New links and a mysterious sketchbook

Hello All,
I'd like to call your attention to some new links I have entered on the bottom left of your screen. My friends Rain and Heidi and Adam are now linked, cause what they've got is worth reading! Yes they are blogs, cause blogs rule! I am addicted.

Rain and Heidi Kernytsky are both writers of the highest quality, their blogs offer intelligent thoughts on life and kids and culture and nostalgia (and moving themselves and their kids Ivy and Indigo to Vermont)....Rain also has the fucking hilareous blog "Dead to Me", which is a "shitlist of trifling banalities." I enjoy reading it at work to my coworkers and have them gasp in horror, "But...Costa Rica is SO beautiful!?? How can it be dead to anyone?!!" Hahahaha. Anyway, good stuff and good people. I recommend.
Also new on the list is Adam, who I was introduced to through Garrett (who seems to know an extraordinary amount of humble artistic geniuses), and whom I have become friends with. This link to to (BEWARE) his Myspace blog. I have tried to tell him he just needs a normal blog, but I think he can't be bothered. He's more interested in writing or something crazy like that. I love his poetry. It is so worth reading, and very San Francisco in case you were wondering how it felt to be here:

I PLEASE EASY

A warm night, and i could easily stare for
the next two hours straight until
a decent hour to go to bed thinking about
old sitcoms i've watched and giggling
to myself occasionally.

Instead, the door knocks, and my cute
neighbor has questions about poetry.

Lucky, lucky.

Later, i climb up on the window ledge for
a smoke, watch the empty taxis trolling.
The streetlight flickers off and on and i
think of rocks or some other shit i could
throw at it. A happy kind
of violence, left in
the darkness of the music you've made.


***********************************


So.
I was put to the task of sorting ancient German books in the dusty attic at work and found this tiny sketchbook, backwards on a shelf between a million volumes of Goethe, filled with whimsical drawings of deer and flowers and candelabras, and what looks like whimsical illuminated sayings. All hand don.. Of course, I fell in love immediately and persueded Carl to let me have it. Mykle thinks that it is written in Hungarian. I don't know. It's a little mini work of art, and I scanned some of it.



It's on my Flickr site, along with some covers of these gorgeous German world Fairy tale collections that I found up there as well. I really want them, but I don't speak German and there are like 35. Each one has a different patterned paper cover and an amazing gold-embossed spine. Oh they are lovely!

Illustration Friday- Angels (& Devils)

I did only angels. Maybe I'll do a devil soon and post it, but the angels obsessed me. They are harder than devils. Devils I know. Devils are easy.

This is the first one it did. Hmmm.

You know you are a romantic when........

this is the kind of "comment: you take pleasure in leaving on MYSPACE:

"I found her walking along the edge of the docks towards the end of my time there. Her hair was as black as the oil-slicked water beneath the pilings. Her face was sardonic and beautiful, eyes knowing, tracking my thoughts, my torn and inconsequential ideas. She gave that slightly wicked chuckle towards the end of my speech, tenative. I felt like a giant beside her, thick waisted and clumsy. We walked and the fog blew through our hair and white cold fingers. I knew I'd always see her again.
Distance was nothing to us, our friendship renewed wherever we had left off before, no remorse or apologies for our diverging lives. I treasured that. I always will.
Night closed around us and so did time. I left her tiny figure in the shadow of the lighthouse. I'd find my way back in the morning and look for footprints and find only ash."

that was for Jess.

One of my favorites: Yoshitaka Amano. An Asian homage to Klimt, with a delicate and rapturous line quality that is utterly stunning. I have his book of prints, but want one of his painting books. The color, the pattern, THE SPACE he can create- all are amazing and sensual. Oh!

Tell your rich friends!

BUY BUY BUY!
Haha, jus' kidding!
I have put my miniature paintings up on ETSY, and am about to start listing all sorts of things for sale there (for instance my rad earrings, above). It's like an online handmade crafts bazaar, and therefore I feel right at home:
Lovelorn Design by Kai Smart
I have this strange thing inside me which is a distastful feeling of vanity or presumption whenever I endevour to sell my art. There is some little voice in the back of my brain saying, "Oh, WHY would anyone want something of MINE?" and also saying..."Hey, I WOULD just give this stuff away, especially to my friends....!"
I'm working on banishing it. The thing I have to realize is that people shop BECAUSE they LIKE it (I got this all caps thing from Summer, and goddamn it is satisfying!). Just because shopping is a loathsome and frusterating act for me doesn't mean it is for everyone else. Quite the contrary, GodblessAmerica.
Also, because I see the ability to MAKE STUFF to be totally normal and no problem at all (heck! It's a lot of fun!) I downplay the stuff's worth. Like, I would make this stuff anyway. This is also something I have to fight against. The most successful artists I know (even artists that I don't consider to be very good) are the ones that have absolute confidence in their self-worth. The non-artistic masses respect that confidence. They view artistic talent as a gift, that they don't mind paying for, since they do not possess it themselves (or they haven't figured out that they DO have it!).
Anyhow, I'm sure this is quite fascinating (SEE?! There's my inate self-depricating behavior!)....O.K. umm.....updates:
This weekend I am seeing The Court & Spark, The Fall, and hopefully going up to Rock It, to see my brother because I MISS HIM so much and I want to dance. Tomorrow Pete Bernhard is playing at the Makeout Room, and Wednesday Michelle and I have a date to dress up in killer outfits and go vamp it up at the unfortunately-named Dark Sparkle at Cafe Du Nord. Lastly, Jessica Cooke (my tattoo Master) and her boyfriend Chris are having a show HERE in San Francisco at a gallery in Hayes Valley (580 Hayes). San Franciscans should go see it, the art of hers that I have seen was very cool, delicate paintings on wood of geisha with planar, almost robotic features. Wow!

textures and colors

These are patterns from some of my clothes and bags. I thought I could use them as sort of a backdrop to webpages or something. I lost my memory card for my camera, so now it only takes 12 pictures at a time. It's sort of nice. It makes you picky about what you photograph, like in the old days when people actually had cameras with film.

It's sort of amazing how epic it is to just sit on a bench in the sunshine in San Francisco. The land of fog becomes the land of cavorting children and people throwing frisbees to their dogs, and picnics and barbeques for no reason at all.

I have some recommendations for y'all:
Brick- a stunning film noir detective movie where all the actors are teens. It's set in the suburban wasteland of San Clemente, CA. I am of the opinion that that hard-bitten, gritty, and overly dramatic film noir thing fits the world of teenagers perfectly. Everyone is wild with sexual tension, violent urges, emotional turmoil etc. at that age. It makes sense. The dialogue is killer too.

Ian McEwan- this author writes such slow chaos and drama into quite insular family stories. It's like that David Lynchian unveiling of the inner perversions of outwardly normal suburban life, except without the random surrealism and blantant "I'm a weirdo!" moments. McEwan also seems to have a thing about spending hot summers in isolated places and how this makes everyone a little crazy. He's also a extremely respected author so you can feel smart when you read him on the bus!

Fernet and Ginger Ale- a refreshing after-work beverage. Fernet on it's own is sort of gross (though it's apparently taking the hip SF bar scene by storm) but paired with ginger ale it is both minty fresh and warming. If you forget to brush your teeth you can dash out on your break at work and have a shot at the bar! Viola! (Just kidding...jeez!) It also contains natural opiates.

Robert Wrigley- I gave my mom a book of his poems for Christmas, called "The Lives of the Animals". Each poems is about animals; horses, dogs, bats, but of course about just being alive on the earth too. It's truly kickass stuff:

QUIET NIGHT by Robert Wrigley

The bat's opened thorax blips

—that's its heart

beating, says the child—and its mouth bites at

the air, and the cat

that brought it down sits two steps below

and preens, while the pale cone

shed by the porch light makes and remakes itself

with the shadows of miller, moth, and midge.

Listen, the darkness just under the stars

is threaded with passings:

nighthawks and goatsuckers, the sleepy respirations of the forest,

and the owl that asks first for a name,

then leaves its spar

and spreads a silence

so vast and immobile

you can hear whole migrations inside it,

the swoons, the plummets, the bland ascensions

of souls.

El Radio Fantastique- We caught their show the first night we were back in SF, at Amnesia (the aptly named dark red bar where I forgot my hat and sweater). The frontman was a Buster Keaton figure in a ill-fitting ancient suit and spats, his croons and gentlemanly gesticulations were done in utter touching seriousness, and his voice was fantastic. He was backed up by a crack band with stand up base and fiddle among them. His Girl Friday was seated at the keyboards, she sang in a husky timbre and looked like she was fashioned out of Victorian ivory, black velvet, and lace.
Do you:
collect old Valentines?
use a pen and a bottle of ink?
drink wine in junkyards?
Then this band is for you!

Tattoo Appreticeships- Christ I hope this works out...........

much love,
Kai