I have never liked reading fiction. To quote Carl Sagan "There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any." Sign me up for the documentary... the stranger than fiction... the true crime. I would rather understand why people believe in ghosts... than play the ouji board all night. This week I have been reading "The Demon-Haunted World" and it's giving me ideas for a new series of paintings. Insomnia is something I wrestle with on a regular basis- this week has been no different. I read a chapter in the Sagan book on one such sleepless evening recently. This particular chapter talked a lot about demons and witches. It was once believed by the majority of people, that demons would fly down into the beds of women at night and suffocate and or rape them. There were nuns that would talk of such spirits that violating them while they lay there helpless ... strangely, many of these incubus would bear a striking resemblance to the priest or the bishop. In the book Sagan draws parallels between these stories and personal accounts of current day alien abduction victims. The mass executions of witches in the 15th century could easily translate into the story of any number of mass genocides in the last 600 years. In my opinion, people... not just individuals, but entire societies... like to believe that they are special. That their plight is unique. That they are martyrs. But, the truth is, if you spend any time at all reading the history of civilization... you will realize that humans are animals. Animals with the ability to reason... but sadly, that doesn't seem to help us a whole lot. We still make the same mistakes over and over again. We beat our heads against walls of all kinds. We are afraid. Afraid of death. Afraid of loneliness. Afraid of weakness. It is this fear that controls everything we do. Even War, one of the ultimate display of power, is born out of fear. The demons we should fear are those within ourselves. I know when I can't sleep... the reason I have to get out of bed... that's if I stayed there... wide eyed for hours... I would be severely depressed. I would go through a long list of my fears and failures. Then my mind would wander to my family... their mortality... the past... the ominous future... the world at large.... my own health or lack there of... financial woes etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. So, my cure for insomnia, is to get out of bed... and paint. It is easy to invent fictional demons. To focus on them... to make them into monsters in the closet... so frightening we can't move.  We are all ready to conduct a witch hunt on ourselves. What are we all so damn afraid of?

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ~ George Santayana

Famous Insomniacs:

• Charles Dickens always faced his bed north and had to sleep in the center of his matress.
  
• Proust used Barbital, a barbiturate to fall asleep.
  
• Napoleon couldn’t sleep more than three hours every night but it seemed that this was enough for him.
  
• Marilyn Monroe took up to 20 Phenobarbital daily to help her rest.
  
• Alexandre Dumas one of the most prolific writers of all time also suffered from insomnia.
  
• The Earl of Rosebery, the Prime Minister of England for one year, between 1894 and 1895 was forced to resign due to chronic insomnia.
  
• Margaret Thatcher stated that “Sleep is for wimps” - oh, I agree Margaret 

i love to chase the sunset across the open western plains... i have done it so many times that i suppose they are starting to bleed together... it makes me sad though, because i feel like every mile contains a thousand photos... the grasses turn from pale yellow to a deep golden at sunset. cattle, black against the light of the golden hour... random windmills and delapitated barns. i have this urge to pull the car to the side of the freeway and rip off my shoes and run off into the field. it fades so fast, that perfect light. 

 i feel so small in the west. pinned between the sky and earth like some sort of ant crawling through a giant sandwich. today, the car rocking violently in the cross-winds, reminded me of how vulnerable i felt while crossing the ocean for the first time... as if there was nothing to anchor me and that i am so insignificant... if it were to swallow me...  no one would notice. 

i think feeling humbled by the earth is very important. 

i am lucky. i grew up playing in fields and forests. i would help my dad plant saplings every spring from the DNR. my parents built a log cabin themselves.  i learned to fish, pitch a tent and start a fire.  i have been camping more times than i can count. i love sleeping on the ground. and every time i go home to visit, i question why i am in the city at all. i become frustrated at times with how so many people are so disconnected from the planet they live on. yes, so many people in the city are ecologists... they recycle and ride their bikes... and yet, they never leave the city. i get itchy in the summertime. the asphalt makes me crave grass and water.

i have a lot of favorite memories associated with crossing this vast country in a car. here are my top few...

- my dad and i driving to beatrice in his firebird (i must have been about 5) ... i can't remember the exact reason for the trip, but i know it was related to the welfare of my great grandparents... i think it was because my great grandfather was sick... and it pertained to that.... i just remember how for the first time i sat in the front seat. we stopped at the gas station before we left town and he let me pick anything i wanted to drink and for snacks... i felt really important and grown up. he made me the navigator and taught me how to use a map. that was really the first time i felt like my dad and i had something in common that the rest of my family did not. a love for the open road. we were content taking in the country-side for hours. we didn't even need to talk... the stereo would play and we would feel free

- a trip to montana with my whole family. mom, dad, jess and i.... it was the first time my sister and i went to glacier national park. we camped the whole trip... if memory serves me... the thing i remember most about that trip was that my sister and i were sleeping in the topper of the truck... my parents had already been driving for hours. we were just getting in to the prettiest parts of the montana plains and they pulled to the side of the road to come and wake us up... it was probably around 5 or 6 am the sun was just rising and it was beautiful and cold. there were hundreds of antelope not just there but for miles ahead and they wanted us to see them

- driving alone from minnesota to billings montana. naive and scared. i was 19 and it was my long distance boyfriend's birthday. i think that was the first time i'd ever been anywhere alone really. and i felt so strong in that. i loved the way it felt to spend 16 hours in the car all alone. open stretches of nothing but me and my thoughts. 

- traveling the west from top to bottom with someone that knew it very well. we went everywhere. i fell in love with the way the west was so different than minnesota. the people care about such different things. back home i felt many times awkward. in montana i felt uppity and almost snobbish. as if the things that i thought were important weren't at all. clothes. etiquettes. education. background. all the people i met there cared about was getting by... and having time to be happy and alive. they spent so much time just living in the moment and they didn't even realize they were doing it. 

i think everyone that lives in this country should drive across it... i think i'd rather walk

i spent some time today getting some photo prints into the peanut gallery- finally
these are prints i made up for the red hot arts festival last summer and have been meaning to get them on my website since then! ya, life gets crazy like that. i hope to have some time tonight to paint as well... heading to transmission later to dance to duran duran! 

interesting side note... i went to see duran duran in new york at the barrymore theater ... i think it was almost 3 years ago now. my boyfriend was playing with them for 4 nights... two of which were in new york. i had a chance to meet the band... developing a giant crush on john taylor... who is still pretty cute :) there was an after-party at the gramercy park hotel... which has the most amazing party room at the top! my favorite part of the room? the ceiling!!! there were lightbulbs... thousands of them hanging at different lengths covering the entire ceiling... all at different luminosity... the only thing that simon brought up when i met him was prince.... he called him mr purple.
moby was there also, he's really short... and let me cut in line in front of him for the restroom. that's pretty much all of the celebrities i've ever met

love 
noun, verb, loved, lov·ing.–noun
1.a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.

here it is... the day we "love"... it's a good thing there is a holiday in place so we don't forget- i've done a little research and turns out there's all kinds of things you need to know about loving if you wanna do it by the book: HOW TO LOVE  

In Diane Ackerman's "A Natural History of Love" she writes:  

"As a society, we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it...After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite she him to stand close. What could be scarier?" 

and she describes Proust's relationship with love and time.

"... Every face reminds him of hers. Every object is a trip wire to an explosively painful memory. She is perpetually present in her absence. And that really is Proust's point about love, that it doesn't exist in real time, only in anticipated time or remembered time. The only paradise is the one that's been lost. Love requires absence, obstacles, infidelities, jealousy, manipulation, outright lies, pretend reconciliations, tantrums, and betrayals. Meanwhile, the lovers fret, hope, agonize, and dream. Torment whips them to a higher level of feeling, and from that mental froth comes love. Love is not a biological instinct, not an evolutionary imperative, but a feat of the imagination which thrives on difficulty."

Much of the book concerns the evolution of love... it wasn't until the middle ages that: 

" They honored pairs who felt passionate love for each other. Until then, love between men and women was thought to be sinful and vulgar. As often as not, it led to madness. And it was always degrading. To portray love as majestic, an ideal to be searched for, was truly shocking. To accept that sexual desire might be a natural part of love, but that the total feeling was more spiritual, an intense one-ness, didn't jibe with classical teachings. After all, in Greek tragedy, love was an affliction, a horror that led to cruelty and death. For theologians, human love was a poor reflection of the real thing, which could be found only in spiritual rapture. 

... and the ways in which we as a society like to pretend we are and aren't in control of our love and lust. 

The love-potion is an alibi for passion. It enables each of the two unhappy lovers to say: "You see, I am not in the least to blame; you see, it's more than I can help." 

I don't think we will ever understand "love" relationships because to do so would require us to understand the inner workings of the human brain... and if one can go so far the "soul" ... it seems that it's always just out of reach... like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow... like the "light" people see in near death experiences... the existence of aliens... there's just too many unknowns to explain why we collectively act like lunatics in search of "love"- But, wouldn't this whole dance we're doing be kinda boring if we understood it. Love is strange... and I like it that way.

"The course of true love never did run smooth." ~Shakespeare

little things make me really happy. there is  a very serious boy across the room from me, glasses low on his nose, buried in a book... something that looks extremely boring... like a training manual... that kind of boring. he might as well be in black and white. the entire room is silent except for the clicking of keyboards. a few minutes ago he pulled out the biggest bag of gummy worms i have ever seen.... and methodically ate the entire bag. it reminded me of a bansky painting.... like the only thing in the room that had any happiness/color to it was that giant bag of worms. they were almost glowing. 

the "great thaw" is upon us... i spent some time this morning walking around the neighborhood... it's still there...  i nearly forgot it's been covered in snow for so long... i am really nervous walking on ice because that's how i broke my leg a few years back.... slipping and falling on an icy sidewalk... so when the sidewalks finally clear i take extra large strides! you know, that feeling when finally you can walk all the way down a block without having to step around an ice slick! welllllll it's almost here! plus, today there's the added fun of puddles, lots and lots of puddles.... personally i am a foot in the center of the puddle kind of person.... but do what you like... i saw a woman just ahead of me today drenched head to toe with muck when a truck hit a pot hole right as she was standing in the spray-path... she was not happy

i AM happy today... the weather has me feeling really alive. i started "spring cleaning" .... it's probably a little optimistic to call it that, but  that's how it feels... my apartment was filled with so much sunshine this morning! 

this weekend has been really nice. nice seems like such a little word, but it fits perfectly. friday night's art opening was so much fun, great turn out in a really interesting space. I had a lot of fun catching up with an old friend from college, i think the last time i saw her, i was a bridesmaid in her wedding! and finally having time to talk to some new friends. thank you to everyone that made it out... it really means a lot.
i hope to know more about the opening/closing party for the seward show soon!
last night i ran into more old friends, people i haven't seen in years...  i used to paint with their 4 year old daughter when they would come over, they said she asked if she could come with to see me :) she's 7 now! 3 years, has it really been 3 years? it seems that if i could pick the overwhelming theme for my weekend... it would be old and new friends coming into my life at the right time. minneapolis is starting to shrink. 

i shot these photos in alley in my neighborhood... i love walking the alleys. it's the fronts of the houses that people want you to see... walking the alley gives you a whole new perspective. you see what people abandon, what they want to hide. old cars that don't run, matresses, a garage that needs paint... the alley is less perfect and in my opinion, more beautiful because of that. 

i'm working on some sketches this afternoon... everything looks hyper-color in this light

lately i seem to lose everything. it all started about six months or so ago, i lost my favorite scarf... a beautiful black scarf with silver stars all over it... i am a little obsessed with stars and this was the first scarf i'd ever seen with stars on it that wasn't cheesy. i loved it... i wore it every day for years. all winter... all summer.... it went with me on many trips and served as more than just a scarf... it came in handy many times. after that scarf went missing... it seemed i lost something every couple of weeks. the only thing these missing items have in common really, is that they were all dear to me in some way. a favorite sweater, the only pair of sunglasses that ever really looked good on me and functioned properly, a photo of my mom i always kept in my wallet and even the scarf that was growing as a close runner up replacement to the star scarf... now all missing. 

i don't really spend a lot of money on anything i own. i managed ragstock for years so all of my clothing is seriously priced under $20. it's just years of savvy shopping/collecting. for a few years i bought items at auction and sold them on ebay almost full time. i would roll up in my 1978 el camino (ya pretty kewl) and load the back up with random antiques that i would get at a fraction of the cost. i became really good at wading through the junk and finding things that sold for a fair amount of money. i loved most parts of that. the auction houses... filled with crotchity old men in dirty clothes... eating $2 hot dogs... seeing who could wait it out til the bitter end when things were the cheapest. they were always bickering over a dollar here and a dollar there. i learned to be very sly in my bidding. my favorite "lots" to win were the $5 or sometimes $1 boxes... take them home, dump them on the kitchen floor and sort... and sort and sort. i learned a lot that way. i would consult stacks of books or the internet or sometimes an antique shop owner in town. but, the thing i learn most of all from years of sifting through estate after estate of objects... was that you don't take anything with you. i hate estate sales because you walk into someone's home... all the cupboards and drawers opened up... it's so invasive... like they just stepped out for lunch and we're rifling through their stuff. 

i like that life isn't about "stuff" ... i was lamenting the loss of my latest missing object... a favorite sweater i left when dancing a week or so back... and my friend said... now there's room for new stuff. how true. i frequently paint over my canvas when i tire of or outgrow some of my work. it feels good to let go. 

i think "lost and found" boxes are so interesting for this same reason. what do people leave behind... what do they bother going back for? i remember one time over a decade ago i went rollerskating with a boyfriend. i left my sweater at the rink (maybe 30 miles away) i was content letting it go... he drove back for it... delivering it to me heroically... and although i was touched, i thought it silly. 

all of this is sparked by my discovery yesterday that a couple of my favorite paintings- that i'd rolled up and tossed into a storage room.... had since frozen and cracked in this cold weather. i guess you can't store acrylic on canvas, rolled up in sub zero temperatures for long.... good to know. i kind of liked the way they looked today, when i pressed them down flat, cracked and broken. they are old after-all... i guess it's time to let them go.

have you heard? it's currently -10, but today's high is 31! i find it hard to believe that the temperature is going to increase 41 degrees today, but i am ready for it. supposedly 37 and sunny on sunday... a much needed respite for the winter weary people of minneapolis. it's not that we aren't prepared for our 6 months of winter every year... it's just that this one, as echoed by every person these days, has been almost comical.  so, what perfect timing for a warm up... this weekend looks busy! 

above are the pieces i dropped of with the lovely ms. katrin snider last night for this benefit happening tonight and tomorrow night: 

Valentines Day Show & Benefit for LGBT Youth, Feb 11th & 12th
Location: Loring Theater
Time: 7:00PM Friday, February 11th

It's a silent auction so bring your piggy bank and get art for a song while doing good... we all love doing good now don't we...

i also dropped off my pieces for Studio 204:RED and Kristina Perkins was busy getting things ready for tonight's opening!!! great space in a neato building... i've often seen those studios from the outside and wondered what the guts looked like.... here's a sample

 ♥ ❤  ♥ ❤  ♥ ❤  ♥ ❤

today i am prepping my silent auction donations for this event:

Le Cirque Rouge Cabaret & Burlesque Show Presents:
“I Love You”
A Valentines Day Show and Benefit
for RECLAIM and LGBT Youth
@
Loring Theater 
(Formerly The Music Box Theatre)
February 11th & 12th,, 
Doors 7pm, Showtime 8pm 18+ !!!
Tickets: $12 advance, $15 Door 
Tickets available at: www.loringtheater.com 


For more information check out the facebook invite: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=125647150833521&index=1

this morning i drank coffee from turkey and wrapped a pashmina scarf around my neck... among the spoils of my dog sitting adventure.... a glass pendant from italy.... but, truly, my favorite souvenirs are the stories of Rome.... I think ancient Rome is soooo very interesting... if you've never read  "A Natural History of the Senses" amazon that immediately