Sorry for the brevity of that last post! It was hard to find the time to formulate any thoughtful reflections about the year while buried in the stress of packing, moving, and saying goodbye to everyone. But I have returned to my northern homeland, finally got around to unpacking the car, and life is beginning to settle again - even if only slightly.

First of all, just in case anyone was suspecting that my departure from Spartanburg was joyous - think again. In the time between giving Nicholas my last hug and pulling out of the parking lot, I began crying so hard that I managed to get lost on the way to I-26. I probably drove around for a good 15 minutes, sobbing and snotting and getting glared at because of the overfilled state of my backseat, before I gathered my wits and realized I was somewhere over by Asheville Hwy. It was certainly a sight to behold.

Anyhow, it is hard for me to sum up the ways in which I have changed over the course of the past eleven months - I’m not sure I have enough distance to offer that kind of perspective just yet. But what I can say, without hesitation, is that I am so grateful for this opportunity, for the experience of living in the American South, for the writing and art I was able to complete during my residency, for the limited ways in which I learned how to better communicate with others, for the relationships I forged with my fellow artists and in the community, for the many triumphs I felt, and perhaps most importantly, for the many failures I experienced and what I learned from them.

Aside from the time I spent on the third floor of 149 S. Daniel Morgan Ave., it seems like the only other place in Spartanburg where I spent a concentrated amount of time was on the streets and sidewalks of Converse Heights. Since last June I spent countless hours jogging the blocks of that neighborhood, always by myself, usually on the same route, and usually at dusk. Not having grown up in a neighborhood, I quickly grew to love how my runs along Connecticut and Glendalyn seemed to somehow place me on the periphery of the lives of strangers. From the scents and odors that wafted by me, I learned to predict who would likely be drying laundry, who would be cooking dinner, which houses would miss garbage day, and which houses would always possess an omnipresent must. I memorized the placement of lawn ornaments, the names of dogs and the times they would likely be tied outside. And sometimes, through an open curtain, or amidst the backlit scenery of blinds left ajar, I was allowed to glance every so briefly into those homes, and the lives of their occupants.

Experiencing the life of this neighborhood on a daily basis was perhaps the most subtle feeling of community I could have ever imagined gleaning from my time in Spartanburg, but for whatever reason, it often afforded me tremendous reassurance during some of my most troubled times. So thank you, Spartanburg, for offering me your community, however quickly I may have come and gone.

To everyone I had the pleasure of meeting - and especially those who I had the opportunity to know more personally - Thank you. Thank you so much for making my experience in Spartanburg what it was. I only hope that my contribution to you in some way equaled the many gifts I am so lucky to have been given during the time I spent with you.

Derya, Nicholas, Arielle & Brian: I love you so much. I know I played it off as a joke at the time, but if you ever need a bone marrow donor, the offer still stands.

So long, Spartanburg. I’ll be seeing you.

thank you for this year.

thank you thank you thank you.

It finally happened.

For the first time in the whole eleven months we’ve lived here, I can actually say that I had a crush on Nicholas. It lasted exactly 14 minutes and 54 seconds - the time it took to sing The B-52s’ “Rock Lobster,” The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun,” and Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” at karaoke last night.

Seriously, just look at this:

Brian came up from Athens for the evening and graced us with a song or two.

Derya outdid herself yet again, channeling Dolly’s part of “Islands in the Stream.”

I sang some Smokey Robinson.

And though she’ll hate me for posting this picture, even Arielle - a self-proclaimed hater of all things karaoke - sang some Hank Williams.

Looking over my more recent blog entries, I’ve noticed that these updates have grown increasingly less thought-provoking and proportionately more full of pictures. I suspect that this is because most of my energy has been going into preparing for our departure from Spartanburg. Even more than packing, cleaning, and organizing, I’ve been been trying to mentally ready myself for the reality of leaving.

Trying to imagine my life without seeing Derya, Nicholas, Arielle, and Brian on a daily basis is like preparing to have a family-sized tumor surgically removed from one of my internal organs - namely, my heart. I know, I know, it sounds so corny, but they really have come to be my surrogate - albeit dysfunctional - family. So if I’m not blogging, its probably because I’m trying to spend as much time with them as possible.

More soon . . .

we went to atlanta! we saw lots of fish! i’m feeling lazy today! so here are some pictures!

brian drove:

we listened to a lot of madonna over the course of the 3-hour drive:

we made it in time to eat delicious indian food, go barhopping, and play big buck hunter:

i drank a lot of whisky, arielle learned how to hold a gun:

at the star bar, we saw a band, and a lot of artificial fog:

did i mention dancing yet?

we stayed with our friend taylor (brian’s brother):

after sleeping in way too late on friday, we went to the georgia aquarium,
which was just about the best thing i’ve seen in a long time:

we were as excited/awed as children:

we saw sharks:

and whales:

and turtles:

and gigantic crabs (these were like three feet long!):

my favorite were the jellies:

on friday night we relaxed,
ate falafel, listened to the thunderstorm:

that evening we stayed in and watched “the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford,” which we unanimously agreed was an excellent film. saturday morning we all slept in way too late (again), taylor made the most delicious breakfast burritos ever, and we made it to eyedrum gallery before jetting back to spartanburg.

i think we all really enjoyed the entire trip. i liked what we saw of atlanta, and it was great to get out of town for a bit to spend some quality time with friends.

jones boys, a-i-r’s at the aquarium:

vacation! how novel!

aaaaand we’re back. i know i’ve been absent from the blog for the past week or so - its been busy around here! this post is mostly for my folks, who weren’t able to make it to our exit show this week. since its been so long, we’ve got a lot of catch-up ground to cover. get ready for the quick version . . .

last week thursday my best friend meghan flew into town from cape cod! here she is, at my desk:

yay!

that afternoon she accompanied me to the book release/signing for the poetry anthology i edited during my residency.

we had a great turnout for the event. thanks to everyone who joined me there!

we spent most of the rest of meghan’s visit preparing for the artist-in-residence exit show, which took place on tuesday night. meghan helped me finalize some of the diagrams i had been working on, calmed me down while i spent a god-awful 24 hours or so formatting/editing my chapbook, and even more time binding books, etc. all of my pieces in the show, including my latest chapbook, were centered on the themes of appropriation and recycled culture. my show statement reads something like this:

We live in an increasingly frightening world. The realities of poverty, war, famine, loss of our natural resources, global warming, pollution, and contamination of every kind grow more tangible by the day, marking our emotional landscape with consistent, low-grade panic. The present seems to inevitably merge with a future we are trying to avoid, while we struggle to actualize the future that we desire.

And yet, as we move toward these futures, our ability to access information is improving constantly, increasing the ease with which we can draw on that which has come before us. We are consequently able to rediscover history, reinterpret culture, and reanimate artifacts as never before. Somehow, the future has begun influencing the present by bringing us closer to the past.

My current work examines of the role of recycled culture in art and society today. This thematic preoccupation stems from an ever-present fear of the unknown, the concern that creation of “new” works of art might be impossible, and a curiosity regarding the relationships that the current generation of young artists might have to artistic movements of the past. Through the poetry, lyric essay, collage, audio, and found objects on display today, I aim to explore the value – and ethics – of appropriation and reinterpretation as sources of inspiration.

In his lecture titled “Goods,” designer Charles Eames asks us to return our attention to those fundamental materials that our society once coveted – objects such wood, wool, and chalk – reminding us to revisit basic definitions of beauty and value that have become so easy to overlook in today’s technological age. It is with a similar desire for re-evaluation of our unspoken definitions of beauty, of purpose, and of worth, that I present the work you see today.

in that vein, here are the pieces i had in the show:

a six part poem based on the aforementioned Charles Eames lecture, titled The New Covetables.

i also included a very large chalk diagram mapping some of the cultural/artistic appropriations i’ve been researching/reading about over the past few months:

this chalkboard diagram was a fragment of a larger diagram i’d been working on made from tiny slivers of typed vellum pasted on paper:

this original diagram was also photographed in fragments and printed on vellum. four different iterations of the photographed diagrams appear as vellum leaves in the chapbook i created for the show:

this chapbook, titled “notes on appropriation,” was constructed from all recycled/reused materials and hand-bound using a tortoiseshell-style japanese stab binding:

each of the chapbooks is completely different. the covers are made of old record sleeves and lined with pages from second-hand books.

some examples of the front covers:

one of the inside covers:

the book itself contained the lyric essay i wrote, “notes on appropriation,” along with a bunch of corresponding images:

these images were incorporated into a visual presentation that accompanied the reading i gave as part of the gallery opening:

it was a TON of work to put all of this together, but entirely worth it. the books came out beautifully and almost all of them sold! here i’m signing a copy for ginna:

i only have a few copies left, but if you would like one, they are $20. just send me an email at rachel.harkai@gmail.com

also in the show was a poem i found while perusing old children’s books for pages to use for my inside covers. it was about andy warhol’s campbell’s soup cans:

the last paragraph reads, “Maybe the artists are trying to prove / that they can do as good a job as a machine can. / Or maybe the artists think that soup cans / and other products with trademarks / are so important to people today / that pictures of these things should be painted. / Maybe the artists are making fun of people / who think that such things are important. / What do you think?”

this was in a book geared for 5-10 year olds, which pretty much blew my mind.

finally, i also included an audio piece, probably inspired by my love of karaoke, which was my reinterpretation of gary numan’s classic new wave hit, “cars.”

i recorded all eight tracks that comprise my acapella version of the song in my car, using my cell phone microphone, while running errands around town. its pretty embarrassing.

so its getting to be crunch time over here. eager to finish all of our chapbooks/sculptures/dresses/paintings/recordings/etc., the four of us are in the throes of the final push to complete everything for the opening of our exit show next tuesday. this equates to collectively high stress levels and erratic sleep schedules, in combination with anxiety and general mania. to top it all off, my one saving grace in all of this craziness is that my very best friend was coming into town from cape cod today, but as of now her flight is something like 11 hours behind schedule, with no certain end to the delay in sight. but apparently, according to the star-shaped post-its left by my computer, i’m not allowed to pout.

a little motivation/inspiration, care of the girl next door:

thanks d.

i very well may be too busy working/hanging out with meghan/dying to update here for the next few days, but i guarantee detailed updating of all ensuing debauchery (AND, ahem, serious artmaking) will follow as soon as the stress passes. see you then.

So February was hard, but you survived. Now what?

With early Spring on its way, the snow-melting sun has signaled that there is - in fact - life after winter. Warmer weather causes your cubicle to feel even more claustrophobic than normal, and in the improved quality of light you can finally see that the significant other you’ve been hibernating with all winter is actually as hairy and bear-like as the term “hibernation” suggests. As summer finally surfaces on the distant horizon, you might have to actually start making some future plans. Things are going to change. Life is suddenly confusing and full of unanswerable questions.

Thats right, folks. It’s March - Existential Crisis Month.

So while you’re repeatedly asking, “WHY?” (and often more-satisfyingly, “WHY NOT??”) here are some tunes to make the suffering slightly more bearable. In between the tracks about how difficult/confusing life is, check out new(er) stuff from High Places, Beach House, Jana Hunter, and Hot Chip, and also as-of-yet-unreleased songs off of the forthcoming albums from Man Man and Notwist (their first album in six years, yay!). Enjoy!

*DISCLAIMER: If you can believe it, I only today just realized that this player doesn’t let people who aren’t me hear more than 30 seconds of some of these songs. I am in the process of figuring out how to fix this problem, bear with me.*

Also, if anybody would like to join me (that means YOU Brian Jones!), I’ll be running a 5k Saturday morning to raise money for the Caroline Virginia Pulliam Mitochondrial Disease Foundation. It starts at 9 A.M. in Duncan Park, I hope to see you there!

Flight AC506

From Chicago, O’Hare Int’l Mon 19-May 2008 13:55 Toronto, Pearson Int’l Mon 19-May 2008 18:25

To        Toronto, Pearson Int’l Mon 19-May 2008 16:35 London, Heathrow (LHR) Tue 20-May 2008 06:25

Stops 0

Duration 10hr30

Aircraft E75 77W

Fare Type Economy (Lowest price)

Meal * F M,B

I bought a plane ticket! My summer European adventure is scheduled to begin on May 19! First, Chicago-Toronto-London, then bumming around Scotland/Ireland for a while, on to meet Marshall in Istanbul/Syria for a few weeks, then Berlin, Poland, and Ukraine with Edward, after that - who knows!

To continued escape from real life! Cheers!

1) Some perspective on the change of season, verbatim from my Gchat with Justin today:

3:47 PM
me: i’m just about to go for a run
Justin: that sounds fun, i think i might try to go cross country skiing after work me: ha! skiing! thats hilarious!
its 65 degrees here!

I know friends and family in Michigan will think this is cruel (sorry Dad), but seriously, the contrast between the climate here and the climate of my former home-state has been crazy this week! For example, running home about one hour after the aforementioned conversation, I turned the corner onto my street and pulled these - the first blooms of the season - from a flowering tree:

SPRING!

2) Also after returning home this afternoon, these things were found within a 15-foot radius of my apartment:

A box of heads.

A bag of arms:

I haven’t yet formulated an opinion on this.

3) I STILL hate Sasha Frere-Jones, who had another winner of an article in the New Yorker this week. Again centered on the overwhelming hang-up he has about white people appropriating elements of black music, his commentary this time was focused on recent Grammy-winner Amy Winehouse, who he dubs in the article as “the Marge Simpson of junkie retro soul.”

Wait, what? Do you mean a “junkie” who sings “retro soul”? Because Sasha, seriously, don’t pretend like there is more than one artist who comprises that musical genre you JUST MADE UP.

I could go on and on listing the article’s many well-padded, yet nearly-meaningless assertions (”This style provides a way of singing derivations of black music without resembling modern R. & B. In fact, avoiding the sound of current R. & B. may be its guiding principle. White singers generally seem to use it more than black singers, though it is open to anyone who wants to use its limited vocabulary.”) and unanswered questions (like the opening line “Is there anything surprising about Amy Winehouse’s being awarded five Grammys this month?”), but I’ll spare you any further reiterations of its uselessness.

Basically, I’m irked because Frere-Jones fails to make much of a stand on any aspect of Winehouse’s music or reputation, convincing me again that any and all claims he makes to his current employment as a CRITIC - much like his assessment of Winehouse’s “worrying series of relapses and collapses” - are “simply a trick of the light.”

4) I’m really digging the new Beach House album, Devotion. It’s pretty. My friend John works for Baltimore Public Radio (Beach House’s stomping ground) and you can hear his review of it here.

5) And finally, on the theme of music reviews, don’t miss Food For Animals latest Belly - an album I was loving for a while but had almost entirely forgotten about. Though a friend gave me the album almost exactly a year ago today (at which point I proceeded to rave about it for two months) I somehow abandoned it in sync with my move from Michigan. Fortunately (I hate it when I have to thank them), Pitchfork reminded me to revisit a sound that I didn’t even realize I’d been missing. Though FFA’s gritty, noisy hip-hop might seem out of alignment with the rest of my moody taste in music, this album is SICK.

More soon . . .

Its been a bit more of a movie-going week than usual around here, though its taken me a few days to get around to blogging about it. I know, I know, I’m probably running late in making any sort of meaningful commentary about these three films that Derya and I watched, but you know what they say about the South - things move slower down here. Apparently this cliche is also meant to include the planes, trains, and automobiles used to transport feature-length film reels to my local theatres. I don’t know why it takes so long for them to get here, it just does - so for my tardiness, I apologize.

1. Lars and the Real Girl

On Sunday night Derya and I headed over to the dollar theater to see a film recommended off-handedly to me by a friend - Lars and the Real Girl. Having expected something quirky but heartwarming, I was completely surprised at how disturbed I was by both Lars and the general premise of his character’s dilemma. In short, an overly-awkward, shy, late-twenty-something played by Ryan Gosling falls madly (and somehow asexually) in love with a life-sized, big-breasted sex doll, whom he names Bianca. To give you a quick idea of this film’s aggravating quirks, Lars supplies his new, mute love with the persona of a half-Brazilian, half-Danish, uber-relig missionary with a nursing degree, and spends the majority of the film talking to her, serving her meals, taking her on dates, etc. Though this might SOUND adorable, believe me, the novelty wore off almost as soon as Lars cracked open her oversize delivery crate.

If you can believe it - Ryan Gosling’s emaciated, tormented, crack-addicted, school-teacher character in Half Nelson was INFINITELY more endearing than the obviously-Midwestern, chubby, seemingly-harmless yet TOTALLY CREEPY Lars. And even more ridiculous was the suspension-of-disbelief required throughout the rest of the film as Lars’ friends and neighbors encourage his delusions by inviting Bianca to parties, giving her makeovers, bringing her to volunteer at the hospital, and even electing her to the schoolboard! Basically, aside from a few hearty chuckles, I found Lars to be nothing short of aggravating. But all general weirdness/lack-of-believability aside, I’ll admit that the degree to which this film creeped me out was probably compounded in part by the general jankiness of the dollar theater: stale popcorn, Christmas Coca-Cola commercials popping on-screen in the middle of the film, weird squeaky sex-noises emanating from an unseeable couple in the back row, and a room temperature cold enough to freeze my nose. But I guess you get what you pay for, right?

2. Be Kind Rewind

Conditions were much improved on Monday night when we headed to the more-expensive (but proportionately more comfortable) Spartan 16 to see Michel Gondry’s latest Be Kind Rewind, a heartening, full-of-hijinks comedy in which Jack Black and Mos Def remake a whole slew of popular films after Jack Black erases an entire video store by turning himself into a human magnet. I need to preface here: I love Michel Gondry’s filmmaking. I love it so much. I think of his films as being sad, romantic, visually stunning, well-scripted, lushly decorated - basically hitting all of my top requirements for what I like to see in art. After Be Kind, though, I was wondering if my expectations for his work - rooted in this intense, aforementioned love - might be set slightly too high.

Both of Gondry’s last two films, The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, found much of their magic in combining suspensions of reality (as found in the limitless possibilities of dream-worlds, or in the labyrinthine innerworkings of our memories) with the surprising, unpolished sort of beauty that emerges from a stop-motion, paper-and-paste aesthetic. This in mind, I had assumed that the plot of Be Kind - one centered entirely around unpolished, DIY-style filmmaking - would do nothing but enhance these lush, magical qualities of Gondry’s previous work. But I forgot that this film’s plot requires its characters to remain rooted in a world of realistic limitations. Any escape from this, even into the slightly surreal, would negate the film’s entire premise. The result is that, this time, Gondry’s aesthetic seemed to be a little too sparse, a little too deconstructed, and much less vivid than his previous films.

Maybe I was just in a bad mood on Monday - maybe I’m growing too embittered to relish the heartwarming, escapist qualities of popular cultural phenomena - I’m not sure. But as much as I wanted to like Be Kind Rewind, the end-credits left me slightly disappointed. This is not to say I didn’t enjoy the film - I did! I laughed at its imaginative wackiness quite a lot! I guess I was just hoping that Gondry would reach a more poignant high than, when in the middle of the Ghostbusters-remake about 25 minutes into the film, Jack Black brought me to tears (the laughing kind) by playing a green-saran-wrapped Slimer lit internally by an industrial shop light.

3. Persepolis

Eager to get our money’s worth out of the expensive Spartan 16 tickets, and still searching for some respite from our collective feelings of perpetual-disillusionment-with-reality - a condition that manifests itself as abiding low-grade heartache - Derya and I extended our film excursion for another few hours, sneaking down the hall into what was inarguably the gem of my week/month/maybe even my next few months: Persepolis. Really, I can’t say enough about this beautiful, beautiful film.

Through strikingly simple, monochrome-only animation, Persepolis presents the autobiography of graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi with breathtaking grace and eloquence. Operating in the tradition of so many great bildungsromans, Persepolis strikes the coming-of-age chords that would resonate with nearly any viewer, commenting on so many of the universal pitfalls of adolescence: the intoxication of young love, the pain of heartbreak, the difficulties of friendship and fitting in, and how we deal with our ever-evolving relationships to our family. From the curious little girl eager for an engaging bedtime story, to the teenager so-rebelliously blasting contraband Iron Maiden tapes, Satrapi’s story feels intimate and familiar. And though Persepolis conveys much of its poignancy through the universal, it is just as engaging - if not moreso - in its foreignness, both literal and figurative.

Using 1980’s Tehran as its backdrop, the film offers a glimpse into certain cultural and political dimensions that, for most of its American audience, will likely seem distinctly unfamiliar. With adroitness and poignancy, Persepolis presents the austere injustices of oppression, asking the viewer to consider life in a society that seeks to snuff out political freedom and cultural enlightenment, along with romance and all of its trappings. And without relying on any graphic carnage or gore, Persepolis depicts the tragedy, the utter incomprehensibility of war. See this film, and then see it again. You won’t regret it.