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6:20 p.m.

15 November 2009.

I wish there was a way to blog on myspace without blogging on myspace.  I'm sure there is.  I just haven't figured out a best approach yet.  I woke up this morning at 4:45 a.m., so I feel a bit messed up, but the good news is I woke up and wrote a song, or at least started one.

It's been a very strange couple of years and when I say years, I'm not kidding.  There's this thing about being on the web, there's a sense that everything is about 5 years old or just born, or fantastically new.  As an end-user, that's the experience, there's a chance to learn social networking and to be expert at it right away, because it's only been around for a short while.  Lately, I've been thinking a lot about things that build up over time, which is most other parts of life and civilization.  Construction principles, for example, the cultivation of soymilk.  On the other hand, while music has music history, because of it's nature, without FORMAL training / learnin' a person can still make a sound, it's in a different category.

I guess without formal training someone could fix a shoe, but they might not be so good at it.

Oh brother, what's my sleep-deprived point. 

It's been a strange couple of years, where, through no real intent of my own, I have time-traveled while living in Los Angeles.  My concept of myself has shifted from, oh, I guess, happy / unhappy ego-centrism, to awe in the sight of what's been around and what will come around, and what will go into the ground in that process.  Mostly individual lives.  So, no, I haven't been thinking about mortality, but just feeling a sense of joining human civilization as one finite (but still in progress) consciousness.

One small blip.

I guess some stars must feel like that.  Out in the cosmos. 

Where does the word "toggle" come from?  I've been toggling and time-traveling between now and forever.  That's just mumbo-jumbo.  But therein lies the perfect irony. 

Blip James Brown has time traveled to Echo Park today.  These ten year old Hispanic boys hanging out on the folding docks of my laundromat were singing his songs.  And every time they sang a line, they laughed because it was hilarious.  Who knew!  Blip James Brown is working from home, podcasting through the mouths of babes.  TA.  Totally awesome.

Even though I'm pooped.  I have more energy lately.  More to come.  Gotta keep these things short.

Love,

Shalanna, I mean, Alanna

There is a certain numbness that comes with drinking small amounts of whiskey and smoking small amounts of cigarettes that feels like intelligence. It's the chemical narcissism that posers are made of, so. . .that's me. I'm pleasantly buzzed listening to a second round of Johny Hartman and John Coltrane and it's the end of a Saturday night and I feel like waxing. . .my legs, waxing poetic, same difference.

I have some new pictures of myself, more to come, as the Glambike poster woman. I'm no girl. I have an article to write about discovering my own cleavage. If any of you know someone at Maxim, please let them know I'll be sending a submission soon. My computer just told me it's 11 o' clock, so I'll keep this short, but I just wanted to blog about an art experience I had because I'm numb and intelligent--the best state of mind in which to offer an art critique to the gods of myspace.

Ahem.

I was taken to Hollywood yesterday to go to club where a friend's friend was having art presented in a part of the building. More importantly he was going to have a private table, complimentary bottle service, and had an unlimited guest list. More importantly we would get to wait in line (there was none) and be exposed to the elements, namely a lithe doorgirl in small black panties who moved across the floor like a young dear. You say Bambi. Her buttocks were emerging unselfconsciously, a perk of good staffing, when I look back on it now.

The art was a series of canvases to which painted light bulbs were affixed. Beneath the painted light bulbs were tidy streaks of paint of the matching color. Sometimes the light bulb would appear by itself, singular, with one single streak. Sometimes there would be several light bulbs, evenly spaced with evenly spaced streaks beneath them. One piece had three bulbs, with streak beneath, one bulb left slightly untreated with a clear streak beneath it.

I was not moved by the art and I realized why. No where was referenced what light bulbs are to the average non-light bulb painting individual. No where was there a sense that the artist was concerned about this probable, dare I say, universal frame of reference in the viewer. Most of us expect light bulbs to give off light. These bulbs had been extracted from that frame of experience/reference in a deliberate act of painting and organization. But it was not art, to me (I'll add that), in that while looking at it, my analysis and hypothesis of what could have been, became more interesting to me than the work itself.

I wanted him to go ahead and paint his balls, I mean, bulbs, but I wanted to see the process by which he arrived at the impulse to make opaque that which is typically incandescent. I wanted him to acknowledge what a light bulb does and make it do more than it normally does through artistic technique. If his painting used metal that in a representation of smashed bulb gave off even more light through broken refraction than one intact and switched off --- I would feel a swell of meaning, through analogy, conscious or not. I would feel a Leonard Cohen song. But there was no analogy, just simple subversion, that is, taking the light away and leaving nothing at all.

This blog has been sponsored by Knob Creek and Dunhill Cigarettes, International.
Meaning, I use the stuff and it helps.

Love,
Alanna