"My done!!" is what my three year old cousin used to yell at me when he was finished on the potty. That is also how I feel about being done with grad school. (Finally all this shit is over.)
actual image of me
"What have you been doing with your free time, Royal?" my coworker asked today. Well, that's a great question. I wake up every morning and am grateful that I don't have to do homework or check my school email. I read for pleasure (not that I was reading for school. I mean, I was doing the absolutel least), go outside, roller skate, look at lunar eclipses, and tell myself I'll clean my apartment later.
My most recent obsession is watching people make houses and shelters on youtube so I'm going to drop some of those videos here.
I liked this guy's little oven and night mode feral hog camera.
These two!! Absolutely obsessed. Their well! Their little catfish pond! Tree-as-ladder!
I liked this one because it had a lady and because she also made a little stove.
I am hoping to get back into some studio work soon, but I have been doing some other catching up like all the personal correspondence that I let drop over the past month or so. Also I am allowing myself to check out as many books as I want which is already becoming absurd. But in a good way.
On to the next adventure! xo Royal
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Art byMFTFernandez on DeviantArt; there's a tornado warning right now
So, it's fucking Lent which I can't stand. The Orixá are off fighting the forces of evil, so it's a time when our terreiro works with our Egun and Exus/Pomba Giras. Apparently this is a Candomblé thing - it is a syncretic leftover from slavery, when (for lack of a better term, or maybe this is the best term) the Yoruba liturgical calendar was tweaked to fit the Catholic liturgical calendar - thus placing the Olorogun during the space of Lent. (I actually do not know too much about it, because I am bad at asking questions. Generally, someone says, "So we don't do this at this time" and I just say, "Okay," very matter-of-factly.)
Another fun fact I heard about Lent was via some TikTok on Twitter. (It didn't have a translation and my Portuguese is not all that great, so I wound up finding it on YouTube with closed captions and I would type the Portuguese captions into Google Translate.)
What Pai Leo is saying here is that Lent is the WORST spiritual period (I agree), but it has nothing to do with Catholicism - he says that it's a period of time when all the spiritual planes are in conjunction, so it's very easy for us to be influenced by negative energy. At any rate, it sucks just my imo. I am also in a bad mood. Mainly because it is Lent. Anyway it's almost over, alhamdulillah.
Lately I have been making recipes out of Anissa Helou's wonderful cookbook, Feast: Food of the Islamic World. I first read about her in an issue of Travel + Leisure that I swiped from Yovi's Hot Dogs (it really made me want to go to Oman until I realized the person who went and had a great time and wrote about it was a man and then I was like, Of course). She was talking about her quest to find camel meat, and it was so interesting, so I picked this up from the library in Pittsburgh and never made anything out of it. Now I am in Kentucky and I have no one to cook for except my very own self, oh well. Maybe those people I used to cook for should've been a little nicer, or a lot nicer.
So far I have made three or four recipes from this cookbook and it's been very nice and fun. My favorite so far is Umm Saeed's Balaleet, which is different from traditional balaleet, and also I have a good time saying the word "balaleeeEEEEET" like I am RuPaul saying "CameROOOOON"!
Here's what I have been into lately:
Well, that's all for now. Lent is almost over, so if you want to lay down some hexes, some curses, some jinxes, I heard that you can do all your black magic on Good Friday, because on Good Friday God looks the other way. That's the word on the street. Remember, no brujeria on Fridays, so you better make this one count.
I was just minding my very own business as usual and my Macbook died. She just gave up the ghost. I spent about an hour texting Apple support the other day for confirmation that my laptop was 1) old ("vintage" is what Apple calls it) and 2) dead (unless I take it to someone to try to recover it). I am not sure if I have the money for someone to recover my files off my laptop, but I did have the money to buy a Chromebook, so I bought a Chromebook and we are back in blogging business, baby. If there were any business. Which, I mean, there isn't. Here's some space vixen art from earlier this month. She needs a new name before Doug Felts sues me. I can't tell if she is finally becoming a fully realized character in my brain or if she is just Alfonso Azpiri's Lorna with green skin and pink hair. Which, I mean, is fine. (Don't sue me.)
Wow I have been reading so many fun things but I can't possibly write about them at this very moment because I have to go trim my nails. They are too long to type on this tiny keyboard. Anyway we're back! If you are reading this, tell your wife to call me. I have a perhaps-not-startling confession to make that the only news that I look at is a) what's on my twitter timeline b) the "LIS news and views" newsletter that one of our professors puts out, and c) ARTnews Daily. The benefit of ARTnews is they have a weekly newsletter that comes out on Wednesdays called How I Made This, which is much more interesting to me as an artist than, say, some art collector that I never heard of dying.
This week in How I Made This is the hyper-realistic colored pencil drawings of Cj Hendry. What most interested me about this article was that Cj Hendry organizes (and finances, though this part was not more detailed) her own exhibitions - her exhibition for her Rorschach show was set in an immersive white custom bouncy house - and that has me thinking about how to step further outside of the traditional gallery model when considering how to show work. I think the extra special touch for Rorschach was the little wristbands - it ties the whole exhibition together. Hyper-realism is always something that tempts me but the temptation never stays. I am too impatient, I think. When I was in undergrad I was in the Art Barn spending weeks on some pencil drawing of birds in a nest that I never finished. Now I'm absolutely beside myself if I can't get something finished in one sitting. Ah, well... I took a little bit of an extended break. Extended vacation. It's good. I have been trying to rest and relax. It has really paid off. For Christmas this year, Santa brought me an electric typewriter! He knows that I'm good for goodness' sake. I have been reading a lot and some of it has been good and some of it has been not so good, so we'll hit the highlights and leave the rest for another day. Wintering was a terrific read. I'd heard about it when everyone was raving about it during our first pandemic winter, and this winter was really the right time for it. It's very difficult to tell ourselves that we need to rest, or even to tell other people that we need to rest - especially now, when we all have pandemic exhaustion and are supposed to continue on with daily life as though it were normal for people to be dying in scores every day from a health crisis that could've been over by now. It's A Lot. I think people are trying to pretend it's Not A Lot, but it is, and that's okay. Take a break. The world will keep turning.
I'm going to segue directly from Wintering into Fierce Love because I think they pair well together. When we nurture ourselves in our times of difficulty, that's the only time we'll be able to nurture others in their difficult times. That is what living in community is about. We can't pour from an empty cup. I think that Fierce Love is my book of 2022; I got it from the library but I'm going to have to buy it. We have to start being more involved in the well-being of others, of our communities. I love this book and it's really been inspiring! Fun fiction: So, I checked out a lot of comic books to read and I happened to pick up this Warren Ellis Moon Knight TPB & what a joy, what a delight! I particularly enjoyed it because I didn't need to know a lot about anything that was happening - the character is well-enough explained for the new reader AND all the stories were standalones! I haven't read any kind of superhero comic for YEARS that has not been part of some larger arc and the individual comics stood alone. YEARS!! I didn't even realize it until I read these, and it was such a breath of fresh air honestly. Just fantastic, fun, witty, a great time. I am also working my way slowly through Krazy And Ignatz 1919-1921: A Kind, Benevolent And Amiable Brick (I snagged the next one, too, for when I finish this one). Krazy Kat is so good and it is a delight to read. I have never read anything like it and I love George Herriman's little puns and alliterations. I usually read a few of the strips before bed and they're like little treats at the end of the day. Hope y'all are staying warm and staying safe! Feliz ano novo! It's a little busy around here and rather than be busier, I am going to take a little break from the blog. Winter is a season of rest, so rest! You don't have to do every single thing.
See you after the semester's over! XOXOXO Royal The above is a panel from my sketchbook that's from 2010. When I was a kid, my parents divorced, and my dad compensated by sending me care packages full of comic books from the local store in LA. (It's actually, I found out, the same store whose owner had a comic book themed wedding back in the '90s, when things like that were still pretty unusual. I was so impressed when I found out, because there had been a photo of the happy couple in Wizard magazine.) Some time in middle school I started reading Marvel comics and collecting trading cards. Eventually my single issues were all sold or given away, excepting the single issues I have of Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise. It's hard to justify dragging the long, heavy comic book boxes along from state to state. And even though I still read comics and still liked superhero comics, it's the Disney comics I read as a kid that really stuck in my mind. Underground comix artist Victor Moscoso talked about Carl Barks in a long interview he gave to Gary Groth of The Comics Journal: "None of the other artists that did the duck stories came anywhere near him. I didn’t know his name — Crumb told me his name. We were talking about it and he was very knowledgeable in comics, so I asked him, 'Hey, who was the good duck artist?' That’s how he was known: the good one. And he says, 'Carl Barks.' That was the first time I ever heard the name, because they were all signed 'Walt Disney.'" (I had never heard of this particular distinction before I'd read this interview - by the time I was old enough to look back on duck comics, Carl Barks was already a known name - so imagine how surprised I was when I googled, in quotes, "the good duck artist" and google just immediately returned "Carl Barks" as a result.) I was on the hunt for a couple of Christmas themed Donald Duck stories I'd remembered as a kid. This is not one of them, but it is a stellar example of Carl Barks' gorgeous lettering: I absolutely adore his lettering. It is so crisp in this story. I love the little flair on the "n" in "in" on the title card. Even the word balloons themselves are gorgeous. What I was looking for was a story called "Letter to Santa", which was originally published in Walt Disney's Christmas Parade #1 back in 1949. (This story has been republished in the collected Carl Barks hardcovers - it's in Trail of the Unicorn, which is Volume 8.) Michael Sporman uploaded the recolored version onto his blog, in two parts, so you can read this wild story if you want to - part one is here and part two is here. (There's no "next post" navigation on his blog that I could find, so it might be easier to navigate like this.) It's so good, like most of these comics are, and it's perfect for the holiday season. (I was really more of a fan of Donald than Mickey, but Mickey Mouse did have some good detective stories. I really enjoyed the Thirteen Ghosts story and the one about Kali's Nail. I don't think a lot of people understand how often Mickey Mouse has a handgun in the comics - and uses it!) Victor Moscoso is also terrific. I didn't realize how much his work influenced mine until I started re-reading Zap. As a teen, I'd scored some issues from a friend of my stepfather ("Don't tell your mother you have these," he said), so I must have had them somewhere back there in my brain. Here's one of Moscoso's pages from Zap Comix #2: Victor Moscoso is absolutely a professional and if you love art shop talk like I do, that long interview I linked above is just fantastic. I think often about his application of color theory to concert posters and his references to Josef Albers.
By the time R. Crumb had asked Moscoso to do Zap, Victor was the oldest of the underground artists and he already had a family, so it's funny to read his reactions to the other Zap stories: "...I thought the taboos were all illusions, until Crumb did 'Joe Blow.' Then I realized, OK, you can chop off a guy’s penis and eat it. That’s all right. But you can’t fuck your children. There are limits in this civilized society." The above is a little story about Natalie Goldberg and Katagiri Roshi. When I lived in Pittsburgh, I went to Goodwill one day and found a very highlighted copy of Writing Down the Bones and I was so excited. I hadn't read it in so long. It was like meeting an old friend.
The other day I was looking for it and then I realized that it was one of those books that the post office lost when they lost a whole box of my books that they are allegedly looking for. It's so frustrating. I have already lost so much this year and then the reminder that I have lost even more just because USPS can't do the single job they have is insult to injury. Anyway, I found a super cheap copy for $4 total and ordered it. I am excited for it to arrive. I have been letting loneliness toss me away lately. Some days are better than others. I used to have a post-it note that said "If you were busier, you wouldn't think about it as much", which is probably true. The motto for this week is "Keep swimming!", like a shark. I have not been super great at doing that, but I still wake up every day and make an attempt. To-do list items get checked off. I am just isolated, lonely, angry, and impatient. I don't know how to really change that, other than to keep swimming. So here we are! There is not much to see from this last week; mainly it was spent drawing smut and the above is a cover for a little Xmas-themed smut comic I'm thumbnailing at the moment. These are made from a folded piece of copy paper, so there's only so much I can fit on the small pages - I wound up making this a two-parter and I'm still figuring out the second part. I mean, I know what happens, I am just trying to make it look good and also deal with the constraints I've placed on myself. Earlier this year I did a little comic and made it mini-zine-sized and while that gives you more pages, it is so tiny that it is really not worth it. I like doing these because:
1) They're small, so they can get finished faster (I'm very impatient) 2) They unfold into a single page so they're easy to photocopy. I also did a Santa pin-up in the style of Tom of Finland but I don't like how it turned out. Oh well. There's a first time for everything. No one in the Kake comics is older...or has a beard...it's okay though. Jorman dreamed that he was in a crowded room full of people dressed in white. The air was hazy with incense and cigar smoke and the haze of dreams. He scanned the room, but found no familiar faces.
Jorman felt slow and tired, even though he was in a dream. A splash of color in the corner of the room caught his eye, and he moved towards it, gently weaving in and out of the crowd. The people around him bobbed and weaved, dancing to drummers that Jorman couldn't see. He arrived at the colorful corner - bright yellow in this white room, not from paint but from yards and yards of yellow and gold fabric that had been gathered and draped with great care over the walls and floor. Saffron-yellow satin, tulle embroidered with golden butterflies. Yellow rosebuds in golden vases, a statue of a woman looming over a rowboat. On the floor, a bowl of money, a bowl of oranges, a multitude of cakes iced in yellow and white and green and orange. Jorman took all of it in. The drumming across the room seemed to grow more insistent. He turned to crane his neck to look at the drummers and he saw Maja. Maja had died two weeks ago, in the world of not-dreams. She was young, so young; was about to turn twenty-eight. Her death had been sudden and shocking; Jorman had attended her funeral to support her brother, who had stared into the distance for the entire sad ceremony, tears streaming silently down his face. But here she was in this dream, alive and well, smiling and catching Jorman by the wrist, yellow satin tied around her head like a pirate's kerchief, her own wrists clanging with bangles. Maja also wore a white dress with a wide skirt, and it billowed around her as she danced to the drummers, who remained lost in the crowd. He tried to call to Maja, to say that he was so glad she was alive, to say that her brother would be so happy that there had been some kind of mistake. But his voice came out in a whisper. Maja cocked her head and put a hand to her ear, the sign for "repeat that?", but Jorman was adrift in the drumming and the dancing and the crowd on all sides of him, who sang in a language Jorman had never heard before, the language of the world of dreams. Suddenly Maja seized his arm tightly with both of her tiny hands - baby hands, her brother used to call her - and threw Jorman with the strength of a circus strongman. He landed directly under the canopy of yellow satin, the side of his head smashed into a cake. The crowd cheered, the drums pounded louder, and it sounded like a bell had been added to the drumming, but the bell was Jorman's alarm, snapping him suddenly back into the world of not-dreams, where Maja was dead and buried. *** Jorman lived alone, so he didn't know how there came to be a cake on his dining room table. He didn't even so much have a dining room. He lived in an efficiency apartment, and had a table where he ate all his meals, so we'll call it that just to make things easier. Nothing else was different about this table - his empty glass from yesterday still at his place, his wallet, his keys. Here there was, however, an exquisite cake. It was not iced in yellow or green or gold like the ones in his dreams. It was all white, with delicate piping around the edges, and on top were glistening strawberries arranged meticulously on tufts of white frosting. Jorman put his hand out to pluck a strawberry from the top of the cake, but his hand passed through the cake. I'm still dreaming, he thought, but then he stubbed his toe hard on the wooden legs of the table and he knew that he was wide awake. He tried again to touch the cake, but again his hand passed through it. Jorman sighed and started his coffee maker. *** A week later, the cake remained. It looked as delicious as before. The fruit flies that bothered Jorman's bananas every other week did not seem to notice the gleaming strawberries that topped the cake. Every day, Jorman looked at the cake - there was not much else in his apartment to look at - and every day, his hand passed through it like it was a ghost. On every other Wednesday, Jorman saw Maja's brother, Marquis. Jorman hadn't expected Marquis to want to come by so shortly after his sister's death, but Marquis insisted, saying that if he didn't force himself to leave the house he would just stare at the ceiling fan for hours. Jorman imagined Marquis, laying crucifixion-style on his bed, listening to the CDs he'd kept from cleaning out Maja's apartment, crying silently like he did at her funeral. I used to hate this music, man. But now it just reminds me of her. Jorman had even offered to pick up dinner this Wednesday, but again, Marquis had overruled him. It's my turn, Marquis had insisted, and although he was right, Jorman felt bad about it. Jorman was replaying the conversation in his head, thinking about how he could have and should have argued Marquis down, when a sharp rap at the door jolted him out of his own thoughts. It was Marquis, ten minutes late, carrying two bags of take-out balanced on a pizza box. "What's that?" Jorman asked, nodding his head at the pizza box as he took the bags from Marquis. "It's what they put the naan in now, man," grinned Marquis, opening the pizza box. "They gave me extra." Jorman unpacked the boxes, rice and curry and samosas, while Marquis rummaged in the fridge for a drink. Generally Jorman and Marquis ate at the table and then watched a movie or played a game. Jorman brought the take-out boxes to the table, but stopped short and stared. The cake was gone. "You alright?" Marquis asked. "Yeah," said Jorman. "It's nothing." "It smells nice in here," Marquis said. "Like strawberries. You got a girl now?" "Nah," said Jorman. He gingerly touched the table where the cake had been. Nothing. A dream. He looked at his friend, still present, still Marquis, even in his bottomless grief. Jorman smiled, a quick blink of a smile that disappeared before Marquis could look up from his bowl. "Let's eat." |
AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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