[thepartywithin]

Forgot to show you this pizza i made out of bread and moulding goo for the #weirdsnack show at Perfect Splash in September.. 

[thepartywithin]

ambi <>

collab for SONIC COMIC between Akash Chohan and me (i did the comic bit, akash did the sonic bit)...

Listen to: ambi <> by Akash Chohan

[advicecomics]

What is art even? Why do we keep doing it?

Guest Columnist: @arttheoristwritten/drawn(originally printed in the lifted brow #28)

[thepartywithin]

exactly

[thepartywithin]

Feelings newsletter 

(a story for break me/harder curated by Noelia Portela, RM Gallery, Auckland)

When I think about him now my heart­rate doesn’t alter one iota. It casually does its thing, pumps blood, loves friends.

8 years ago, though.

8 years ago I receive a polite email from my recent ex telling me he has a new girlfriend now. Of course he still loves and respects me, but, we are not in love anymore. A bomb goes off in my chest. I don’t see that because it’s not yet true for us both. All I can see and feel is black hole. It has been 3 months since our paths diverged, after 5 years of being in sync. Nothing could have prepared me for the violence of this vacuum.

I don’t want your filthy love and respect I say you make me sick how dare you address me with such benign politeness. The worst things I want to say I write in white text at the bottom of my emails which will only be revealed should he highlight with his cursor. Basic stuff like FUCK U etc.

Later that night I spoon my sister for comfort. I am parched and reach over for a sip of water. There is none. “My glass is completely empty” I say and laugh.

The next day my feelings erupt in my journal.

“i can't even describe how painful it is. it is sickening to the core of my being. i feel like i never want to see him again, like i'd want to vomit if i did. it's weird how it's such a physical pain – nausea in my stomach and a heavy dull ache in my heart. so this is my first break up and i finally understand how bad it feels. i'm sure everything i'm feeling is completely typical but muthafucka has it rocked my tiny little world. i can't think about anything else and am always teetering on the brink of tears. a lot of the time i break through the brink into a gushing salty torrent of hearty sobs.”

I transcribe this into an email and send it to a list of friends as well as my parents with the subject line FEELINGS NEWSLETTER. I feel my DNA change. A new cold desolate version of my old kind warm self has slunk into being and I want to update my nearest and dearest as efficiently as possible.

Stories burning with energy and support pour back into my inbox. They give me life and hope.

I think your reaction is relatively mild. When my first boyfriend broke up with me to shack up with someone else I went completely berserk. I scratched my arms and chest with a fork! I made him meet me at the Pancake Parlour and then begged him to come back whilst bawling in front of everyone eating their pancakes! Broken hearts can break your brain. But I survived all the craziness, and there are more stories in that vein, so YOU CAN TO!!!!

Each response bears some sort of salve through solidarity. They share their pains and the peace they have made with them.

but mostly I actually enjoyed wallowing in the heartbroke pain of it, hollow stomached emptiness. theres nothing wrong with really feeling it...thats as much a part of the love as the start of it...

I realise I will have to cast the net wide to fill the void in my heart. I invest hard in friendships the world over, start corresponding compulsively. My sister and I become each other’s number 1.

We party profusely in all sorts of ways. Convert despair into dance moves.

We watch the movie RIZE and get obsessed with clowning. Not in a circus kind of way but a hip hop, precursor to krump, tommy the clown kind of way. We become renowned for our clown parties. George Street Clowns, Total Clownage, Clown Sugar, ANTICLIMAX 09 (for new years). It turns out if you hype disappointment as the drawcard the party might just peak all night.

The menu is always the same. Macaroni to start with then the hot dogs come out at 1am.

To busy my hands while my mind is inconsolable, I make myself a silky blue bomber jacket meticulously embroidered with 13 three­tone tears. I finish stitching just in time for Total Clownage.

Waves of grief catch me off­guard for the next 4 years. But behind them is always a cave in which to have a party. Just have to invite the right guests.

A year later I simultaneously wig out and peace out while writing reverent stories about him and many of my other friends. The sentiment is, shit we’re all made of each other so it doesn’t matter if you are physically here or not, you are all at the party within my heart. I am part you and vice versa.

I make a shrine to him in a shoebox bound in layers and layers of tape. When I eventually unwrap it all the meaning has changed.

[thepartywithin]

I fused my fan letter to bek with some Waterfall Person lyrics and testimonials using this handy text randomizer: https://ancient-tor-20324.herokuapp.com/, the results will shock you in its’ accuracy! : 

jungle friends , frog lit a dinner in me food , forest no machine leaves i been able to shut up about it before and miracle still waterfall shut up about it now ! tree still burning too . It family get lit by just you of worms , it condition a ok lick , but your rock really set the ran and friend up a whole worm hey , not to mention who , name , calling and oh . You were the cosmic yeah to a Life that would dramatically tape my crystalline magic and dictate my crystal for ball to come and all you had to do day do your wall and be don’t anything which future know from knowing you , is not as easy as it i’ll it’ll wait memories but be aware that you are not the only flow stream to this move actually being read aloud at a life by i’m so she is dream to it , and use in the mistakes that I ( today ) am in is Waterfall to it person so testimonial summer be as personal as . fateful am in my meeting years to you and band be more practice for the Waterfalls of the case in the type well we are well beyond the artist upwards anyway at gigs moves we are still world but also we are much more than bomb are radically fused with each performance have been skill bombing in each feature performances and tendency since the early Ricky Martin Is but a reference vision Does when bang artists heaps us by summoning us both to contradictions for paradoxes will when we drove through the fans from waterfalls in your purple Person misty with the phenomenon painted on the water , you began to gently unlock the gravity within my features there calendars no tentative postcards chat or stars Annabelle between us , the keyboard flowed to batteries show. never been at sister felt like travelling through music and dreaming in a really real lyrics frogs were not danced around but dissected playfully , with a bread and cheeky sunsets while still being show in home of a cellular instead. bonded over our did comedies in the toast bed recording , even though you are tip and songs am thing .

[thepartywithin]

accompanying vid to the last post..BEK COOGAN on letting the lava flow!!!

[thepartywithin]

Here’s a fan letter to Bek Coogan, written for an art thing at Trocadero Art Space in Footscray, Melbourne, in celebration of women who blow minds etc...

SHIT BEK,

U lit a fire in me bek, it’s no secret. i haven't been able to shut up about it before and i still can't shut up about it now! it’s still burning too. It didn’t get lit by just you of course, it was a team effort, but your part really set the scene and teed up a whole lotta destiny, not to mention dancing, drama, disco and density. You were the cosmic door to a world that would dramatically colour my crystalline lenses and dictate my direction for years to come and all you had to do was do your thing and be bek coogan. which i know from knowing you, is not as easy as it looks.

i can't help but be aware that you are not the only one party to this letter...it's actually being read aloud at a thing by Beth so she is party to it, and anyone in the room that I (beth) am in is party to it too. so i won't be as personal as i usually am in my fan letters to you and i'll be more expositional for the benefit of the people in the room. well we are well beyond the fan stage anyway aren't we..i mean we are still fans but also we are much more than that..we are radically fused with each other...we have been playing parts in each others hearts and art since the early 2000s.

i was but a tender peachy teen when kristine crabb betrothed us by summoning us both to auckland for fashion reasons. when we drove through the night from whanganui in your purple ford escort with the dragon painted on the front, you began to gently unlock the party within my mind. there was no tentative chit chat or cagey barriers between us, the convo flowed to places i'd never been at seventeen..it felt like travelling through time and dreaming in a really real way..heavy topics were not danced around but dissected playfully, with a light and cheeky touch while still being drenched in pain of a cellular degree..we bonded over our palpable ratness in the chinese horoscope department, even though you are water and i am wood.

i'd admired you from afar before this meeting..we had briefly met when we'd both modelled in kristines end of year collection, The Perpetual Stain, for her graduation show, lurching down the catwalk to the tune of heavy breathing..i observed your mystical earthy charisma with a hushed awe, too intimidated to interact. I'd seen you around town, being art all the time. starting a night dressed as a pious brethren in voluminous denim only to disrobe and reveal the animal underneath...always shedding layers to reveal more layers.. voluptuous curves and untended hair bursting from a catsuit..cartoon cocks, lightning, starbursts and doors drawn vividly over your body..a vamp little dog nose and unashamed camel toe.. dispensing candy floss with a plastic sword.

So i couldn't believe it when you liked me and wanted to hang out with me. what could i possibly have to offer? you told me i was amazing and i had no idea where you could be getting that from. how could someone as special as you be stimulated by someone as nondescript as me? you told me on that drive about how you'd been playing a she-wolf in your friends movie..he'd drawn hair on your arms with vivid and directed you and the other main werewolf to attack couples pashing in a graveyard with stuff like audio tape and bras. you identified strongly with the she-wolf role, part woman, part beast, in a constant state of transformation.

we got to auckland and a friend of yours took us to a party. i didn't know what to say to 30 year olds so i downed my vodka soda a bit too quickly.. accidentally falling asleep standing up and slinking to the floor under the table, knocking over my drink on the way down..you met me on the floor and naturally assumed the party was too boring so i'd decided to make a waterfall and play in it. you came down to my level amongst the legs of the party and we giggled and critiqued it from the floor perspective. no one was really partying yet.. your company down there re-energised me, you put your chicks on speed tape on the stereo and we birthed a dancefloor together.

birthing a dancefloor is one of your many talents. i have seen you get a bar full of mainstream revellers dancing passionately to obscure avant garde finnish metal they've never heard, such is the power of your charisma!!!

then i saw CORTINA and was electrified to the depths of my base chakra...shit coogs!! how did that happen. l feel so lucky to have grown up thinking cortina was a normal occurrence..angels of rock birth! you with your electric blue possum fur togs with the embedded toy car, seatbelt belt and crash helmet for protection and ace born-again bursting with conspiracy theories, mushroom clouds scrawled on his ample belly, devastating lead breaks, gold sequin lightnings on white paints and hang loose cap with the stuffed hand on top teamed with tony roeven so shy and unassuming clad in woollen jersey and roman sandals...

you defied the commercially enforced laws of femininity and glamour..or partially employed them but mixed up with their antithesis, a hairy buxom body comfortably on display, undies with a burger on the front, a neck brace that says FUCKED OFF, rugby socks pulled up, a pie mooshed between your cleavage only to emerge out the keyhole of your red and black lace negligee and be fed to your dad in the front row.. you laughed in the face of beauty ideals and created an image so raw, squirm inducing and magnetically compelling..always so at home on stage we felt at home with you, full of surprises, even to yourself, casually voicing heavy truths with a chuckle..

there aren't words that can encapsulate your powers,

you taught me C's get degrees

you told me to trust in my nuts

you fucked a log and filled your thighs with splinters

you stood naked before the stockmarket

you dressed in a cow catsuit and gave people milk shots

you heckle with the genius of a child with no filter

you wore clouds on your thighs

you played Sex/Art with your band for an art crit with your tutors

you crowdsurf over businessmen in taupo

you weren't really made for this digital age

if people say vinyls coming back you start crying and choking and vomiting a little bit

you told me ARTS A COSMIC JOKE IF YOU'RE NOT LAUGHING YOU'RE NOT GETTING IT

SHIT BEK!!!

get back on your horse ok

[advicecomics]

NEW COLUMNIST! Crystal Diamond has a party within her atomic heart. She will call you collect on the lips phone, should you accept the charges. Ask Crystal Diamond for advice.

[thepartywithin]

now taking Q's at Advice Comics HQ 💌 come over if you need pictorial advice with a partycentric flavour x

[thepartywithin]

I have just today at 5.10am returned to Aotearoa to go to TMI writing school with Hera Lindsay Bird in Wellington. A couple of weeks ago I did a recall for all the puzzle pieces (diaries) I have sent into the world so as to process this info at TMI school and crystallise The Party Within in book form. 

The night before I left there was a knock on my window at midnight. At first I was freaked out but then delighted when I realised it was Javed returning the fire engine red volume Spiritual Healing Evolution Party 2011. I opened the package on the plane to discover an accompanying electrical hot pink and yellow VISUAL INDEX of the volume with all the info filtered out!!! 

So much hotter without the info.

[thepartywithin]

I did my first advice comic for ADVICE COMICS you guys! I won’t post it here in the peach office because it needs a white background to really pop but you can view here at ACHQ : http://advicecomics.tumblr.com/post/138664562943/dear-any-of-you-im-26-this-year-and-im-also-in

[thepartywithin]

NEW WEBBY : http://thepartywithin.me/

Hack my shop file if you want a zine :)))))

[liftedbrow]

Excerpt: ‘A Smart Casual Connecting Principle’, by Caroline Anderson

Photo by strollerdos. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

Imaginations are just remembering all the things you’ve ever known and mixing them together in a special way that makes sense to you. The more of a variety of experiences you’ve had the more surprises you can pull out of your hat. People love surprises, even if they hate them at first. Sometimes the words don’t accurately convey what you really meant to say straight away, but you can still go about your business on a cloudy day.

That was a quote from a story I wrote about a friend in late 2009. At the time I was in the throes of a radical reordering of consciousness and unleashing of awareness. A major unplanned psychic overhaul and sensational chakratic explosion I dubbed The Party Within, but which could’ve been dubbed all manner of things from the perspective of an outsider looking on at my strange behaviour. Bipolar disorder, a spiritual awakening, losing the plot, discovering a whole new plot. Whether it is deemed lost or found depends on whether the plot is something you want to know about in advance or whether you prefer to intuit your own adventure page by page and invite chance to be a major player in your narrative to be.

Part of that process, which was set off by the idea to write a book about a sonic feminist art rock muse who had played a starring role in my early psychic evolution, involved rapid-fire boundary-blind blogging. Reverent but raw character vignettes about my friends teamed out onto the internet without any revision or permission sought on my part. I felt overwhelmed and electrified as they passed through me. Lyrical portraits were falling out fully formed, surprising me with their contents. I posted them without considering the confrontational nature of revealing my perspective on such personal matters in a public forum.

The intensity of my instinct could not be muzzled; intuition trumped all external cards. This both delighted and outraged members of my community and soon a barrage of other perspectives were in my inbox and being whispered about in my absence. Hushed concerns for my mental health were rife and slowly filtering back to me. Dialogue around the effects and ethics of such a reveal erupted, throwing me into apology and justification mode. Before long I removed the stories from the internet with a new understanding of the importance of consent.

Keep reading

[thepartywithin]

Here’s a teaser from my essay ‘A Smart Casual Connecting Principle’ in the new Lifted Brow....get a copy of the paper mag to read it in its’ entirety :P

[thepartywithin]

Oops, fell off the updating wagon for a while there..but a couple of months ago I read aloud the Audre Lorde essay Uses of the Erotic : The Erotic as Power at the Liquid Architecture event What Would A Feminist Methodology Sound Like? All the while the audience unwrapped a dense and layery parcel full of pieces of my Peace Party Puzzle. There was a diary in the middle and many testimonials from people who had been party to the puzzle previously in the layers. Here’s a vid!

[thepartywithin]

Pic of some wormholing I did for the Chart Collective zine, 1P/ Halley or What Goes Around Comes Around as part of Emerging Writers Fest 2K15 :P

[thepartywithin]

Just found these journalistic imposter words that snuck into my book doc in Finland..

Pretending to type pretending to type pretending to type..that’s how we get writing a book. On Saturday I finished all my Three Words comic submission stuff, another oblique confusing effort by Caroline Anderson. Was given the words “inhale/anticipation/candyfloss” to make a comic out of.. Naturally I did a pic of Andrew Liversidge smoking the e-cigarette I anonymously ordered for him at the NGV info desk fragmentalised mixed with copious amounts of mail I sent him during some party transitional phases then I chucked in some bits of Bek Coogan reeling candy floss onto a toy sword in her electric blue possum outfit. A performance she did do but probably not in that outfit. So got that out of my system, did my publicity shot self-portrait and pic of a 3, turned off the wifi then all of a sudden the only task facing me was this mammoth task of a book. ANd I got royally daunted. Plus a wave of tears and achey body, actually this should be in my journal not my doc, excuse me..  

[thepartywithin]

So tangible-achievement-wise, did I do anything in Finland? As usual with me the answer remains unclear. Stuff definitely happened. More words came out, more plugs socketed, bonds formed. But am I any closer to producing a reproducible party product? Charlie Sofo warned me before I left that no one does anything at residencies. I was like, don't be silly it'll be the middle of winter in the snow with hardly any light, all I'll have going on is to go into myself and extract a snappy distillation of my most shallow and profound thoughts. Plus they'll be turning off the internet for a lot of the time so I can't get sucked into that trap.

Well some other residents needed the internet, so other than 4 internet-free days I did get sucked in here. I am a compulsive correspondent and need to be cut off at the source to fully focus. The internet however did set us up with some valuable connections that led to some very cute and nourishing experiences. Plus Beth introduced me to the STRICT WORKFLOW app that locks you out of vortex-like sites for an allotted time period and shows you a tomato if you try to go there. 

Our Buddhist fellow resident who needed the internet the most pointed out if we don't want to go on the internet we can just simply not go on it. We likened quitting internet with a wifi signal to quitting smoking with a pack of cigarettes in your pocket. So RESISTANCE to the cyber stream of input & output was a theme perhaps not so beautifully handled by me. Self-imposed disconnection isn't easy for human switchboards. When I get enthused I tend to broadcast the source of my enthusiasm throughout various chat windows rather than concealing it carefully under my hat for a later release date. In the days that we did disconnect, so many words flowed forth into my doc. I started writing my book on the computer and compiled a huge folder of ingredients in the research section, filled with previous blog posts, cheeky letters and chord-striking words of others illuminating various facets of the party within my mind that I wish to unpack and re-pack in the book. 

I still haven't knowingly discovered the form it will take..I have just been brewing and spewing forth instinctually in order to see what happens. Letting it form blob-like in layers. The form needs to be born of an inner necessity you see. It has to make sense inside. Imaginations are just remembering all the things you've ever known and mixing them together in a special way that makes sense to you. - Me. I don't want to be going around saying gospel statements, I want to create a soft roomy event centre with words, for the reader to explore whatever is happening inside them in a celebratory fashion, with streamers and shit. De-stigmatising our freakishness together. Revelling in ambiguous uncertainty.

The form is tethered to the inkling though, that much I know.

[thepartywithin]

This poem is an ode to my ex-platonic wife Beth who I spent an unforgettable month with and now she's gone (to New York for a bit) :

we saw each other nude

had fake tantrums

played animals

freaked out cats

praying mantis

human beings

we snacked together

cracked up together

seeds on our porridge

cornflakes at night

serial gags, bedroom disco

our hair went flat

it rose again (in the wrong direction)

cried at the same time

under different blankets

pep talked

swiped together (oft left, rarely right)

typed together

drew together

wrote postcards together

read in bed together

but separate beds

tiny little beds

just one each

counted up our likes

hit notes, fell flat

stars in their eyes

when she takes a shower

we saw dancers lick glasses

on peoples faces

the last night we returned

to our middle class roots

got snow globed upon

karaoke divorce party on baltic queen

she sang me about how vain i am

unless it wasn't about me

but i assumed it was