So Saturday Isaac and I got up and headed to Austin to pick up Cody from the airport. He had spent the week out of state for work last week. He was tired from his trip so we went on back to San Marcos for him to shower and take a nap before we went back into Austin for the AustinTuners noodle meetup.

Before we got to the noodle meet up we stopped by Tek Republik and dropped off the xbox 360 for cleaning and repairs. Hopefully it won’t take too long to get fixed up so I can get to playin forza3! The noodle meet had a small turn out but I didn’t expect a crowd in the slightest. Not everyone likes pho and lots of folks have been busy with school lately.

We brought Isaac with us, Jack and Ellen came too, so did Ian and Ashley. After about an hour we were all ready to leave and we had Xrunnit show up so Cody stayed a bit longer to chat cars with him while Jack, Ellen, Isaac and I went to Amy’s Ice Cream for dessert. Obviously I didn’t have any, but we got some for Isaac but he was super tired by then and only ate a few bites, Cody had to finish it for him.

Today we all slept in a bit. Cody went over to Chuck’s house to watch the Cowboys lose. Isaac and I stayed here while Isaac took a nap and I worked on the next meetup for the AustinTuners thing. Later in the afternoon I was planning on headed out to Walmart to get diapers and such when I couldn’t find my keys. I had left them in the passengers side door of cody’s car. /fail. He brought home groceries and stuff and said to clean up the living room cuz Bryan and Traci were headed over.

I made some spaghetti for dinner, used macaroni noodles instead of thin spaghetti noodles, sooo good. Watched last nights recorded episode of SNL with Sigourney Weaver…AWESOME. Then Bryan and Traci came over with late Christmas presents for Isaac and us. They got him a toy guitar, nerf sword and a nerf basketball goal! They got Cody a copy of Uncharted 2 for the ps3. He has been playing it all night, it’s pretty fun looking. But the coolest part is what they got ME:

Nintendo Controller Soap from Dirty Ass Soaps. Super awesome as its the exact size of the real controller to the point its probably molded straight from it.

It smells good too! The second thing that they got me, which I wasn’t expecting at all, as a copy of Between Me and Life, the Romaine Brooks biography. I had been looking for something on her since I did research on her time period back in an Art History class at UMHB. Super hard to find these books because they only printed them once in the 70′s and it’s the only biography of hers that the lady who wrote it actually interviewed Brooks in person. She died in the late 70′s so this was cutting it close!

The book is pretty cool as it has actual pics of photos of her I haven’t seen before like this one of her actually WITH d’Annunzio: (yes THAT d’Annunzio)

What was even cooler was the full color photos of some of her paintings in the middle:

Totally awesome, I really need to sit and read it, I’ll probably bring it to work and read during breaks

I seem to be getting the heaviest traffic from my top 5 lists so I figured it was time for a new one!

In this list the rules are very simple, any female artist, dead or alive. This is totally based on my tastes as a 20-something white female. I’m sure there are others out there that I don’t know about who are far beyond greatness and won’t be included only because I don’t know about them, and for that I apologize. Selections also may not even be any good and I totally picked them for some arbitrary reasons.

Very well, moving on!

5. Valerie Solanas -

Best known for, well, nothing really artistically. She wasn’t even schooled in art of any kind, she held a masters in Psychology and soon after getting her degree went a little bit crazy. And by a little bit crazy I mean something snapped and she became a violent bra-burning feminist kobald. She joined all the hip and cool newly emerging feminist groups and scared them. She wrote a book called the SCUM Manifesto. A book that would send off little red flags of any doctor studying insanity or hysteria. So what did she do that would deem her worthy of fifth place? She wasn’t a good artist and wasn’t even a good person so what gives? She SHOT Andy Warhol. This gives her a default place in the list regardless of what else she has ever done in her entire life, all crazy sins forgiven. (note to the art historically challenged: Warhol did not die from this incident)

4. Frida Kahlo -

I know she is one of the “big three” (O’keeffe, Cassatt,Kahlo) and I didn’t want to put her in this list because I wanted to give the spots to some lesser known artists. She was only well known because she was Diego Rivera’s wife blah blah blah. However, aside from her avant guard Mexican art and fashion sense. (She is the only woman who could ever pull of a unibrow AND a mustache) Frida Kahlo had something else going for her, something that gave her a reason to paint all those weird self portraits. Frida Kahlo refused to die. Polio at age 3, spina bifida, massive bus/trolley accident that broke her “spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder. An iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability.”, After somehow recovering from the accident she spent most of her life in surgery and recovery and most people allot this to her style and subjects in her work. She lived with pain in her legs and back for the rest of her life. Not to mention that she was married to THIS GUY. To the point where when she actually did die some people said that her sudden heart failure was due to a self-induced drug overdose.

3. Audrey Kawasaki -

Finally to the real artists! The only artist on this list who is still alive. Audrey Kawasaki took two things that people love, Manga and Art Nouveau, mixed it together into a super awesome hybrid skull monster and covered it in a rich layer of allegoric nudity and hasn’t stopped since. Infact, every time she attempts to sell a series of prints of her work – not the actual painting but just prints- the store server crashes and pisses off about two thousand of the people who clicked “buy” all at once. Rather than paint on conventional canvas she uses wooden boards, painting thin layers of oil paint over a penciled in sketch untill the image “grows” out of the panel. Her subjects, primarily women, all give the same sultry-zombie-staring-through-your-soul look that people just can’t get enough of. Since most contemporary art is horribly bad Kawasaki is the little glimmer of hope we have for the future of fine art.

2. Artemisia Gentileschi -

An Italian baroque painter, one of the first woman to do several things in the world of art, including attending an art academy and receiving awards and praise for her work. These were things that were never considered for women artists in her time. Women of her time were all uneducated housewives whose job it was to pump out babies and dinner. Artemisia was, like others of her time, heavily influenced by Caravaggio and incorporated his realism with the rules of painting she was taught in the academy. Well if she was so great why do you never hear or read about her being the first big time women artists? Because you have probably guessed she didn’t exactly paint bowls of fruit and vases like most women back then. Anyone who has taken an art history class probably will recognize her for the painting of Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes with a sword and blood going everywhere and the guy scrambling to get away, infact she liked the subject so much she painted it twice. My guess is she based his face off an art teacher or critic who didn’t like her.

1. Romaine Brooks -

When I was in high school I did a research paper on Emily Dickinson. As I was reading about her and her habits and subjects of her poetry I thought to myself, “what if Emily had been a painter instead? what would she have been like?” Skip ahead to my last semester of college and I found her. Romaine Brooks was an American born portrait painter who moved to the south of France at the age of 19 and immersed herself in turn of the century culture. She attended life drawing classes and was harrassed for being the only girl, “When a fellow student left a book open on her stool with pornographic passages underlined, she picked it up and hit him in the face with it, and was not bothered again.” Once she finished school, she attempted to do good art but was not happy with the bright fun “Cassatt” pallet she was using. She locked herself in a small studio apartment in Capri and mastered grayscale painting. So good that she exhibited the scratch cardboard she was working on to much critical acclaim. She soon began to work in her new color pallet, painting all of her friends, her girlfriends friends, her friends friends girlfriends friends. The list goes on. So how is she like Emily Dickinson? Dickinson was never popular during her lifetime and had little to no friends outside of her family. After the 20′s Brooks stopped painting entirely, would hold up in her room for days and would refuse absolutely everyone who came to visit, she did a few sketches and line drawings and eventually went a little nuts. Sound like anyone to you? Emily only wrote for a small window of time and stopped entirely after the age of 30, given she died in her 60′s she didn’t have time to go full on crazy. I have a huge list of similarities right here its almost scary. Only difference I can think of is Emily wore white dresses all the time and Brooks dressed like a dude. … Really, I could write a dissertation on this.