Page 1: 18 July 2022

Eclipse Theatre of Deep Water.

Schéma book - Emotional Alchemy by Tara Bennett-Goleman. (Rec’d by my psych at the time, perhaps not by me)

Schemas tend to lead back to themselves - like a knot?

I feel safe is pernicious (insidious) ~~~~> but it’s so primal

Safe. Safe. Safe.

WWWWW-Maintenance-wwwwww

Unsafe. Unsafe.

Barbed Wire—\

|

V

Anarchism just acknowledges the negotiation.

A line - A definition - A mathematical judgement

Is a knot a 3D ouroboros????

Page 2: 20 Oct 2024

How was your day at the angry boy factory?

Anticipatory

Collab

Drawing of a traditional celtic knot 🪢 but it’s made out of barbed wire. Two interlocking loops 🔁 one blue one pink. This drawing made me want to get a tattoo of the decorative bricks my dad used to carve out of sandstone - he mostly carved dogs.

02 August 2024 - Orthostatic Shock

Attended 05 July 2024

it's always an uncomfortable moment - taking our parents to a place I think they will enjoy and then having to wait and see.

Joy Exhibition @ the Melbourne (Naarm) Immigration Museum - collection of blue promotional paint cards/souvenirs.

I suppose parents know about this kind of suspension sickness quite acutely.

I liked the immigration museum - either way.

12 April 2023

Page 1:

I <3 the Saturn Emoji

Jupiter has very cute rings too. (Though I think I drew them the wrong way)

WHY MAKE ART?!?

Because of the Visions! The visions are what you believe in!

What are my visions?

It's that unity↔duality thing, at least at the moment.

"All the time -- now"

I'm making things to save this little part of me, in a page, in a post, in a painting, so that I can collaborate with myself. Argue with me, agree with me. It lets me see how many things I can hold, and how many I've let go.

Sometimes, I think all artists are driven by some obsessive infatuation with all the beauty in the world OR by all its ugliness. The desire to capture it OR to correct it. We're compelled by beauty

[YOUR BRAIN ON BEAUTY]

The sky's a mirror [co-star app]

Page 2:

It's so weird that they're gonna make a Cat Person movie. Other Cat Person thoughts from me. Ghost World already exists and it's perfect.

Sterope, Taygeta, Maia, Calaeno, Pleione, Alcyone, Atlas, Electra & Merope - Pleiades. The Sever Sisters.

[God is a Circle - Yves Tumor] Now Playing - Tally Tunes

Pipes, Plumbing, Dumb Plumbing!

Anemic Maiden in reply to the Iron Maiden, Lack of Blood, There Won't Be Blood.

[OK]

Polaroids are a very cool lil bit of chemistry and physics - a site where the negative is fused to the positive (print) Private and Singular.

Like a memory -

I just want to watch Cabaret!

07 April 2024

26.6% of the Year

Creature

Frottage - Verbatim Floppy Disc (HD) labelled: TROUBLE! ok. OK!

I always feel like I'm overstating my progress, but like it really was May 1st 2019 when I wrote my dangerfield resignation letter.

Every time I leave a situation frustrated and filled with the spirit of the stairs, I have to remind myself (over and over and over) - No Grit. No Pearl.

I came here looking for trouble, because that's when you learn and... I can't seem to find anything else!

Never Post - Never Post Podcast. (Australia Maria Island TAS 10c Postage Stamp)

17 FEB 2024

The MCR that exists inside the minds of obsessives (me) is kind of like the holy mother (Mary) -- it's not the thing or even a representation of that thing anymore. It's not even a simulacra (? I might be pushing it with this - because upon reflection I think I might be describing a simulacra quite accurately actually - haha)

it no longer bears a likeness, really at all. An idol is what the k-pop darlings call it, and that makes sense to me. I feel it's closest to an effigy. An item that has had so much projected upon it, it becomes holy*.

Wholly unrecognisable

GIMME ALL THAT PAIN

That Gucci Scent - The Last Day of Summer

*Holy - to the holder, and item of ultimate projection. Like close reading. Like for what you really collect is always yourself**. Like all fan art, is just art, is just a reflection of self and now. A light bent through the body.

**Baudrillard, The System of Objects

April 2024 (Iodine)

Getting a lil bit tired of being treated like a mug for trying to remain open hearted. Do people not imagine what tenacity and discipline is required to keep a song in your heart. in. this. world?!

Listening on Hecate - Hope - Vampire Weekend.

Weather Forecast: Cloudy with a chance of cynicism

Stay Tender

How the cover of my 2023 hobonichi is looking at the end of this year.

Couple of pages, one from about this time last year and two from last week-ish.

Page 1. 17 Nov 2022 - Flower on Head Bunny.

Soft Sweet Naive Tender Bunny.

She's a Rider - Caroline Polachek "Bunny is a Rider"

of Montreal "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider"

Listening on OGION (my computer, all my towers have been named after famous fictional wizards, which I kinda didn't realise until I got this new one last year and was like I gotta name it!)

Page 2. 06 Dec 2023 - Billions and Billionaires.

I've been thinking about Caroline Polachek's Desire I Want to Turn Into You (DIWTTIY) a LOT, I can tell because Kits has started calling her "Caro Polo" in a funny singsong voice that implies we're talking about the -thing- again. I will try to write all the loosely assembled thoughts down a in a continue reading jump. Maybe. I dunno.

Erstwhile indie darling, goose screamer, k*yne scooper and acclaimed quirked-up vocalist Caro Polo has stopped explaining, intellectualising, labeling, making sense! I'm sure there's theory or a name for this idea or reoccurring expression(ism) ;) because of course there's always a framework, context and philosophy that one must know of and employ effectively to place their work in the culture - but good pop music doesn't make sense, or have a basis in theory, and it will not explain itself!

I think PONY by Ginuwine is the most clear example, to mind, like you get it... you get what he's on about, the vibe could not be more legible, tbh, but the song lyrics themselves are not in clear support of the thesis, nor is the odd farting bass, but nonetheless you vibe!

It’s giving C'mon stop trying to hit me and hit me. Morpheus in the Matrix, who was of course shitting on the mother toilet when he said that.

I dunno for sure, really the intentionality of it or her work generally, and it is beside the point — to be encoded or decoded merely makes it a signal, not a sign, not a message, not a meaning. Is this all in there or are you projecting? It doesn't matter so much, as it is a successful attempt at unfocussing that third mythic eye*, feeling that intangible gestalt enough that she's tuning into the desperate leitmotifs of the current moment and amplifying/refracting them through this soaring album.

OSTENSION. DéTOURNEMENT. RECUPERATION.

Par Avion

Re: The Billion____s and The Billionaires

Page 3. 06 Dec 2023 - Année du Lapin (2023) Year of Bunny

Low Pixel

Certified Top 0.1% fan of Caroline Polachek in 2023

Bunny is Hustle Culture?

Bunny is the girls on Epst*in's Private Island? This has legs but is grim and requires more thoughtful elaboration than the general rambling I’m currently on.

Is DIWTTIY about the weird, real and unreal relationship we all have with billionaires because of their inescapable influence over lives?

Is that what the Grimes feat. is about? Is that why Caro Polo did the Harambe song? I've got a Hyper-Chain-Link-Fence of Theories.

That Trace Dominguez video - You Love Billionaires?

Why Bunny?

and What makes her a Rider?

*Probbo I know!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Any ways here's my Tally Tunes playlist for 2023.

Related to that ^"the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them" Brian Eno post.

A confusing number of fingers will one day look like a synthetic VHS glitch artifacts filter -- As mundane, and as nostalgic. We’ll add extra fingers and abstract distortions to otherwise legible photos to evoke a sense of 2023 -- And they will remind us of a sweeter and simpler time. A time when the over load of visual information was still beyond the """comprehension""" of ML. When the comprehension of machines, I've simply got to believe, started to slip away from us. I think it will feel like watching a virtuosic child play a new game. A thrilling threat. Which is impossible to believe, but feels like it might come to be true.

-------Unrelated, but always related any way-------

Saturday 24th of June, 2023

I feel like so much of Buffy exists in this tension between the idea of

"I came back wrong/I came back right"

The loss of innocence through adolescences/puberty/transition to adulthood. Y'know the same thing Barbie is about, to be 2023 about it for a second.

I hear mostly "I came back kinder"

This thought that came from a silly string of ideas I had while training for a half marathon - like, I get that it's inane of me to be annoyed about run of the mill competitiveness from other local joggers, I know I only care about it because I hold on to my own, run of the mill competitiveness, but I'd rather be free of it. I'd 100% rather not be competitive, and I try to let it go, but it feels like people are always dragging you back into it, they feel like they've got to tell you they are faster, smarter, more. They run them more often, they're good, they're good, they're so good. And they are!

This is loosely connected to weirdly competitive guys who try to outrun you when you're literally out practicing to run, so weird.

And also loosely related to an acquaintance attempting to use literally the only trigger I have, against me. They acted like I might 'go crazy' and snap at them, but all that really happened was the invisible rescinding of trust, duh.

I just want to yell at the whole world about how pushing yourself isn't pushing against other people. And learning new ways of thinking is just for the sake of the new ways and the thinking. And how surviving something actually does this weird and exciting thing to you, where yes, you're weakened but it shows you how to love other weak/bad/foolish people. And yes you are scarred and damaged goods and it’ll probably always hurt and it shows you to love other scarred and hurt people. And you've lived through the thing that most people think would destroy them, and actually the most destructive thing that happens is that people might distort their whole lives to avoid 'the terrible thing'. Or that simply changing from an experience is part of life and I could no less grow hairs out of body than I could be changed by the things that happened to me. And, like, being the victim of profound sexual assault is about slowly learning that many people are and have been through the same, and it’s not that profound, even though it comes to define you in some ways and you fight against it defining you in other ways. It’s just another thing that you and your body and your self concept pass through, it doesn’t destroy you, it does kind of create you, but so does eating mango and watching movies with your friends, it just happened.

At the time of writing the journal post I was- "One week until the GC half marathon" - I finished it - it was good.

Good Job!

A Day in the Water - Christine and the Queens.

CONNECT

When everything is wifi and bluetooth, we'll miss cables.

•••

Monday 12th June 2023 - Hops from the Linear Park Community Garden.

Memory Disk

27 June 2023

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

― Brian Eno, 1996, A Year With Swollen Appendices

My Planet

Brunswick 2023

Page from Jan 2022

This page is from the when I was kind of realising I wanted to do the “opposite of bullet journaling”.

When the fight is a collab, how do we survive it?

We must survive it.

Babe - You've simply got to fix ur heart and carry on as if anything is ever simple

It feels to me like a return to the origins of the journal, maybe the journal has always been a grenade? Waiting to explode.

Again Against

Against Method

Is hand grenade journalling against method? in opposition to the aspirational mentality of bullet journals.

Sticker - Flash Forward Podcast. One of the best futurist podcasts to ever do it!

Page 1:

25 March 2023

First quarter of the year is about to draw to a close.

Same old bad brain, well if it isn't me breaking my own heaart. I wish I just didn't feel or process things, I do [sic] the way I do.

Always thinking 'About Adam'

"Hey Bird! I know the true name of god."

Without really thinking about it, I have started yelling this at wild animals that look at me. I think I say it because it's what I hear or feel when animals look at me. I'm curious if this is something I've seen in a film or picked up from somewhere, if feels affected, but I honestly cannot place it, or at least I cannot place it, to a place outside of me?

Mangawhai, Aotearoa

Do you suppose birds know about negative space and gaps and silences in the text? (This is kind of a joke about the QLD English syllabus in 2004)

Page 2:

21 March 2023

Solving <Laceration Gravity?

Solving Wobbly Stars

Gravity vs Yearning

An icon for the growing plurality of voices and perspectives? in STEM? In the world?

Lens and Light

This is kind of the main ideaa I've been noodling with for a[nother] zine I want to eventually make about the star as symbol. Like it's definitely cool and interesting that stars are one of the constants in all representational art. Like celestial bodies are one of the first things we record, as culture, as people, we see them and we want to draw them! Currently there is a trend or movement or feature of a lot of indie art in the late 2010/early 2020s to include twinkles or sparkling ornamentation in illustrations. Ornamentation, of course, is hardly new, and neither are stars in art (the seven sisters babyyyyyyy), but the twinkle style is kind of evolving at the moment. With what I recognise as a recent spike in representing the star/twinkle as irregular or wobbly. This is also an evolving aesthetic in many areas of contemporary life, I see it especially clearly in jewelry design right now. Previously stars were represented as point lights, and then regular radial point lights, not exclusively but predominantly. I think that the transition from point lights to regular radial point lights is related to increased access to lenses and viewing apparatus. The anime style four point twinkle, made enormously famous by shows like Sailor Moon, rose to its huge cultural status in lockstep with the deluge of space images from the Hubble Space Telescope (and other contemporary terrestrial telescopes which also featured photographic artifacts or diffraction patterns derived from the four struts used to support the primary mirror), which of course impacted contemporary artists. We are already beginning to see the impact of the James Webb Space Telescope in contemporary art/fashion/popular aesthetic. However I place the emergence of the "wobbly star"TM not solely on the shoulders of JWST, but on the subsequent realisation that the change in the star pattern from HST to JWST, broke the spell of the four point star as a given, the four point diffraction pattern for the first time since We started receiving space photographs was recognised as an artifact not a natural aspect of stars. Astronomers and Physicists stayed knowing this, of course, but we needed the images to change to know this - maybe that's true for them too?

Any way, this change in the image then supposes a new series of questions for us.

Where is the image constructed?

The Star itself? The collisions that create the photons? The distance the light traverses? The atmosphere it then travels through? The increasing molecular density that filters it? The lens that refocuses it? And then the lens that refocuses that? The housing of that lens, its shape, form and material? The sensor/s that captures the light? The codex used to record the data? Or the codex that in turn decodes this data into an image? The screen that projects it? The printer that produces it? The eye that captures that reflection? Or the mind that understands it?

How many lens known and unknown does light pass through before we recognise it as an image?

The wobbly or irregular star, in some ways implicates the 'suture lines' of the optical nerve, that to each person create a unique diffraction pattern, in each eye separately. It implicates the messiness of receiving an image, the unusually unique circumstances of receiving an image. I like to think of it as a sign or symbol of the beginning of understanding the necessity and value of diversity in STEM (maybe, at least I hope it is) and maybestars more broadly just in people. I think the wobbly star comes very specifically out of this moment, from modernity and identity politics and anime and space telescopes and instagram and printers and physicists, and that's all very exciting. I like when society sublimates a thing happening in many places into an aesthetic and a symbol. That stars can be so many things to so many people, points, like a star in many directions. To our diversity, but also to our sameness. That we all look up.

03 Nov 2022

Heteroglossia - (a word i learned from this tiktok from T X Watson)

Does close reading always reveal the self?

Pearl Pearl Pearl Pearl

The Pearl, The Grit, The Oyster, The Ocean, The Salt.

Seasonal ---------------- is it always a cycle?

What the critic (and of course the artist) always -run the risk of- enduring the vulnerability of- is revealing too much of themself?

Why do I love V for Vendetta and why is it also the worst possible film about actual political organising.

Decora Fashion.

Does Seb remember my neopets username?

What would it take to desire the future? itsradishtime youtube video with Sarah Jacquette Ray.

I’ve also been posting all the music I’ve been listening to, I dunno maybe you’ll like it?

Love how the pearl looks like a weird little gremlin face.

The pics vs The journal page.

July 2022

I went to Splendour in the Grass (Mud) in July and I think Amyl and the Sniffers were the act of the night for me. Though every we saw was excellent. I want to have recorded more this year but it’s been busy and tough. I am hardly alone n this, but I feel like full time work is just so exhausting. It’s really built to keep you on the cycle. But I’m also trying to imagine myself, imagining myself without deficit framing. Like you know that post about “not to self diagnose, but something is wrong” I am a little bit stuck on the idea that many of us have concluded that the thing that is wrong, is us. Puts a funny point on the concept of self-diagnosis, anyway, now I’m just obsessed with a vision or version of self that does not first point at its feet when it thinks something is wrong. 

Drawing jigglypuff from memory versus with reference. April 2022.

Directly related to me discovering I’m aphantasic.

I keep seeing this phrase, and frankly I agree.