The bulldozer monologues.

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:25:45 GMT

Let it be known that at the Oakland Pubic Library, one can rent power tools.

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:11:22 GMT

Jay and Pancake watching my slideshow;
Easily the best picture taken all night.

Fucking Gold.

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:38:34 GMT

Littlefoot's Conscience.

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:28:37 GMT

At my art show we pressured my mother to get a tattoo from Tyre. My mother has not had a tetanus shot in thirty years due to a horrible fear of needles. She was screaming violently and cursing like a sailor throughout the whole process, which needless to say was entertaining for me to experience. John also got a tattoo [where else] on his ass. My mother now enjoys showing off her classy mark of fanaticism to her fellow Red Sox fans, and John now enjoys having an excuse to moon everybody.

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:02:51 GMT

I found Heaven.

It made sense at the time.

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:45:37 GMT

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:44:21 GMT

Burlington train yards.

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:41:03 GMT

Burlington train yards.

Sarah Franceschini.

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:22:13 GMT

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:14:20 GMT

Driving the massive pick-up truck around the corner of a marble gravestone company in Industrial Williston, we were heading back into the village after checking out a deceased Camaro in a deserted parking lot. I managed to turn the beast around and began heading out of the lot, when I noticed something pink and appealing emerging from the corner of a dumpster on my left. The boys, staring off into space and dreaming probably of the many irresistible muscle cars of the world that didn't yet belong to them, flew forward in their seats as I suddenly slammed on the brakes and screamed at my remarkable dumpster finding. I jumped from the truck, misjudging the height of the step down, and flew into the arms, er, legs, of the stuffed pink pony that someone had thrown away. I tossed the dampened and disposed-of toy into the back of the truck, and so began the following week of the sidekick pony mascot that would endure pleasure and pain in its many adventures with yours truly and my gang of delinquents.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with the thrilling escapades of Pancake the Pink Pick'em-up Truck Pony of Dreams:

First thing was first: We had to shoot it with a rifle. Obviously.

Being shot with a rifle is stressful, so we brought Pancake to Esox to relax with the beer and beezies. He was well-accepted and made a lot of friends, despite his near headlessness.

All that drinking brought Pancake to pick up smoking, and the bullet holes aided nicely with this newfound pleasure. This also helped him bond nicely with my stepfather, who shared cigars with him from his most precious collection while they shot the shit about rugby, sports cars, and their mutual love for breasts.

Pancake was even nice enough to show up and entertain at my art show, where he continued to impress people with his undeniable strength to hold even the biggest of art-mingling guests.

But above all, despite the tremendous number of friends and followers acquired in the week of merry-making and adventuring, no bond was stronger than that of a pony's bond to the girl who found him, loved him, and dragged him by his ear everywhere she went. Godspeed, Pancake. We love you.

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:34:48 GMT

Burlington train yards.

The Well-Deserved Shout:

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:29:08 GMT

Here I am, twenty-one years of age and back from three solid weeks of kicking ass, confronted by an old flame I call Going Fast as all Hell, and it comes in two forms: one little pink pill and Ben Banks.
Three weeks ago I was horrified of the future. I had every ounce of belief that I could do it, but watching my sister stumble blindly into an abyss of drug addiction that lead her to homelessness made me fear the same outcome following college. My sister's decisions after art school weren't exactly the smartest in terms of pursuing success. I always had a different attitude than hers, but a fear of failure lingered in the back of my head regardless of my tendency to exaggerate life's fastballs. What if I couldn't find a job fast enough, and ended up completely broke? What if I couldn't find a place to live and ended up at my father's house for the next four years? What if a couple little things went wrong and lead me into a similar downward spiral that I felt completely out of control of? I had three weeks of play in good ol' Burlington, Vermont ahead of me, and I was determined to play in every way possible. There was boozin', swingin', and bruisin' play, flashing and flaunting play in the most epic Severance Boob-off display of sibling confidence, future side-kick recruiting play, old flame re-lighting play, pick'em-up truck and Pancake the Pink Pony play, and then, to top it all off, the kind of play you only experience when you've got a smile from ear to ear, having just nailed the interview for the job of your dreams.

In three weeks, everything in my life that I feared before, fell right into place as my past home presented me with something fantastic and thrilling: my future. Seven degrees of separation brought me to a girl composed of all the qualities of every best friend I've ever had before, and the room and its mate were found in the short time it took to write "MAGIQUCE JOB SON ~-~ REAL FAACK" in refrigerator magnets (it made sense at the time). Burned CDs and a tuxedo business card at the home of a renowned designer whom I call family brought me by means of black pick-up truck to a tittie-glancing introduction with the man, who an hour later would invite me via email to come back the very next day for an interview. My past as a screen printer at a factory I like to call "the best fucking job I ever had" would bring me, one day and one tight blue dress later, to an interview aced and a future opportunity at what I like to call "the best fucking job I could possibly get fresh out of college." My past being under the needle of one of the best tattoo artists in Burlington would not only present me with lifelong works of art I could partially call my own, but a long sought showing of my art that would begin the making of my name as an artist in this incredible art-thriving town. Past fears of intimacy and intimidation, mixed poisonously with drug addiction and stubborn arrogance would shatter at the mere moment my sister and I collapsed into each others arms with tears of horror, optimism, and love above all. On the sidewalk of a second-home town, I suddenly found the ability to believe that I was needed and wanted by someone I had always died to be important to. A love and talent for words and stories that had so apparently diminished to almost nothing in the chaos of college, had flown me one last time to the one place that produced sentences and paragraphs in my mind brilliantly and hypnotically, and I began contemplating in sentence fragments and conjuring metaphors with novel ease once again. And a rascal romance long since mistaken to be no more would resurface in the presence of PBR and a talkative ex-girlfriend, guiding me with a hand on each shoulder and plopping me directly face to face, Going Fast as all Hell, with that very fling of two forms that I knew I could never forget: one little pink pill and Ben Banks.

I sit here, twenty-one years of age and hand-greasing the Alfalfa dreadlock on the back of my hair, picking my nose and chain-smoking cigarettes, flea-bombing my practically perfect San Francisco apartment and watching my stolen cat play with flies, sipping 40s of St. Ides and organizing my array of vandalism utensils, editing photos and writing memoirs; reminiscing about my past and thanking it for my future. I am as much a celebrity as I ever hoped to be, loved dearly by the ones who matter most, and by many of those who don't. I'm here now and I no longer fear what's to come, because I've proved to myself that someone of my mindset, nerve, and technique, is capable of great things, and more importantly, driven perfectly to achieve them. I'm able-bodied and ready to fucking kill it.

Show for Me.

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:43:09 GMT

So I know that there's a lot of you in the Burlington/Chittenden County area that read my livejournal practically religiously, but go unnoticed due to lack of your own journal or simply just interest overall but lack of interest to say so. Well, this post is for all of you (and everyone else in Burlington, too, for that matter).

I'm having a photo show at 'Aartistic Inc.' in Winooski, Vermont. The show contains about 70 of my photos and I am the only artist on display there for the next few months.
The opening is this Saturday evening, July 5th, at Aartistic Inc. in Winooski (next to the Monkey Bar and Sneakers, on Main St.) from 6PM to 10PM.. I hope everyone will come and check out some of my photos and Tyre's shop, as it's probably the best place in all of Vermont to get a tattoo from, and this is also my first major art show. I hope to see everyone there.

Old.

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:30:24 GMT

I'll be the Cap'n and you can be the bitch who lives in my closet. Forever.

Yeeeh!

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:14:16 GMT

For Spirits Sunglasses, a faux brand created by myself and five other designers.

Screen-printed shirts and bandanas by Justin Silvera and myself, group's photography by Robert Turner; five independent photos composited into one group ad - this is just my shot.

DC Comics.

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:49:52 GMT

Standards Manual for the re-branding of DC Comics.

I finally made a branding piece worthy of putting in my portfolio, so I guess torturing myself through eleven weeks of design-illiterate fifth quarter students with arrogance problems was worth it to an extent, but PLEASE tell me that we weren't that awful when we were at that level. On a side note, I actually sewed and printed a DC cape that Tyler wore on the rooftop for me, which goes to show you that the Mexican rooftop next door has proved very useful to me this quarter. Sewing machines, however... not so much.

(Cover reads "( You just never know. ) The New DC Comics")

Fin.

Nida as Peggy Bundy.

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:16:50 GMT

Liz asked me to do a shoot for her final for a styling class. She did a fantastic job of styling her friend Nida as a modern-day Peggy Bundy from Married with Children. These are my two favorites from the four that we did. Andy helped with hair and makeup, Matt Forehand helped with the indoor lighting, and the outdoor shot was taken on the roof of my neighboring building - the one overcrowded with inappropriate Mexicans that have apparently never seen a good-looking Asian girl in spandex.

HU399; Poetics of Persistent Vision

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:53:01 GMT

This is my final essay for the poetry and film analysis class I took this quarter. Keep in mind that this is the same class for which I wrote poems about naked ladies and really big dollars and chairs and bagels, so it has already been established that I'm not the most serious person in the classroom. In fact my entire knowledge base when it comes to poetry is laughable, which has (surprisingly enough) helped me acquire much love from my professor for having the ability to turn my utter confusion into humor in a class full of equally confused poetry-illiterate nincompoops.

Rachel Severance's Valued Opinion of Everything.
Quarter twelve for Rachel Severance (yours ever-so-truly) was an interesting one. It was chock-full of graduating best friends, year-long relationships ending and new ones with art store cashiers beginning, drug-addicted sisters, apartment decorating, cats pooping on my floor and my projects, and the most gnarly and ADD-ridden poetry class known to man. Throughout the quarter, I came in close contact (by that I do mean touching, sexually) a slue of poems and films that, quite frankly, confused the shit out of me. I found myself accidentally enrolled in a poetry class as a girl who finds herself, well, rather against the whole idea. As a prose writer, and one that is enthralled by a little bit of concept sprinkled throughout a more straight-forward approach to story telling, I found myself twirling my hair like an idiot perhaps more so than ever before. With eyes squinted at a television screen as if it would actually make me smarter or more capable of understanding the hidden meaning of meaninglessness in every film presented to me, I have made my treacherous way to week ten, and my confusion wears itself like a nifty pin on the front of my shirt that everyone can point at and say “Wow, Rachel, I like your pin,” and I can say “Thanks, I got it because I don’t have any idea what the fuck is going on.”

In this final paper, I have been asked to analyze three scenes from some of the various films we’ve seen throughout the quarter, and express my opinion and examination of said scenes. Now, I could very well do so, and perhaps bullshit my way through pretending to understand what Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali meant to illustrate when they dragged a man by his piano across the room of a dramatic and anxiety-ridden woman, but to be honest, I’ve never much been one to do things the standard way. If anything, Buñuel’s film only makes me feel anxious myself and makes me thank the lord Moses for not making me contemplate life in such a confusing way, and for making bacon not very appetizing anyway so that I wouldn’t be too upset about not being able to eat it for fear of disappointing all the people in the world who are better Jews than me. I could tell you that the concept of meaninglessness fulfilling and serving as the meaning of anything makes me wonder why certain people seem to think that up is down and left is cucumber, because searching for hours on end for the meaning in something with no meaning seems to obliterate the point of creating the piece of meaninglessness in the first place, but I would fear that the grading Gods of HU399 Poetics of Persistent Vision would frown upon me and curse me with something like a C- or a QX7, whatever that means, or a U, which is what they gave me for Student Success. Oh well, too late.

And let me be the first to say that, God Damn, I hope I never have to watch myself die 230,895,628,390,640,982,364 (that number is larger than 100, so I don’t have to write it out) times before I finally get to see what I look like dead with some seaweed around my neck. I would think that if it took me that many times to finally see the blank face of the Grim Reaper, I would have thought by then to try something different than chasing a flower and asking myself pensively, “Hmm, what is this butter knife doing in the stairwell, and why can’t I walk up said stairwell without floating awkwardly and answering the telephone from the ceiling?” If death really got that complicated in a life like mine, it would probably make me hum obnoxiously and wrap seaweed around my neck too so that when my boyfriend/husband/mysterious man who walks into my house casually but has no real relation to me finds me they can ask themselves, “Why is Rachel/this random woman who’s house I’m in sitting dead in this chair with some seaweed around her neck? And where is the butter knife? I want some bread. Maybe now would be a good time to cut her eye open with a straight-razor.” I would also hope that when I finally made acquaintances with the Grim Reaper, he wouldn’t be so blank-faced and have such an obnoxious hum. I would hope for something more along the lines of Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life,” wherein he could interrupt my dinner party and become unenthused when I told him that I had spent my afternoon crawling on the ceiling of my rotating apartment. He could then tell me that I had just died from eating bad salmon mousse.

And I won’t lie, in the mere few moments of the day that I spent unoccupied by the contemplation of things like galloping endlessly through fog and bad-smelling flowers the size of ten humans-turned-demons, I wondered what would happen if I tried to follow out the remainder of my life using only the poorly-memorized Russian of Battleship Potemkin, that I mulled over while watching and trying to prevent my soda can from sliding off my crooked desk and into my lap. I wondered if trying to reiterate such things that I knew so barely well would come back and make a fool of me, like when people learning Spanish try to say “Tengo ocho años (I am eight years old),” but they forget to pronounce the ñ right and end up saying something like “Tengo ocho anos (I have eight anus).” I think that if I were a Russian person, it would probably be really funny for me to encounter a Spanish-American with eight butts, reciting phrases from Battleship Potemkin in bad form.

So here I find myself once again, week ten and at the end of another paper I have written in hopes of merely sliding through another General Education class with a satisfying grade, by means of my excellent wit and charm when it comes to humor and immaturity. Now, I do not mean to make a mockery of someone else’s love, and I hope that you have not found the preceding analyses offensive or close-minded. On the contrary, I am in fact a very open-minded and creativity-loving pupil of the arts, and I have much appreciated all attempts from all educators passed to get some kind of meaningful response to poetry out of the tips of my booger-picking fingers. The truth of the matter remains to be demolished by a man who writes a meaningless poem and a man who tries to teach me the meaning of it: I may forever be the antithesis of a poet, but I will always try to epitomize someone who can at least make you laugh at how hopeless I am when you strip me of my meaning and leave me with a plate of thin strips of meat surrounded by thicker outer strips of pure fat, also known as bacon.

Tyler.

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:03:37 GMT

Six years old in the creepiest elevator in the world.

Stick N' Poke.

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:31:05 GMT

Ryan gave me a stick n' poke today, on my leg, underneath and to the right of my knee:

For those of you who don't know what D7R stands for, let me show you:

It's the most beautiful thing man has ever created.
And let me tell you, this Jew skin was tough to pierce.

Mon, 26 May 2008 08:37:32 GMT

Dear 'Crackhead Boyfriend' (as we like to call you):

I'm glad I finally gave you enough attitude tonight for you to leave at the offering that you could indeed come back bearing another 40 and a fresh pack of smokes, but you left telling me I had pretty eyes and you never actually came back. I had one more cigarette stashed with my iPod and camera that I hide every time you come over.

Sincerely,
Rachel Severance
(Your non-sugar-mama, non-makeout-buddy, non-crackhead, maturity-lacking non-girlfriend.)

PS, Please don't try to kiss me ever again.

Colina and Bunny.

Mon, 26 May 2008 05:43:29 GMT

Although a fitting cheer-up session for all, I must admit that watching them dance around to bad 90s pop was far too reminiscent of a time I can't get out of my head. With every Backstreet Boys lyric I watched them sing in unison, I remembered laughing at you for knowing all the words and even some of the dance moves, parading around with your partner in crime who was constantly stumbling in his phone conversations, and documenting blackmail I would never have the heart to use against you. I miss you, you mother fucker. If you come back to me soon, I promise to buy an extra 40 for us to share the morning after.

Also, I gotta say, I don't think I've met a girl as cool as Colina since the day I met Bunny. What other gems are you hidin' from us, Florida?

Mon, 26 May 2008 04:52:22 GMT

There are mistakes flying around this room like fruit flies when you keep the Tenderloin Television on for too long.

A Poem by Rachel.

Fri, 23 May 2008 05:37:45 GMT

"Things I would make big."

If I could make anything big
it would not be a dandelion
because dandelions smell bad.
It would be
a slide
so I could slide down it
and slide for a really long time
and I could slide long enough
to be satisfied
with my sliding experience.
Or
a bagel
because I’m Jewish
and I like bagels.
Or
a dollar
so I could show it to someone
and be like
hey look at my really big dollar
even though it would still only be worth
a dollar.
Or
a chair
so that all my friends
could sit in it with me
and I could be like
hey guys
welcome to my really big chair.
Or
a pony on a stick
so it could be
almost like a real pony
and I could gallop it
through the fog
until someone said
hey I think you are lost.

A Poem by Rachel.

Fri, 23 May 2008 05:37:11 GMT

"Naked Ladies."

Sometimes when I look at Kanji characters
I see naked ladies
in compromising positions
like some of the drawings
by weird goth people
of naked ladies
in compromising positions
and big boobs
because they cant get their own
naked ladies
in compromising positions
but they can look out the window
of our classroom
and see naked ladies
in compromising positions
on Market Street castles
that are covered in male pigeons
trying to mate with female pigeons
like they want them to be
naked ladies
in compromising positions
but the naked ladies
always fly away.