09/12/07 8:57 AM
This site is about to undergo a bit of redecorating so that I may easily make changes to it and add new art to the galleries, which is totally exciting. In the meantime I want to share a new project that I have been working on with anyone who is interested to read it. You can find it here at www.sugarbooty.blogspot.com (just copy and paste that link cause otherwise it will only open up in the page on my website, which is way too tiny to view the whole thing).
Basically, I am posting a page or so a week of a comic that I have written, drawn, penciled, and inked. Its an ambitious project; eventually I would like to have enough stories to compile into a book (or rather, graphic novel). But for now, I am going to post the stories I have written and drawn onto this blog so that I can get some good feedback from the people who read it. Hopefully it will help develop the structure of the other stories I am working on, so please feel free to leave comments. “Jasika, dont draw his head so big next time, he looks like a pickle” or “Jasika, why does all your wallpaper look like grasshoppers?” are excellent examples.
Stay tuned to the blog so that you can have a chance to read each new page as it comes out…
As always, thank you for your good love (act like I just sang those last words like Anita Baker).
Ciao!
05/11/07 9:10 AM
I used to have a friend who took pride in being associated with only the most beautiful, photogenic people that the world had to offer. She was quite lovely herself on the outside, but had what I presume to be insecurities on the inside, forcing her to find the company of long legs, long dreads, exotic beauties traipsing down Williamsburg sidewalks. Having visually perfect friends seemed to make her feel as though she were worth more, and indeed, when she walked down the street at night, knee-deep in her throng of ethnically diverse hipster friends, breathing in gulps of stale, sweaty air from as many hot spots and trendy lounges as they could muster, people would stop and look at her in awe. So what if the girl with the accent and the huge blue eyes had a coke habit? So what if the guy with the amazing run of tattoos all along his arms and back was in an abusive relationship with his girlfriend? So what if they were all as screwed up as the rest of the world? She was walking down the street with a crew of beautiful people, that’s all that mattered.
Once, when I excitedly introduced this girl to my closest, silliest, most kind-hearted friend, a friend whose inside beauty is so magnificent that the world shakes when he enters a room, I asked her how she felt about meeting him. I always love to hear how his presence affects other people, because I am so proud to call him my friend; he is simply THAT fabulous of a human being.
She said to me “Oh, he’s cute…your friends are really cute”.
Cute.
Uuugg, anything but cute.
It was dismissive.
It was belittling.
It was unkind.
I knew she didn’t mean it offensively, but I also knew that she would never have called him “cute” if he were of a more appealing frame, if he looked a certain way, if he fit in more with her idea of what was beautiful.
If he had met her criteria, she would have called him “brilliant”.
She would have called him “the funniest geisha alive”.
She would have asked for his phone number so that she could be friends with him, too.
She would have noticed how wonderful he is at making people feel good and happy and loved, and she would have wanted to be a part of that. He would have made her proud, like he makes *me* proud.
I am realizing more and more that many people are overwhelmingly proud of beauty, their own and other peoples. Beauty is a priority, and for them it’s something to embrace, something to forgivably spend a lot of money on, something to herald and to work towards. Now I would be a hypocrite to say that beauty is not an admirable thing; I spend my fair share of time applauding another girl’s vibrant skin, a guy’s easy sense of style. I spend my hard earned money on new eye shadows and shoes, too. But I know that its not the shoes that make me look beautiful…it’s the way I feel when I wear them. The kind of beauty that so many spend their time idolizing is fleeting, and the kind of beauty that’s unseen, the kind that can only be felt…well, that is the kind that is so often undervalued.
So, let me just take a minute to praise someone I am very proud of. She is beautiful, and courageous, and intelligent, and innovative, and passionate, and I am so fucking excited to know her. Although she is long and strong of body and comes with a mane of gorgeous brown curls atop her gifted head, it’s not her outside beauty that makes me so proud to know her, it’s all the stuff that she has on the inside.
Courtney E. Martin just wrote a book, and I just finished reading it last night, so I’m a little high on it still. It is called Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, and it is nothing short of incredible. Now, do I say that only because I actually know the author? It’s possible, but unlikely. The truth is that I probably wouldn’t have read this book if it hadn’t been brought to my attention by someone involved in it. If I had seen it on a bookshelf, it might have caught my attention breifly, but since I don’t have a real history of eating disorders and since I don’t currently “hate” my body the way that the title suggests, I wouldn’t think that the book would be for me.
Im so fucking glad that read this book! It *is* for me. It’s for me and for every woman, young and old, and every man, too. The title of this book is very specific, yet it spans an entire world of importance, and it’s not just for girls who have unhealthy body issues, (although it is true that most girls in the world DO have unhealthy body issues at one time or another in their lives).
This book is about helping women get along in the world; acknowledging a bad sense of self if you have one, and celebrating a positive sense of self if you don’t. This book is about understanding the disease that so many young women go through life afflicted with, whether its anorexia, bulimia, or a constant battle with what is “good” or “bad” for one’s body; women’s obsession with their appearance is ALL harmful, and it shouldn’t be seen as normal.
So many people think that obsessing with food and weight loss is just a part of the many trials and tribulations of womanhood; that it has always been that way and that it always will be. But, as Courtney writes in her book, womanhood should NOT be just about getting your period, making babies, having a career, and then participating in a lifelong struggle to stay as thin as you possibly can. Womanhood should be about making declarations, making new pathways, making NOISE, celebrating the incredible position we are in where we can make virtually anything happen for us! There is an army full of women, past and present, who fought long and hard for little girls to be able to grow up and be anything they wanted, yet we are wasting all their blood, sweat and tears by counting calories…by slaving away at the gym…by denying ourselves life’s pleasures…by being unhappy in certain aspects of our lives and then taking it out on our bodies.
As she articulates so well in the book, we are all perfect girls/ starving daughters…girls who were told we “could be anything”, who instead heard we “have to be everything”. We are a generation of women who struggled to be the best, the baddest, the smoothest, the most perfect at every task we sought, and who started to ignore the needy girl still stuck inside us, crying for attention, for care, for some love.
If you are one of the lucky few who has been able to exist in the world without so much as a detrimental thought about your body and the food that you put in it, then MORE POWER TO YOU. It’s something to really be proud of. But the sad fact is that not every girl has been so fortunate to grow up without that kind of negativity festering somewhere inside her, and its important for all of us as women and men, sisters and brothers, to be aware and support our girls. This book is not just about little girls who starve themselves and teenagers who purge…its about what its like to grow up as a girl in this society, how not only our mothers, but our fathers play a pivotal role in shaping our dreams and our ambitions when we are young, and how the world as we know it adds to those factors, for better or for worse. It is about being good role models for young women in our community. It is about how we have been conditioned to view overweight people in a very negative light, yet sympathize with super skinny people who may or may not have a diagnosed eating disorder. It’s about how 8 and 9 year old girls grow up knowing what liposuction is and how some16 year olds get boob job for birthday presents. It’s about young girls who are purging and bingeing and starving and purging and starving and bingeing and how no one is saying anything to them about it. It is about the double standards that exist in our society, and how, simply by acknowledging them, we can start to change them.
In this book, Courtney makes you ask yourself some really tough questions, and she delves into WHY young women are heading down this dark, all-consuming path. Media, music videos, denial, advertisements, pornography, Jesus, higher education: she shows how all of these things play an incredible role in how young girls are shaped today. But Courtney doesn’t want to leave out the most important common denominator of all, the one factor that can help girls see themselves growing up to be brilliant, interesting, funny, generous women, as opposed to skinny, trendy, sexy, hungry, tired women.
That factor is us- you and me.
We all have a part in this. We can sit around on our asses and lament the dire state of the youth today, or we can do something about it. Reading this book is a start. Who knows what new connections you will make, what hidden things you will find out about yourself, what new sparks you can fuel by reading Courtney’s words and letting them sit inside your head for a while.
I am really proud of this woman, and I’ve only known her for a little while. But I am hoping that just from reading her book, just from drinking a few beers with her and talking and laughing and singing with her, some of her incredibleness will rub off on me. I want to walk down the street with a crew of beautifully smart people, that’s all that matters.
to find out more about Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, visit the website: www.courtneymartin.com
05/11/06 10:12 AM
I know a lot of people are not into watching things that dont come equipped with 60 second trailers, highlighting all of its good/funny/exploding/tear-jerking parts ahead of time. And some of you arent interested in seeing a show unless its from a band playing music that you have already been able to download and therefore determine whether or not the tunes would be worth seeing live.
But see, thats the joy of theatre, of plays, of live craftmanship- its fabulosity is spread not by television commercials, not by amazing soundtracks with a slew of famous musicians making collaborations with other famous musicians, not by special programs on MTV, but by word of mouth.
You cant immediately know whether a piece of theatre is going to be good unless you read about it, or listen about it, and thats what I am doing right now; writing to you and saying to you. Because I care.
Im taking it back.
Im doing it old school.
Last night I saw a show called NO CHILD…
Its a one-woman show created and performed by a young, black and incredibly talented actress named Nilaja Sun. For those of you who are foreign to the ways of theatre, I can tell you that there are a TON of one-man/ one-woman shows out there in existence and a lot of them are pretty painful to sit through.
This is not one of them.
Nilaja tells the story of her experience as a teaching artist in the NYC public school system…not the pretty school system with the small class sizes and all the white kids in their navy blue bottoms and brown shiny loafers, but rather the scary school system with the brown faces and the metal detectors and the violence and the cursing and the miseducation and the hopelessness. She tells the story by embodying all the characters that she introduces to the audience, and this is a very common tactic employed in one-person shows, but rarely is it done with such acuteness and accuracy and humor.
she plays the role of the narrator, the old man who has been the janitor of the high school for nearly 50 years…
she plays the role of the scared and defenseless lawyer-turned-public-school-administrator, Mrs. Tam, who practically cowers in a corner whenever a student looks at her too hard…
she plays the role of Shondrika, stereotypical tough black girl,
Gerome, classroom instigator-turned-participator,
Jose, the dumb-in-a-can student,
but most importantly,
she plays herself, the bright-eyed and bushy tailed teaching artist who gets a lot more than she bargained for when she comes to Malcolm X high school in the Bronx to put on a play with a bunch of less than enthusiastic 16 year olds.
What follows is a story that is at once sweet, sincere, and painful, and one that will no doubt leave you more than a little inspired. Without forcing any particular political views on the audience, Nilaja is able to show the effects of what uncertainty, degradation and neglect have done to the children in our school systems, and how some pretty amazing things can be accomplished when those children start to realize that there is more outside of what they have been conditioned to expect from life.
Yeah, I cried.
So what?
Its important to note that this wasnt a sad show…it was uplifting, it was profound, and it was executed so eloquently that it left me speechless at the end. I am not a teacher, and I have no idea what I can do to change the world in even some small way. But this is certainly a start. You dont have to be a teacher or a lover of theatre to be able to take something away from this production, you only need an understanding of what its like to be
a human
a teenager
an underdog
a parent
a brother
a sister
a friend
a person who wants to make a difference
a person who is making a difference.
For any of you in New York who are looking to be exposed to something new and beautiful and funny and remarkable, I urge you to go check out this show.
I promise you wont be disappointed.
05/6/06 3:49 PM
i am the spotlight artist (http://www.vision2words.com/artist-spotlight/Jasika-Nicole.php) on the vision 2 words website, a really fabulous online magazine dedicated to urban artwork and poetry. i was pretty *stoked* when i was asked to contribute to the site in the first place, and then i even got to answer questions for an interview to make me feel important.
thanks for your support, folks. im thinkin of hittin the NYC streets this summer to sell some prints and cards and bags with my artwork on them…let me know if you want to be a part of my posse.
posse (posee) n. pl. posse-s
1. a temporary police force
2. Slang. A group of friends or associates that stand around a person to make her and/or her wares seem interesting to the surrounding public. Activities include but are not limited to: a) singing songs dedicated to how fabulous it is to tote a bag with jasika artwork on its side, b) buying lots of the product and waving it around to make everyone feel jealous and c) threatening people who dont seem convinced that they need to invest in a printed piece of artwork.
…or you can just come by to say hi.
j*
04/7/06 11:12 PM
*for those interested, i am now back in new york city after a three month stint in LA. the vapor of vendor meat has never smelled so good…
and now, on with the regularly scheduled blog entry*
It’s something you are taught very early on, that things change, but it doesn’t mean anything until you have more years under your belt.
I was told when I was 5 that even though I was scared to death to ride my bike without training wheels, things would change and one day I would be strolling through streets in big-girl two-wheeled glory.
I didn’t believe it.
I was told when I was 11 that my body would change and one day I would need a *real* bra, as opposed to the nipple clinging training bra that fit around my chest like a second skin.
I didn’t believe it.
I was told when I was 17 that my feelings would change and one day it wouldn’t hurt so badly that the boys I spent my high school years pining over didn’t like me back.
I didn’t believe that either.
But here I am, what seems like a trillion lifetimes later,
weaving in and out of sidewalk traffic on a ten speed (look ma, no hands!), jumping up and down in the mirror for fun just to watch my boobs jiggle in perfect circles, trying to remember the last time I even spoke to those guys from high school, and honestly hoping that they are well and happy, instead of hoping they would get rabies like I did by my senior year.
I used to really hate being poor. Not as if anyone actually enjoyed being poor when they were young. But I think it’s a little easier in some respects to be poor when you are surrounded by other poor people, because you’re all in the same boat. Growing up poor in a spectacularly wealthy community causes embarrassment in so many more ways because you always have to explain yourself, to cover it up, to make it better. There are people to impress and lies to be invented, and doing so was my fulltime job as a child.
I remember carefully peeling off the blue KEDS stickers from my friends’ old shoes and using Elmer’s Glue to try and tack them onto the back of my knock-off Kmart brand KEDS. I didn’t think it would be obvious at all to be walking around in bright white $5 fake KEDS with a beat up blue piece of rubber hanging off the back of my sole, but I was very wrong, and I heard the snickers anyways, whether real or imagined.
But despite all the hand me downs I was wearing, despite the fact that we didn’t have a car and we had to walk everywhere, despite the fact that our power got cut off periodically because we couldn’t pay the bill, the most miserable thing about being poor when I was a kid was the fact that I was in the reduced price lunch program.
Have you any idea what sort of travesty this is for a kid to have to endure?
While the rest of my classmates entered the cafeteria with their Cabbage Patch Kids lunchboxes, complete with bologna sandwiches tucked neatly next to their thermos’s of apple juice, I had to go through the lunch line letting them place wads of pizza and French fries and green jello onto my tray until I could barely lift it. At the end of the line I had to face the cashier lady as she held out her hand for me to place the one dollar and twenty-five cents into it.
I would then whisper to her “I get free lunch”.
“What’s-that-huh-what-you-say?!” she would scream out at me.
And so more loudly I would have to repeat “JASIKA PRUITT. FREE LUNCH”.
Then she would look down on her Reduced Price Lunch List for my name, her glasses sliding down the greasy skin on her nose, and she would say “Oh uh-huh, FREE LUNCH…go on, then”.
Its amazing that the same ladies worked in my cafeteria everyday, yet none of them could seem to remember that I was poor…its as if we were all hoping for the same thing…that one day I would just walk into the school and have a lot of money, and I would throw dollar bills and quarters at them, and I would buy myself all the icecream and Golden Flake brand potato chips an elementary school kid’s money could buy….its as if they were hoping that if they kept forgetting I was poor, that one day it just wouldn’t be true anymore.
I was hoping the same thing while the students in line behind me would look at me with questioning faces.
Sometimes they would ask “How come you don’t have to pay for your lunch?”
And sometimes I would say “Ummm, because the school said they didn’t need any more money .” That only worked for a while though.
It was the most embarrassing thing ever to sit down at that lunchroom table with all my friends and their plastic Ziploc bags of chocolate chip cookies while sticking my fork into the thick gray layer of cheese on top of my pizza.
When I was little I couldn’t imagine a fate worse than having to admit that I was so poor the school felt bad about taking my money.
But.
Things change.
I swear to you, if I could go through life right now living off reduced price lunches…. shit! I would be the MOST popular girl in New York City. I could go into SPICE on 10th and university, my absolute favorite thai restaurant in the world, and I would order up a big dose of their Green Salad, the one with the peanut sauce dressing on top, and I would order some curry puffs with the sweet cucumber dipping concoction, and then of course I would order some pad thai with shrimp, and enough lychee martinis to last me throughout the afternoon and well into the night, and then the waiter would hand me my bill, and I would say to him, loud and proud, for all the other SPICE patrons to hear…I would say to him, “SIR, I am actually in the REDUCED PRICE LUNCH PROGRAM!” and then everyone in the restaurant would look over at me in awe and they would ooooh and ahhhh and wish they were my friend, and if anyone asked me how I had been bestowed with such an honor as that of the reduced price meal, I would say to them “Because POOR people have to eat, too!” and then I would take my boxes of leftovers and give it to the homeless guy on my way to the train…
…I would carry a badge with me at all times with my name emblazoned on the front and Reduced Price Lunch Participator typed out right underneath it, and I would show it to all the people who worked at Whole Foods as I walked up and down the aisles, throwing expensive jars of things I didn’t need into my basket and proclaiming at every turn “IM JASIKA AND I GET FREE LUNCH!”
And oooooh…don’t even get me started on food stamps!
(Okay, you can get me started on food stamps.)
If I could apply for them today…man, my life would be heavenly. I know that now they have that savvy and user-friendly EBT credit card looking thing for people on welfare to use, but I remember when food stamps used to come in a book, and you had to literally tear the bills out of it. You could spot a food stamp from a mile away cause it looked like oversized Monopoly money, all pastel-colored and whatnot. I was beyond embarrassed about them at 14, when food stamps were a punishment unrivaled by any grounding I had yet to be faced with. No one wants to go buy late-night popcorn and soda with their friends on a Friday night with a fistful of pink money, and whenever my mother was in line at the store to pay for our food, I would mysteriously disappear as soon as she pulled out her color-wheel of stamps.
But.
Times change. You know why? Because I would go to a strip club with food stamps if I had them today! Oh yes I would, and I wouldn’t be ashamed about a damn thing….! Without a second thought, I would stuff those rectangles of paper into all the g-strings that got close enough for me to snap. I wouldnt be embarrassed at all. If only I knew then what I know now…that not having to pay for food means having more money to pay for clothes!
What a valuable lesson, that somehow completely escaped me in all my years of grade school.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I was first introduced to Shel Silverstein in the third grade. I was in high school before I ever seriously considered being an actor, but before then, I wanted to be the 8-year old female Shel Silverstein when I grew up. I couldn’t think of anyone else in the world that was as good at rhyming words AND drawing as he, and I would spend entire Saturdays writing my own poems and drawing accompanying pictures for them. I even started dappling a bit in jingle writing at the age of 9, which is where the very popular song for the imagined Stink No More line of deodorant originated (”you’re going on a date/ and you smell great/ stink no more/you aint gonna stink no more!…”)
Shel Silverstein belonged to me and I wrote pages and pages of things trying to be way better than him, and of course I never was, but it was okay because it made me want to read him more and more, to try and sop up all that goodness he had inside of him. I would read A Light in the Attic over and over again, and I would stare at his picture in the back of the book, the picture where he is baldheaded and sitting in a chair, and his feet and toes are silhouetted perfectly against the backdrop of his crisp white shirt…I thought to myself “He looks kind of like my Dad”, which isn’t true, but I wanted it to be.
Every word he wrote was ingrained in me, and I swallowed up all his rhymes, all those crude line drawings of kids and plants and toys and animals and mommies and daddies, and I had so many of his poems committed to memory that for fun I would recite them to my mother while she cooked dinner.
But at some point in time…some point between free cafeteria lunches and counting calories…I completely lost him. So many of his words were stuffed into me, packed into my brain as if I had written all the words myself, and then things changed, and they all seeped out, and I realized that all these years later, I couldn’t quote him anymore, could barely even recognize any of that poetry anymore, that poetry that I thought was so genius and made just for me. I realized that I was claiming him by name, but not by practice.
So. I went to the bookstore to right my wrongs, to get him back.
Where the Sidewalk Ends.
Flipping through the pages, I got chills because I could feel the excitement creeping back into me just as it did when I was a little girl and had checked the book out of my school’s library for the 100th time. It was the most familiar experience in the world.
I smiled at all the illustrations that I had spent so much time tracing with my fingers, and then I noticed that Shel’s line drawings of people, his hard, thick lines broken up only by dots and curls of shadow, were much like the drawings I make…no backgrounds, no color, no sky and no ground, just faces and bodies and stories etched into solid lines.
It was surreal to make this connection from his work to mine, to think that maybe I didn’t completely change once I grew up after all, that maybe he never stopped belonging to me in the first place….that maybe his art/ his words/ his world just manifested itself inside of me in a less-obvious way
And then my fingers stopped on this page:
MAGIC
Sandra’s seen a leprechaun,
Eddie touched a troll.
Laurie danced with witches once,
Charlie found some goblin’s gold.
Donald heard a mermaid sing,
Susy spied an elf,
But all the magic I have known
I’ve had to make myself.
02/24/06 1:11 PM
Something has been wrong with me since Thursday. No one would notice it. They ask me if I am okay, and even if they are only asking over the phone, they can hear me smiling from all my miles away, and saying yes I am fine and nodding to try and further convince them. But something has been wrong with me since Thursday. The reason I *should* have been upset was apparent. Last Thursday, a week ago today, at 2 in the morning, Ms. Jesse May Fomby died; the woman I was named after; the woman who taught me how to dance her famous Jesse jig to her favorite song, which happened to be How Come You Dont Call Me? by Prince. Jesse May Fomby, my grandma. She is the only grandparent that I knew. And I have her mouth.
Death is plenty of reason for me to be upset. Plenty of reason for people to call and ask if I’m okay, if I need anything, do I want to talk? Do I want to cry? Can they get me anything, anything at all? But that wasn’t the real thing that was wrong. The real thing that was wrong was that I was fine. I was upset, but I was fine. I cried when I found out. I cried in my bed. I cried by myself, all the way in California with the swishing sound of a ceiling fan drying my tears onto the faded pillowcase beneath my head. But that was all I could do. This was the first time I had been introduced to death in real life. Before that, my relationship with this foreboding entity was strictly through Six Feet Under episodes. I saw what death was *supposed* to do to people. Sometimes they threw things. Sometimes they fainted. Sometimes they yelled, sometimes they got violent, sometimes they made strange noises in the backs of their throats and moaned and growled and hollered. And there were always other people nearby to console them, to make that easier, since grief is probably tremendously difficult and exhausting to go through by yourself. But all I could do was cry silently for her. No sounds. No sobs. No uncontrollable body shaking. I don’t know if that didn’t come out of me because it wasn’t inside of me in the first place or because I knew that no one was around to catch and hold onto my sadness when it did pour out.
Each day that has passed since Thursday I have had to use my grandmother as an excuse for something…I’m leaving early, I cant go out, I didn’t email you back, I didn’t return your call, I forgot to ask, I left it at home, my mind has been busy….cause she isn’t here. But how much of that is me really feeling neglectful and unhappy and sad, and how much is it me *wanting* to feel that way? Cause that’s how you are supposed to feel, right? I miss her. Yes. I miss the thought that she is not laying in her bed in the nursing home in Birmingham, giggling and threatening to flash her boobs at me and my brother like she did last time I was there. This is what happens right? Death I mean. Death happens, and you just hear it and you take it, and you breathe it in, and then you move on. That’s what I did, so why did it make me feel like I didn’t love her as much as I was supposed to? Maybe because I don’t yet know how to grieve. I don’t know if this is normal. I don’t know if it makes sense for me to pour myself into other people and other thoughts so that I don’t have to remember what’s really happening and that not only is Grandma no longer here, but that this will happen again with someone else, cause this is the way that the world works, people die, and I just never noticed it till I was 25 years old…
Today, all day, 2 minutes at a time spread out all over my Thursday afternoon, I packed to go home to Alabama for my grandmother’s funeral. I’ve never been to one before, but I know enough about them to know that Black people take *forever* to bury their dead. I guess funerals count towards CPT, too. So. I put my suitcase on the floor. I pulled out all the black pieces of clothing that I owned and folded them neatly beside my suitcase. I pulled out the black heels. I pulled out all the underwear I knew I would need for the trip. The socks. The conditioner. The jewelry. The combs. The jeans. The sweaters…
…and then tonight, in the middle of negotiating suitcase space for both my boots and my blue jacket, Iron and Wine rolled up in my iTunes.
Such Great Heights.
Do you know this song?
Its just guitars, and this soft tiny voice, singing
They will see us waving from such great heights
Come down now, they’ll say,
But everything looks perfect from far away,
Come down now,
But we’ll stay
And that’s all it took.
Finally, tears pumped from my heart up to my face and then guzzled out of my eyes. It was painful crying, the kind that comes in waves and makes your head burn and leaves that sour taste in the back of your mouth…just when you think they are all done, they start up again…
Cause FUCK, that’s such a beautiful idea, to have her waving at me from somewhere, the sky, a taxi, a ferris wheel, a warm kitchen, anything…but somewhere specific, so that she is not gone anymore, she’s just living on and on and stretched out over the rest of all my days, smiling and telling me how incredible it is to be where she lives now.
01/21/06 2:31 AM
This is supposed to be week 2 of Jasika Harlem Shakes LA, but 4 days of my time here was actually spent back in New York City shortly after I arrived in California. I’d like to say that I was jet-setting in style from coast to coast and rubbing elbows with the most elite of entertainers, but that’s not quite true; in reality I was dragging myself through a slew of airports via red eye flights to make it back to NY in time to work on the commercial I booked for Intel with Mariah Carey, whose elbows I did not once get to touch. But I was continuously sprayed with her expensive hair products whenever her hair stylist came to touch her up between takes, so I guess that is just as good.
Now I am back in LA and trying to get a better grasp on this place. NYC and LA are about as different as two cities could possibly get, which is why I am fairly surprised by how much I am enjoying it here so far.
There are a lot of highways in this place, and unfortunately MAPQUEST treats me like the red-headed stepchild…sometimes he gets me to exactly where I need to go in record time, and other times he completely makes up roads that simply do not exist. Its times like those that make me want to paper-cut my body with my printed MAPQUEST directions, but each day I seem to get lost in a new way, and I am hoping that after a while I will simply run out of *wrong way* options and make it to everywhere I have to be on time.
The people here are friendly and smiley, which I like. But they also have an unrealistic concept of winter and as a result, they insist on wearing fur coats and thick wool boots when its 55 degrees outside. All I can do is roll my eyes at them and be thankful that I managed to avoid stomping around city streets with snow packed up to my eyeballs for at least this winter.
Tuesday was the best day ever because I got to see almost all my cast members from Take the Lead. We were doing our ADR for the movie, and afterwards we all got a chance to hang out. My friend and castmate Marcus invited me to a party hosted by House of Courvosier (act like I’m saying that with The Lady’s Man lisp). Because he is a celebrity, I had to pose with him for pictures, and it was both very exciting and exhausting.
I’m used to going to parties and letting my belly hang out if its bloated and slouching my shoulders and even picking my wedgies if need be, but not this time: here there were photographers snapping pictures every which way, and I suddenly had to be super aware of the angle of my face and whether or not my curls were hiding my eyes, and I had to bevel my legs to make them look longer and suck in my stomach and tuck under my butt, and arch my feet…by the time we left, I was tired and fully unclear as to how real celebrities go to events like that as often as they do and actually enjoy themselves…
I had fun pretending to be a lot cooler than I truly was, but then I got in my car, went home, and put on my flannel pajama pants and ate peanut butter in the bed while watching Jimmy Kimmel on tv….
I guess I cannot fully appreciate the truly fabulous things in life if I don’t also appreciate the simple ones 
this is me and marcus:
this is me and a bunch of beautiful people that i do not know, and also proof that my pants are not nearly as photogenic as I would hope for them to be:
if you scrutinized me as much as I scrutinize me, you would notice that one of my eyes is *completely* a different size than the other one…(and dont even get me started on my facial warts)…
01/11/06 7:25 PM
I have decided to close my online shop at the beginning of next week, because I want to focus on the selling of actual pieces of my artwork.
I am making printed artwork available for purchase through my paypal account, and I will have that information up on the site in the coming weeks. Until then, any inquiries about design/logo/commisioned artwork and prices need to be directed to my manager, John Essay, whose contact information is under my CONTACT link.
You will not get another opportunity to buy any other items from my online shop after it closes, so if there are things you have been meaning to purchase (…I know how long you have had your eye on that mousepad…), then make sure you do it before January 16th!
hearting,
j*nicole
01/8/06 3:38 AM
I cannot lie…I was weary about my move to LA.
I was convinced that I would be accosted by fake boobs in every direction that I turned, and I was nervous that I wouldnt find anyone that I liked. However, despite the 5 hour long flight that I had to endure with a hearty hangover, despite the waiting in the hot sun for my bags to be thrown off the plane and then subsequently bashing my knee with one of my oversized suitcases in my haste, and then the hour and a half that I spent in my rented car trying to find my way to my new temporary home, and then the realization that I left a lot of important things in new york the night before since I was still reeling from the beer and the girl that I was with and unable to think clearly enough to pack the correct way…
despite *all* of that,
I think California is a beautiful place, and the people here are NICE. Not overly nice and not disingenuine (is that a word?), but just very comfortable and open and kind. A man with his wife saw me in my car at the gas station fumbling over my faulty mapquest documents, and he offered to help me find out how to get back to where I needed to be. The man in the Enterprise office where I got my car rental (thanks to the lovely and amazing John Bailey) gave me his most heartfelt wishes for a thriving career and promised to remember me when he saw me on TV. And tonight, after a little nap and a shower, I drove to Hollywood and attended the art gallery showing of my unmistakably talented friend Jon Marro, and I did it all by myself. The girl who was supposed to be my date canceled at the last minute, and instead of not going at all, like I normally would have done, I sucked it up and drove out there (without getting lost) and I had a great time.
His were the most amazing pieces in the show, and I was thrilled and excited to be in touch with a good old friend.
Sure the novelty wears off, but I didnt realize how much I missed being in a car and driving myself around places…Ive never experienced 75 degree weather in January before either. And I forgot what it was like to be in a gocery store with full-sized shopping carts.
New York is my absolute favorite place in the world, but my first day in LA has been full and sunny and bright and exciting…
here’s to continuity
12/20/05 10:12 PM
I was just talking about peanut butter and how fflipping fantastic it is. When I was young, I was also a punk, and there was a huge list of things that I refused to eat. The only thing still on that list is cheese, but everything else has been moved from the list of Things Jasika Will Throw Up If Force-Fed to Things That Jasika Might Eat if Your’e Cute Enough to Convince Her to Try It.
I had to revise my peanut butter hating stance when I was in college and too poor to be picky about anything. I had no idea that you could get so much out of a $3 jar of Skippy, because, with the incorporation of a few other foodstuffs, an entire jar could feed me for breakfast, lunch and dinner for about a week. For some reason I never tired of the food; this could be because my body was making up for lost time when I wouldn’t eat it in my youth, but it might also be because peanut butter can quickly satisfy both my desire for sweetness and my desire for salty with one fell swoop of my index finger.
Things I Have Enjoyed Putting Peanut Butter On:
My finger
Granola
Cheerios
Hot chocolate
Graham crackers
Warm toast with honey
Candy bars
Cinnamon Toast Crunch
Bagel
Chicken on a stick from a street vendor in china town (ask Cecilia Elaine Mohagony Davis about that one)
Nutri-grain bars
Chocolate pudding cups
Crackers
Pita bread
Marshmallows
Rice cakes
Icecream
Fish
Protein bars
raisins
Peanuts (don’t judge)
I don’t drink milk so my favorite way to eat cereal for the longest has been to pour it into a jar of peanut butter and drizzle honey on top of it. This is annoying when you share a jar of Skippy with a roommate, but now said roommates know what’s really *hood*, and they don’t mess with my shit anymore.
Anyways, this entire blog has been inspired by the fact that I made the most delicious peanut butter soup concoction this afternoon for dinner, and I went on and on about it all day. I’ve been requested by two, count ‘em, TWO people to provide my fabulous PB SOUP recipe here, and I can’t say no to spreading the joy of my peanut buttery life with others. I just can’t.
So.
What follows is the culmination of the recipe I was given for peanut butter soup with the fact that sometimes I don’t want to be told what to do….eff a measurement, y’all, I will add curry powder til I FEEL like stopping, HOLLA!
This would normally make for a disastrous dish when all is said and done, but as I said before, my soup was so freaking good. And it didn’t even give me gas or anything (but I have already built up a tolerance to massive quantities of PB consumption, so you’re gonna have to stop yourself after two bowls unless you want to face the repercussions).
Jasika’s Peanut Bettah Soup
some butter
red onion, diced
some chopped up carrot
8 cups chicken stock (make it with bullion cubes, people- cans of broth are for PANSIES)
1 cup peanut butter (p.s. SKIPPY makes a delicious natural peanut butter minus trans-fat that you don’t even have to stir around to get that creepy looking gook off the top, nor do you have to refrigerate it: I highly recommend adding this to your life)
tomato, chopped
4 small potatoes, cubed
bell pepper and/or red pepper (I used to both cause its December)
celery, cut up
scallions, chopped
curry powder
2 tbs parsley flakes
fish (salmon, or halibut, or snapper) cut into bite sized pieces
3 tbs fresh lemon juice
cayenne pepper
peanuts
1. Melt the butter in a big ole pot over medium heat. Add onions and carrots, cook for 5 minutes or until the onion starts to smell too good to stand.
2. Meanwhile mix one cup of chicken broth with the cup of peanut butter. Prepare for this being exciting, cause its not every day that you get to mix thick creamy butter into a liquid and turn it into a smooth and potent concoction. But don’t eat it, it tastes like buttcrap.
3. Add the remaining 7 cups of chicken broth to the big ole pot of onions and carrots. Stir, adding the tomato, potatoes, peppers, celery, scallions and parsley. Add the curry til you don’t feel like adding it no mo’.
4. Pour the exciting peanut butter mixture into the big ole pot and stir. Bring to almost a boil, then lower heat, cover, and simmer until potatoes are cooked through, about 15 minutes. Here is where they said you could add zucchini, but I had not paid attention to that item in the ingredients list, so I just cooked it for an additional 10 minutes. But then I threw some peanuts in there for fun.
5. Stir in the fish and cook about 7 more minutes, til it’s opaque.
6. Add the lemon juice and cayenne pepper to taste, then stir.
7. The most exciting part (besides the broth and the butter) is the presentation of this dish: drop a big spoonful of peanut butter into the bottom of the bowl, and then sprinkle with peanuts and parsley. When you ladle the soup into the bowls, the peanut butter will stay in tact at the bottom but will gradually melt away a little at a time so you will get these sweet bites of peanut butter in the midst of your soup enjoyment, and the peanuts will offer the most delightful crunch when you least expect it.
Damn it, I want another bowl now.