Mannie comes to live with me

So, this post has two points. One is to show that I'm keeping up with my creativity maxim. The other is to explain that I now have a mannequin living with me in my new apartment.

Last Thursday night, Una and I were enjoying post-work bloggy drinks when BFF and fellow Commune resident Zac came to join us. As we were walking out of the bar, we saw two mannequins strewn haphazardly across a trash pile and Zac and I gasped in disbelief at our ridiculous luck. Two questions loomed large. First of all, who throws away mannequins? Secondly, how are we going to get these home?

We decided to house them in my office for a night so we could properly transport them uptown the next day. Then Friday we lugged them up to 104th on the 6 train, and it was a surprisingly easy trek. For now, Mannie is in my bedroom - he will move to the living room eventually, but my roomie is in the process of moving and I don't want him to be in the way - and yesterday I decided to do a little iPhone shoot with him. (Aaaaaand that brings me back around to point one: creativity maxim in action.)

The frame on the wall is also a recent addition; I'm eventually going to put a piece of fabric or something in it, but I'm not sure exactly what yet, so for now it's empty. Pretty green wall is showing through.

Each day, something new

So I decided recently that I'm going to make something everyday. Whether it's a piece of writing, a photo or series of photos, something I create in InDesign and/or Photoshop, a mini-collage, a shitty little drawing, whatever - I just want to create something every single day that didn't exist in the world before. That probably sounds a) a little pretentious and b) like a shit ton of work; but the thing is that it's actually more natural than anything, and shouldn't be considered work at all. When you're a little kid, all you do is create. You create all the time, every single day. You make up little stories, you draw things, you build a house out of blocks (or, in my case, playing cards), you create entire worlds in your bedroom - and you do all these things just because it's fun. You don't even think about it, you just do it.

So when does that stop? When does the creative mind take a backseat to the mind our parents and teachers - with the best of intentions - want to foster in us more than anything? The mind that makes us smart, makes us capable, and makes us, above all, productive members of a civilized economy/society? There's some unknowable point when most of us stop making art and start learning the quadratic equation and the history of the Byzantine Empire and something about the cotton gin. All that stuff is good information to have, but I reject the notion that there isn't enough room in my brain (or in my life) for practical knowledge and creative efforts. And this is my form of active rejection.

Day One. I made this.

What? It's a start! And blog posts count, too. So now I've made two things. Bam. Have a good (creative!) weekend, y'all.

2010: The Year of (The Birth of) The Commune

The lucky ones amongst this group of organisms we call the human race occasionally have moments that reveal to them the purpose and direction of all their past experiences. These moments are like the flash of headlights you see as a car makes a turn toward you and then away at the far end of a long road; fleeting, flashing, and unmistakable, they simultaneously illuminate everything down the road and everything that came before. At the risk of losing it all, I have to say: certain recent events provide evidence that I might be one of the lucky ones.

For the past few months, I've been feeling very inspired and artistically anxious; like I knew I wanted to create something but I wasn't sure just what that thing was supposed to be. I've felt inspired by the era of New York embodied by Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe: the New York of the true artist. Even though I had barely even heard those two names before this year, I felt an undeniable pull toward them and their story. I had daydream fantasies of quitting my job and moving into a big empty loft with my two best friends, getting a job at Starbucks or something, working to make just enough money to pay the bills, and using all my new free time to make art and love.

I dreamed about this so many times, knowing in the back of my mind that I would probably never actually do it, because the great value of responsibility instilled in me by my parents pulses through me too prominently. This pulse bugged me. I wanted to be one of those people: one of those people who just drops everything for art and love and beauty, who takes risks in the name of creation. I saw myself crouched on the floor over scraps of paper, my hair long and messy, or maybe short and messy, surrounded by paint smears and word doodles, with my two best friends on either side taking photos and editing film or painting or talking about art. I emblazoned this image on the back of my eyelids, labeled it "desire," and went on with my normal, responsible adult life. But not even the responsible side of me could make me stop wanting it. And once I want something, that's usually just it. I just don't forget things I desperately want. I don't even think I can.

I've always been a quality over quantity kind of girl. Given the choice, I would rather have one amazing steak than lots of mediocre ones. I prefer the experience of one incredibly inspiring piece of theater over a large number of ones that are just sorta inspiring. I would rather have mind-blowing sex once every few months than so-so sex on a regular basis. And the same basic principal applies to my history with relationships: I would rather have a small number of nurturing, enriching, encouraging relationships than a large number of relationships that do nothing but keep me entertained. I've always been like that, so it's maybe no surprise that the universe blessed me with Zachary and Jenny nearly three years ago - and that, now, the universe seems to be aligning, for whatever unknown future purpose, to bring us closer and closer together.

At the end of January, inspired by a particularly exhausting roommate situation, I decided that I needed to move out by the beginning of March. I put feelers out on Twitter and had a magazine acquaintance contact me telling me her friend was looking to move around the same time. Said girl emailed me, we met for brunch, I liked her and we decided to move forward with the moving process. We started emailing Craigslist links back and forth and going to see apartments. I liked a couple places but nothing overwhelmingly called to me. On Tuesday of this week, she sent me an email that changed everything.

She said we had an appointment that night to see an apartment on 104th street. I stopped and stared at the address, reading it over and over again to make sure I was seeing the numbers in the right order. Then I started laughing. It was the upstairs apartment in Zachary's building.

Aside: I don't really believe in coincidences. If anything, I tend to fall on the other end of the spectrum, seeing meaning where there probably is none. But sometimes, stuff happens that is just too strange - too uncanny, too serendipitous, and too fucking unlikely - to be anything but meaningful. And I really believe this is one of those things. I mean seriously: of all the buildings in all of Manhattan, his literally lands in my lap via a person I just met one month ago. It's not like I hunted it out. It came to me.

Even before the apartment came to me, when I was talking to him about my hunt for a new home, Zac told me that when he first walked into his apartment, it felt exactly like when he first walked onto the Ole Miss campus: he just knew it was right. He could feel it. He said he had actually been sort of reluctant to feel as good about the apartment as he did, because at the time he didn't want to live in Harlem - but he couldn't deny just how right it felt. I have to believe that there's a reason he felt the same way on both occasions: he's been pulled in a certain direction for years - first to Oxford, then to Ole Miss, then to journalism, then to New York, then to Harlem, then to East 104th - for a specific reason. And now I'm being pulled there too. And if everything goes as planned, Jenny will move into Zac's apartment at some point this year. And then we will all be there together, being each other's home and family and hub of artistic inspiration and creation. We will be The Commune.

I'm not getting the loft and the unemployment and the Bohemian freedom of Patti and Robert, but in a way, I'm getting an opportunity to create exactly what they had, on the terms of the lease of new youth.

I'm lucky - the universe saw the back of my eyelids. And I am so thankful.

 

April 2007

Inspiration from New York, Circa 1971

I recently read this feature in New York Magazine on punk goddess Patti Smith's new memoir Just Kids, which she wrote about the time she spent running around New York in her 20s (the 1970s) with her once-lover-turned-gay-best-friend (yep) and fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe. If you have any free time, it's worth investing it in this story. This woman doesn't let a word escape her lips that is not thoughtful and poetic. She's 62 and claims to still be working to create her great life's work. Living and working as a "creative" 20something in New York in 2010, I of course found the piece interesting as a comparative study.

In addition to loving the story, I have become obsessed with this photograph. I have looked at it for at least an hour. As I flipped through other pages in the magazine, I found myself compelled to turn back to this one page, just to stare at this one photograph.

 

The caption below the photo reads: Smith and Mapplethorpe on their West 23rd Street fire escape, 1971.

I'm obsessed with it for several reasons. 1. Everything about it screams New York. And not the new New York, but the old New York; the New York we'll never get back, the New York of the pre-fame artist, the New York of Andy Warhol and Janis Joplin, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, renting out rooms in Chelsea Hotel and living off whatever money they could make at their counter jobs, doing drugs and smoking cigs and drinking and creating amazing art just because they wanted to create. 2. Every time I look at it, I see something new. It took me several views to realize that Robert's right foot is actually not touching the fire escape. It looks like he's levitating, which seems appropriate. Writing this just now, I notice that Patti's fly is unzipped. XYZ Patti! 3. It was totally candid. 4. They're clearly fucking badasses and I want to be them.

I feel that I am entering into a new stage of my life where I want to explore everything and try everything. I want to listen to every kind of music that exists (just because). I want to read a gazillion books (just because). I want to stand around outside bars on the Lower East Side and smoke menthols, (just because I do it sometimes when I drink, and I always want to be those beautiful punk girls who let the smoke glide between their thick red lips while they talk). I want to get tattoos and then sort of regret them later (but not really because I'll just remember wanting to memorialize something that was important to me at the time). I want to make new friends, some of whom I'll never forget (and others I'll never remember). I want to write until I pass out. I want to use art to celebrate where I'm from. In short, I want to recreate (my version of) Patti's New York.

I want to remember that one day, I will look back on these young minutes and realize how special they were, and how important. I can't know now why they're important, but one day, if I'm real lucky, I will.

"...[Patti] was in the room in the Chelsea when Kris Kristofferson played “Me and Bobbie McGee” for Janis Joplin in her easy chair. 

'I was there for those moments,' writes Smith, 'but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.'"