Spoiled brat Katya

Today I want to address the state of my emotional being. A lot of negativity has entered my life recently, and trying to deal with very separate negative issues is really hard, because as much as I am trying to stay positive and do all those things people tell you about being positive, happy and so on, it is quite overwhelming. It is overwhelming how much just piled up on me in the last couple of weeks, and instead of getting better it seems to only be getting worse.
When I was a kid I used to have these day dreams that I was actually a test subject for some crazy experiment on human life, and everyone around me was in on it, all except me. They all had specific roles to play in my life, and acted accordingly. When somebody was being mean to me, it was because it was required of them, and no matter how much I begged for softness and care, it was not to be given by that particular person because that is just their job, they don't actually care about my feelings. I am simply a test rat, and no matter how hurt I was inside, how much I felt like I was breaking, it didn't matter to anyone except as a result for their test.
I didn't really believe in this day dream but I would just sometimes think about it and imagine how truly horrible it would be if that was true.
I haven't thought this way since I was a little kid, even in my worst teenage years I did not think of my life in this way. Recently however this thought returned to me and now I am fighting the urge to believe in it.
Why? Because everything I really want to happen is not happening. Every person I want to impress with my artwork is not impressed. There is one side of people that keep telling me I am talented and awesome, and then there is another that doesn't care about my artwork, that hints at how truly shit it is, or just outright ignores my pleas for some feedback.
I feel like these people were told: get in two teams. One team will be overly nice to Katya, and the other will be horribly nasty. It's funny how I imagine myself "so important" (as someone told me one time about this theory of mine about the experiment; sort of like... stop thinking you're so special that everyone around you is watching you; that's not how I imagine it, in fact it's the opposite; yes, I am being watched, but for what purpose? to be a test rat, that's really low, lower than being just boring human). I imagine myself "so important" and yet so pathetic and useless. All my dreams that I have are laughable, minuscule. Kind of like "you make art? aww that's cute but so not serious". I feel like I am constantly fighting to be understood as being important, as being something solid. I feel that a lot of times I am just perceived as whatever, as if my art is a "hobby" and I am just lost trying to find something to occupy my life with.
The problem is I am not lost, I know exactly what I want to do with my life. But for some reason the majority of people perceive my plans as unimportant, as laughable, as stupid and naive. Perhaps they are naive but most people that have achieved what I want to achieve were also perceived that way. I don't know how the hell they dealt with it, except exasperation and excess. My hero is Van Gogh, and he had it rough, and he didn't really deal with it in a good way either. I don't want to be like him, but I want to be as great and as important as him.
Art is very subjective, but for some reason people like to objectify it. Oh you don't draw/paint people precisely as they are anatomically - that rules out any significance your piece has in the eyes of the majority. It's like we've traveled through 20th century modernism and we're still back to the core of how to paint realistically, how to render things realistically because that is still how most people judge art. That is so ridiculous and so narrow-minded, it makes me want to vomit.
I create things that I enjoy to look at. If I ever create something I don't like, it makes me feel as if my insides are being squeezed by an iron hand. I am so excited about my artwork, and I always want to share it with my friends, but it seems that nobody else cares at all. I invite people to come look at my stuff, but it's so hard to persuade anybody to waste 10 minutes of their day to look at my work. I want to cry about the state of the society I live in, where looking at art is almost as annoying and hard as writing a response paper for a class or doing a calculus test.
And this is where my other day dream comes in. In this dream I imagine as if I am the last human on earth. All the animals still exist, but everybody is gone, every single human being is gone from the earth. I learn to survive on my own, slowly but steadily. I usually have this day dream when I ride my bike for long periods of time. I ride through the green lush landscape, and the sun shines on me and makes me smile, and I look at the patterns the sun creates through the leaves and the trees, and it moves with the wind, the patterns move and the smell of the flowers mixes with the smell of spring that the wind brings. It's really wonderful, it's really beautiful, and I just want to freeze this moment because I don't want to go back to dealing with rejection, harshness, aggression, and everything else that humans bring. I know I am starting to sound like a neo-hippie-nihilist. I can't help it, this is what the world makes me feel right now.
Don't worry, I am hanging tough. I am a tough cookie... I can take it. I just don't want to, but we all know that what we want and what we get are star-years apart from each other. Ask me about my day dreams in twenty years, and I will probably still have the same ones.

totally new worlds

Following the last post, here is my newest art. This is a whole series of works called "Other Worlds". Here are the photos from my senior art exhibition at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Here is the concept:

The next two are the starting points for the series:

"We Bring Christianity to Another World"

"Baptism by Water"

The next eight are huge 4x8 wooden boards, all inter-related.

"I Can Walk on Water"

"Rebel in a Church"

"The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa"

"Baptism by Fire"

"Camus' Outsider"

"Lions' Den Survivors"

"The Skeptic And The Believer"

"The Good Samaritan"

And then I also made a sculpture piece in collaboration with Joe O'Brien. I made the sculpture and posed for the photos and he took the photos and developed and printed them. It's called "St Sebastian as a Woman"

There are also other paintings that I made for this series but did not put in the exhibition.

"A Planet of Dreams"

"Cosmic Vibrations"

"Negative Tension"

And finally, this is kind of a joke painting... I like to make things less serious sometimes. It's called "Adam and Eve enjoying some planets."

new art/old art

Today I am posting some of my art works. These are all part of the "bodies" series, done over the last year and a half, mostly since I've come back from London up until about mid-fall semester. The last three are from sophomore year but they are also some of my most favorites. All different sizes, some on wood and some on canvas. 

Words of Wisdom

If I write such good analysis of fiction, fictional characters, their relationships, families, their 'tragic flaws' and characteristics... then why can't I come up with a good analysis of myself, my life, my relationships and my feelings?

I've always enjoyed writing about literature, in school it was one of the first true accomplishments I had. I reviewed Gogol's short story and I got a perfect grade for it.

As I got older, the books got more complicated and my passion for writing about them deepened. It was no longer listing metaphors and what-not. It was about delving into the head of the author and the heads of the characters.

All kinds of relationships were unveiled before me, relationships I could never experience, settings I would never be part of, and yet I enjoyed them a lot more than my own life.

My own life seems to have become quite boring and pointless. Or maybe it started out that way. I had a brief time in early teenage years when I actually rebelled, I thought I was worth a dime or two. But now I see that really life is minuscule. I'd rather spend it experiencing as much as possible, not necessarily first hand, but more likely through the experiences of fictional and real people.

However, reading all those books never really made me understand myself any better. Sometimes I read something or watch something and I think: this is just like me! But then I realize all books have endings, all films have "the end" written in the last scene. My life has no end, well not yet anyway. It's hard to think about my life and what different things mean in it, when other people, real or not, are much more interesting and accessible. I can never be my own therapist.

It's funny how that happens. I am so good at analysing everyone else, but when it comes to myself I am lost. In the end I just throw it all over my shoulder and think about somebody else.
Here is some of my most favorite literature ever written, in no particular order.

Not that much passion

I just wasted 2+ hours watching The Passion of The Christ. What a disgusting, unnecessarily violent and pompous film! On top of that it’s so far off on the message it was supposed to bring. The acting is good, and the iconography is amazing, and so is the cinematography, in a lot of sequences the shots are amazing. But come on! Nobody in their right mind can sit through 2+ hours of pure torture. Oh and did anyone perceive how Lord Voldemort looks a lot like the devil in The Passion???

I am amazed at 2 things:

1. How could someone film so much gore and not be permanently sick from it

2. How could this movie draw such a huge audience when the movie is so bloody, violent and cruel

My verdict? Humans are incredibly savage. I didn’t make this conclusion from what the film showed me or the message it tried to send. I came to this conclusion from the fact that this film was even made the way it was made, and from its wide acceptance in the world.

If this was a standard horror flick, then this would be a completely different matter. To take something so holy [to some people] and turn it into this???

I am not religious. I am an agnostic, I would probably go as far as saying I am an atheist. But you know the funny thing is, an atheist would never make such a disgusting film.

Here is how I watched it: I forced myself to watch the first 1+ of it without turning away from the screen. I did close my eyes during the scourging. But starting from the scene where Jesus is carrying the cross, I started alternating between watching it and looking up stuff on wikipedia. I just couldn’t do this to my psyche any more. I watched the last 10 or so minutes, right from when he dies till the end.

I am incredibly disappointed. I wanted to watch something calming and beautiful. This is why I usually read the plot before I watch a movie, so I don’t get any nasty surprises.

Stop SOPA

I am joining in. Since I am not very good with words, I will simply reblog two important things concerning "Stop Online Piracy Act"


Number One, the most important points from https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/One-Page-SOPA_0.pdf

• SOPA gives individuals and corporations unprecedented power to silence speech online. Under SOPA, individuals and corporations could send a notice to a site’s payment partners, requiring those partners to cut the site off – even if the site could never be held liable for infringement in a U.S. court. Since many sites depend on this revenue to cover operational costs, even one accusation of infringement could be ruinous.
• SOPA gives the government even more power to censor. The Attorney General can “disappear” websites by creating a blacklist and requiring service providers (such as search engines and domain services) to block the sites on the list.
• SOPA uses vague language that is sure to be abused. The bill targets nearly any site that hosts user-generated content, or even just has a search function, by failing to provide protections for legal speech.
• SOPA would not stop online piracy. The powerful tools granted to the Attorney General would present major obstacles to casual users, but would be trivial for dedicated and technically savvy users to circumvent.

Number Two concerning films from http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111111/12040916725/why-all-filmmakers-should-speak-out-against-sopa.shtml

SOPA won't even affect its target group. Those who infringe content have their own private networks outside the reach of prying eyes. So even if SOPA successfully took down a few sites, infringement would simply move elsewhere to areas more difficult for law enforcement to find. Not only that, the more important problem is that stopping file sharing doesn't encourage customers to buy.

The net sees censorship as damage and reroutes. The internet was created by DARPA. Being built by the military, its primary design was to allow a web of information to fix itself as network nodes were destroyed by nuclear blasts. Take out the Eastern seaboard? No problem. New pathways automatically arise to keep information flowing. This is the defining part of the internet. It's why we love it, why we use it, why it's vastly improved our lives and why it's created an entire industry that supports it.

Okay, so here's the sucker punch: censorship -- or DMCA or SOPA takedowns, call it whatever you want, the internet sees it all as the same -- is interpreted as damage to the network, and automatically finds new pathways to get that information flowing again. By "automatically", I'm not just talking about the network itself -- its users are part of the internet that pro-actively makes their information (illicit or no) available if it's ever suddenly removed. Take down one web site and a mirror site emerges elsewhere. Kill that mirror site and another pops up. That's whack-a-mole on a global scale... and the moles posting illicit content far outnumber the whackers. Moreover, if the studios think piracy is bad now, wait until our current generation of kids -- now accustomed to "sharing" media online -- grows up and implements increasingly easier tools to circumvent egregious DRM. Software DRM is regularly broken within days of a software's release... and last year, Ubisoft's DRM was broken in only one day. That trend is only going to get more acute, not less.

You can't miss a future you don't yet know. Mike had a great post about how we can't anticipate what kinds of new jobs are created because we don't fully understand how new technologies will become integrated into society. Whenever something radically new comes around, it disrupts everything we understand about how things are supposed to work. Human nature is always to resist change unless there is a clear benefit, but with new technologies, that benefit is rarely clear. And for incumbent businesses whose profits are based on the benefits of old technologies, there is no clear benefit. To them, media piracy is a threat that needs to be quashed because it endangers the status quo. Everything they've built their studios on has come from a business model swiftly becoming obsolete. Of course they want to defend that -- who wouldn't? And so they pine about the good old days when they could make movies and just sit back on the money they made from box office ticket sales. They miss that.

But what if they embraced the future and used the best attributes of the internet to create more opportunities, more jobs, more new content? Then they'd look back on all of us today and wonder what took us so long to make the switch. History shows us over and over that people resist change, then adopt change, transition to it, and finally laugh about how they used to love riding horses, or copying manuscripts, or listening to town criers, or reading newspapers... The future holds incredible possibilities, but you don't know what those possibilities are yet, so how can you say it could be the end of the movie industry when you don't even know what that future really is?

I encourage everyone to read about this and take action!
Article on wikimedia and SOPA
How to call/take action
Anti-SOPA activism
PDF file you can print out and distribute

last night's dream

I had the strangest dream last night. It was absolutely amazing. At first I was a teacher in a school, my class were children around 10-11 years old. It was my first day on the job, and I brought my cat Panther with me. She was as always hiding somewhere. Then I realized I didn’t prepare a plan for teaching and got very self-conscious.

The children were screaming, fighting, it was awful. Then I finally was able to have order. The boy from my childhood school was one of my children: Sasha Dubrov. And then I realized I was supposed to teach the Satanic Bible. However, as we started class, I did something that propelled us to another planet, in another galaxy, in another part of the universe.

The planet we landed on had no air, so we got propelled onto another and another, and continued jumping from planet to planet until somebody from Earth pulled us back into the classroom. That was the end of class and everyone was dismissed. They liked my first day on the job. I was beyond confused and Panther had to find a litter box.