Sarah LaBarge

Photographer Amelia Morris’s unspoken one-liners, booming silence in image.

sblabarge — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:20:32 +0000

Few people so succinctly sum up visually what needs to reach me like my friend miss Amelia Morris, currently of Indianapolis. Catch her.

www.thanksandsorryphotos.com

From her project, “The One-Trick Pony and Other Concerns”

http://thanksandsorryphotos.com/portfolio%20one%20trick%20pony.html

“In art classes, Amelia Morris heard several individuals remark that when they are in need of subjects, they can always turn to self-portraits. Adopting this idea as her own personal philosophy, Amelia often incorporates an autobiographical slant to her work while still striving to express a universal experience.

That being said, she’s still trying to make sense of it all herself.”

Perpetual Summer Wyeth-esque Gif by SBL

sblabarge — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:32:30 +0000

My Advice

sblabarge — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:29:58 +0000

Internet treasures. This post updated over time.

Hours and hours of my life were dedicated to researching this madness. It is actually on my to-do list to research much less.

Here they are:

Evernote.com. Interface can be tinkered into any machine of organization. I stack notebooks to keep everything from novel chapters, research, to-do lists, family addresses, to pdfs of art show entry forms. I like: forward e-mails to your account. Free.

http://the99percent.com/tips/7093/Setting-the-Scene-for-a-Productive-Day

An article that in itself could be the basis for success. We are all visual and distracted artist-like people to some degree.

http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2010/12/10-tips-to-beat-clutterin-less-than-5-minutes.html

http://the99percent.com/ ”It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.” This really opened my mind to the nature of being creative, and how to geek it up and get it done instead of daydreaming about it endlessly.

Mint.com for finance.

Etsy.com, look for some intro videos for sellers. Great articles for anyone with art or a brand.

I tend to look up classes in catalogs, then look up textbook requirements for that class using their school bookstore site, then read the intro of that book preview on Amazon. Ha

Klok 2 free software download- punch in as a freelancer, monitor your down-time, work time, work-out log, sleep log, on and on.

Svpply.com, visual product feed with an interface I prefer over all others. Visual list-maker, great for inspiration.

The Ego, Hawr-hawr-hawr

sblabarge — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 22:06:19 +0000

In the box I live in, I see the ego as a doll we were all given to play with, and in the absence of others we prune and groom and pose it to any number of standards we were presented with. I would choose not to if I could, and would celebrate and mourn with and for others. But I can’t get the little girl within me to believe what I am telling her; “You know now how silly adults are, how sequestered and stuck and violent inside about how they suspect they will hurt you in the end, or that someone else will be better to you, or that you aren’t putting them on any sort of pedestal, and you know that now, so you musn’t try so hard to ‘get them to stay’, right? You know you are more than of a standard or average uniqueness, and if you weren’t, you could have enough fun and make enough pleasant meaning out of anything, right? You should celebrate what you want to celebrate and mourn what you want to mourn.” She stops putting a trendy barrette in her doll’s hair just long enough to say, Well, I think I see what you mean.

There are those vibrant people who make us feel welcome and wonderful the second they meet us, “Awesome shoes! Great song choice as well!” and if you are anything like me, you are hung hook and sinker, slave by the motion of a handshake, not knowing whether you will emulate their healthiness or claw for their attention as long as their head edges your direction. But of course I’m being hyperbolic (it’s what I do) and yet, are they really healthy, and aren’t there enough indicators in life that prove just how ephemeral everything and everyone is… celebrate them/you, and/or mourn them/you, but attachment is going to occur one way or another. When can I be that gift to someone else?

When can I make someone feel warmed and welcomed? I put down my doll and try for a moment, though I’m far too introspective to do this better than an autistic kid unless I’m wearing a glow. Running down my street, I see a ten-year-old in a football jersey wearing headphones and chanting his own athletic success to himself with a stern and focused face. We pass each other like people passing in subdivisions in the afternoon… nary a flag waved or flare thrown… I am doing what he is doing.

I would have applied to graduate school by now if I didn’t feel this way. I would major in art or writing or fashion or architecture. I would mow the lawn if I didn’t feel deep in my bones that any part of a lawn not meant to be sat on or muddied for the dog in summer or used to grow tomatoes is not meant to be an obligation. I look at houses and see nothing but obligation someone else chose to want. I’d like to help out more and do tasks for others, but my wiring is fierce and I trip over it in my mind’s cellar.

I can’t just waltz out there and admit that I think I’m cute enough to be this and yet not witty enough to do that, or lie that I am not pissed about the bizarre emptiness hitting me in the face like an agitating drizzle or heat wave in a city I would have found uninhabitable 1oo years ago as well, and yes, I’d have been one of those women whose lack of desire to continue mankind by birthing offended the orthodoxy, so let’s be glad I wasn’t around then. I’m in yr subdivision, rippin up yr concrete sidewoks w my kicks. I’m blogging in yr down tyme, makin words on yr screen.

In the few times I’ve had children or teens under my wing, I am That Adult who thought all of the above thoughts, who is waiting for them to ask very specific questions about self-expression. Then I will be good Aunt Sarah who can take them on my knee in an appropriate form and say, well, I am so glad to hear you are headed that direction. Maybe I can help, after all.

Maybe I will go to graduate school when I find that, from here, choosing to delay a career path that is defined by its history is dumb, and I will know how to choose a career path that allows me to define its future. My jobs do not pay well. And I’m far too meta to cover up their lack of dignity.

So do you know the solution to this harangue? The internet. I am well-dressed in my own eyes by words, I am hawt in my own eyes by the hilarious pointlessness in it and great editing software, and I may sell my wares and wait out my destiny.

Clocking In

sblabarge — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 03:46:52 +0000

Earworm: music, or lyrical prosy or poetic phrases, stuck in head, which are the citrus candy I keep in my cheek until my cheek is sore and the taste is abhorrent as I vacuum the floor in the English department at a high school, eying the grammatical errors on the teachers’ handouts, of which I am not licensed to create or disseminate, but thoroughly justified in filching from the trash and completing with varying loopy lefty false-dignity handwriting.

JOANNA LEWIS

sblabarge — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:50:14 +0000

JOANNA LEWIS

Excerpt

“Jo’s boldness rose and fell with each step in approaching the shack, which she’d waited all night and part of the morning to investigate. The shack was primitive and haphazard as if built with the remains of several cannibalized others. The night before, candle light had shot through the open door and stolen her attention—she’d lain awake wondering at the closeness of such a place to her domain, of which she was a naive master.

~*~

Henry’s grizzled yellow-whiskered face and blue eyes, yes, piercing, his unknown age in a youth of 30 or so, his distrust, all of it, sitting at his table—JoAnna caught it and turned it over in her head.

“Well you can have some of this meat here if you want or need, whichever,” he offered with a soft voice, tearing at a chicken leg with sharp teeth. “So that was you over there and not some gypsy. I hadn’t thought to drop by just yet then. No, no, it’s true I didn’t care. Damn I needed this chicken; it gave its little life for me, but whichever, it’s dead now… why so quiet there?”

JoAnna could only stare at him. She didn’t know the game at hand. Why was his smile warm with a warmth that indicated a few screens sat in front of the fire?

~*~

She watched him in the cooling evening and began to need his offer of warmth. As he sat filing his toenails and crooning a gentle song, her hands quaked behind the bushes, her pupils dilating like snake’s jaws.

In her wild defense, she ran back to her lean-to which was degrading to an awkward pup tent and rocked back and forth on the chilly quilts. In her mind, she heard his laughter, which she’d stolen in the dark without his permission when he was chuckling to herself, and made it about a joke she’d told. His sunburned shoulders and pale neck were her resting place, but made of clouds. His pink chapped lips were hers, and so were his angel-ridden kind smiles.

She stayed the winter there, and he slept soundly next to her and never reached her way, even if he had smiled like a handsome prophet due several wives, even if he had shared his meat—all of it stolen. She listened to rich stories of his childhood in the country, how he’d done well in school, fleeting dreams of a rich life, but her brow stayed knitted.

If she hadn’t taken him to town for dinner, she wouldn’t have seen his eyes brimming with desire for a young couth barman, and his hands running vehemently through his long blond hair over and over, stretching his forehead with a grief, trying to express thankfulness for the dinner in lies, instead expressing a poetry-based confession of a vast loneliness recited in rhyme which sounded like demons to Jo, all leading up to a queer sprint home to the woods, his muscles like that of a mustang, his cries like those of both coyotes and eerie mad foxes, desolate like a freight train, and plunging through the snow which bit JoAnna through the tops of her boots as she pursued.

Back in his cabin, he paced from end to end, then grabbed JoAnna and pressed his lips to hers. In the heat he worked her mouth but flew to her jawline, his teeth clenching with irritation and lust on her neck, then turned away from her and took pause.

“Go,” he said.

If she hadn’t taken him to town for dinner, he perhaps wouldn’t have died.

She spent the first night in two months in her abandoned tent, feeling ill like a kicked dog, loved like Aphrodite, and hated like Medusa the bitch with the snakes. The tent was no home and making a fire with old stolen gasoline no pleasure, as the moon was making its way into fullness.”

Late 2010, Early 2011. Sarah LaBarge