I just reread my last entry. What a complainer I am. I'm so much better than that.

How do i feel lately?

* Have not made much progress on the Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest because my time has been consumed creating and sending press packets for this yet-to-be-written-if-I-wasn't-sending-press-packets-for-this-show-show. And time is a ticking.

* Rent is going up again. Another $40 a month. That's $480 more a year.

* When I look at the Real Estate section in the Times my heart breaks in two hundred pieces.

* The most affordable set up seems to be one bedroom condos in North Hollywood. Do you know how hot it gets there in the summers? Do you know how long it takes to get down the 101?

* My parents are now censoring my blog content from 400 miles away. They will probably call me later to strike that last sentence.

* I read something in American Theater Magazine about how touring for artists was dead because nobody has money anymore. I ask, how much longer will I beat the odds?

* Gig in Chicago was cancelled.

* Moths all over the apartment and I can't find the nest.

* All sorts of very personal crap not worth going into.


On the bright side, I am 1/4 of the way through a baby blanket for my friend Reagan's baby. And, last I checked, I was still breathing.

Where was the zest for life that I once knew so well?


Well, now I feel better. Thanks for listening. Onward with my one woman revolution!

But I did it.

Thank god I have all this yarn in the house to keep me busy in my lonely hour.

My friend came over yesterday to keep me company and announced to me all the mutual friends we have that have the clap, HPV and all these other new hardcore STIs that I swear can pass through sheet metal. So I won't be coming up for air anytime soon.

Thanks all for your support. Now, back to my yarn.

I want every man who ever wronged me to see these pictures and cry their lonely hollow little hearts to sleep tonight.

Things that suck about coming home after being in New York City for three weeks:

* My "to-do" list is four pages long.

* There is cat hair everywhere.

* Bills. Many of which are unpaid.

* House always looks more messy after a long trip.

* I've been told that a couple weeks ago, two men in ski masks mugged someone who lives in the building while he was in the carport. They had guns. They patted him down and everything. They've come back to the building twice in the last few weeks, and both times waved their guns at other people who live in the building who were walking by the carport. So now I don't go back there after dark, even to take out trash. The police have rounded up suspects but who knows if they've caught the guys. I feel trapped in the apartment. Not a fun feeling.


Things that rock about being home:

* I get to eat breakfast as soon as I wake up, rather than walk down to a deli to eat something that has a faint bacon flavor to it.

* I got to see my spread in the LA Times... and it's freaking big!



No wonder all these nastoid old white men have been writing me for dates. I'm freaking hot! I'd stalk this shit too if I was an old unloved white man.

The LA Times photographer also sent all these other test shots to boost my self-esteem. They aren't as hot, but will suffice in my lonely hour.




The photographer's idea with this one was that I actually squeeze myself into that area under the glass. Yea Right! Only a baby could squeeze into that space, so instead we took this awkward photo with my squished boob.




Not import tuner, but close.




This was so freaking uncomfortable. I was trying not to scuff the pink paint and keep my neck upright.



Anyway, I'm off to the DMV to pick up my personalized plates.... They say "WONGSTA"!

I am leaving NYC in t-minus 2.5 hours. The Chinese car service is coming to get me. What a trip it's been. It's been really emotional. And of course, I've been terrible at documenting everything and thus will be doomed to repeat my mistakes. I went to a BBQ tonight wrapping up the Hip Hop Theater Fest. Such a nice way to end my stay. It was at Danny Hoch's lovely pad in Brooklyn. While lounging outside on the hammock, my face and legs were eaten by mosquitos and now one eyelid had a great new shape to it.

Last night I went to another party in Williamsburg. It was a rooftop birthday party of a friend's roommate and he turned 38. He took off all his clothes and had everyone give him one spank for one year until he had been spanked 38 times. The whole time his large nutsack was swinging around. The scene was so strange and yet so totally normal.

My friends here are so amazing and staying in my own single up in Union Square has been such a blessing. One thing is for sure, there's way too much LA bashing out here in NYC. Sure sure, LA sucks for so many reasons, but so does NYC. I'm looking forward to being back home with my bicycle, my cat, my partner, my yarn and my life. I also look forward to stepping outside my front door and not crashing into 600 people and city rats all in a rush to get somewhere and also not smelling sewage brewing outside my door.

There's so much I want to change about my life. I don't know what exactly. But this trip has really given me a lot of perspective to play with.

Here are some pics from my trip...


Here I am rocking the Trader Joes shopping bag on a ferry to Governor's Island where I watched this big site specific dance show yesterday afternoon. I ran into my friends from LA, Nehara and Derrick (the cute couple in the back) who were in town!






On the Lower East Side, Colleen's friend Peter lives on the sixth floor and has roof access. He screens bad movies from the roof in the summertime. We watched Carmen Electra's Strippercise video and "The Room."














Do you know about this trainwreck of a movie? If you are in LA, you may recognize the horror movie-esque billboard in Hollywood that's been up for years featuring writer/director/lead actor Tommy Wiseau. It's actually promoted as a "black comedy" with a plot that revolves around a love story. The movie is so wrong and terrible on many levels but somehow this cyborg of a man was able to raise 6 million to make it. It's a hit on the midnight screening circuit and the audience throws stuff at the screen. I can't wait to go now.

Ok, time to pack some more and clean up around here.

I had so much fun last night! I went to see a preview screening of "Snakes on Plane" in Brooklyn. I actually bought an advance ticket on Fandango in case it was sold out (which it almost was). We snuck booze and cashew nuts into the theater. This movie was so fun because the audience who came for the 10pm screening was so rowdy and kept making hiss sounds and screaming "snakes!" during the middle of the movie. It was like Rocky Horror except better. Everytime Samuel L. Jackson said something that eluded to the ridiculous plot, but said it with complete earnest commitment, the crowd went nuts. And there was so much gross humor, like snakes bitting people in the boob, cooch, and penie. Now I have a whole new language of sexual innuendo to work with ("Can I put a snake in your plane?").

I swear this movie will open a whole new host of drinking games, inside jokes, and awesome quotables.



And now, I have the day free, to perhaps, get work done! I've made no progress on the show while out here. I've met a lot of people who will be instrumental to helping the show tour but that does me no good if I have no show to tour.


I was downtown the other day and saw the original Project Runway Designs on display...




They looked less impressive up close than on the show.


Here I am at the Summer Stage Dance performance last week in Central Park with my new friends.



I can pretty much assure you that none of these guys find me attractive.

On the subway today, I watched a couple, a pregnant woman and her male partner, looking at a print out of her sonogram. They were smiling and pointing at it. They presumably had just come from the hospital because he had a "Patient's Bill of Rights" on his lap. I felt warmed to see this. Only on a subway in Manhattan can you come so close to people's lives like this.

A few feet away, a man was reading the NY Daily News. The headline on the front page read "Baby Bomb."

I'm still in NYC, at a Starbucks in midtown. There's a television with cable at the sublet I'm staying at. Goddamn, television is interesting. It's hard to turn off. I find myself watching it and saying, "This is more interesting than art."



What I can't shake from my head is the new season of "Flavor of Love 2." I've caught the end of the first two episodes and I've been obsessively reading about these women. REading their interviews, the IMDB comments on the show. How people are talking about body issues, race issues, and class issues that have come up in the show.

I watched this show obsessively (yet don't have a TV that gets cable or even regular stations) last season and even drove to Remi's house last year to watch the season finale. It turned out that there was a week of waiting, so I drove back the next week to watch it for real.


Somehow this new season of women vying for Flav makes the women from last season look classy.


It's unbelievable. The women swear during group prayer. They kiss Flavor Flav upon meeting him the first night (UGH!!!). "Somethin" shit on the floor after the first clock ceremony. "Wire" a white woman who was eliminated in last night's show said she "wanted dark babies," and all the black women gave her a look and went off about it, yet nobody seems to question how exploitated they are in the show and how much diginity they lack for being there.

Who are these women?

Well, leave it to your truly to look them up on imdb. Someone posted all these links to the women's sites. Some have done porn and almost all of them are trying to be models. I guess VH1 really had to scrape the barrel to find people that hungry for that 15 minutes.

And the women from last season apparently are on a "world tour" of sorts. Coming to a local dive bar near you!


It's really sad. I remember when car/ booty models were somewhat novel and even sexy, but with the advent of myspace I wonder, "Is everyone in the world a band member/ internet model/ or pushing a solo show?" How did a woman in lingerie become so boring? So blase?


Even Oprah can't stand it.

The half week I've been here, I wake up in this beautiful private studio in Union Square here in Manhattan and feel overwhelmed at the prospect of walking a block down the street to the maddening crowd.

In the past week and a half I've crocheted/knitted about 7 hats. I should meet my goal of 10 hats in a few days.



i feel a little bit of post partum sadness after the retreat. I went from being surrounded by hundreds of amazing people who were talking to me a lot and having every moment filled with knowledge, to being surrounded by a lot of people and not feeling like talking to any of them and having a lot of unstructured time. So I've just been typing away at the Starbucks, watching Project Runway, and emailing folks.

I did go to a dinner tonight at a gallery near Times Square. That was a trip. I was randomly invited to go by an artist who I met at a dinner in Brooklyn last night... At tonight's gallery dinner, we sat at a long table, lit with candles, and ate spaghetti. It was so how I imagined upwardly mobile artists in NY live.



Here's a pic from last night's dinner in Brooklyn. My friend Jeff who I met at the retreat lives with his partner in an amazingly huge studio in Brooklyn. The dinner was so nice because it was more room to sit down and relax than I've experienced in the last few days. His loft is amazing. It's like on TV when they show fancy artist's loft. It's apparently, very rare.

How do people cope in such little space?

Well, as theater starts up this weekend, things should be less boring. I could after all start doing work!

So ever since my stardom was made apparent by my pink car and validated by the LA Times I've been getting all sorts of random friend requests from strange men on myspace. One 99 year old white man with no picture wants to take me to the Oscars.


But what was cool was getting an email from a reporter at Current who wanted to do a profile on me. Like the dumbass I am who knows nothing about tv, I said, "What the hell is that? Public Access or something? I only know Skinamax and CBS!"

Unfortunately because I am in NYC for the next two weeks, that story may not happen.

I also got a few emails from women friends congratulating me. And apparently at home, a neighbor left a note of congrats about my front page calendar pic!

But what I can't get over is all this attention from random men. A whole crop of stalkers has come my way all because Kristina Wong decided to get a little pretty.

Anyway, what's up? A girl puts on fake eyelashes, a nice dress and poses by a car and suddenly she's the belle of the ball? How come nobody paid this much attention to me for my smarts and for my even more remarkable solo performance career?

May I remind you assholes that without makeup I look like this....



And with makeup, FAKE lashes and two hours of grooming (which I refuse to do on a regular basis), nice lighting, a good photographer, and 50+ test shots later, I look like this.....




Silly boys. Don't make me file a restraining order on you.

The LA TIMES Article is out today! I haven't read it yet, all I know is I look freaking hot!!!
















I know you all love me!

This retreat is just about over. Oh man, I've learned so much and met amazing people.

Life rocks! See you in a bit! Updates to come later, time for me to celebrate with some BBQ!

WOO WOO!

wow, since my last post i've gone through an intense two days of artist business training. Everything from how to have a conversation with someone to financial planning to developing my "elevator pitch." This grant is so freaking amazing. Not only is it a nice amount of money to sustain the project but a larger investment in the business tools for life. Last night after our training we were greeted by over 100 professionals from the arts field-- fellow artists and presenters from major art institutions. We had dinner with them and it felt in ways like some odd challenge a la "America's Next Top Model" where suddenly the professionals were here and they would grade us on how well we were applying our knowledge.

Today we present our artistic work to everyone in formal video, powerpoint like presentations. It's odd that there are 40 of us here and we've only gotten to know each other as people in the last couple of days. I forget quite easily that I am surrounded by the most amazing cultural voices in the country. It's quite nice that the format is such that we learn about each others work later in the week,rather than earlier in the week because we don't get into that jealousy ego and judgement shit that I was describing in earlier posts. And in many of these workshops, other artists have vocalized what a struggle it is to stay alive. Here I thought I was the only one who was climbing up a cliff with my bare hands.

But what was affirming was when an artist who was leading the training sessions said, "You have made the decision to be an artist, and that is the hardest thing in life to do. If you can make that decision, you can do anything else."

I'm so nervous about my presentation. I got a glimpse of some of the other projects. They seem so much more interesting and fancy and just plain out more aesthetically pleasing than mine. I put together some really silly slides in photoshop. So I went through my speech last night and started peppering it up with some dirty jokes and stuff. Hopefully this will keep them awake.

I've been making hats since I arrived, and here they are....


My goal is to make about 10 hats by the end of my whole NY trip. I look pretty yucky in these pics because it was late and the food here is slipping and sliding right out of me. sexy!




i may give this to an artist who gave me some art yesterday as part of a trading project she's doing. it's my first hat with flaps and tie strings!




ok, wish me luck! need to prep my presentation!

he called to say he was sorry. i guess we're better now. ugh!!! goddamn relationships are so unnecessarily dramatic.

I'm in upstate NY now in a little town called Hamilton for the Creative Capital retreat. This retreat is freaking amazing. Tomorrow, about 40 of us grantees go into "Professional Development Program" where we learn top to bottom about working as an artist. Then on Thursday all these arts leaders and presenters from all over the world come in and we meet with them one on one.


I'm not quite sure where the hell we are. It's so embarassing when I go to the East Coast and have no idea what state is the left or right of me. The bus ride from NYC this morning took 5 hours. But if you want any idea of just how UPSTATE I am....



This was actually at a pit stop in Pennsylvania.

A lot of these artists act so cool and casual about being here, I'm totally flipping out on the inside. But the heat is kinda keeping me at bay. We had an opening reception and I had a beer. I need to really just not drink at all this week. I'm not a big drinker in the first place and so when i did drink, I got really saucy really fast. I started talking all loud and telling these grantees from Kentucky about a confederate flag I saw on the bus ride over (like they would feel an immediate kinship to this).


It's hot as hell out here. It was so hard to eat dinner. It's like a sauna in the cafeteria. The staff has been so kind as to relocate a lot of sessions in air conditioned rooms.

I'm in my dorm room now. Well, ok, I'll put it out there. I'm really sad now.

Not because of all that jealousy stuff I was talking about in my last posts, I'm over that. And I feel more in control of life now.

I'm sad because my partner and I have been really tested by all these new changes in my life and our relationship in the last few months. We have been having so many disagreements lately. Anyway, I feel really sad because I feel like we aren't going to make it. Wow. I said it. I can't believe I am talking about this kind of stuff on my blog (curse you Wes Kim for setting up this blogger where every vulnerable moment is so much easier to expose). But I feel so sad and alone now.

I've got to be the strangest girlfriend a person could have. My career is freaking weird, unstable, requires every ounce of my energy. I'm out of town almost 1/3 of the year, and as a person, I'm totally self absorbed, messy, neurotic, an inconsistent. My art is really personal and for a lot of people they don't seem to be able to separate who I am to how I present myself in my work.

I look around at some of my artist friends and they either can't stay in a relationship for long or have a partner who loyally follows them around, emotionally and physically waiting on them hand and foot. I don't want the latter. I don't know what the hell I want. But I've been feeling more and more confused at the what the heck a relationship is for. And I feel sometimes so consumed by my work these days, and yet it's the happiest I've been in my whole life.

Anyway, I'm just going to lie in bed now. Thanks for listening. I feel a little better. Please drop a line if you feel like you have something to say to all this public confessing.