I am this forever

I suck at photographing my work at the moment. sorry.

p.s. approx. 12x16 inches, graphite + watercolor + pen and ink + brush and ink. I'm not sure why people always seem to want to know these things.

smell report

At the end of a semester such as this one, when I am generally freaking out about own failure at life and too busy distracting myself/paralyzed with worry to take showers, I move around in an aroma-cloud of baby powder, tea-tree oil, sugary lime juice and "stinky soap" (someone used this to refer to Dove as in the brand of my deodorant).

I'm not sure if I would rather smell like girly sweat or stinky soap. The other aromas are all pretty fun and addictive to me.

Just in case you were wondering.

---

In other news, it is almost time for the 10 year anniversary of the oldest (known) documentation of my presence on the internet. I just came across this while googling myself looking for something else. What I am referring to is my signature in the Lion King Guestbook in 1998 (I was 11). I only wrote my name and where I was from. Because that was all you usually wrote in old school, tangible guestbooks as a kid. Somewhere in the middle of this page, May 20th 1998. I like the fact that the person who wrote after me is named Sami and is from Nokia, Finland.





---

this has been me trying to distract myself. I am now going to switch over to J.D.Salinger as a method of distraction.

"all those picassos and stuff" -on art and animal cruelty

I was going to write a real thing about this but I am too lazy and it is too late so I am just going to paste the (splendid) instant messenger conversation I just with Alex Fitzgerald about the matter. I did edit it for easier reading.

Before you start I want to say: I have my own very firm opinions about what should and shouldn't be done with animals. I'm not going to get into it too much, but if you want to discuss it with me you are welcome. I just want to clarify that I do like dogs. I am just not delusional about them. I also think that hippie americans should leave people who have a tradition of whaling (=iceland (japan, etc.)) ALONE. just wanted to throw that in there. ok here's what i'm talking about:

alxfitzgerald

At the costa rican bienarte, this one artist tied a dog he had found on the street to a wall, and wrote "you are what you read"

in dog biscuits on the other side of the gallery

and then he took pictures of all the people standing there at the opening not doing anything about the dog

and then he let the dog go, but he led the people to believe that it had died

and everyone on the internet has gotten incredibly worked up about it

because people like to pretend they care about things on the internet


Júlía

oh blah


alxfitzgerald

but anyway, I joined the facebook group today, after a 5th invitation

and I stated my opinion in how it was a successful piece, and that too many of the people in this group had gone as far as threatening to kill the artist without doing the proper research to find out that the dog lived, and that while people are investing all their efforts into this one not dead dog, there are thousands of dying dogs no one is thinking about right now. And I also talked about the fact that the petition for this one dog has over 2 million signatures while the petitions against the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of strays in romania didn't even get 20,000

and now I am getting facebook hate mail


Júlía

people can be so hysterical


alxfitzgerald

and seriously, if I read "HE COULD HAVE PAINTED IT OR MADE A SCULPTURE"

one more time

I think I might cry

for all of humanity


Júlía

I want to join the group just so I can tell them they are dumb

and that they probably EAT MISTREATED ANIMALS EVERY DAY


alxfitzgerald

BUT THOSE ARE NOT DOGS JULIA

OTHER ANIMALS DON'T COUNT


Júlía

and what about the dude at the tate modern with the goldfish in the blender

and everyone else who starves themselves or others or pretends to do so as performance art

are they gonna make petitions about that too


alxfitzgerald

I want to start a group about that

WHAT ABOUT HERMAN NITSCH

I should post that in there


Júlía

i wanna write them all sorts of things

"your mom is “art”"

"your mom is an “artist”"

“dogs suck and they need to die”


alxfitzgerald

"i feel really bad if the owner had lost the dog and then this guy took it and did that to him. i mean, the dog has to come from somewhere......" -group member


Júlía

they are so stupid.

there are probably more stray dogs than people over there. like in so many other places. they just hang out in the street and suffer and starve.


alxfitzgerald

I KNOW

also, I love the ones who are like “I JUST WANT TO GO OVER TO THE GALLERY AND CUT THE ROPE AND SAVE IT”

this happened in 2007.

it lasted for a day.

" Abey Interante (Mylton High School) wrote: you know i think that the mona lisa and all those picassos and stuff are pretty good art and nothing died in the process of making those, why does a dog have to die for this! this is sad!!!!!!"


Júlía

i am going to start referring to good art only as "all those picassos and stuff"


alxfitzgerald

I want to go to MoMA

and just say "he's not bob ross" and "these definitely aren't as good as all those picassos and stuff"

fail time.

I've been eternally sick. sickety sick sick. not cold and flu sick, mystery sick. It just keeps coming back. I went to the doctor's yesterday and they took my blood out of me and then I felt even shittier because I don't have a lot of it already. So I'm on the verge of failing all of my classes on attendance. I need some crazy miracle to happen for me to pass them all. If you are doing some kind of voodoo on me you can stop now. You have succeeded.

They're going to let me know if they can solve the mystery of what exactly is wrong with me in 2 weeks. great. that helps. I already waited 3 weeks to see a doctor and by the time they get back to me I'll be going home in 2 weeks. To iceland where there are real doctors who actually talk to you.

This makes me want to give up on america but i am not going to. But I want to go home and hibernate and have my mamma take care of me and make me oatmeal and boiled fish.

maybe my poor icelandic cells are just suffering from a lack of good fat white fish. maybe that's all i need to make me strong. and homegrown boiled potatoes with melted butter on top. maybe that will stop me from wasting away.










I'm sad.

winner time.

I got an e-mail the other day:

Dear Julia,

Congratulations! On behalf of the jury members of the Vera List University Art Collection Writing Award, I am pleased to announce that your submission "The Butcher" to the 2007/2008 writing competition was awarded the first place in the category of creative response, with a prize of $400.

This means I wrote a story and sent it into a competition and won. The competition is for all the schools within the new school university. This means that a lot of people take part. this means that a lot of them are americans and native english-speakers. this means that some of them are writing majors at eugene-lang.

I still won. The Icelandic girl who never took a creative writing class in her life won. The Icelandic girl who just recently started writing secret stories when she was angry at people and/or had interesting dreams and/or real or imaginary conversations.

AMERICANS = PWND

This makes me happy.

Now you can all say "hey I started reading what Júlía wrote before she won an award and became famous."

joke.

I have one problem that I want to talk about. I have a borderline unhealthy obsession with real people other than myself. I guess I am interested in myself too but I am more interested in people who I know or know of. I am not interested in imaginary people. I never ask these real people permission to draw them or write about them because that would be weird. They would think I was in love with them or something. That is not the case. I am never in love with people. So I just go ahead and draw them and write about them, telling myself I'll just never show anyone. Like when I wrote The Butcher. Of course I change names and details when I write because that's easier than changing people's faces when I draw. But I still thought "I will never tell anyone I wrote this. I will not win anything in this competition because I am foreign and this story will never be published and no one will read it."

Well I was wrong.

The story is about being foreign too, in part. It's about me and being foreign and angry and tired. It's funny. The jury used the word "Irreverence" about something in my story. I had to look the word up in the dictionary because I am foreign.

Okay. this might make me seem productive. I am not. I never make anything serious. except this story and another story that I illustrated for my lithography class. I am happy with these 2 things. Even if I get bad grades, which will probably happen, I will be happy that I accomplished two things that I like this semester. Here is a picture of the book I made:



I don't want to post the inside because I wrote and drew a real person in it and I didn't ask them permission and I'm scared they will not like it. But if you want to buy one of these they might be for sale. You should ask me.

I want to now apologize to everyone I might ever draw or write about without their permission. I'm sorry.

I should do my homework. Instead I always spend all of my time making very unserious things. Like this unserious thing I made today for Alex Fitzgerald. I like Alex Fitzgerald because he makes me smile and he likes the internet more than I do which is rare. Before I knew him I thought he was a lame internet person. Then I got to know him as an awesome real person. Now we talk to each other regularly both with our real faces and with our internets. So today's conversation resulted in this:



I am going to leave it up to you to read into this piece. Here is a clue: "Irreverence."

I am going to drink my tea now, it has probably gone cold. then I will draw tesla coils. good night.

life plan and things you need in order to acquire eternal happiness:

I think I am trying to fix my state of "nothingness", by sleeping less for example. And doing some other things. I feel less like "nothing" right now. Maybe it's just because I went to mama's food shop though. Here is my new life plan: I will seduce someone who works at mama's. He will in turn bring me food all the time because I practically live next door anyway. very convenient. He will like horror movies and videogames and our lives will be perfect.

Now I just need someone who can teach me mad seduction skills.


joke.

Hey. I am really happy that people like to read this even though I'm writing about "nothing". And that icelandic people read this even though I'm writing in english = betraying the motherland. ACTUAL FACT = most icelandic people read english, but most foreign people do not read icelandic. It's a twisted world, I know.

Now I will talk about fun things.

Fun thing number one: Playing chess. I really want a nice chess set now. Rachael London has one and sometimes we play chess and drink tea or red wine and that makes for a very "happy sophisticated lady"-time. I'm probably better at checkers though. I will somehow acquire one of those double time sets. Then I will seduce people to play chess with me and we will drink limeade and look like this:



Fun thing number two: Limeade. Here are some reactions to my limeade:
Rachael: "Oh my god you are so incredibly good at this!"
I think that's it. Nobody else has tried it.



Fun thing number three: The brothers Quay are coming to present their films at my school on Friday! That is very exciting! If you are not familiar with them, they are basically a set of IDENTICAL twins who want to be Jan Svankmajer. If you are not familiar with Jan Svankmajer, you should be. They are almost 60. They looked like this when they were younger:



They pretty much are pretentious for a living. There latest film is called The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, possibly the most pretentious name of a film ever. At least their pretentious shit is really good. I tried hard to find a clip on youtube that wasn't 10 minutes and incredibly pretentious but this was almost impossible. But here's one from the Institute Benjamenta, which I watched several times during my video store days.



(Parts of the beginning reminds me of Vera. She will know why.)

If you don't have patience for that, here's a short scene they did in the film Frida, probably seen by more people than all of their own films combined.



nice, yes?

Well, one can only take so many fun things in one night. I think I need to stop now.

p.s. here are some titles I considered for this post: "The Piano Tuner of Pretentious Wannabes" and "Limeade Seduction". Neither one qualified.

p.p.s. I am enjoying this book very much now, both as reading material and a headrest for when I wall asleep in class: