SOCIETY IS NOT JUST SICK, IT'S COMPLETELY ABSURD!

at the big fancy art museum opening for the sculptor in oakland, the film i made was the highlight of the evening and had people reeling, including the photographer who inspired me to make the film... the sculptor's wife told me people were sitting in the auditorium watching it loop 8 or 9 times ~ i did not attend the event, but have since received an invitation to attend an Art Table Meeting with the same racist, narrow minded bitch ass snobs that would instantly give me Stink Eye before they saw that film at the exhibit.

*pfffft*

for MONTHS in preparation for this exhibit & corresponding book on his work, i was made to feel like everything i do is just amateur bullshit by upper class art hags who then went about REDOING all my work by paying a "professional" 8x the amount of money i make to take the IDENTICAL photographs and redesign an IDENTICAL book.  so this is indeed POETIC JUSTICE, that i STILL MADE SOMETHING they couldn't ERASE ME FROM, something that they COULDN'T REMAKE before the exhibition, and it turned out to be the "Best Part of The Show". 

the bittersweet guts inside : when i recorded the "music" for this soundtrack last summer, i was alone in the studio working while the sculptor and his wife were on one of their biannual holidays at the studio in the south of france.  suddenly, i decided to try an experiment and pushed my face up against one sculpture that i liked the best, pushed record on my android phone and emitted random frequencies that reverberated through the steel. i did 3 separate takes, then, with audacity, put the 3 recordings on top of each other randomly. 

i thought of him as a mentor after working for him these 20 years. i thought he had some respect for me in return as an artist, as a woman, as a human being. i was so grateful for his presence in my life...especially since he was now one of the only people i ever saw or spoke to on a regular basis. he was the last thread i was holding onto, he was the last semblance of this life i was living in california. 

so while singing these notes, i was OVERFLOWING with gratitude & the sadness one feels for the passing of someone they love ~ at the time, i could not imagine my life without the sculptor being a part of it, but he's 80 years old, so i had to start imagining life without him... after so much loss experienced during the last 5 years, i did not think i was ready for more. i thought i couldn't handle more death, more grief. i thought wrong.

that would be the last time i'd feel this bright shiny way about him because upon his return, his friendly pats on the back gradually began slipping further down to the small of my back and once, even reaching under my clothing. that's where my deluded loyalty to him ended. 

i've often said to him that making art is so difficult, but more so for a woman because EVERYTHING you do is considered for it's artistic merit only AFTER considering the fact that it was made by a woman, and that a woman has a CUNT. duh. whenever you lose yourself in the creativity itself while making something that is Not About Being A Woman, people who see that work Always Assume You're A Man...wtf?  he and i spoke on these issues Deeply Ad Infinitum for Years...  you THINK you know a person...

and yet, he KNOWINGLY paid me far less than i was worth, saying to the woman i was training in the office to do my job, "Why should I pay a designer or photographer thousands of dollars to do work for me when I can get Tena to do it for free?"  

$20/hr is ""free" in his mind, i guess. in comparison to all the other photographers' $150/hr fee, i guess it is nothing.  but it was more than i'd ever made, and i was happy being around the art and ideas, so it's partially my own fault for not knowing my own worth or for not being completely concerned with money as if it were life itself... but a discrepancy that massively huge is not easy to overlook, it's just insulting. these are people who spend $25,000 on a 3 day hotel stay on a regular basis for christ's sake. 
it's not like they couldn't afford to pay me more. 
but it no longer mattered, i was done. 
all the love was gone.

i always knew in the pit of my stomach that something was not right here, that something was being hidden from me, and once i was ready to see the truth, it revealed itself to me ~ on paper, in emails, in receipts, invoices, even in words said directly to my face, and then i could no longer feel any of that former love or gratitude or loyalty to someone who essentially just saw me as a cheap weekly entry in his jerk off bank, but who also just so happens to have a good eye for design. 

ironically, the sculpture i sang all those grateful and sad notes through was called ELEGY, and it's one of the most prominent pieces installed at the exhibit.  

so i say FUCK YOU to the art world that is no different from the pathetic 8th grade corporate world with it's unequal pay and discrimination in all ways across the board.

i say YOU'RE WELCOME to elitist art fags for giving me the chance to prove to myself that i do exist and that i am worth something, or at least worth as much as you poncey prats.

i say THANKS BUT NO THANKS to the sculptor for not having my back, especially since it was not going to give him access to the only thing he was really paying any attention to, my fucking ass crack. i'm sure i'll forgive him for all of it when there is no longer an older man in my life making decisions about where i will live or how i will pay my rent or how much i am worth to him Without Putting His Money Where His Mouth Is and/or Without Also Consulting Me In That Decision-Making Process About MY FUCKIN LIFE.

then i borrowed the camera with which i took over 5000 pictures of his work; pictures that were always credited to him in publications, even though he never took the photos or even knew how to work the camera, until the last set of three pictures on the exhibition invitation, when i was finally "allowed" to receive a photo credit in print, after a week-long argument with his tight fisted control freak of a wife. then i cashed my "little vacation" non-employment compensation pay that is, in fact, and unbeknownst to them, my Final Severance Check. 

MORAL OF THIS STORY:
please world, don't force me back into that corner, cuz I WILL FIGHT BACK, I WILL LASH OUT, AND I WILL CUT YOU A NEW ONE ~ I HAVE NOT LIVED THROUGH THIS FULL BULLSHIT LIFE WITH OPEN EYES TO JUST END UP ON MY KNEES SUCKING OFF SOME RICH MAN BOOBS BEARDED DICK FACE CUNT. 
I'D RATHER DIE.

*u can call me ph!*

nude krampus and bleeding eyes descending a staircase #2

this might cheer you up Lance.... 
but it also might not. 
i dunno. 
i tried. 

after all that stressing out, i finally just said aloud "i need some time off." yesterday, on my 3rd day of the only paid vacation i've had since 2000, i wondered why my stomach wasn't churning...for more than a whole day, no pain!!! then it occurred to me that This Is What Being Relaxed Feels Like.... FUCK!! so normal people must feel like THIS all the time.....DAMN.... no wonder everyone thinks i'm crazy.  so much of my time is spent in the turmoil of avarice...and just to stop myself from saying something i might regret on my last day at work, i randomly opened The Book That Has Changed My Life, "When Things Fall Apart" by Pema Chodron, 

and read "OPINIONS: When we hold on to our opinions with aggression, no matter how valid our cause, we are simply adding more aggression to the planet, and violence and pain increase. Cultivating nonaggression is cultivating peace."  and the sentence that was like a kick in the stomach and brought me instantly to Ouch-This-Much-Compassion-For-Self-Hurts tears, "Never give up on yourself." once, again - exactly what i needed to think about all day. it has already made a huge difference in that the attention paid to Nonaggressive Thoughts actually gave me a full 3 days of painfree living. it's a truly Great book, in the best sense of the word. that might be why i've never read it cover to cover and have only ever read the pages i open randomly in times of peril. 

it continues to serve me well...  

after watching a documentary about Delia Derbyshire, i was inspired to do something with the massive pile of tapes with piano recordings on them. in the process, i experienced a tactility that reminded me of editing super 8 film, but a Digital Tactility~never thought i'd see the day... so i made a new song, but can't really call it a song since it was more like an exercise in exorcism as there is also a large pile of things written on paper since 2010, and in order to put it behind me and throw them in the Ever-Increasing-Pile-O'-Things-To-Toss-Tosser!, i wanted to choose the best one and DO something creative with it so that all of that horribleness wouldn't have been in vain. 

so i did. some unexpected stuff came right the hell outta me. 

not sure how other people feel when they make things that end up scaring them, but it is most certainly an odd experience that i cannot say i like or dislike, as it almost becomes Someone Else's Work that you are looking at after completion.  [there is no easy way to say this, but...] the reason the music i make is so varied, as well as my general eclecticism, is probably due to the fact that there are a lot of us living in here. although we are a lot closer, aware of each other, communicate far more frequently out in the open, and are far kinder to one other than ever before...it's almost funny to me now, having actually met the alters and discussing this, that i used to think i was Not Lucky Enough to have my brain fracture into several different people in order to deal with the war that was declared on me by my mother and father, starting  when i was 19 months old until i was 19. then of course the post trauma ghost war that officially ended in 2013.

it was a good day, when i realized at sunrise, walking home down capp street after seeing my parents for the last time, trying to hold in the bliss fueled tears, that 

The War Was Finally Over. 

it's important to have things to look forward to, it helps curb the depression, so in an effort to reduce current uncertainties about where & when & what to do with myself(ves) when i move out of bleakhaus, out of sf, out of california altogether, i've been intentionally attempting to contact certain helpful entities during lucid dreaming and ask What Would You Have Me Do? but i have yet to actually have a lucid dream -- and it's been over a month of waiting for lucidity to happen....  while listening to a new Kate Bush song tonight, suddenly the word "horses" in her lyric reminded me of last night's insanely colorful episode in which i was lucid for a mere 30 seconds but went back in to dreaming without waking up. so, once again, for the 8 billionth time, i say Thank You Kate Bush, for without your work being in this world, i would probably not still be alive -- Hounds of Love, and specifically The Ninth Wave kept me going during a particularly crisis filled period from 1984-86 and it's still difficult for me to listen to that album without becoming overwhelmed with gratitude that you exist, that Dan Wilbur in high school told me about you, that the album came out when it did, and that i bought the tape immediately upon it's arrival in new jersey.  The Sensual World : same thing for 1989-91 in Massachusetts, but all for a crisis of uplifting because for a person who is accustomed to living in darkness, sometimes the light can be too much even though it feels fucking amazing & great to be in the light instead of lost & alone in the dark. (((0)))