she broke them, then collected the pieces and buried these outside the walls at night. Night was when her hands grew huger and huger, until in the photograph they are like two parts of someone else loaded onto her knees.

30 years. Thirty years. I am thirty five, that's mostly my entire life, thirty years. Imprisoned by her younger brother who dissaporved of her lifestyle- who was a POET! He wasn't some artless fob, he was only her younger by 4 years, he only visited her 7 times in three decades, and he denied every request by everyone to release her.

I read it once and was curious. I read it again and was confused. I read it again, and then the wikipedia page, and then the wiki again, and then I put my head in my hands and cried. How do we do this to people, to people we know, people we are supposed to love? How could so many people and policies fail a sane woman, a genius, a well known figure? She lived until her 70's, she didn't tragically die young, she was merely illusioned into a young death. Disappeared away. It all happened when her father died, the wiki said "her loving and wealthy father," the last line between her and the end of her life. I'm ineloquent about this, but I will be thinking about this for a long time. I feel like I must align myself with Claudel over Rodin, like having ignored her for... 30 years... I. feel complicit. Like she's been there there whole time but in a little walled off room. 

Ocean Grove Day

 

Waiting, so I'm not early, after being late

The first sighting of a fuzzy bumblebee:  I heard buzzing behind me and caught it just as it disappeared under a wooden awning. Josie and Rachel will be upset- even the most innocent flying bug freaks them out- but I love the fat little guys. They are like little floating bumper cars, fizzing and drifting, drunk on pollen. 

Last night Samson, Ester, Lilian and I had a drink after work. I had to finish up a trynight, and Sam got off work right as I was done so we walked together to meet the other two at Sea Witch - which was *bumping* Some kind of birthday party I'm sure. We saw Maryim, a student at Gasworks, and also two different tik tokers. Samson was the only one who recognized one of them, I think our algorithms are similar. I actually really like the content of the guys I saw, but I didn't say anything to them. 

I don't know if Lilian's crush on Ester is a play act or real, maybe it's a little of both. Ester just broke up with Nick, who is a nice man, but I think everyone was a little relieved, everyone was expecting it to happen. Anyways, we were sitting there and the way optical illusions can flip an image from one reality into another, I kept switching between the reality we were in, and one where Ester and Lil were a couple. I think it would be really sweet, they'd be such a power couple.

This morning I was supposed to be on a train to New Jersey. Mom is here for two more days, and I was invited out to spend time with Tate and Mom at the same time, which hasn't happened since Christmas, two years ago (two? three?) in Tennessee. But the trynight, the drink. The fact that I'm in sleep debt. I woke at 6 but couldn't make it out of bed till 7:30. Had to buy toilet paper, the first place I tried wasn't open (really Brooklyn bodega?? 8am you're still shuttered?? for shame, FOR SHAME). I also meant to buy deodorant. I also just realized, via misspelling it just no that deodorant is a de-odor- ant. I mean, barely a revelation but I've never looked at it before.  Language is a complex made of bricks and each brick is a tome. 

Well, I didn't make that train in the end. Didn't even try. Looked at the schedule for the F, realized I wouldn't make it. Called my mom nearly in tears. I'll catch the next one. I'll be there by 1. 

I gotta go now, actually. dang. 

Post Script: I made the train, and got to New Jersey and had a really nice weekend with the fam.