And the MacArthur Genius Award goes to.... Fecal Violence

The Creative Capital deadline is coming up and more than a few artists have been asking me for help. You guys! I don't really know anything about grants. I just apply for a lot of them and some come back to me.

It's nice when people think you have the magic touch. But really, it's just perseverance. I've written many many many grants. And I get turned down for a lot. Grants are like auditions, except there is more logic in who gets them-- but like auditions, it's also random who gets them.

I think I'm losing it. I'm tired of the haul it takes to get work as an artist. (Have I not mentioned this a hundred thousand times?) I'm sitting on a grant panel in two weeks and am getting a nice stipend to sit on the panel. But then I got the grant binders from the foundation! Whoa! There are like over a hundred applications in a stack that's 8 inches thick! I have to read each and every page of this! Blech. My stipend is well earned.

Today the REDCAT Now Festival application was due. I started it late last night and decided to use it as an opportunity for creativity. I'm tired of trying to prove my post-post modernism and how I'll save the world in one fell performative swoop, I decided to enjoy writing every word of this application.

From now on, I'm writing grant applications that are fun to write and read!

Here's a sneak peak at choice bits and pieces from today's REDCAT proposal narrative for the presentation of my new work--- "CAT LADY!"

"'Cat Lady' is a 20 minute performance piece intersecting the personas and rituals of cat ladies and male pick-up artists to create surreal moments of human isolation."

"...cat sculptures that are spoken to throughout the piece like old familiar lovers."

"My first golden shower..."

"I frantically sniffed all the cushions in the house..."

"As I slowly forfeited to Oliver's fecal violence..."

"dangling hairy lymph nodes..."

"The cat lady. Was that mythical persona of the unmarried woman living in the lonely world of filthy catdom becoming my reality?"

"...an animal psychic who came well recommended by our lesbian friends."

"...my set as a menagerie of cat sculptures made of newspaper and felt..."

"...i speak to them, dance with them, and enact my own obsessive compulsive thoughts..."

"...life alone..."

"...attempt real connections with the audiences and my cats..."

"...concurrent to Oliver's urinary woes..."

"...struck by his boyish eagerness..."

"...post-modern gold..."

For all you artists who keep asking me to send copies of my proposal or grant applications to you, feel free to plagiarize all of the above!

THE END.