14.5.11

May Daze.

LUNCH!  (or, Saturday in Queens.)


Need to learn how to cook this.

My fetch came to me in a dream.




I really, really fucking love this new Raphael Saadiq record....so much so that I drew both of these on the train while rocking it since I copped it yesterday.  The first person to kill it with me on the dancefloor to this joint this summer gets my undivided schoolgirlcrush attention for at least a week.

Listen- if you are tryna holla at a thick grrl, you need to know that serenading her with this joint is the magic ticket-either by singing along, throwin it on a mix cd, or dancing mad close and sweaty.  Good lord.  Mr. Saadiq - Thank you.


BONUS!

Tropical Chip Cookie Recipe

I made these cookies for a work meeting and people loved them up.  I make variations on chocolate chip cookies all the time and firmly believe that there is nothing that quite shows people how much you adore them than bringing them baked goods.

Ingredients:
3 C Flour
2 tsp Soda
2 pinches kosher salt
2 1/4 stick of butter
1 1/2 C dark brown sugar
1 C granulated sugar (preferably vanilla sugar if you make your own)
3 Eggs
2 tsp Vanilla
1 bag of semisweet choc chunks
1 bag of milk chocolate chips
1 cup coconut
1/2 cup raw almonds
9oz dried pineapple
a decent hunk of ginger

Oven 375 degrees.  I start by grinding the almonds pretty fine in a coffee grinder I've reappropriated as a spice grinder.  Mix these up with the coconut, stick it in the oven as it warms up, spread evenly on a baking sheet checking frequently as it toasts (like 5 minutes, should be brown like this:)



 Cream the butter and sugars together, and while that's going, chop up the pineapple and grind up the ginger into kind of a paste.



Add eggs, salt, powder, vanilla, flour and mix it all up.  Then add all the other stuff, stick it in the oven.  Each batch takes like 10 minutes.   Make sure that while you're making everything you're thinking good thoughts, actively asking the cookies to "Be delicious!", having a beer with a girlfriend and talking about art and dreams and politics and boys.  The most important part, however, is to dance around the kitchen as they are baking.
And I swear they are really good.
10.5.11

Sketchbook Diary(-a?)

Just got put on to this Small Black record from last year....love this song and think it's apt:  "There is a difference between what you want em to know and what they have to know--- Here that the mirror reali-y never was found from the ways to to rise up again --rise up again like a ghost"




Have a lot of projects in the works right now....a bunch of spot illos, murals, book illustrations.  So I've been drawing but there's not so much I can show right now until things start to finish up a bit more.  But I do have a few little things I've been banging out in between all the craziness.

drawing I did for myself on Mother's Day.

I've been doing a lot of little doodles and paintings here and there for this Self Love series...this is one of the quicker ones I did recently that I kind of like.  There's things about this that remind me alot of stuff I used to do before I went to college.


Folks who've been following this blog for the last few months may be surprised about how personal a lot of the drawings I've been doing for myself have been lately. I'm challenging myself everyday to try to do visual journals and prayers - those of you familiar with my work in the past may be more accustomed to seeing me pretty much do just political work and weird comics, cartoons and characters. Making more personal work has been a really creatively/emotionally demanding experience - and doing a blog where I post that stuff has felt like a strange combination of Brooklyn-artist-cliche, teenage-girl-angst, exhibitionism and self-righteous/feminist insistence. I'm trying to explore the interstitial areas between self-consciousness and self awareness in a socially networked, constantly surveilled, live out-loud, reality TV, spectacle ridden, hyper-capitalist spectator culture. I'm trying to focus more on living a life that is, by its nature, inherently-exponentially creative rather than seeing my creativity as a market-based skill suitable only for developing a "career", as though that can somehow be compartmentalized from one's pedestrian existence. I don't know, maybe this is a big bunch of blah-blah-bullshit, but it's the type of stuff I think about.

A well-respected artist friend of mine once told me, " If you're into it, someone else out there will be too." I'm hoping he's right.
9.5.11
I love sundays.

It's Spring in Bed - Stuy, folks.

After being sick all last week, I made up for lost time with some early morning drawing. Then brunch with Mensha: buckwheat pancakes and strawberry sauce. Bike ride in Prospect Park. It was the first time I've ridden a bike in 5 years and I am hooked again. Ran into Mau and Candy and broke out the frisbee. Then impromptu, last minute BBQ - the first of the season! There's nothing I love more on a Sunday night than caressing a grill to life... We made cheddar parmesan sage biscuits (trinidadian style), blackbeans with mushrooms, sweet potatoes with raspberry syrup and ginger, turmeric jasmine rice, hot dogs, grilled veggies, garlic chicken and mint tea with mint fresh from the garden.

Also someone needs to teach me how to take good shots with my DSLR at night.  I'm not good at this.

How on earth did I get so lucky? I am so profoundly grateful and humbled and can't wait to get the wall up in the backyard so we can just throw back sixes, grill up deliciousness, hit the wall, and shoot the shit.

Also -this SBTRKT joint is basically how my insides sound all the time.









8.5.11
The Parsons Scholars did their final show.... 5PTZ had it's reopening party...and I drank beer on the tail-end of a flu.


Smooth mother's day jam "Give You Praise" by my boys in Doble Flo.

Some Scholars.....some Graduated Scholars...some Coordinators and Directors and I.  I love this program.

The super-ill COL


Jamal

5PTZ reopening!  Hoooah.

Clarity and someone elses' piece.....inform me who this is because this shit is DOPE.

CLARITY AND MENSEN 4EVA

Spaze Craft

Dealin Pieces of Wall







Mr.  Beck stops Traffic just to hold Clarity



This is how I get over the flu.

My brilliant, beautiful roomie Clara.


Clarity tells it like it is.

Grrrrl Tawlk.

Also:  a terrible rhyme:
I quit writin cos it's not my hood-- I keep talkin tho I'm Ms. Understood. We talk love lost and gained tho I'm on the minus- tryna kill this headcold frontin its my sinus. 


6.5.11


Also.  I have recently rediscovered the Monks.  They were one of my favorite bands 10 years ago. 


Also this last joint by Wimple Wynch is probably one of my all time favorites....I've been sick all week with a nasty flu so I have a feeling it's gonna be a freakbeat/garage type of night to get me back on deadline with all these projects.  Say a prayer for me.
3.5.11

New Ink by Edwin Vazquez

Finally had the opportunity to get a new tat from incredible comic artist, and good friend, Edwin Vazquez.  Definitely check out his site, and get at him for an appointment!  I highly recommend him; he's got a super light touch, lots of patience, is very focused and clean, did a great job on redesigning my original sketch and is just in general awesome to be around.

Resolve:

(noun) firm determination to do something:


(verb) 1. settle or find a solution to (a problem, dispute, or contentious matter)

2. cause (a symptom or condition) to disperse, subside, or heal

3. reduce a subject, statement, etc., by mental analysis into (separate elements or a more elementary form)

4. (of something seen at a distance) turn into a different form when seen more clearly

The venerable Mr. Vazquez

Edwin and his awesome girlfriend, Jenai Chin, who is also an ill tattoo artist.
2.5.11
I will let other people's words describe my take on this.

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”--Guy Debord.

“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.” - Hannah Arendt

"And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?" -- Nietzsche


At one point, the crowd spontaneously broke into a rendition of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'".  I don't even know how to describe what it was like to watch this crowd of people sing,  "Don't Stop Believin/Hold Onto that Feelin" as they waved their flags next to the Freedom Pit, an open grave, to celebrate the death of a spectre.






Chanting, "America, Fuck Yeah!"  sans the satire.

When this young woman climbed up here, the crowd began to chant, "TAKE IT OFF.  TAKE IT OFF.  TAKE IT OFF."





This guy was reading the Declaration of Independence out loud from a smart phone.







Crowd surfing.


Singing, "Nah Nah Nah Nah, Nah Nah Nah Nah, Hey Hey Hey, Good Bye."


Chanting "USA! USA!  USA!"


Singing God Bless America.


Our national flags.


Pledge of Allegiance.


Singing "We are the Champions."   Yes.  Really.

This guy was wearing a Busch Beer Jacket and carrying a boombox blasting Lee Greenwoods "God Bless the USA".  Yeah, you know, "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free."










Shortly after taking this shot, the couple started walking away, with her still propped on his shoulders.  Two cops approached, and one said to the other, "Follow the tramp stamp."



ghosts.






This one goes out to you, Amerikkka. "Keep on Rockin in the Free World."