things that make you happy

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marquez ill girls - mieze katzen

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drawn to marquez ill's music!
www.voltage-musique.com/

Here are some close-up details:

marquez ill girls - d-town

There’s b-town and then there’s d-town.

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drawn to marquez ill’s music!
www.voltage-musique.com/

marquez ill girls - twin

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drawn to marquez ill's music!
www.voltage-musique.com/

marqez ill girls - cake mix

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drawn to marquez ill's music!
www.voltage-musique.com/

marquez ill girl - all mixed up

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drawn to marquez ill's music!
www.voltage-musique.com/

marquez ill girl - paradise

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drawn to marquez ill's music!
www.voltage-musique.com/

marquez ill girl - chillout

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drawn to marquez ill's music!
www.voltage-musique.com/

happiness - marquez ill girl

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drawn to marquez ill's music!
www.voltage-musique.com/

blue figure

kimya dawson

Earlier this year one of my friends took me to a hidden loft in the East Bay, tucked away in a place like you'd probably never find in San Francisco. The walls were covered with paintings and the place was packed; another friend performed to people sitting at her feet and someone had even brought their baby.

People chatted and exchanged beers and really felt the music; for some reason I thought of the famous musicians rushing by me in a hallway in Los Angeles. It was such a different feeling, once everything had become successful and had been packaged and put through the motions. There come lunches with the right people, and the hordes of young and hopeful Hollywood girls materializing as fairweather girlfriends, and then the larger and larger shows. I am not so naive as to think that musicians do not need savings and healthcare, and that most musical careers, at least the conventional ones are short-lived.

But here was a different kind of feeling, something that doesn't mesh well with that other kind of scene. I had never even heard of Kimya Dawson at that point, although I knew about the movie Juno and am a big fan of Michael Cera. I didn't know any details at all. All I knew was that when she moved her chair to the floor to sing, I could feel her power.

There are many different kinds of people in this world. I've decided to stop analyzing everything; there are so many explanations for why things are the way they are, but when you encounter certain people the chemistry is there and you know they are powerful.

Kimya started talking, and even though her voice was very small and she was humble, I was entranced; she started to sing and it was the first time in a long time that I'd wanted to cry when a musician sang, and the first time in a long time that I really appreciated seeing a musician live.

Kimya said some things about becoming suddenly famous that year, and how she had had to deal with many kinds of people she wouldn't normally deal with. When she was finished people were tearful; I wondered how you could capture such emotions on video or audio. I guess that's the power of the live performance! She has a charisma that only a few people have, and I (as well as everyone else in the room) desperately wanted to meet up with her afterward and ask her about her thoughts on life, love and the universe.

Of all the millions upon millions of people out there, why do only a few touch us this in this way? Of all the singers and actresses and dancers that traipse across the stage, leaving me with nothing after I see them come and go, it's so remarkable to run into someone like Kimya.

After the performance, I always want to go and talk to the artists or musicians, but I always chicken out. What can I say that hundreds of other people haven't said? Despite the performance being one of the most intimate moments of the evening, when it's over the space is closed somehow, and the artist closes down and becomes shy.

Had she been prepared in the usual way, chosen by a guru, then run through the general mill, would she have had the voice that she does now? Is there space for the voice of someone with talent who doesn't look like Halle Berry or Christina Aguilera? There is!

green happiness

i love los angeles

figure drawing again

It's so easy to get out of practice. You have to stop, sit down, and truly take a look around you. The thing about actively drawing is that you can't draw out of your head--you have to sit and see and look and realize that things are not always as they appear at first glance.

san francisco people

I've been getting into the pleasure of simply sitting back and drawing lately to relax... people and places have always been very fascinating to me, and as you can tell, I am not such a photographer and was always more into drawing.

Yet all these people around me, they have so many stories to tell, their own way of doing things, their own needs and desires. Every person has their yin and their yang; good natured and giving, yet so mean-spirited at other times. At times you identify with other people, then other times you couldn't possibly imagine why they would have such a strange point of view.

And they're all living in San Francisco, such a famous and infamous place, so wrapped in romance and such a strange and interesting history.

that's the night life

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mischeviouses maedel

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leda's swan

found scribbed many months ago: when large planets circle too closely to each other, they collide. that's why the wiser ones are careful to keep out of each other's way, travelling in parallel paths.

comic con 2008

the bode broad, my favorite toy!


tokidoki headphone doll



Legends: the hernandez brothers!
I always wonder what people get out of these cool autograph/sketching sessions. It's a cool way for fans to go up to their favorite comic book artist, who usually is quite recessive and antisocial by nature (but maybe not the hernandez brothers)

Still, it becomes this weird personal exchange at big conventions like comic con that involve tens of thousands of people...




skeleanimals



talk about bright lights! it's exciting when costumed characters can garner as much attention and glamour as the original stars. Paris Hilton was also circulating as well as the Heroes stars.. which drew huge crowds, thankfully, that made the rest of the event space less crowded for everyone else.

so much to learn about life, love and beer

My friend S said that she wanted to live to be a thousand years old, because she wanted to see everything and know everything to come. That's why she's so beautiful, you know, that and she's constantly exploring and trying to convince me why i should finally let myself go and fall in love with San Francisco. It's all about a lack of boundaries, about poets working with biochemistry projects and women unafraid of working with welding machines.

S. told me not to go to one of the bike shops here, because on seeing her, they treated her as they saw her. "I hate people who think of information as power. I asked them for a simple thing and they won't even bother to say why or how to do it. They don't like to share how to do things there. It's really lame." She pointed us to a better place to go. I'm still intimidated by bicycle shops though, by all the gears and the fetishization of expensive equipment. But at least now I know the right people to talk to.

Well, I have fallen in love with this place, S. It snuck up on my very quickly the past few months. Maybe it's the ideas, all these dreamy ideas. I'm just meeting so many interesting people, and it's nice not to feel out of place for being someone constantly exploring, making things for the sake of making them.

There were some friends visiting from Europe a few weeks ago--well there should be qualifiers. Is there a time when someone isn't visiting this town from any random place? Well, they were nagging me to get a new bag, my bag was hurting my back, my laptop was too heavy, and thankfully they weren't after me this time for working too much. When you're passionate about anything you do, how can you not get into it? It just comes naturally. There are just moments where you have to take a deep breath, slow down, but you have to really care about what you are doing.

Well after this gentle nagging, I got a new backpack, made from the same company who'd made my first good backpack I bought almost 10 years ago in New York. Back then I had been obsessed with other silly things, but was seeking something of quality that would look cool, and I wasn't at the point where I was able to do a lot of things alone. I was still very much concerned with going to concerts with friends, although the process had already begun where I'd go wandering alone through Brooklyn and get emotional phone calls from my friends asking me "Where are you?" Buying the first back pack in Chinatown, the people I was with pointed me in the right direction, and it was a good buy.

That backpack lasted through many years through several different countries, time zones and climates. It was hard for me to let it go but it was not one of the things I brought back with me to the States when I returned from Berlin. I wanted to, but someone pointed out that it was ratty and about to pass out. I had been kicking it underneath plane seats on trips to Egypt, put it next to my bed on overnight trains to Poland, and filled it with bathing suits, work computers, paintings--but it was time for this backpack to go.

So I went to the same store but now here in the Bay area, and I bought a new backpack. The company's very famous for good quality but also very clever. They got to me this way: written along the side is the motto NEVER STOP EXPLORING. What kind of marketing ploy that was in whatever presentation someone gave, well it worked. Are you happy now?

And people in the Bay Area never stop exploring. They're poking their noses into everything, like beer.

You know, I had never thought seriously about how to make beer before. In Germany I was very into these historical museums, they call them Freilichtmuseums, showing how people lived in the past, and why things today are the way they are. I sat this weekend and learned how beer was made; there's something incredible wonderful about a tactile experience, where you hold the ingredients in your hands instead of reading about it.

It is pretty magical, making beer. There aren't so many ingredients to doing it, and it's all about paying careful attention to deadlines and temperatures and making sure things are clean and efficiently done. It's dizzying that so many different variations can be made from basically the same elements.

I had never known what hopps were, that they are crushed flowers used to preserve things, and they make beer bitter, and British colonialism are what have made India Pale Ale and Guiness what they are today. Heavy taxes on various elements of the recipe made people skimp on other portions of the recipe and voila, there you are, something that becomes entrench in tradition. Long sea voyages to India made English brewers ad excessive amounts of flowers to their stews, so that's why india pale ale tastes the way it does today. Guiness was created at the beginning purely to avoid an English barley tax, and so was Scottish beer. And that's why things are the way they are today!

It was never my expectation to be sitting outside watching men joke about modifying turkey roasters and using workarounds to make tools to brew beer, but there I was, and they instilled a very nice value in me that I had been suspecting all along. Tools don't need to be prepackaged, and you can make a lot of things that you need by fiddling around with what you already have, especially if you have some time when you don't have the money.

The men answered all of my naive questions patiently with the happiness that comes from sharing knowledge with a newbie. Sadly there were not so many women answering questions there, although the men told me that originally it was women who did all the brewing until the monks stepped in and took it away. Viking women cooked the stuff in big ceramic pots before the Christians came along and told them they were heretics for worshipping their goddesses. Did I ever know that it takes a year to make mead from scratch?

This is what fermentation is when looked at up close in the reality of boiling bubbles of water. I had read about glycolisis in school, and even now regret not deciding to take that genetics class, because I was so wrapped up in things that were not related to what was really important, which is learning for the sake of learning. When I was younger biology as something you studied so that you could become a doctor, that was everyone's understanding. I regret not taking those extra steps. It was an opportunity. But you know, there's still time to pursue that when I'm older, in a kind of reverse fashion, as opposed to the biologist who decides to take up art later on.

Never stop thinking and asking questions and keep in movement. And please don't indulge in too much good beer when you're not really that alcohol tolerant, especially on a somewhat sunny day when there's a good bbq going on. You'll get really drunk and say something charmingly embarrassing, even if you do have a good time.

lives

I've gotten into the habit of drawing again. When I drew this I was staring at Virgin Mary candles lit up, eating fresh-baked pizza dripping with blue cheese and roasted apples, talking to many different people that night. I like how people get into very easy, rolling conversations here, no barriers. There were many life stories. It just takes so much less time to get to that point here.

There was a woman talking about her childhood in the South, about wandering through cypress trees with Spanish moss and pretty little towns disappearing under traffic lights and suburbs. There was a man after a big change speaking in exclamation points: "I'm still young! But the world is small. Everyone knows each other! Yes! I'm so happy I made this change!" and the bartender speaking in loud rollicking English accented with Russian recounting a bar fight the other night.

It was the night when everyone liked to tell me their hopes. I was especially jealous of a young man about to go travelling for the first time and move to another country; somehow, even though I am still touched by new things, nothing is quite the same as being really young and flying across an ocean for the first time. I wish I could forget a few of the things I have seen that are so wonderful, so that i could see them again for the first time.

Lately the weather has changed...the sky's gone out! The wildflowers blot out the sun and we're plunged into an ashen sky, something that the dinosaurs would feel. I like the mood though, to go from boiling heat into a nuclear winter. We went outside and drew on the chalkboard. It's infectious, this drawing. People called out to me on the street, harmless people, but quite strange. The colors were pale and rubbing on my fingers--I keep meaning to tear myself away from the computer and paint again, get my fingers wet with pigment, but it's never so.

daydream sketches

carnival cotton candy

old detroit, new eastern europe

there is not much I can say about Detroit that has not been said lately by other people before me. Maybe the things I bring to the table, me being myself, are that it reminds me in many ways of the old East German towns abandoned by a world that was moving too quickly. The world moves at a fast pace--that is something you deal with, and the resistance to efficiency and change leaves behind great ruins. 

I'm used to sitting around kitchen tables listening to people who grew up in an entirely different system mourning a way of life in which things were not so chaotic, in which you were taken care of either by the government or some kind of large company. It was something to push back against and at the same time, according to the younger people, stultifying. To blend into the group, resist change, resist the events of the outside world...  

so many human memories and traditions woven into these big factories.  There are human stories here, friendships and alliances and petty feuds. 

But it was this comfort and resistance to change  and blindness to the world outside that made the fall particularly painful. There are many parts of Berlin that look exactly like parts of Detroit--former east German newspaper buildings empty and covered with graffiti, great skyscrapers ready to be demolished because everyone has moved away.

As many people before have told me, there's an eerie Mad Max effect to Detroit that can't quite be duplicated by many places in the world outside of Eastern Europe. You go through East Germany and it's the same story: cities standing half-empty, huge skyscrapers in downtown boarded up and forgotten. It's a ghost town. Even the homeless people move slowly, in a daze, as if there were a nuclear bomb; i saw a woman sitting very, very still staring into space for a long time on these steps. It was incredible. This was in Detroit though. There are not really so many homeless people in East Germany.

The outskirts of Detroit are where you go when you have not seen a fresh vegetable for a long time so much so that you really notice it and realize why San Francisco and New York are not like the rest of the United States. 

This is real hippie stuff, sitting down and chewing real greens between your teeth. Most people in this country subsist on french fries, or so the European media would lead us to believe. 

Here is the largest Arab-American population in the united states. Nobody really knows why (why?), but if you drive out to Dearborn, where the Arab American museum is, there begin the signs in Arabic and neat brick suburban houses with children playing and women strolling down the street in hijabs. If you go here, which is something that I may have done, desperate to eat "real" food after daily assaults of deep fried burgers and deep fried seafood and deep fried onions, you can go, as I might have gone, to a Lebanese grocery store and ask for the directions to the nearest decent restaurant. The men might not speak English as well as they would have wished, but they are all good intentions and directed me as they might direct you down the road, turn right, can't miss it, the best restaurant in town.

And this is change and new life right here, when the tabouli and falaffel are in front of you, and across the street I could see, as you might see, a sign for halal subway sandwiches, which is something I have never seen before, although I have been in many halal neighborhoods in my life. It's something new in a place where I never thought I would encounter something new.