Monday, December 11, 2006
THE REASON FOR I HATE YOU

before I calmed down sitting by the side of the road. There was just too much to process, too much to deal with and no escape. I could spend all of my money and race down to the city and forget everything that happened yet the idea of revenge echoed louder. Insert one million I HATE YOU images for the afternoon and beat down the back roads by the side roads in the dimming light.
Yeah I wanna go
Cause I’m right, your wrong
Don’t look back
You were warned

AHPOOK: THE VALIANT RETURN
The last time I received such a lousy half-witted comment on my work was in 1998 when Derrin made the comment my collection of women figure studies were nothing more then disgusting rape images. Instead of crying under my bed (as I often do when I feel defeated) I took all of my work that wasn’t on the walls of the gallery home and destroyed them.

Yep.

I poured paint over them, I kicked them, I poked them, I fell on them and curled up in the mess in my room and smoked a cigarette and thought of glorious vengeance. The ones that escaped the mindless act of violence still look at me in the face as depressing rotted comic book covers fading in a clogged sewer grate.

/cut to a scene of AnnK on the couch

“I guess I was always that way. If I made art for me then I wouldn’t share it. I have made many things that have angered me and the joy of destroying something that upsets or depresses me is part of process of creation. I know it sounds silly, but when I get comments like that from people I thought I could respect I’d rather beat the crap out of the paintings then the people…”

/cut to a scene of AnnK doing her best Bill Lee impression firing several rounds from the 35 into the canvas screaming

The colours have changed. They are all dark now. The faces are never there, the places so familiar and yet so distant.

Saturday, December 02, 2006
Reading, writing, and Hiding- Reflections on the written word as a young child.

When we had no school, my parents used to pull the cable box out. You would flick on the TV, static would pulverize your eyes and you would reel back from the hissing fuzz pouring out of the speakers. This was done not because my parents subscribed to any filth cable stations, (they were actually fairly PC when it came to specialty channels, A&E, PBS, no HBO) but to avoid a fistfight or a leg injury or just-in-case-they-burn-the-house-down-to-smoke-out-the-other accident. Truth be known that my brother and I never got along famously.
That is the funny thing about Ivor, whenever we got together it was never a good scene. It was either tag-team desperadoes working together with personal agendas or like gasoline on a fire. However, the results of our adventures hardly ever came out positive and ended usually in frightful messes.
Sometimes on those days cursed by rain and thunderstorms, we would challenge each other by dragging our books out and would make the other read.
Hey- keep you head in check! This wasn’t “kiddy-hour”- this was READING time in the Kornuta house. We didn’t have yucky baby books here. Sure, we had the occasional Sesame Street reader (think “Super Grover” mid 80’s plot lines) and “the confusing book of cartoon bears”, but those were throw books. You throw them- in corners, on stuff, at Ivor- and you leave them. You never saw any bit of attachment or respect like the other books in the house.
Mom had a whole wall full of the good books. They were the kind of books you always dreamed books were when you first found out. They always want to describe books to children as ‘magical imagination creation devices” where you plug in and discover new worlds, fantastic creatures, new friends and you always go on an adventure. They rather ruin the dazzling effect of books once you get to grade three and suddenly books are bland, horribly relative to your age and social understanding and reports are due at the end of the week.
(next week on The Lens- Secrets of an 8 year old girl: Hiding the truth./camera cuts to scene of a mini AnnK sitting in a pile of books in her room
AnnK: “I don’t like to tell people what I read because they will tease me. The books we have to read aren’t that great so I don’t like them. The teacher also doesn’t believe that I can understand the books I read but nuts to her.” Mini-AnnK then looks up and flashes a slight smile. “You know what I do? I make up books.”
The smaller version of me starts to fidget and starts listing off on her fingers. “Every time we have to do a book report I make up a story and an author and choose the stupidest of title I can think up only because it will sound more like the books the other kids read.”
REPORTER: “What do the other kids read?”AnnK: “Baby sitter books,” She rolls her eyes. “They collect them.”
REPORTER: “You ever read one?”
AnnK: “Nothing…happened. The girls sat some kids, one got cancer, I think one got a haircut… nothing happened”)
The books were different in my house. Mom would consume murder mysteries, sci-fi, Ivor had a dark obsession with movie monsters and macabre graphic writings, Dad was always going through encyclopaedias and history books… I was obsessed with dark and rude humour, satires, how-to books, picture books of animals to sketch, horribly personal short stories, comical sci-fi novels that centered on the relation of lizards and chickens, books that would tell me all I needed to know to put together pieces for publication…
We just had good books in the house. Nothing really of value, but we had better then what I could see when I went over to other kid’s houses. I also noticed that other kids did not really have READ time when we would get together. Just “pretend” time and we be ‘great women of the house’ and totter around fake mini kitchens and gosh oh my how boring but the mini playthings are highly amusing until the dolls come out and damnit dolls are boring.
Ivor would always be so demanding and would trick me into reading ALL of the books on the dark and stormy day’s home from school. Picture an 8 year old girl squished into a worn out chesterfield reciting lines from Clive Barkers Books of Blood as the rain shatters down the windows. Yeah, that was Ivor- always trying to do a contest on ya. Always trying to prove he could find something that would make you stand back in an envious rage over. I would sit and read him chapters and passages as only to prove to him I was smarter and I could see what was really going on in his lousy horror cliché novels.
When we would run out of books, we would move onto the newspapers and start combing the headlines for something brilliant. Usually words such as “MURDER” or “FIRE” or “RIOT” since those often followed up with a good photo. Dad used to bring home The Sun (until the great Newspaper Dispute episode in the house) so we were also exposed to that smiling face of the sunshine girls (or page 3 girl since in the 80’s the babe always was a cover-turner). The sunshine girls scared me more then words such as “MURDER” and “FIRE” or “RIOT” because at age 8, I felt sorry they could never defend themselves being a photo like that in a paper like The Sun. People could say all they wanted about the girl in the white leather bikini on newsprint and get away with it. I would usually draw huge beards on them with a ballpoint pen or black out their naughty bits to piss off Ivor. This progressed into other bad habits I would later have with tagging rude phrases or arrows that point in lewd areas in school textbooks.
I never had passion for any of the books we were forced to read at school. I especially loathed the textbooks that were collections of wimpy stories with silly photographs. The only connection I had with school textbooks was destroying them for all their worth. I also felt I had connections with other kids- ghosts some of them- who would share my same thoughts on a page of fractions or a short story about a girl gymnast or a fire truck that had human personalities and human problems. My parents also refused to read to me from the textbooks.
My Mom would read from her books. I can remember one day when the sun was pulverizing through the windows she read to us a story of discovery of love and attachment- an idea of that moment humankind first ever associated that feeling of attachment that wasn’t out of survival but yet out of love and affection. (The story was of the birth of the first homo-sapien child, a mutant in a clan of lesser, hairier early cavemen.) I think I was four when I heard that story. I think after I heard that story I got the idea in my head that when you’d die you’d get together with everyone who ever lived so you could sit down and ask them “what was that like, inventing the wheel”, or “What were you thinking when you got that no-so-great-idea?”
Mom would always have a weakness for the warmer side of stories yet the covers of her murder books spooked me. Years later, I found the collection of short stories where that one came from and as I tried to pluck it out of my mother hands she almost started to cry. Pages were falling out of it- it was held together by an elastic band- it was a very used book and part of her pained to see it leave her possession.
I will never forget those days we read.