If you’re anything like me, you’ve wondered what would happen if you viewed the music video of the Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot duet “Comic Strip” twelve times in a row. Well, what happens to me is I begin to draw things like this:
Back when I lived in Chicago, I frequented the Milwaukee Art Musuem, the Midwest’s secret best art museum. One of my favorite pieces at MAM was Pies by Wayne Thiebaud, pictured above. As it turns out, Thiebaud is strongly associated with California; I didn’t know that back then, one year ago, when I was still living in Illinois.
It was a real surprise to me when I found that the Pasadena Museum of California Art – situated right near by my parents’ new home in Los Angeles – is doing a big Thiebaud show this month, organized by the man himself. It feels like I am being followed by my favorite art, but I guess that is a little bit like saying I feel like I am being followed by the moon.
So I went to see the show today, and it was great, of course. Thiebaud’s paintings are poppy and colorful – his shadows are blue, his whites are Renoir rainbows – and real thick with impasto. Lots of different subjects: some lovely huge fanciful San Francisco cityscapes, a couple of bathing-suited figures, and of course his famous desserts. I bought a post card, but if you can’t see the texture in person, you’re really missing two-thirds of the fun.
There was another show going on right next to Thiebaud’s, of work by Frances Gearhart, who was evidently one of America’s premier color printmakers. On seeing Gearhart’s prints of pretty children at play, I was tempted to holler not as good as Kate! but when I calmed down I learnt that Gearhart is famous for her beautiful California landscapes:
After my visit to PMCA, I zipped over to Vroman’s, a cool independent bookstore in Pasadena, and bought Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, a novel about an Indian-English teenager in London’s south suburbs in the late seventies.
The first chapter read well, but I suspect that the book’ll devolve pretty quickly into lots of English orgies, and as much as I like the English, I think history has proven satisfactorily that they cannot get orgies right.
So! Quite a day. Quite a year. Moved to Los Angeles in September of 2008. Might be someplace else next year. Will more of my favorite art follow me? Will the moon? Yes, I think maybe. I hope so, at any rate. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
To read another post about the Thiebaud exhibit (this one written not by me, but by a gentleman a portion of whose genes are shaped an awful lot like mine) go here.
So, I’m creating a tradition here at Dorothy Guest Tours the West by installing Poem Thursday, where I do a post every Thursday talking about a Poem. I know it’s not fair to just create a tradition, I know it’s meant to happen organically, but I don’t care.
SO. In my Chinese Short Stories class, I came across this first poem. It’s from Ying-ying chuan, a story from the Tang era, written by Yüan Chen. Ying-ying uses this poem as an invitation to her young suitor (but it is in fact a trick to lure him to her so that she can once and for all inform him that she is uninterested in his advances):
To wait for the moon I am sitting in the western parlour;
To greet the wind, I have left the door ajar.
When a flower’s shadow stirred and brushed the wall,
For a moment I thought it the shadow of a lover coming.
When I read that, it made me think of Canadian Love Song by Alden Nowlan from which, because I am unsure about copywrite laws, I will only quote the third (and last) stanza:
To my love’s bed, to keep her warm,
I’ll carry wrapped and heated stones.
That which is comfort to the flesh
is sometimes torture to the bones.
At first I couldn’t put my finger on any connection between the two. Then I realized that both poems feature a love coming in from without, and in both poems, there is an indellible association between the wilderness and the arriving lover. In both, the nature imagery is invasive. Interesting, yes? I think most of the time we ignore the connections our subconsciouses make between works of art, when really we should pay attention to them – I learnt a little bit about both poems by paying attention to their similarities.
November is a special month to me; I was born in November, for one, and so was my father (but a couple years before me). And in Chicago, November is a neat seasonal cut-off: the first half of November is autumn, and then the second half, it snows. Everyone in Illinois knows that winter begins in November.
Here in Southern California, autumn blends pretty unrecognizably into winter until January, but I still consider November an important landmark. November is my time for making plans for the new year.
SO – DOROTHY GUEST, WHAT ARE YOU DOING THIS NOVEMBER?
A series of oil paintings meant to look like old Roman portraits! The first (unfinished) one, pictured above, is of nobody in particular; I was worried about finding sitters, and figured I’d just make everybody up. Then a gentleman from one of my workshops volunteered to sit for me, and since then I’ve found that people are flattered, not frightened, when you ask if you can paint them.
I’m working on a new novel! I have high hopes for this one.
I’m researching schools for next year! I’m thinking of transferring, and hoping to go to – but no, no, I’ll jinx it if I say more. I’ll have to keep you in suspense for now, okay?
I’m listening obsessively to Bowiesongsonloop. I blame my father, who won’t stop singing that one damn Cat People song.
That is what I am doing this November; that is what I will be doing for many months to come. Wish me luck. Or if you don’t want to do that, just go and read the most recent installment of Going to College With Dorothy Guest.
As you all ought to know by now, I am a born-and-raised Chicagoan, living in Los Angeles for college. I started this blog initially to talk about how funny my situation is; the Midwest and the West really are like two different countries, and I’ve undergone some major culture-clashing in my time here so far.
Of course, this blog quickly became a place for my cartoons and photos of my dorm room, but let’s get back on topic, shall we? Let me tell you about
Things Californians Make Fun of Me For:
- My adding “Man” to the ends of all my sentences: “Hey, man!” “C’mon, man,” “Are you kidding me, man?”
- My being righteously indignant that you cannot buy good pizza, bagels, or hot dogs anywhere in Southern California.
- My accent. Mostly I talk in a soft, vaguely Midwestern, vaguely Eastern accent, but now and then I slip and go Chicago. “Yeh gahtta be kyeddin’ mee, mayn!” imitate my amused friends.
Things I Make Fun of Califorians For:
- Their turning all sentences into questions.
- Their putting on winter coats, scarves, and boots when temperatures hit the mid-60’s.
- Their accents. “Ya gohtta beh kodding meh, I mehn, dee yuh knuh?”
Mid-60’s. The mid-60’s! For me, this is like the balmy pink-blossomed springtime. I mehn, yuh knuh?
Issue no. 3 of Going to College With Dorothy Guest! Today we examine decisions I have not yet made, but which, based on the decisions I have made lately, I am likely to make in the near future (click on the thumbnails):
After you sign his contract, Satan sloughs off his handsome hipster guise, and reveals himself as he truly is: a drugged-out jackass wearing brothel creepers. Here he is in his proper form, hanging with Michael the Archangel:
Michael: C’mon, Luce, the club’s closing.
Satan: In a minute, Mike. I’m, uh, I’m, too much – cups? You know?
Yesterday, October the 25th, was St. Crispin’s day. On another St. Cripsin’s day many many years ago, the English had a vastly improbable win at the Battle of Agincourt. Maybe not quite so improbable a win as Shakespeare would have us believe -
Welsh soldier: Harry! Harry! How many guys did we lose?
Sick of seeing photos of my dorm room yet? Well, tough! I’m so crazy proud of how much I’m making this place a cool Dorothy Guest hang-out that I pretty much just have to show it off.
Click on the thumbnail to see a looonnng photo which grossly exaggerates the size of my truly tiny living space:
I’ve stuck plastic hooks on the wall so that I can display my necklaces:
And check it out – chilling in some mukluks you may perhaps remember from past adventures:
Sorry about that one panel on its own there – I was having such trouble drawing mugs that finally I had to allocate that panel to its own page so it wouldn’t ruin any other perfectly good pages.
