twangypearl the elastic girl

reprieve

Well now. Where to begin? Gal.way Arts Fest. That was good. The show was in a thatched cottage in town, with tiny crooked rooms. The curator was one of Those People. You know? Those People. Who can do everything - she curates, shows, organises everyone and did I mention she does it all with calm and good grace? and is only about 25? Very impressive. We stayed in the Radisson which was a slightly futuristic and dehumanising experience. I mean, they didn't make us feel particularly special as they took our e150. And since we got back, I seem to have morphed back into Twangy The Housewife. Many many domestic and gardening chores ave been completed this week - including the installation of a gardening chest, and potting of a ton of plants and tidying and cleaning. I mean, not that there's anything wrong with that, but I want to be out, in the world, moving and shaking. On the other hand, I don't, I like being at home with my plants and slugs, making art and freelancing on the side.
The constant dilemma.
Speaking of Those People, my Friend, OldFriend, she of the eight children, was on this week. In addition to her 8 CHILDREN, (three of whom are on the autism spectrum) her part-time DEGREE in PSYCHOLOGY, she and her husband are making a business proposal the ambition of which would make your head twist off with awe. They want to start a farm/riding centre for special needs children/young people. AMAZING. I am going to help her with graphics, logo and whatnot.
On the Da front, things are looking better all the time. We are cleared to take him home for lunch on Sunday. I feel like a first-time parent bringing a new-born home. He is excited to get out. As well he might be.. He talks a lot about "good behaviour" and what he can get away with, with the screws. (Okay, not that bit). I mean, he really seems to hold the view he is in rehab prison.
So things are ticking along. I feel a sense of reprieve - Bad Things happened and we survived. I am happy in a relieved way. I went for my Day 3 blood tests, and that was fine. It required some suspension of the thought process during it - you know, when you just float through, and engage the brain after? All is okay.
Your well if voluntarily brain dead,
Twangy

Water water

12.00AM SMS to Twangy's mobile from JB:
drink some water
13.00PM A little more water
14.00PM Have a little sup
15.00PM A little boiled water
And so on. I don't know why, it must be one of those blessed mysteries that make marriage work, but I find this very sweet. You see, last night I had a bout of cystitis (horrors! dreads!) but it seems that with all these helpful hourly reminders to imbue enough H2O to sink a Mediterranean cruiser, I may yet have dodged that burning bullet.
That is the JB. The problem, but also the solution. My heart nearly failed me last week - he'd gone away for a few days for St Patrick's Day to see his father at the Edge of the World (aka remotest Kerry) - and I was left to brood over our situation. While others pirouetted and cavorted their way down O'Connell St, painted green, I was weeping quietly into my keyboard. I don't know why it hit me so. (I mean, obviously, I'd like to blame St Patrick, but I'm finding it tricky to find the thread of responsibility that joins a shamrock-loving medieval saint to my marital problems). I feel as if I am grieving for the happy calm early years of marriage I had so arrogantly envisaged. I feel I am making an adjustment to the reality of what and where we are, and it's hard, sometimes. But it's so strange too, it's like a wave breaking over me and then it's over, and I am - not fine exactly - but peaceful enough and able to look forward to things.
I went to have water torture this week a la pelvic ultrasound. It seems that I have some little fibroids and a little cyst. Nothing to worry about, really, but as the doctor explained, there could be some "polycystic element" going on there, which could be an explanation for our non-up-the-spout-ness, if the JB's test turns out to be normal. Indeed, I did have some cysts in the past. And though my tests were all fine, and dandy, when I looked at the list of symptoms, I thought I recognised the moodiness and acne. (Blooming Nora, what a syndrome. Talk about insult and injury. Infertility, weight gain AND depression. And if that wasn't enough, have some painful volcano-like spots too). He is going for that on Wednesday, poor feller.
In the meantime, I am working away on my shows, and I had precisely 3 weeks to turn out a ton of animated scenes. Yikes. The clocks are driving me flipping crazy. (Another witty clock joke! I slay myself).
It seems that somehow there is however time to go to Eindhoven to see my college friend Joa.nie in Str.p. She is in a show with A.phex Twin and Laurie Ander.son! Oh the reflected glory! and the reflected reflected glory! for yes, I helped her make her performance machine, wherein she will lurk for the 10 days of the festival ("err" I said, "are you sure you really want it to be that small?") albeit in that slightly nay-saying way. I am so looking forward to it. OH WOW! Give me a change of scene and I am all excited.
In the meantime, hand me down a glass of water. I'll need to be in good shape for all this.

~I saw a man in the supermarket with a entire trolley full of full fat and light dairy spread and nothing else. The expiry date was August, I noticed. I wonder if he was going to make a art piece with it? After all, only last week in college, for the degree show, a colleague of mine got into a bath of coke lying belly-down and made humping movements that alluded to the sexu*l act. So why not, I suppose.
[Incidentally I was interested to hear that C*ke turned down the opportunity to sponsor him. Shortsighted of them, I thought, not to want to be associated with a bearded art student humping their product. Could have made a great new campaign. Move over, The C*ke Side of Life. You are so yesterday!].

~Am still a cleaning lady. We put up the curtain rail yesterday, and yes, by me, I mean JB.

~It's surprisingly obsessively fun though, cleaning. Strangely satisfying.

~Have begun to chart my cycle, in the spirit of have a go. It's quite a novelty so far.

Time will tell.

For now I remain, your charting cleaning lady,
Twangy

power down

Last week was hectic to put it mildly. We installed our work in the old warehouse that for 2 weeks every year doubles as the exhibition space for the Masters students. And my. Oh my. It was quite the monument to Sisyphus (if that's how you spell him). One student built A SMALL HUT in there, seriously, a real hut, in block and render, in which she and a friend/actor now lurk waiting for people to step in so that they can glare intimidatingly at them from above. The interview, it's called. Someone else for reasons best known to himself, has built a small (admittedly shallow) swimming pool with a toilet in the middle. Yet another lined her space with stainless steel tiles and a shower which is really a microphone. The whole place is like a demented and non-functional movie set, with pallid students running about muttering obscenities under their breath like so many clapper boys.

To think it'll all be gone in 2 weeks.

My work was easy to install, so I left it to the last minute and then arrived in a taxi with 9 folded cardboard boxes under my arm. My stuff is different to the others, rather than being installation per se was more of a frame for my content, which I have been chipping away at these past months at home. I'm fairly happy with it, I like the narrative layers, the stories and cross-references. I (mostly) loved making it, the process of making it was far more the point than this goal of the show. (This might possibly be a good thing about being 40 - rather than being caught up in ideas about being discovered and catapulted to stardom, like I was in my early 30's, I am more interested in my ordinary dreams, like having a family, someone to love, and a nice house to come home to. To live for a humble cause, as the saying goes).

Being that humble dream as it may, the exams are next week, and I will somehow have to find a way of waking Sleeping Beauty-like from the comatose state I seem to have fallen into. I feel so sluggish and dull-witted today. Like I've been drugged or something - all the adrenaline has drained out of my body leaving me like a pale weak ghost. I slept till 9.30am (!) and then had the nerve to fall asleep again while "watching" 7th Heaven (btw, what wonderful drivel! fantastically bad). Spike was over today too, and going great guns until he fell on a sharp stone and was suddenly tired and disconsolate and had to be carried home by Bobby and yes, that would be me, and yes, he would be a ton weight.

However, tomorrow is, mercifully, a bank holiday, as well as being, you know, another day.

CORKSCREW

At a show last week, with my friends from the MA programme:
 

Oh, how I'll miss them.

On Monday of this week, JB texted me to tell me he was leaving for Kerry at once. He'd spoken to his father whose health seemed to have deteriorated suddenly - he seemed "shook" and poorly. We hoped that a bit of JB's magic TLC would do the trick, and get him back on his feet, but over the week the cold turned into a chest infection and from there it was a small increment to breathlessness in the middle of the night and thereon, in quick succession, to pneumonia and a call for emergency medical help. My poor J. He had to see his father being taken off in an ambulance at 4am that night. It's so hard for him, because he saw his mother be taken away too, in 2001, and she never came home.
I feel a lucky dope. My parents are alive and well and living in (their, Protest*nt, idea of) comfort, nearby. They have each other. They are (let's face it) not short of a few bob. So I really don't understand the fear that's in the JB. I mean, I try but I don't, not REALLY. Not sharply. I am stranded on another misty shore. It's like my imagination is stunted. I can't see clearly through it, it's like an immature organ or a damaged lens. 

In his absence, life has taken on a different shape. Without his normalising influence, I have departed slightly from my usual self, mentally. I feel strangely exposed and a-hum with internal drama - I am buzzing around like a bluebottle trying to get out of an open window, but by going through the pane. If some unfortunate psychology PhD student was assigned the task of tracking my thoughts, they'd get something like this:

- which symbolises the whole week really.
Trips up to see house: 2
Trips to see tiles: 2
(one of which with Lithuanian builder, in a van. Funny scene in Outh*us, the tiling place.  He got chatting to the guy behind the desk in Russian - and the guy very frankly told him the place was outrageously expensive. But then he'd revert to English and be all salesman of the year. Please, look at these samples and Yes, I can check for you, etc. He was the double-sided salesman).
Trips around head, chasing thoughts: innumerable
Trips from desk to kitchen to table to bathroom: 5 million (at a conservative estimate)

At one point, I found my set square on the breadboard. Was I thinking of making a sandwich with it? With nice 90 degree corners?

(They are finding the next Oliver on the telly. I can hear them belting it out in the other room, desperate to be a star. It worries me a bit that this time they are children. I mean even the big Josephs were having weekly emotional breakdowns. Hmm. Can this be good?)

Today we finished the purgatory that was Etching. I came through with an unexpected burst of (caffeine-fueled) energy at the end, and produced some stuff that might go into the degree show. As ever, I warmed to the other classmates over the 6 weeks after a slightly unenthusiastic start and was sorry to see them go in their different directions at the end. Ah, parting.. is such sweet and sour sorrow.

And so I end the week that was with tired feet but hope in my heart. Kdid (JB's Dad) is perking up and has enough strength to be giving out. A good sign, we all agree. And we must be happy with that.

perhaps

the better way to think about blogging is not as an attempt to record every single event that might happen but just the more interesting moments, strung into some sort of a intelligible narrative, preferably.

And so:
GoodFriendR came to town for a visit before she flies off once more to Rhode Island to continue her Masters. We had a powefully garlic-infused Moroccan dinner in a place in Wicklow St. All was cloistered, with painted tiles and had the ornately detailed screens I associate with confessionals. (Although this is from films more than real life, me being brought up in the Other Irish Religion). 
GoodFriendL (usually the pragmatic kind) was confiding in us:
"Do you ever wonder - you know - why we're here? I mean, what for? It all seems so.."
"Pointless!" R and I interject.
And jovially "Why, yes! All the time" and "welcome, welcome to the fray!"
It seems that L is having a bit of a moment. I might have handed the baton over to her - recently I have been feeling quite meaningful. Or at least in the face of the futility I find what joy I can - clean sheets, a joke with friends, finishing a job, having a good stretch, or a slice of apple pie - are good enough reasons to live, it seems to me, these days.

We had a pre-crit crit with tutors. It went quite well - they liked my memory contraptions, and were if anything a bit too excited by the possibilities of the project. They got carried away with their ideas on the space - a little confusing, but good, you know. Not bad. They'll push me into another gear with their (slightly annoying and bossy) comments on how much work I still have to do.

Telescope into past:

I had a fevered night last night, dreaming about Russel Br*nd. I am going to have to swear off P*nderland, at this rate. (He so alluringly defies categories. Puts me in a spin!) I dreamt I was in his house with a lot of other guests. In fact the house was more of a BnB than a house, it would seem. Anyway, the fact is, he was charging everyone 2 pounds sterling to use the shower.

My subconscious has some unusual priorities. I mean, really, could we get some more interesting action in, somewhere? No - the economies of hygiene, is what concerned it.

I would kill for a slice of apple pie. Well, not kill, I am the gentle vegetarian type. But injure slightly perhaps. Injure someone's dignity, maybe, with a bit of a pinch. Actually, I'm glad there's no question of that. My middle-class sensibilities are being made uncomfortable by these very suggestions.
I will go to the shop, like a normal person.

Oh! one more thing. The builders are back. Hurray hurray hurray. The prospect of actually moving in to that house is now becoming real once more.. alarmingly so. I had forgotten that we bought that house to live in, so much time has passed. I had begun to think of it as an albatross we bought out of self-hatred more than anything.

Free food day

Ah, if only it was a National Holiday but no, it was merely a symposium in N.CAD and (get this) the Creative Licence Tour brought to you (or me, in this case) by Ad*be. At the symposium Gordon MattaClark's widow talked - his work is so powerfully strange - I loved her stories of the old days in NYC, and being in Soho before it was taken over by Banan* Republic et al, and the vacant condemned buildings and the artists' restaurant they ran. It was all so passionate and sincere. He was really a radical philosopher whose thinking underpinned all his work - he was compassionate and fearless. Her photos of those times were so evocative - it was an experience as close as you can get now to his work, for it was entirely ephemeral. All the buildings were finally demolished.
After that, 3 students presented "pieces" - kind of talks, lectures and performances. They were good. The whole thing degenerated though into one of those pointless discussions that I have come to recognise oh so well in NCA.D- our head of dept was critical of the quality of presentation, and others weighed in, and there was much use of words like context and format and so much analysis of what we were at, that it became hard to continue to do it. The art world is liable to eat its own head, such is the endless self-referencing and analysis. How can you inhabit your life if you are standing outside it, I wonder.
And how far they spin away from normal people into their own little isolated world.

Rhetorical questions, you will understand. :)
On a more interesting note, there was some free soup, a free roll and some sausages for lunch.
Then I split and went to the Ad*be tour, which in its fantastically self-celebratory way was in cineworld, a huge anonymous cineplex in Dublin.. lots of boyz there with headsets, talking about rich internet delivery and some other things. It was quite amazing what they can do with photoshop. L and I plotted a little after on how to get our mitts on it since for some reason, we didn't win a copy of it in the draw. Yahhhahah.
(I couldn't resist the noddies at one point. Terribly embarrassing! I am sure the Platform Evangelist. (No, seriously, that was his title) guy could see me and was heartbroken that I was a lost sheep as far as AIR conversion went. This despite the endless cups of coffee available outside and any amount of choc chip cookies. As many as you could eat! (without shaming yourself. That is.)(I wonder if I am abusing the bracket btw. (Maybe))
Now it is Wednesday and I have been struggling to make Self work all day. I am finding Self rather easily distracted though. What with finishing the D*wn Patrol site,  and updating my site with Unreliable memories, and talking to L, and London Friend, getting a job for a large corporation (the Irish semi-state telecommuncations company) and having to think about their (slightly dopey) ad campaign for an alarm system, there were plenty to choose from.

It's 6pm now and dark outside. Bobby tired. Speaking of Bobby, Guy has turned the corner into A Difficult Phase. My rather haggard brother told us of how he completely melted down on the way to the video shop, and had to be carried home kicking and screaming. Brother says it was hunger and tiredness. Maybe child has a child-sized version of our hypoglycaemia which so often has been blamed for our grim-faced and monosyllabic moods. Speaking of which, my face is turning in a slab as I type. Food, it must be introduced ASAP.

I'll away.

a slightly melancholic cloud

is hanging over me. I am a bit :( glummish.
Which made the presentation of my work a bit more tragic than it needed to be. I think maybe our tutor - (whose name is ironically the Irish for Freedom, and henceforth shall be known as such, with irony, though, great irony) just isn't interested in my style of work. But I shall sally forth, with my new plan, which is to work with interactive narratives (people like a story, I find. Loads of people have said they like Placement) and perhaps my thoughts about narrative-making and meaning-seeking can be submerged in it and not so obviously dealing with and testing the boundaries of narrative.
My work is quite different to the others. I draw, for one thing. They are mostly into sensors and video.
Steph showed this hilarious piece of herself working out ideas. It was truly brilliant, everyone loved it. And lots of postmodern stuff about Youtube and such-like.

Do you know, I think I feel a bit better already? The Time beckons, which is probably half the problem.
But Twangy will bounce back.

Last night I went to a Cameraless Film workshop, where we drew on 16mm film. It was really good, organised by Bl*ck L*tter, with the usual bonus Nice biscuits and tea. John O'C*nnell was leading it - he works on film art himself. (Must look up the links he gave us). It was so pleasant to be there drawing on the film in marker, in the warm institutional interior of the L*b on F*ley st, with people rehearsing their plays in the corridor.
At the end we watched the film we made on a wonderfully evocative projector - they are going to put it up on the site later. Will link.

blur special FX

Some over-enthusiast videographer seems to have applied a blur effect to my life. I am really in need of a good weekend-long sit-down and an endless cup of camomile tea. Weekends have been frantically busy since the wedding, what with the painting of the parents' house, the courses, the house, the people. The people!
Yesterday was the final day of the Intaglio course. Intaglio is the most weep-inducingly frustrating and yet, wonderfully promising and surprising technique I have learned thus far, in my long and illustrious. I worked  a series of three of these, with variations:

One had some geese migrating over it in a NJ kind of way, another some colour, another, a deeper colour.  The idea was to show some progression of time through them - a narrative sequence - so I made a few in a series. I had every kind of small annoying fly in the ointment from oops! dropped the paper in the carefully rolled acetate to oops! printed on the wrong side of the paper, (the one with my initials on it). It was maddening and at the same time, tantalizing, because you can see how good the results could be,  potentially, if you could just leap deftly over the hurdles, while calculating prime numbers and holding a raw egg in your mouth, without breaking it.
Our teacher was encouraging and seemed to think I could go ahead with it, that it might suit my drawing. I don't know though. Prints - they can be beautiful, evocative and perfect, to say nothing of highly saleable, but, (see above), that way madness lies. Still A and I have inquired and will probably go back for another course in the new year. (Hmm. Typepad keeps correcting my Hibernian English spelling. We are not wrong Typepad! neither better nor worse but merely different. I wonder if there are other Irish folks using it. I would have to guess yes. Unique as I like to think of myself as being (if not very deft in the sentence forming dept) not even I can believe I am the only one in the country to have stumbled upon it.)

Today I got up at 6.58am and lept on my bike to hare over to mind Spike while Brother went to a rugby match in Toulouse.  (He does this as casually as if it was a trip to Bray to go on the dodgems. Am I (and Kevin from Grand Designs) the only ones that worry at all about the effects of flying on global warming?) Spike was sleeping in his parents' bed, breathing noisily through his congested nose and flailing about like a horse with colic. When he got up his hair was pouffed up at the back like Russell Brand's. He was a bit tired after the party last night, but rallied gamely when Gan came to visit. He can say so many things now, it's charming. For the moment. Soon it'll be time to tell him to sit down and shut up.*
eg of nephew genius:
Where's Gan gone?
and on his flash cards, which show opposites, he says BROKEN and FIXED instead of BROKEN and WHOLE.
Which is very sweet.

Oh, there's so much to know, in this human life.

My college colleague E and I went to look at bikes. The fear (that we share, ehem) is that with time we might actually merge into the same person. We call this horrible vision of our possible enjoined future FREAKY EM-BIE. The funny thing is, the more we try to avoid it, the worse it becomes and the more we spout the same nonsense at the same time.
A nice man in an Aladdin's cave/clausotrophobe's nightmare of a bike shop seems to be willing to help us find a suitable frame and bits. In truth he will probably be happy to relieve himself of the alarmingly high piles of bikes, dead and alive, that are lining his workshop to the point where you have to edge by them, nervously, afraid you might touch one and cause them to come crashing down on top of you.

Getting up at 6.58 really makes for a long day. Feels like 7 now, for instance.
I enjoyed the cycle across town under the lightening sky. The streets were so quiet.

Ma says she and Da need to be put down (lookit Typepad, Da is a word. So is lookit, come to that). They are in worse shape than Smokey, the Oldest Horse in the World.
Da has had (in the last 2 weeks)
1. A dodgy knee
2. A hiatus hernia
3. Suspected enlarged prostate
Ma brings up the rear with:
Her usual complaints and:
1. A back sprain that turned out to be a kidney infection

Poor things. I mean to get down and light up their lives with my presence asap. (ha ha) Not really, but I really should go down and tend to Smokey, TOHitW. It's just been terribly busy, and I have to present my work (yet) again to the group on Tuesday. Which means I must clarify my thoughts to the degree where they can be translated into actual words.

Spike made chocolates for us. They are call-call-calling me, or that might be the cinnamon buns Ma made for Johnny. We suddenly are adrift on a sea of baked goods.

I must away. More Irish spelled drivel later, I promise.
*(Not really. I'll leave that to his parents)