Battling My Pink Robots

This is a blog about stitching, textile art, creativity and community, not about the visitudes of my emotions. But I try to be a honest maker and artist and, for me, my emotional and intellectual life is a huge part of my art practice, so please be patient with me.

My view: knees, sheet and stitching

Woke up lonely and blue this morning. Unsure of myself.

I had two choices. 1) Stay in bed, stewing in my sadness, feeling like no one cares about me. 2) Get up, eat a big bowl of Greek yogurt with berries, put on some music that feels like an embrace and stitch.

Guess which one I chose.

The yogurt was tart and fresh. Listened to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (The Flaming Lips) and stretched out on my soft bed and stitched. The music, Wayne Coyne's voice, the simple red back stitch and my vibrant purple sheets... it seeped through my skin and worked its way down to the sadness.

I love stitching in DMC 321 red floss!

I wouldn't say that it removed my blueness or loneliness or shaky self-doubt, but it softened it. It put the lonely blues within the context of being a "part of life" that I can embrace, experience, survive and even create from, rather than be overwhelmed or crushed by it.


I don't know where the sun beams end and the star
Lights begins it's all a mystery
And I don't know how a man decides what right for his
Own life - it's all a mystery
~From, Fight Test

I have a long, busy, lonely day ahead of me today in the corporate salt mines. But tonight I meet up with friends, go to an art opening at The Nasher (The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure  the Signs of Power, 1973-1991) and meet Wonder Woman!

Opening night talk at the Nasher, 9/15/11, 7pm

And I had this morning and my music and food and stitching to buoy me. And there are so many people in my life that I care about and love and, I have to believe, that they care about and love me, too.

So I'm going to keep fighting and living and embracing experience and making what moves me to make it. And I'll keep reaching out to people, trying to make connections, both with my friends and by meeting new people.

I'll keep battling my pink robots.

Good Intentions Paving Company… How Do you Stitch a song?



Tell me if you know. I can’t stop listening to this astonishing song recommended by my brilliant friend Joe in Brooklyn, an amazing, musical man with ranging, eclectic taste. How did he know I would love it so much? Lucky me for having friends like this. Sometimes you are just fortunate for no good reason.

“Good Intentions Paving Company,” by Joanna Newsom is the most beautiful, weird, raw, surprising song I’ve heard in a long time. And yet, I recognize that it might me hugely annoying to other people.

And, although I can’t see when I listen because the tears almost instantly blur my vision (the song is so beautiful and “mysterious” as Joe described it), I’m moved to try to stitch it, the beautiful lyrics and the strange, fluttering, surprising vocalizing, the changing tempos, the moods.

It feels like a layered tapestry, this song. It makes me feel like something cracked open inside me. And I didn’t know that I could crack open any more. I’m going to be nothing but a pile of shards at the end of my short existence. How to stitch these layered emotions… No clue, but I will try.

I think Newsom, this artist (at least as far a this song goes) lives in such a crazy, free, open, honesty and fearlessness. And I know that I can (as much as anyone who supports herself by working for a corporation) live in this kind of honesty… I always have, often to my own detriment. But to live in this kind of fearlessness to say and create whatever I can possibly imagine… I want to be in that place in my life. I crave it. I’m not there, now. But, I am getting closer by inches…

My favorite line, squeaked out in a scary high register without any apologies on her part, is:

“And am in love with the hook
Upon which everyone hangs”

When you’re in love with the thing holding us all up and it is not defined… it is a hard way to live.