A BAD DAY SURFING IS BETTER THAN A GOOD DAY AT WORK

Beltane, books, arts and crafts and DNA. Also, am I channeling a surfer from another dimension?

The last time we were here, my newsletter was formatted like several entries in a diary, with dates and all- I don’t think I want to do that this time.

Beltane.

This is the start of summer, here in the northern hemisphere. A time to light fires (safely) and dance around maypoles with flower crowns. 

I don’t have a maypole to dance around but the flowers are a-bloomin’ around the Lay household! Instead of stringing flowers around my head, I’ll be cutting and bringing them inside and placing them in water. My favorite kind of pink geraniums that I played with as a kid and bright orange and yellow nasturtiums that grow like bonkers for me during this time of year and I cannot get enough. I saved a bunch of nasturtium seeds last season and moved some from the front porch area to our backyard and they are fantastic. They keep away pests and I’m hoping they keep rabbits and squirrels away from my attempted food garden.

In other summer news, I’ve been accepted as a vendor for a festival we have in my neck of the woods at the end of summer called the West End Festival. It celebrates the arts and there’s music, food and drinks.

After Kenny and I did such a nice job creating our living space, and his business decor has been turning more and more into his own vision of the tiny disco he started last July, I feel the need to curate my own shop-space again. That said, I don’t have the time or funding to have an actual shop, so I decided to start this “reasonably sized” process/project.. My “Lil Art Shop” online does well when I post works, and things I want are coming to me for this goal, so I am trusting it.

This early summer has me returning to so many small art and crafting things and it feels very good. This Beltane marks the start and Lughnasa will be the time I get to share the works and a lil tented space that hopefully will feel like everything I want it to feel like. 100% me. 

I attend this festival every year and even had my work on display as a part of other people’s collectives and organizations. It should be cute and fingers crossed that the weather is absolutely beautiful.

At West End in 2019, helping to promote a pool party.

Poetry

In Los Angeles, I was surrounded by poets. Poets and comedy writers. Artists as well, but so many of them also dabbled in performance and objects and the stringing together of words.

Conceptual poetry was something that felt like the glue around the art events and performances I was welcomed to and glad to be a part of. My work, I felt, was of a writer of prose as well as a visual artist, but I found myself more often aligned with the poets when I presented anything I’d done. I could use props and costumes and not be so “direct” and well, it was a good group to fit into as a conceptual performance artist, which is more of what I now realize I was. 

In Echo Park, 2011

The art world I knew there from around 2011 to about 2016 started to become something I felt myself carefully squeezing out of. It seemed that artists around me were doing what they could to fit into whatever it was that would get them moving forward and accepted into a world I just didn’t feel connected to, probably to the detriment of my career as an artist. Instead I worked on learning some life skills I’d somehow managed to skip over, and on the creative side of things began exploring fiber art, as I could work with those materials rather easily on public transit, on my daily and nightly commutes to and from my job as an art teacher.

Here is a wonderful former student who borrowed a piece I made during my aforementioned commute, to wear to Rupaul’s L.A. DragCon in 2017.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, aside from my recent desire to get back to taking time to experience poetry and art that requires some slowing down and stillness; trying to stop myself from getting carried into the rush of things and things that take me off course.

BOOKS

I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Ben Okri’s Astonishing the Gods after hearing about it from Nick Cave’s recent book. Actually, I’m on my second listen now.

I’m alternating between this and this other book called the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene that a student of mine started to talk to me about. Initially when I started reading it I felt so appalled that I was physically ill. It was something about a “law” involving taking the credit for things others do and benefiting from it that set me off. I read online that prisons don’t allow inmates to read this book, and several figures in popular culture who have amassed fortunes claim it as part of their start on the path of power and money.

I put it aside and when I asked my student about how the reading was going, he said he’d lost interest. 

I went back to the power book after I saw my partner ordered the same author’s book called The Daily Laws that is literally daily (dated) affirmations and stories. He had heard about it somewhere that it was good, having not read the author’s most notorious work. He still hasn’t started it, and since it was sitting around I read up until the date I first found it on the kitchen table. It’s kind of similar to what I get from pulling tarot cards in that one reads a page or two and you figure out how it fits into your day.

It reminds me of The Art of War, and also Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. And then there is Think and Grow Rich, which combines magical thinking with power and greed. I got that book in the 90’s. 

(PS I’m intentionally not adding links to any of the power books.)

I’m far more comfortable and interested in the “reality" that Ben Okri presents, but I don’t want to put blinders on when it comes to people hoarding power and money because that has an effect on my existence. But, if it’s all an illusion then who cares? I guess that’s it- Greene’s world has to do with accepting the reality of manipulation and power as an integral part of humanity and should be learned and used as we cannot escape it. I try to connect that to my witchy belief systems where good and bad come from the same place (to put it super-simplistically), but Greene’s outlook just feels limited or stuck in one dark subsection of the mystery of what we are. It still makes me sick and sad. It’s such a male thing to create a handbook stating what power is, isn’t it? Whether he’s correct or not, whether I’m unable to understand something essential and valuable, here is my review: Barf.

Okri’s protagonist in Astonishing the Gods is concerned with being invisible. He wishes to become visible and heads out on a journey toward that end. As I understand it, he finds himself in a liminal realm- one he’s told he’s lucky to have been welcomed into, and he must challenge himself and his perceptions, in order to evolve or reach this place of being visible. In the end and really throughout the entire journey he learns that invisibility is the goal, the gift or maybe it’s “the way.” But what “invisibility” is, is a complicated thing. Or it’s not, depending on where one is on the path. God forbid we become a statue and are unable to have another go and make another choice.

In getting back to “reality” I’ve also just finished reading Sally Field’s autobiography, In Pieces and I appreciate it very much, as someone who has lived through abuse and written diaries and journals since I learned how to write.

She has such a fantastic way of presenting her life as an actor and person navigating through her career. I don’t want to share much about it, because I think it’s worth finding out through reading yourself. I like how she ties things together and until this book, I spent a lifetime without giving her much thought.

I learned about it through Julia Louis Dryfuss’ podcast called Wiser Than Me, where she interviews women who are older than her, that she admires. I’ve listened to all of the episodes and the first for her second season featured Sally Field. 

SURFING

I don’t surf. I’ve never tried it. I’m not against it but my attraction doesn’t live in the thought of engaging in the activity/sport. It’s been this way since I was a child and I blame it on Annette Funicello and I guess 1960’s pop/consumer culture aimed at teens who were of my parents’ generation. Sunny Malibu beaches oozed from our family TV when I was alone with it, which as a proper GenXer, I often was.

My parents were not Californians. Dad, from Kentucky with roots in the Midwest and (I just found out, Scotland). Mom from Chile with roots in Spain, both made their way to San Jose just before they met and boom, I was born. We soon moved a bit south and living on the often cold and foggy Monterey Peninsula, I had no idea we were in the same “California” that housed these bikini-clad, surfboard-carrying, bouffant-headed teen dreams.

The characters in the lighthearted, technicolor surf movies that always played on the “boob tube” during the early 1970’s didn’t have jobs like the one my father had to go to every morning. They didn’t have to do the housework my mom did. They didn’t complain about money or worry about the lack of it or scold people for having fun. Those who did were presented as total squares.

Needless to say, I thought Annette and the gang were were full-grown adults, living life, and this was the life I wanted. Playing on the beach in the day, dancing at parties in the evening and hanging out at night on the sand, everyone coupling up and sitting on blankets, swaying to whoever was playing guitar. Tiki torches on fire as moonlight shimmers on the water. (Total Beltane “vibes,” right?)

When I grew older and lived in Santa Cruz I continued to follow this pop-culture connection to surfing and as an artist, began to investigate my attraction to the evolving aesthetic (found even more so in skateboarding) as well as the philosophy involved in the sport. You fall, you get back on, over and over again, because when you catch the wave- it’s amazing. 

A painting/study from 2018 that I have since painted over.

Anyway, this idea to write about surfing came about after my partner, Kenny, noticed how much of my artwork has to do with or starts off with an idea of surfing. In a joking manner he wondered out loud if I was channeling someone from another dimension or a spirit who used to surf, and has been using me to express this urge. Maybe? 

Sometimes on my commute, early in the morning, I pass through Santa Cruz. I drive around a bit, and from the seat of my car, I say hi to the landscape, stores, theaters and restaurants that were a part of my young adult life and my first attempts to be inside of some surf-city dreamscape of my own design.

In one area I see people holding mugs, walking to their local independent coffee house. They have time to stroll. Some have dogs with them, some don’t. This slow life I imagine seems nice, like being on a blanket on the beach in those teen dreams, and I’m happy for them.

In another area I see weary men outside of a bar-for some reason open at six-thirty in the morning, smoking cigarettes in the cold, as the sun rises. Their grimy beards and hats and clothes and the look on their faces seem to reveal that they probably aren’t thinking about the golden light taking them over, as I see in my view. Are they aging surfers who don’t follow societal rules? Have they been searching hopelessly for Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon’s beach fantasy with no luck so they are sad? Or are they in need of Robert Greene’s guidebook on power? I think they might be more likely trapped inside the realm of the Gods that Ben Okri described, but what do I know?

DNA

Guess what? I did the online DNA thing where you send your spit to be analyzed. Never trusting what my parents knew about their heritage, I wanted to know for myself what I am, aside from being born as a Californian.

Turns out I’m about equal parts Spanish (a bit more Spanish) and Scottish with a smattering of a few other things like English, Irish, Portuguese, French… and only two percent indigenous Chilean. I knew about the Spanish part but I wasn’t sure how much of Chile fit in, since my mom came from there. I am glad to know about the Scottish stuff, not because I know anything about Scotland, but because I only knew my dad’s side of me was white, and the name Lay comes from so many white places. Now I can talk endlessly about how my deep attraction to plaids is rooted in my DNA, lol.

Despite my recent news, I’ve been learning more about Chile on my own as I am planning on sharing something about the country as well as some sweet treats with students at the school I teach at, during our cultural celebration- something some of the kids decided to organize. I was hoping to share that I am a large part Mapuche (indigenous) Chilean, but alas, I am made up of so, so, so much colonizer. Ah well. At least I can, as somewhat of a Chilean-American, present myself as being in the same category as Pedro Pascal. He was the Mandalorian and that’s on Disney+ so that might impress the teens, which is alway very important.

Blessed Beltane!

The next time I write will be around the sabbat Litha and dude, now that I know I’m so totally Celtic, it makes complete sense that I use the wheel of the year to schedule my newsletters, am I right?

Aside from that- I should have a lot to share about the art things I’m in the middle of, come late June. I’m having a great time working on so many things right now that blend fine art with crafts that are usable and sustainable. I’m really excited to present “my world,” which I now realize is such a big, giant, mysterious mess of a soup, once again. It’s been a while.

Thanks for reading!