into the little window, as if it were a piece of paper, as if it were a wall in the sun and this here were a piece of brush. not a whole brush, just the painted end of it. perhaps yellow and brown. and maybe there could be some numbers embossed in gold. something like that.
the plants will need to survive inside. many will. some will not. for seven days.
a shot glass with a few now dead wild flowers is surrounded by a circle of white pollen. the small sunflower i have recently brought in left a cloud of yellow on the table cloth. it looked beautiful and spooky. it felt like a scream, recorded in little dots on the dark blue of the table cloth.
now the table pretends to be covered with small ocean plants. all of them have seven leaves. all are facing north. this one is actually a bedsheet. it is too long. it reaches the floor on one side. not for very long maybe.
my dinner is a series of disks, a third of a red moon, a whole bunch of little green leaves, half a lemon, a spoon of salty stuff, a few spoons of olive oil... and a tiny wooden cup of small water. frozen. hot. really tiny.
just two more days and we will be able to float on top of unconnected ideas, and aimless plans, images of things to come.
maple leaves and rocky mountains and unexplored places.
just read an article claiming that 0.3% of the light falling on the sahara will be able to supply all of europe with electricity.. make it 0.6% of the light and turn all the cars electric.
i could imagine that the next push for the economies around the world is going to be the true conversion to the so called alternative energy sources, the renewable ones. all buildings should be suppliers of energy, not just consumers of it. the wind should not be wasted. it should be harvested.
the sun should be eaten. pieces of it. particles... they already are being eaten... maybe more should be.
the words here are powered by wind. (switched to wind about two years ago?, maybe three? not sure.)
i wish the subway in new york used electricity from wind power. i would pay more for the metro card if i only knew that my share of fare is being used to purchase renewable energy.
wil there be electric jets?
the plants will need to survive without water for a week.
in a few days.
so glad we will take some time off. really.
Recently in just thinking Category
stumbled into a moment of complete completeness and as soon as i noticed i did the moment escaped me. and i tried to catch it again, but it was not really possible somehow. i had found it as i was using an old burned piece of wood to flatten the soil around three young lime trees which i had replanted into their new home.
it was as if i had stumbled upon a dream, yet i was completely awake.
the opposite of my falling asleep on the train the other night and waking up in coney island.
the first few moments of being awake were special. there i was, running towards the closing door of the empty subway car, in the middle of the night, somewhere in the depths of brooklyn. i think the train spit me out on avenue p.
"does the bird you have on your balcony stop the pigeons from coming?" it is embarrassing when i do not recognize my neighbors immediately. here was my next door neighbor asking me about the crow my parents had sent from germany to scare away the pigeons.
the disadvantage of living in the tallest building of the neighborhood is that it very naturally attracts birds. especially birds that like to nest in cliffs.
i have to keep the my balcony in subtle motion at all times, so the pigeons do not fall in love with some spot.
like that pigeon in the flower box a floor below me. there she was, noticed her yesterday. she looked like a bird ready to die. and my neighbor was nice enough to let her. in the afternoon when he was cleaning the other planters he left the apparently dying bird in peace.
i took the flashlight in the middle of the night and pointed it at the location of the animal.
she was dead. her wings spread, her head to the side.
i only saw her for a split second, as i did not want to look like a psychotic, snooping neighbor.
thought is was nice of the people to respect the need of an animal.
quite the opposite of those two ladies in prospect park a few years ago
who dragged a dying cat they spotted in the bushes, called the firefighters, tried to perform cpr.
this morning the pigeon was completely awake and keeping her spot. a few hours later "dad" was sitting on the eggs.
what is bound to happen here is the opposite of a dying bird.
and no, my plastic bird does nothing to the pigeons. they do not care about it. some seem to come visit it. i will take it down soon. i have two.
and large birds fly by my window now and then. and it is beautiful.
this afternoon something that looked like an eagle (do they live here?,) flew by the building on huge spread wings. he was no more than 300 meters from the building when a little falcon, maybe a fifth of his size sped out of nowhere, fell towards the larger predator and bit him right between the shoulders.
it was just a brief moment, it looked like there was some sort of pre-story though.
the sun will soon set over brooklyn.
i had to bring all of my plants in this morning because of the strong winds.
hope my lemon and lime trees will be okay.
being replanted tends to be a shock for living things.
saw an apartment just like mine available two floors above mine. the view is subtly different. the place smells of fresh paint and newly polished floors.
perhaps the thing to do now would be to bundle up and sit outside in the rocking chair; stare at the clouds as they are speeding by in ever new shapes in front of the ever darker turning sky.
and i might find a place as non-verbal as when i was flattening the ground with the burned piece of wood. or perhaps i will wake up and find myself having to exit the train on avenue p. maybe i will find a moment so simple the perfect one that will be waiting for me there.
and maybe the only way to find out is to finally stop writing this entry and just do... what again?
there is a certain lightness in the knowledge that a lot of the things said here are now outside of me. it is a part of a previous me, not necessarily the current me. and that's interesting and odd and ... how does this really work? what happens when i lose the connection to all the code that was hidden between the lines of some of the former entries, written in a time of desperation and frustration? if i ran into myself writing some of these entries, would i be upset with myself? or would i smile, knowing that things would eventually turn a lot brighter.
when walking down smith street in brooklyn one day, i saw maybe three or four people who's back story i knew at least a little. and it made them more vulnerable, more human. i thought then what it would be like to walk down any street and just know everyone's back story. and also know the back story of every house and every object and even the water that makes up the clouds.
would the world feel larger then? or would it feel much smaller? a unified, large living thing.
"there is a point in life when you know everyone around you, and also all of the surroundings. and then you die." (i think bruce said that.)
yes, somewhere in a tiny room, maybe surrounded by blurry, yet familiar faces. or maybe in a racing ambulance? for a third time. perhaps alone, on the floor of the living room, the dust of the carpet having that very familiar scent of a long unopened book.
and then the rest begins. or it does not. nothing begins really. nothing ends. not on a larger scale. it just keeps adjusting towards something else. but it does not begin or end. we make up beginnings or ends. they are a construct of our need to see things by comparison alone. maybe?
278 days are gone from this year. and there are 87 days left. on day 299-66 we will sit in some very bad seats in the belly of a 747 and go back to europe, on a little vacation. there is always a good amount of driving, but this time we will stay in one place. the places i never dared to visit longer than a day or so, sometimes even an hour, or just an afternoon, these will be the places that will now be around longer.
can't wait.
dear future me. if you ever need to know what an entry looks like by the old you who was tired and ready to just sleep... here is one. a slowly flowing body of water maybe. most of it, at least.
i will now take the trains.
with an open window in front of me and a very hot laptop on my lap i am listening to some Shrivastav/Sabri, playing Raag-Bilas-Khani Todi Vilambit Gat In Teental 4.4.4.4. and i have no idea what it means.
though do i ever have an idea?
probably not.
the wine tastes like wet soil. and that's a wonderful thing. it really is. if only i could drink the earth. i would.
the man who trains bonsai explained that amy's lime tree is not going to grow any fruit for another three to four years perhaps. we might maybe expect some flowers in two years.
my jade plant is almost 10 years now. and she is more beautiful than ever. does she get the pleasure to drink soil? in tiny sips maybe?
still afraid of moving. having brief glimpses at the book about haniva.
what a day. what a day.
well, night now.
it was good to run into a table this morning.
more fun tomorrow.
hope the f will go express.
after this freshly ground day, it might be a good idea to just listen to the cats having a tough time in the backyard here. funny, as i was writing this, there was a noise as if somebody were hitting a carpet against the side of a building.
do people hit carpets until they let go of all their dust and hair?
in that pre-vacuum time in poland, this is what people would do now and then.
(wait... then. now?)
a freshly ground day. brewed in a pretty solid way, dripped into a cup of what had to get done.
only had tea today. the coffee was simply too much for me.
the subtle anxiety was simply too much. especially at 3am. about an hour before i usually wake up. maybe.
though i never know when i actually do.
am i awake now? or am i only dreaming that i am? how can i possibly find out? i just pinched myself.
i often pinch myself in my dreams. just to make sure that i am in control. a dream that is solid enough to survive a pinch is a seriously fun dream.
it can be one that turns out to be one of those floating, meeting with the asleep sky kind of dreams.
or what about that pigeon the other night. the one that just did not want to let go?
miranda july apparently has a feature in domino. there is also a story in the summer fiction issue of the new yorker. (the one with the adrian tomine "city thrills" cover, a moment drawn from a place just blocks from where i spend my days. in fact a place i walked by twice today.)
i have been measuring my subway trips for a few days now. i had no idea that it can take me longer to take the express train that it might take me to take the f. c to the f in the evenings seems to be the most efficient way to avoid tourists.
there are always herds of tourists between me and my train.
the little albrecht duerer garden on my fire escape is currently simply perfect. perhaps i could convince one of the squirrels to model as a hare?
after a freshly ground day, it might be time to just get some rest. tomorrow we will spend at least 7 hours in rather solid meetings. it is going to be a tasty day.
i can smell it.
without even waking up.
a bottleneck of a thought at the end of the day. robots invading the airwaves, as a second coming of a track. a black bear is looking at water. a plastic card painted gold blinks at me. there are six of my faces right here, looking at me. easter cards, printed in poland, sold in the us, ready to be sent back to poland.
the robots are really getting a groove now.
the windows across third street show very wealthy neighbors frolicking in front of their devices of pride: working fire places, entertaining screens, openings towards world wide webs. many.
a had a flashback of something that never existed. (that's a quote.)
i might be going to los angeles on thursday. for two days.
i planted a few more clones of my jade tree. i just stuck them into soil.
played with the soil.
moved it around between my fingertips.
healthy dirty dirt.
the 12 year old wine is not half bad. only half empty. now at least.
i taste the soil.
the ball is in my court.
what is happening with the moon? it looks like it is going to need to get back to orbit. heavy shiny moon.
a bottleneck of a thought at the end of the day.
piles of paper.
pop.
the apples were organic. i had to pull them out of a plastic encasing though, into which they might have been put shortly after their arrival from new zealand. that's a pretty long trip for someone who claims to be good for the environment. (something... not someone. i hope the apples did not have a soul.) maybe the apples i ate took a sailboat made out of bio degradable materials only to get to the piers in red hook? and they rolled themselves up the slope from there?
now they are gone. the tasty parts separated from the rest. eaten. gone.
the cores and skins are ready to be shipped back to a landfill in hmm... would that be new zealand again?
there is a tingling in my mouth as if the apples had not been organic at all.
or maybe it is not the chemical part that kicks me about them?
my other apple has been in the shop for (let me check iCal) almost 20 daysnow.
the display was a bit on the loose side and blotchy and the thing would not close properly anymore. then somewhere on the way to los angeles last month, the airport card disappeared from the consciousness of the operating system. i know, i should not be playing with an airport card, while 10000 feet in the air and definitely between airports, but what if it was just gone? i mean, not there. the invisible airport? (how useful would that be?)
i made an appointment with the apple store in santa monica, as this was where i spent about a week working. my appointent was the last one before the shop closed, on a sunday. the genius did not really want to deal with me, it seamed. but i had a real issue. i needed actual genius help.
he looked at my situation, disappeared in the back, taking my powerbook with him.
he reemerged after 15 minutes perhaps, holding the powerbook as well as a little silver organ bag. okay it was one of those antistatic bags. my airport card had come loose, it was not really broken, but the computer would not boot up when the genius tried to stick it into the appropriate slot.
the computer would actually not boot up with any card stuck into that slot.
the genius recommended that i drop off my powerbook at that shiny new 5th avenue store.
i managed to do that, maybe two weeks later. perhaps about a week after my return to new york.
(and the new york genius was a bit upset with the santa monica genius btw. since the brilliant guy in california had not recorded our encounter at all. so i was lucky that he did not hand me some other part of the powerbook in a little bag. he could have voided all my warranties.)
i somehow suspected that i would not be getting back my powerbook any time soon. and so i got a little mac mini as a replacement buddy for the time when the main computer was out of the house.
it is a good mini (it has two brains on a platter, just like me and it is very subtle about things it does, so we really can relate.) it plays very well with most of the software thrown at it.
okay, it took several days to open indesign and photoshop plays as if it were 1995 and the mini were my good old quadra 800 which i used to carry in a giant backpack, just to prove that the device was luggable. i bet it is 1000 times faster than my old quadra, it just feels as if things were a bit on the sluggish side with those few adobe applications i should be using all the time.
(when i can leave the room to play a round of animal crossing, just so photoshop has time to resize a picture might be a good illustration of what is happening here. i also hear that adobe is on that case. how did apple dare to surprise them with that switch like that.)
i still wonder about the apples that traveled to me all the way from new zealand. sometimes it is the best idea to not leave the country perhaps.
the apples could probably be much tastier in auckland than after their long travels... in brooklyn.
and my powerbook is probably waiting in a shop somewhere in california because of a missing part that needs to be flown in from taiwan, yet is stuck in the airport because it is not allowed to carry any electronic devices on board.
it took a good while to get out of the house yesterday. but then we walked and walked and walked. around 1am i was still walking in my sleep, looking at the clouds in the sky, some resembling faces coming straight from fantastic drawings.
kids on the train were taking money away from each other and almost breaking things.
a kid was reading watchmen for the first time.
as we crossed the overpass, the lantern above us finished its work, letting us see the surroundings in even more spectacular illumination.
an animation of a bunny and the promise of friendship from one of the largest corporations out there, somehow did not feel trustworthy in the slightest.
mona was playful and smart. she just is.
it is not very nice of me to leave posts here as if i were just constantly falling around corners of some tiny room. there is so much beauty around me, I have no words or time to describe any of it. (i guess?)
the other night i had a moment when i thought there might be a cavity in my brain, maybe one of those little bubbles we love so much when we discover them in cheese.
i was trying to wrestle to the ground the 200gb or so of photographs i have on various hard drives, using aperture, that software for which apple gave me a coupon i lost.
and it was then that i realized that i had not a single photograph that was taken in the last few months. i mean that's really a good reason to panic. then i checked the blog and all i found there were just very obscure descriptions of events that never really took place, and especially not with me around.
so what had happened? where have all these days gone. wait, weeks... no months?...
i then remembered that i had just had a wonderful time with really amazing people around me. and so maybe that's why some of the things just did not need to be translated into pixels or words...
and that was somehow good...
and i feel much better now.
if only somebody could please now close that span sewage pipe that has been pumping trackback spam into my site for the last few days, i would be a pretty happy person.
damn them spammers.
yeah, that's why all the comments are off on this entry and many many many others.
Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
There is a field. I'll meet you there
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.
Jelauddin Rumi
(1207-1273)
swam to the subway this morning. the umbrella broke one of its wing joints and so i was one of those guys who held a strangely broken round object above his head.
that train station on 7th ave and 57th street really has a cave like appearance. mineral water of the freshest kind drops from the ceiling onto tiny landing places all over the platform.
how many coffees have i managed to pour into myself today. many too many. and they were not the short kind either. i should be holding on to the ceiling with one foot while writing this. i am in front of the open window. there are still the very last remnants of daylight over park slope. and it is almost 9pm. fantastic.
i visited some temples tonight. walked past rockefeller centre to one of the department stores and let the wood panelled elevator bring me to the top ("notch") floor with all the tight and shiny and ridiculously expensive weird stuff. it is amusing to look at some of the things from time to time.
weird things. very much so. for me at least. there must be many out there who love this kind of stuff.
i dream of buying things once.
the shoe department was amusing as well. such odd personalities. shoe people. buyers, sellers, foot fetishists.
i left the building after having purchased nothing. and i mean it.
right next door: st. marks cathedral. it does have a shop which i did not visit.
i looked for the most quiet spot and just cooled down as far as i could.
once the snow began to fall in my head i was ready to complete my shy round around the church. i ended up by the black madonna, the one which i had seen in original when visiting czenstochowa at the age of maybe 7.
there was a good amount of tourists by the shrine. a woman was there to ask for some seemingly very serious favors or maybe close to impossible forgiveness? the painting stared patiently onto the burning candles. i wonder how many copies stare over burning candles all over the world...
it was really good to visit the church. after that visit no store really made any sense. (I visited two more. buying nothing.) things appeared very weird. weirder than the shoe department at sacks even. yes, that's possible.
i took the train home. the f. f is for hmm... "very" slow. and it was good. it made sense to just sit by what used to be a window and now looked as if some ghost had wiped its behind with it.
the 7th avenue train station smelled like the rim of a truck exhaust. and indeed, an ambulance was idling right outside the exit. two friendly people were eating their sandwiches with the engine pumping diesel fumes into the train waiting chambers.
no swimming was needed for the return home. my laundry was many pounds of stuff.
that coffee just makes me feel incredibly disoriented. the thoughts in my head appear to be like bees mixed with flies mixed with pollen. I am afraid to even open my mouth right now.
would even like to close my eyes and press both hands against my ears.
daylight is gone.
i have some work to do.
for weeks now.
oh dear.
i have to sign some things.
now.
managed to wake up very tired before the sun. outside was a rather dark brooklyn. i packed my things and walked into prospect park. some of the runners looked at me as if i were a broken toy, some looked at me as if i were a new one. (it happens.)
the birds were shy about their songs. only a few dared to let go of a few notes, just enough to not be bothered by lawyers. Bird song sampling.
it took about 30 minutes for me to get softish knees. i will probably die of a heart attack. i do not know how to move my slowly rusting body.
somewhere in the belly of maureen dowd's "are men necessary" (well, clearly they are for some authors, so they can write books about them, no?) somewhere in there was the mention of that edge age for men, when they realize how brutally mortal they are. i guess now would be the time. no. now is the time.
i catch myself with some of the same thoughts i had when i was 15, except that now i know better and this does not make it any funnier. (When i was 15, I had no idea what I was about to do. Now I sometimes have no idea what the hell I have done so far.)
no,wait, now i made it sound so negative. it is not quite as bad as it sounds.
I should be on top of the world, actually. I do work for perhaps the best agency there is, with some of the finest people in the business. Even the accounts i work on offer products which can bring some healthy happiness to those who use them (without killing them in the process. A really rare set of qualities.)
Okay. I am happy. This is it. I am really, really happy.
I want to cry. (Can't even do that right now.)
A mocking bird came by the feeders this morning and told everyone to get out of sight. It looked as if he hated everyone, including himself. He then flew away without even trying to get some of that bird food I have here.
The peanut cake and the cage have been stolen. Maybe the squirrels did it.
My dreams have recently been intertwined with moments of surprising loss of little things. A million things perhaps. Maybe just a few... maybe 3, or 7 or 17?
I am going to create a new category now. Lame entries. This one is going to be added. With a little star. One out of five.
my head was pressed against the window of the f train making its way incredibly slowly towards coney island. the tracks of the express train were two lines interrupted now and then and more and more by the underground walls. then the different cables added dashes of color to my private movie. whenever a station happened to be on our way i would see the slowly moving reflections of the lights on the rushing floor of the station. legs of commuters waiting for the train were like static in the picture of a television screen during a storm. i saw them but they really were not what mattered right now.
eventually the train made it under the east river. to me it looked like a longer period of darkness with a faint red colored stripe. it must have been some sort of cable, but to me it looked like that space between colors in a rothko painting.
and on we went. in carroll street, the train stopped in a place where a warning sign happened to be right there in front of my nose. "no clearance between columns." and i imagined my body thrown onto the roof of an express train, and how it would be spread thin, distributed by a large machine. smeared like bread spread. chutney. salsa with olive oil.
then the train emerged from underground. there was beautiful dirty brooklyn: the canal, the storage houses, the roofs of buildings showing off their brick in the setting sun. i was on the left side of the train, so i had the luxury to look towards the slope, towards the park, towards a reflection of the setting sun in the window of the train. then smith and 9th, 4th avenue... i managed to be the first person to get out of the station on 7th.
i skipped two meetings today to go home early, because of an incredibly sharp pain in my stomach. nothing to write home about, and certainly the result of my eating that stupid egg sandwich in the morning. or was it that coffee, poured together at that unfamiliar and slightly weird place on 8th avenue.
i am writing this in my bed. i will let my body rest a bit, so it can stop hurting. it still does hurt so well.
it is nothing major really. it is actually quite funny how little it takes to knock me out.
pain is something good when one has forgotten how precious minutes and seconds are. they flow invisibly by us when we have the luxury to feel nothing in particular.
once hit by some even minor punch, time turns into that semi solid thing. it does not want to pass. it resists. it takes itself. (time taking time.)
the ticking clock next to me on the night stand now still manages to swallow pretty gigantic seconds between each annoying tick (or tack?)
I will sleep now.
this will be good.
and when i wake up, the seconds spent in the underground of sleep will have washed out my body from under the load of pain.
just like that.
i need to write more. i sound far too dramatic.
time is honey.
This morning I ran for about 13 miles. It was an easy one, I do it all the time. Just up to the park, then around, then by the museum, the botanical garden, down the streets, then over the canal, say hello to the birds by the ocean, then all the way back, up third street. I got a tiny bit warm running up the 52 steps to my apartment, but the windows had been left open, so it was nice and cool, and there were three birds feasting on the feeder. A squirrel was pushing its nose against the glass (makes that squeaky sound, like a small eraser). It looked like it wanted to smell the white tulips in the window.
I think this is when I woke up. It was about 15 minutes before the alarm was supposed to go off.
All of my limbs hurt from the dream run, I guess, perhaps more likely from last night's dinner, an odd composition of what was left in the refrigerator.
I sat in the chair for several minutes, just slowly gathering the pieces of the morning. I drank a glass of water. The tulips by the typewriter are wilting in all possible directions, even before they had a chance to open. I guess it is too early for them to be around really anyway.
The lime tree next to my bed feels as if it were dying. The leaves do not seem to be producing the oils they used to produce. I had forgotten the plant behind a curtain one time, found its leaves curled into dry skeletons. I managed to bring it back to life, with just seven well placed leaves, but it is just not completely recovered yet. I am watching this one very closely now. I took it to the south windows, where it gets much more and much better light. It is too far north for this little guy.
It is actually the top of a much larger plant which I grew from a pit i found in a salad bowl about two years ago. Maybe three years. I bet the plant does not know, or care.
I will draw portraits of it, I think. I should draw portraits of all of my plants. Yes, I will do that. Will start soon. They are not the best looking plants. Most of them were found half dead in some dark offices, abandoned.
Some were just pits. Trash. Hmm...
The train was incredibly packed this morning. I had taken an early one. Maybe that's why. The guy next to me was reading something about beasts with pure golden hair. No other colors. Pure gold. Purest. They seem to have walked to the water.
Whatever this might be. The water.
I found a homeless house the other day. I did not want to write too much about it. I think I will. I just need to feed it something good. It is still very dark.
My reality is often much stranger than my dreams. I think I like it that way.
The pepper in my window looks like a lantern left on from a holiday that has yet to be invented. The lime tree will probably start its own religion, as it has been dead several times and back among the living, so far–more often than the other way around.
The Jade mother tree is currently hibernating, while the three children are growing like weeds, just behind that grey curtain I hung up to finally get rid of the kitchen. (At least visually.)
That other plant I had once salvaged from the office when it was just six limp leaves is now an angry territorial explorer, sinking its air roots into any piece of soil it can find.
Oh, and then there is that dry pot with a bunch of seeds in it. Let's see who is going to win here.
Now that was just what is going on on the inside. The outside is just worse then that, and the squirrels have not been visiting perhaps because they do not like some of the herbs growing there. Nothing illegal or dangerous, just the regular kitchen variety, now under a blanket of ice that used to be snow.
Ready to be plain old water again.
There are some microscopic plants living off that orange spot in my office. I will probably need to get up on a chair and lick the ceiling. I will probably need to lick it softly, so the whole led paint cover does not fall on my face. Maybe there should be no licking at all. Office or not.
My face actually almost fell off today, as the wind was getting under my skin somewhere between first street and union, sometime on the way to the train. I only realized that I was doing something incredibly illegal as I stood by the car door, with my coffee in one hand and a muffin in the other. Aren't beverages now prohibited on the subway? Or was it food?
Or was it just switching cars while the train ain't in the station?
It pretty much looks like my gardens are out of hand and the weather has turned for the worse and some of the new underground rules are not quite clear (yet).
But as far as happiness levels go. Now is the time to light the candles. Beautiful season we have here. Languagebeginswhereitends.
Rockin'
Annie Leibovitz was talking to someone in front of the building yesterday. She looked like a very wise human being, transported here from a very special age, a different age, one where most people spoke about ideas. Not other people.
I hear Yoko did not want to drop her pants for Annie, and so only John did, and so on. We know that picture. John drops pants for everyone in and outside of the picture. Imagine all the people did that. Well, a part of the population, I mean. Does this make sense?
I have seen many angry drivers in the streets around here recently. And there have been near misses in person to person encounters on the sidewalk as well. Somebody nearly hit my temple with their cane yesterday. A bag was pushed into my face. Track work on the B line would need a bit of an overhaul.
I made a small animal sound when leaving the house today. There is a cat-dog roaming around as if we had not stated the species count loudly enough last time. Evolution? Intelligent design at work? What makes us think that progress has magically stopped once we realized that we have ourselves to talk about? Isn't yellowstone still a giant magma bubble? Aren't we in the process of being part of something that will turn the microbes we live for into something much greater anyway?
And I somehow do not understand some museums and their illusion to be less ephemeral than a very well refrigerated mountain side or a swamp, or a dried out corner of a man made cave.
If I had one person to fire today. It would be myself.
I will now take my pen again and start creating some cat-dog-like creatures. I am apparently even less good at doing anything else.
Though then again, there might be some thinking needed to define what "good" is. But that, seriously, is a much bigger question than most of the other questions. It is right up there with the one if it even makes sense to ask questions.
Maybe not dropping your pants for Annie, can be that little thing that saves your life. Yoko could say that, no? I mean really.
it was delivered in tiny packages, which when unwrapped unfolded into dioramas of angst and hope and funny little cinematic scenes.
The ones which did not put me at the center of the action were perhaps better than the ones where I performed tasks which were clearly the inventions of the cruel side of my own mind.
In the end we managed to escape. The car was a scratched up lincoln with the sky falling in the back and the trunk not quite closing. A lot of smoke came out of that exhaust. It was the life giving smoke though. Nothing poisonous, I promise.
We managed to escape. Down the hill, on that very winding road through the forest.
Still barely holding on in the back seat I checked if the camera had been loaded. I had recorded some of the events. Hopefully the good ones. Hopefully the ones that would help me reassemble some of the better stories.
I woke up an hour before the alarm. I was still in the dead centre of the bed, still wedged between the pillows I had arranged around my head to block out any possible outside disturbances. A squirrel attack would have probably gone unnoticed.
The closet in the bedroom had a colder feel to it than a freezer.
My shirts arranged like the bloodless blue skins of the day version of me.
The radio was awake and happy to ask me for money.
Today will be a tough one again. It is going to be worth it. At the end of the day I will take the F into the heart of Brooklyn and there will be a new chapter of escapes in scratched up American machines, animals flying through the air, or not, a floor that wants to give some advice about wood and air and breathing in general.
And there will be new tiny packages of sleep. Wrapped up incredibly well, protected from shocks and stabs and throws.
Sleep is the poorest man's drug. What a gift. What a gift.
we were at the shelter looking at cats and they were just walking around like wind up toys about a large floor, random particles of feline existence. i was given one in a basket. it was a black cube of fur, staring at me with two large eyes, holding on to its life with the claws, not wanting to come out.
i shook the basket a bit, flipped it over and the cat fell out onto the floor, and onto its back, and it bounced a couple of times until it came to a stop, somewhere between the other cats.
i picked it up and it began to become a different kind of cat this time a bone china one, glossy and white and with an ever growing amount of crackle. (Is this the word for the thin breaks in the glaze?)
The color of the clay it seemed was dark red and it showed a bit between the edges of the otherwise completely reflective surface of the animal.
little claws were holding on to me now, very strongly, it was puncturing my skin around my stomach, staring at me, not letting go, ever changing shape and amount of fur on it.
i think this was when i woke up.
a man in the subway raced me to get to a seat. he almost knocked himself out doing that.
he then sat there, the entire half hour, with his legs spread, his arms crossed and his lower lip getting dry from all the exposure to air. he was rather angry with me, i guess. so sad for him. it was just monday morning.
a lecture at the MoMA at lunch time turned out to be a very interesting piece of new york, the lecturer a bit upset about me looking at my watch, ten minutes fast again, she stopped the lecture to point out that she could not concentrate with that noise going on.
it was a spectacular weekend.
and the more i think about it the better it gets.
maybe it would be a good idea to get a coffee now.
i like that the cat in my dream could change so many aspects about itself and still, at all times, remain a cat. i will need to think about that a bit more.
there is something funny about the SAFE Exhibition at MoMA being on display in rooms at the end of a foot bridge which is permanently suspended six floors high, though much higher of course. Visitors can see how comfortable they feel leaning against a thin barrier of glass to see tiny sophisticated german tourists flocking to their cultural mecca.
I hope Chris goes to see the show, as he would very much enjoy it. Maybe I can let him know somehow. Though how?
Oh, and one might want to visit the Julia Oschatz show at Leslie Tonkonow in Chelsea. It is a good show. And those who feel too disturbed by an eyeless humanoid creature injuring herself in various ways can always just step into the gallery next door and see what all those Born into brothels photographs were about... hmm... wait... that show just ended yesterday.
(Julia's show is about more than an eyeless creature being injured or injuring herself, of course. Though giving away more would be a bit lame, so I won't.)
Well, it is still worth going out of the house today. It is turning out to be a great day and there are so many wonderful things to see.
The butter in the dish next to me is like a tiny model of the interior space at MoMA. The tea in the little cup reminds me of the water in a lake I have yet to see.
If I were in LA I would be at the Junc Gallery this morning, looking at some work by Jordan Crane, for example...
In Frankfurt, I would probably run to the MMK (or eBay.)
And anywhere, I would just look at the sky. And the sky is just incredible right now. It changed so much in the last 15 minutes even. Wonderful. A happy sunday. (I also just had the best omelette yet.)
Amazing.
"please check on my command," the man next to me was probably German. "Command" instead of "order" somehow was very clear to him and surprisingly also to the very friendly waitress. He had been waiting for his food for long. In the mean time he had been handling a little flock of digital devices to stay in touch with somebody, somewhere, somehow. nonstop
The waitress soon returned to me (?) with a second check. So maybe things were not quite as clear as they seemed.
The food was good; mystery items arranged in a very beautiful way. I avoided the things that somehow seem to make my stomach twist into excruciating spirals.
Tried to take a look at some of the 4600 or so digital snapshots my father took over the few days of our trip. It was a bit difficult to dive into this giant data bank of first time impressions. It will take us both a good while to decipher the intentions behind some of the pictures.
Many of the photographs are just of me, pressing my left eye against the eye piece of the ttl light meter.
There are no pictures of me screaming into the camera, there are none of me crying, staring into heavens with my fists recognizable only as two crab-claw shaped blurs.
I remained very calm throughout the entire trip. I somehow learned that survival strategy somewhere. It is not a good idea to play dead when attacked by a bear. It is an equally bad idea to lose one's cool when seeing his father once in about seven years.
Many pictures he took are of me taking pictures. And thus I took some pictures on the trip.
I picked them up from duggal yesterday. Some turned out horrible which is a good sign. It means that I can still recognize horrible. Some are quite good. I will keep the good ones. I will not have the heart to destroy the bad ones, I guess. All are too large for me to scan right now, but not everything needs to be scanned and shared and posted and commented upon right away.
I feel like I am getting closer to a feeling of being private in a large crowd (here).
Now I am beginning to just be, perhaps?
This is so very important for any original work, no?
Performances are usually excellent for interpreting arts, I guess they are called the performing arts in English?
It feels nice to be able to write here and not imagine any audience.
Maybe one person. Like, about right now. You.
It was good to take pictures a bit slower. With one eye I would dive into a world somehow related to the one surrounding me, and yet very controlled by my actions. Not only was it important how objects aligned, it was important how i moved myself in relation to them.
The bear was there too. We all had to be aligned into very deliberate arrangements.
We then had to be undisturbed in this position for maybe a minute, maybe two, maybe ten. Of this time, we would allow the film in the camera to be exposed to the outside world. This tiny moment was the one when we would all close our eyes, so the film could see the light. The camera would flip up the mirror, I would stare into darkness, movement stopped. We would all be there. Then. Blind.
Once this moment was successful, I would turn the crank of the camera one and imagine that the moment was not as successful as it potentially could have been.
If the moment failed because one of the participant failed to remain calm, I would repeat the procedure until there was at least a certain level of satisfaction.
It is a quiet thing to do, this making pictures.
And every step is just one of many.
And though things happen in loneliness, at least for a split second, there was an army of ideas and movements and people who made this moment possible.
So many people touched most of the little particles of this moment until it became itself.
My father has been waking up, not knowing where in the world he might be. Was he in one of the national parks? or maybe las vegas?
I woke up last night arguing with myself in polish.
it is getting late again. I will need to close this computer and see what my brain has prepared for me as an interpretation of events past.
good night sweet dreams.
(no period.)
"please check on my command." "in chief."
please?
awoke this morning to a repeated roar of a squirrel. it might have been the black buddy who came by my window the other day to rub his glands against the glass and then to place three tiny soft nut-like objects onto my window sill.
life has reduced itself to very thin minutes of precious time above the surface of a gigantic piece of work. the rest is spent submerged, adjusting little knots of a carpet on the bottom of each newly discovered day, beyond what looked like the very edge of my horizon.
and it is great that the field of vision has been expanding, and i am learning a lot. each day.
so i guess i am not complaining. i feel quite blessed every time i open a water faucet or cross the street without being submerged in toxic soup.
hmm... toxic soup.
the projections of little objects in the windows moved dangerously quickly across the kitchen wall. time is running out of this brief morning as well. i should get up and ready and into the city, i guess.
the squirrel stopped roaring though there he is, jumping from branch to branch.
maybe one day we'll get a picture together. somewhere on the edge of some photograph. and we will look like freshly grown grass.
you have to enter your forest at the darkest possible point
and maybe sometimes follow a path,
but not all the time, that would be boring.
Have you ever asked yourself who was the person who first walked up broadway?
Or was it a person at all?
Maybe it was an animal. My feeling is that is was an animal. It was the first one to walk up broadway, the first ticker tape parade was a flurry of leaves and needles.
There was some sort of chase involved.
(maybe a chicken ran after an egg?)
And then a person followed. Or maybe not yet. Maybe many animals followed broadway before it became a path also frequented by humans.
And of course much, much longer ago before it became broadway.
Have you ever made your own broadway?
Or ...way. Or... any.way...
So a man enters a bar and orderes a drink. He then orders another drink.
Then another.
Beautiful people enter the bar.
The man has another drink.
He sings a beautiful song. (A new creation of unmatched beauty.)
The beautiful people acknowledge the beauty of the man's voice.
The man celebrates his new found talent (has another drink.)
The beautiful people and the man, who by now is also incredibly beautiful, have a very deep and meaningful conversation about the rotten aspects of the world.
(Over another drink.)
The world spins...
(Drink)
...out of control.
The man throws up.
He hits the floor.
Outside of the bar.
So I guess it is not a floor anymore if it is outside of the bar.
That would be a street. The street could be broadway. (Let's make it broadway, to make things seemingly make sense.)
Does the man hit the same broadway that was first walked on by an animal?
Is the man who hits broadway an animal?
Will there always be broadway?
And does this all matter at all?
Now, let's think about canal street.
or...
mars.
Enter the forest at the darkest point.
Or whenever there is a darkest point, imagine that you are entering a forest.
(A finite arrangement of something.)
----and----
this is a very positive post. happy really. very.
I am not the vomiting man. okay?
(just making sure.)
"you should probably eat something first." I walked out of the subway and straight into the exhaust of a blood drive bus on 7th avenue. Tables were set up and each one of them had three clipboards on them with information on how to donate blood. I had not eaten yet, and so the friendly man suggested that I do that first. I have never donated blood in my life. I would like to, hopefully as much as possible, even though i shiver when i just think of somebody being injured, or maybe that's why. I also get nauseous when i see my blood and i even almost blacked out once when just some of it was taken. still, i have that 0 rh- type, the kind that is most compatible, I think actually the ideal donor blood, so why should i not be giving it away in pints. I was told that this is how much is taken at a time. a pint, out of the two gallons we have in us.
i ate, then went home, then woke up very late in the day. the blood bus was gone. gone was a large portion of the day too... i am a bit on the exhausted side. i have been working a lot in the last few weeks. it is quite obvious by the amount of entries here. or the lack thereof.
right now, it is not even 10pm, i am really tired again in my chair, and i will soon just go back to where the air conditioner is currently raging and i will dive back into the land of those odd recent dreams.
I had been driving down an avenue in one of those small pagode mercedes, the city seemed to be berlin, though i am quite certain that it was brooklyn and "unter den linden" was in fact Ocean Parkway.
A new apartment with antique furniture and windows towards a backyard filled with the noise of children racing each other on little scooters.
Somewhere in the depths of the building was a grocery shop, fresh fruit was there, onions with surprises hidden inside, there were plants and stones and windows that had been turned into doors.
A train was audible nearby, an elevated train, the cars filled with stories encapsulated in the blankets of the moving city landscape.
i heard voices and a banging on the door.
i would wake up then, to have a brief conversation with mona, the grey cat lady who now lives in a place that is filling up with boxes, a place where the cords of animal feeding machines have been tested against the bites by the smartest, or maybe not so smart pigs.
i would walk to the kitchen, cheat some food out of that food robot, set myself on some cushions by the heater and watch the reflections of car windows stoke the walls of the living room.
the living room.
living, breathing, image breathing room...
here is my entire life, complete, it is the place where i want to be and where i have to be.
i was born in a place that was built for workers and i spent the first days of my life crying in the presence of reflections on the ceiling of the tiny room in which my uncle still goes to bed every night.
this here was just the perfect location for me. a glowing energy has led me here. this is where i am. complete.
this evening i walked out to get a tiny snack before i return to bed. and right there, right in front of the door, right in front of my nose actually, fireflies. and not just one. many.
i used to be excited to find these little guys in central park, or maybe by the hudson river... but right outside of my door?
life right now feels like a deep, velvety coat of gouache somewhere in a hidden corner of a beautifully mysterious Amy Cutler painting. Even if things that are happening right now are not all front and center, they have still the quality of something that has been placed right into this very spot with full deliberation and intention and thought and skill and incredible care and against all odds and again and again.
as if the universe had no one center but an unlimited amount of them.
and it does.
and this is so unbelievably amazing.
A dog in the backyard just started barking at the thunder. Do I wonder who is going to win? The dog will "win", of course, as he is going to be here longer than the thunderstorm and so he will "think" that... He is going to be under the impression that he...
no wait...
how does that work?
it was good to be in the city today, some people actually missed me. so amazing. amazing.
it is the end of the day and i am relaxed and ready to work for another few hours. this feels good.
i am not going to go out and get milk right now. the water just keeps on pouring down.
oh, and I would like to announce that i will soon be powered by intel chips. give me some time. some of my code will need to be rewritten, but then, hey then... i am going to get several hundred units per bowl of rice. things will look brighter then. Oh yes, much brighter.
There is a bird out there singing in the rain actually. Or could it be a squirrel pretending to be a bird? We have seen this happen before. Squirrels as birds. Rats as Squirrels.
All of the windows are open now. I managed to survive another day without and air conditioner. This is rather exciting. I know it is an illusion that I could survive an entire summer without an air conditioner.
I could save a tree perhaps?... hmm...
The sound of the rain is so incredibly soothing. Please excuse me while I go and draw something on that bizarre reading table with the silkscreen picture of two colibris flying busily around some stylized petals.
The storm is several miles away... I wonder how much wetter it is inside of it's eye...
this was a great day. this is a great evening.
and water. no milk.
It sounded as if the sparrows were protecting their nest. The birds were sitting on a branch very close to the building and a bit deeper in the tree were two juvenile starlings.
It took a while for me to locate the actual source of the screams. Two young starlings were going at each other in a turned around cover of a trash can, all the way downstairs. It looked like a major fight. The cover looked like a beige high tech arena. The birds' black and rainbow bodies twirling in it as if they were parts of some strange engine.
I am just glad to be my size, and to be inside, and to not be a source of food for these guys.
They flew away as unexpectedly as their fight had begun.
And I was awake.
And have been awake ever since.
It is interesting how many tiny interactions and emotions take place throughout the entire day. It is one thing to track the ones inside of oneself, but just imagine one would track the emotions that touch us... the external influences, stored, live, subtle, powerful.
I get my paper without saying a word... oh no, I actually always say thank you.
Coffee is the same thing. I just enter the shop on the corner and the guy in the yankees hat or the girl with the pony tail just do not even look at me anymore, they just grab a paper cup, mix whatever I have been ordering in the past and hand it over to me. I thank, I pay, the tip jar gets a feeding... I take my daily combo of paper and paper with liquid inside back up, up the stairs, just to open up the paper and to see, between the lines, the emotions stored in various articles.
And the articles can be about emotions too, of course. Often hidden in unexpected places. Between words sometimes. Sometimes inside of a letter, or maybe behind a coma.
I looked at some photographs in Bransch yesterday, and when the F train pulled into the Smith and 9th Station, I opened the page to one of the Photographs by Christian Stoll and the picture seemed to portray the street just below the station (including Smith Street Sign.)
And I kept opening new pages as the train moved and the landscape on the pages seemed to adjust to the movement of the train.
We lost synch a few pages and two stations later, but it was a good feeling to be somehow in this parallel pocket of time. Since the images were obviously not instant in any way. And the location was also relatively approximate.
My cough has not been the greatest thing to have. The aftertaste of blood is only fun a few times. Eventually it gets annoying. The iron in the blood makes the saliva taste as if it had been filtered through a rusty decanter. Or as if somebody had stirred my tongue with a screwdriver...
Though most often the opposite is the case...
okay, this was not very funny.
I do not like to cough any more.
Allergies? Is this the reason here?
The only birds I can here now are giant steel containers with people in them. I should let go of this computer now and just go to that trailer room and draw.
My writing here is a bit of an illusion of progress. It feels pleasant... but does anybody actually get anything out of this?
Much of the weekend was spent sleeping. It might be the allergies. They tend to knock me out in the beginning of May. Yes, drugs would probably be the answer here. Sleep ends up being a seemingly healthier choice. Seemingly healthier, until I have to move a bit faster, until my back just does not want me to, until the lights dim even when there are no lights anywhere, when the blood pressure lets me know that I could have spent the day running. Running, or running something.
And the dreams were very strange and simple this weekend. They were great reminders that my skull is just a home of one of those average brains that are stimulated sometimes, but not always. In psychoanalysis veritas... no cures for cancer found in these assemblages of blamage.
And maybe it is okay this way. I should not be upset with myself for having had less than brilliant dreams. I can imagine that even Goethe dreamt of some pretty trivial stuff now and then. And I am not comparing myself here, just trying to find an excuse for something I only barely influence. Or maybe completely after all?
A "Piano Man" was found in a mantal institution in England. ANd I immediately asked myself what would have happened if anybody found me. They would have given me a piece of paper perhaps, and then another and then another... and I would have probably just ended up in a giant room with some other people who just fill page upon page with drawings...
On the other hand... I am waiting for the "trumpet man" to emerge ("He drew a trumpet and we gave him one and he played wonderfully for seven hours.") or the "telephone man" ("he drew an elaborate picture of a telephone and we gave it to him and he immediately called his lawyer and spoke with him for seven hours.")
I need to spend some time locked into the smallest room of my apartment.
I call the room the "trailer" as it remotely resembles one by shape. I should just draw for hours and hours and days and nights. Yes, this is what I should do. And this is what I am going to do.
I resigned my job almost two weeks ago. I have one more week to visit the office in midtown... and then it is going to be all drawing.
And maybe this will be when the dreams finally stop being about advertising. And I hope that this will be when I will finally stop having all of those health issues related to stress.
I will probably see that pathetic number on my back account shrink with unstoppable determination. I will probably see my credit card bills be more and more ridiculous. I will maybe have dreams of drawing. And draw some of my dreams.
I am really looking forward to this.
It had to happen. If not now... when?
Much of the weekend was spent sleeping. Not all of it was spent sleeping. And the time awake was quite magical.
And this morning, when I went to the mexican place to get my breakfast, the neighborhood between the park and the cemetery felt like Holland, or the Belgian coast. Maybe England? It felt definitely European.
I enjoyed every moment of this and all the other positive illusions.
I just need to work on those strange fears and things... but maybe not. Maybe these are the things that ultimately help to keep me alive.
Oh, good.
I think I am very ready for the next few weeks.
The birds outside of my window had their volume settings turned all the way to 11 and it was really perfect this way. I woke up before sunrise and yet did not leave the house to see the downstairs, the street, the park, the sky outside. The light wandered over the walls of kitchen and living room and now everywhere. The food had prepared itself over night and the tea almost made room for another tin box. It is cool outside and bright. What a day.
As I was sitting by the window yesterday, replanting my still sleeping seven trees into their new home on the fire escape, the black squirrel from across the backyard came over and looked as surprised as only squirrels can. He then went on to explore the roof. I have seen him make really incredible jumps from buildings onto trees which i know are right there in the street. Daring little guy.
There are several more squirrels here, but the black one is the most wicked.
Imagine... he just jumps. Long, daring jumps.
A sparrow watched me draw this morning. We stared at each other for a good while. I then pulled out the camera which was perceived as an insult to our interspecies bond, I guess. Next time. Or maybe the time after that. Or maybe by the end of the summer. Or does it really matter?
The walls in the apartment are slowly but surely collecting drawings. Some of them do not want to stick to the wall, which is encouragement to draw more.
The windows in all rooms are open now and I want the wind to come in and maybe take down more of the work still...
If not now, when?
managed to keep myself up long enough and intensely enough to be bitter and crumpled up this morning. I could either feel really bad about myself now, or go through the hundreds of pictures I uploaded for no apparent reason into the private layer of my Flickr gallery... (Most of them actually shown here before.) Or I could just grab a thing or two and get out of the house and take some random train to some random place and take some random pictures and come back and tell myself all about it ...and then...
I sometimes feel like a dog chasing its own tale (and tail.)
Don’t listen to me now please. I am an angry old man right now. Angry at myself for everything and nothing I do and I do not.
I guess the do nots are more painful. And so I need to leave right now.
(And the picture below is a repost from probably two years ago... ghmpf...)
How are the trees going to get the idea that it is time to wake up to spring? One could maybe think that this year will have a different look and that there will be fewer leaves in the park. But looking out the window here, there are some very serious preparations underway. I do not want to give it all away, but a tree will soon turn into a pollen duster or the flamboyant, bright pink kind. And the ground also appears to be soaked, or at least saturated enough to help things grow their best...
I can not hold myself back from running out around sunrise, observe the changing light, the moving and the immobile living and seemingly not living things.
And everything will turn out just fine.
Just as the light changes in the morning so will things have to change ahead. And just as the winter felt too long and not quite the right piece of season for me, so will things need to adjust as well.
And I have been moving on and ahead many times before and it has always opened new angles and perspectives. And it is time again to shift gears, because there are certain things that are as certain and unavoidable as... and why should one waste any time before they all kick in?
: )
All good, all good... for the better for the better.
And the suspended rocks in the sky might be just an illusion for the fearful who tend to spend their time looking too much at reflections on the surface of shallow dirty waters...
oh certainly.
when the sky looked golden in patches over the roofs around here i ran out to make more pictures before the sun rose to change everything. by the time i made it to the street the color was gone and only a cold wind turned my head into a hurting objects on my shoulders. and i walked through the park to grand army plaza and then returned through the historic district streets without forgetting to pick up some groceries and coffee and the paper in not very historic locations.
or maybe they all are. maybe everything is.
and i thought how silly it was of me to spill myself into descriptions of mystic child like religion. and maybe it is okay. maybe it does not really matter. the main thing that drives me is an insatiable feeling of wonder. and it almost does not seem to matter what rooms i enter. i am at all times aware of me standing at just the outside of the surface of something somehow, sometimes lucky enough to glimpse some sort of distorted reflection, sometimes able to make out some rough shapes of large living things inside. no matter how deep i would manage to go in this lifetime, it would be just a tiny scratch on the surface of things.
and that's really very fine.
and i am glad that i am where i am right now, this second actually... this is the happiest i remember to be. and it probably does not really matter...
hey, the colors are back...
i will stay here now. Well, for the next half hour or so...
why am i even writing this all down here?... so silly... but maybe okay...
: )
all bookmarks were just wiped out. not on purpose, of course, it was a silly mistake. (I am not sure where it began.)
did not manage to even get the paper this weekend. somehow wanted to get it, but it did not happen. somehow did not manage to. not even that. so odd. maybe the delivery would be a great option again, though it might not be.
the second glass of orange juice and i still feel like a wet towel. a towel that has been wet for a while, curled up under the sink, somewhere in an apartment...
no, not that bad.
just a wet towel. maybe folded.
into a triangle.
how is that?
there are flowers about to really grow wild on basquiat's grave. somebody had also burned incents. there was a dry rose on top of the headstone.
the clowns are still on the gravestone in the next lot. still in the same position...
the basquiat show at the brooklyn museum felt a bit claustrophobic. the couples visiting looked stunning, there were some slightly insane people, like maybe that woman who would speak to anybody, loudly, out of her own devices.
the visitors overall were a very diverse bunch. definitely local bunch... i know there is no such thing?
i like the drawings most. the paintings are a bit large, though still dense enough to be their size. i like the paintings when they are layers upon layers of smaller drawings. maybe my mind is shrinking... maybe that's what is happening...
i like the smaller drawings.
it is a good show. it is hidden, on high floors, in a museum that feels a bit like a school-house, or maybe some other special institution.
the rubens show at the met felt not as brilliant as hoped. the drawings here appeared as if rubens had been on the phone while drawing. or maybe the drawings were made to give clear instructions to an assistant. Some copies of the drawings were superior to the originals. that's dangerous... hmm... p p rubbens...
the show felt a bit frustrating.
small words in my head. again and again and again and again...
sleep is a beautiful thing.
and i will now go and get some more of that.
no sleep, not much sleep, barely any. the site is back out of the milky whiteness of empty files. no sleep, not much sleep, barely any.
the room is cold tonight. and it is good this way. it is okay. it is warm under covers. and this is where i should be right now.
moved the table closer to the kitchen. sitting on the only red chair in my apartment.
my little garden on the window looks like a floral freak show. i am bad at cutting back plants. the different sizes of leaves are just a joke. i will need to learn more.
just touched the heater and it is hot.
it is just to incredibly windy and cold outside, that's why.
no sleep, not much sleep, barely any.
i sat in front of a white page for twenty minutes. then started drawing with a really hard pencil. then erased everything.
then sat in front of a white piece of paper again.
then read some old diary entries.
i used to have pathetic thoughts. good. this is a sign of progress.
it used to be much scarier when i would pick up one of my many books and read something written years prior and realise that that younger me was a much brighter shining light than the dimlit reader...
so being able to smile over some obviously underdeveloped thoughts is a really great thing. weiter so.
mixed up languages again today. spoke to todd levin in german for a sentence or two.
the few days before that, my brain would try to distract me with clearly pronounced polish sentences. just like that, out of nowhere, there would be people passing on orders to other people passing on orders.
no sleep, not much of it, barely any.
how come it took me this long to discover that the book store two blocks from here is actually a big one, only in the basement.
it took me this long.
good.
now i know. at least.
there are probably billions of things which will take me longer than i have life for.
sleep. it is calling me now.
at least a brief nap.
it is very much needed.
very much.
so glad to have this website back.
really glad.
oh and time sometimes matters and sometimes it really does not.
going to sleep a little now.
Imagine that you pick up a book from your book shelf and you begin to read the book and then there is an awareness of somebody else in this world having just picked up the same book. And you are able to see what they see, the exactly same words, word after word after word. For several days perhaps. The location is different... how about the time. Is the time different? What if you could open a book and there would be the awareness of all instances of this book ever being opened on the same page. And in all translations? It would be a cloud of words streaming through a group glued together by page after page after page. Somewhere in the back of the gigantic vertigo of perceptions would be the author, writing the words, one by one, by one, not really in a linear fashion at all. Some words being older than others. Some words really being something else, not actually even written by the author. Or were any ever?
On a much smaller scale, imagine being able to see all of the readers who moved their eyes over this and this and this word today.
All of them who stopped for a brief moment to try to somehow pronounce the word: Standpunkt. And some of the readers could just include the word in their perception of the text, while others would feel locked out to some extend, that missing word, that missing word, a last locket that made them stumble. And what makes them then think that there are no other words hidden in the text that are equally stumbling blocks, or maybe just rough round stones of words that should have made them stumble but did not? And what about the words not actually written?
Several hundred eyes will glide over these lines, one by one by one, assembling words to very quick, seemingly instant translations into a voice in them, and maybe more readers began to read the entry than will end reading it. Maybe many of the readers will be disappointed that certain elements here are missing. Certain readers will be incredibly disappointed that this entry does not include images, compressed, quickly downloadable images of things or other images...
And the entry does contain so many of them, except that they are invisible to the quickly scanning eye, they open up to the one who is able to somehow align their point of view with something compatible with the combination of words here. And then this entry can open hundreds of images, more, many more. There are images here, put in deliberately, and then there are all the images that are only visible to one person at a time.
There are the peripheral images that happen outside of this window even, outside of this screen even, the images that are stored out of sight to others even. This page looks the same and yet completely different to every single user. Not only because there are so many versions of the page rendered for everyone individually, but because this page is just a spark that falls onto completely different grounds.
So imagine that you pick up a book from a shelf and there they are, the words, written one by one by one onto the page and each one of the words has been looked at, has been blessed with attention by hundreds, by thousands, by millions perhaps. And if you imagine the variety of contexts possible and the locations possible and the voices possible in which the words were read and then multiply all this by the ability of the voices to actually comprehend the words and the words between words... Well, then this image in itself is impossible to comprehend. The potential density in each and every stroke we see, and be it just a tiny particle of a letter inside of a simple word, contains the secret to the entire universe, with its centers always present at the given moment everywhere, now. If looked at the right way perhaps?.
And now throw a stone and see what happens to the pond.
Just minutes ago the sky was bright blue and bright and blue and the only sound i really heard was the ticking of the clock and the softly annoying sound of the spinning fan under the boards of my bedroom floor.
There were giant birds, perhaps turkey-pheasants, a ponyanda, some other indescribable creatures with no given names.
I had big plans. I wanted to cross the lake, the river, wanted to take the subway and go really far to a place I did not know yet. Unexplored, yet unexplored by me only. Big Adventure Digest.
(Quite honestly the only place I want to visit is somewhere 50% between the park and the ocean...)
Now that the rice bowl is empty and the lime tree cropped, the leaves cut into tiny parallelograms, the avocado plants deprived of any leaves for now, bonsai training at its worst, now that all this is done, the sky is turning a less and less saturated soupy something.
It almost feels like back in that country where the year has three days, each of them with more than a hundred instances of sunrise, ten sunsets, and yet each one of them packed with a slightly unhealthy level of passive agression.
I will now pack my bag and pockets and walk into this valentine's day. It is mid february already? It is almost march? The year is in full swing, I see. Looking at some nice drawings on my desk, they are dated back to 2002. Yet another nauseating observation.
I have not been to manhattan for days now. I will walk and ride to resurface in the almost center of the island. By this evening I will be a different person, again.
And maybe the further I will be twisted, the more I will be myself. I hope this will be the case. Somehow, since I still believe in something good in the core of my core.
The comments on this site here have been shut down by my host. This stopped all spam with one kick of a giant virtual boot.
I moved all of the email I failed to reply to into a "read" folder on my drive.
It feels like this today could be a new beginning of something. Somehow. Each day should be, shouldn't it?...
Could the sky be more gray or grey... what is the difference?
I wonder what ever happened to that ponyanda...
happy valentines...
He could not have predicted that he had stepped onto a patch of incredibly fine sand. What looked glittery and pure at first became an ever deeper growing well, filled with fine dust in constant, random motion, swarming particles embracing his heels, then ankles, then further, up his legs, immobilizing, him fur,the,r a,nd f,ur,t,h,e;r,.
At first his illusion was that of the returning to a comfortable and warm space. A light seemed to shine on him, he felt as if there were a center to this spectacle and that it resided somewhere within his chest.
The universe never stopped to expand, of course.
The objects around him moved farther and farther away from him with every minute, hour, day...
the past was rushing away into a milky distance, and so was the future, on the opposite side of him.
An ever louder murmur of voices became the distractor of of his present.
His verbal thinking was preoccupied with the decoding of the voices. His visual thinking became distracted by the ever present motion of his surroundings.
Noise, motion, the deeper and deeper sinking of his weaker and weaker body...
This is when he began to pull on his own hair, the remains of it, stronger and stronger, the short hair, pulled, the good pain, the pain with a purpose.
Soon.
How many times this past weekend did I expect Sir David Attenborough to step forward from behind a car perhaps, or maybe from behind a mountain of frozen dirty snow and to grab me by the arm, softly of course, and turning to a quiet camera team with a giant fuzzy microphone to explain how "lucky of a primate" I was.
Thank you Sir. And thank you for that edit that led us to an open landscape and some happily singing Neandertal children.
(Why "lucky primate" though? Lucky to be in the right place at the right time and still do the wrong thing sometimes?)
Looking at some works at the Outsider Art Fair, it was almost tempting to deliver myself to a neuro-diverse madical facility, just to get some time off and to just draw all day and night.
And maybe some ambitious doctor would also give me a camera and a little toy (a bear, or perhaps a little pony?), and I would rush into the sanatorium gardens, to take pictures of immense landscapes and blurry fields of blooming flowers.
The doctor would use the funds gained through the sale of my "crazy stuff" to afford careless evenings with a semi-pretty, though greedy young nurse from former Yugoslavia. (Not sure why I had to say that, but it somehow made sense as I was writing it.)
The nurse would then fall in love with me, the creative idiot, I would not return her advances, or maybe, by accident, the wrong way.
She would develop a strong hate relationship towards me, she would try to convince the Doctor to somehow get rid of me, in some very painful way, and after he refused, since I were a nice source of tax-free income for him, she would take my life into her own hands, and deliver me to that other place, where I no longer needed to even think about drawing or taking pictures, but where I could perhaps be much more useful to some garden plants.
WHich is another useful dream of mine anyway.
Looking at the outsider art show brought a mix of inspiration and that sad feeling that what I was looking at was the result of deliberate and repeated neuro-exploitation. Maybe there were no nurses involved, but perhaps neighbors, nuns and landlords?
The fumes of injustice somehow felt paralyzing.
Somebody was daring enough to write "Value $375" in crooked letters in sharpie onto the back of one bold drawing of a woman. The writing was clearly visible (thanks to the miracles of chemical engineering), and somehow more so than that little laser printed museum-like note, describing the artist, the title, the year, the dimensions and the amount of $7000. I think there was a little red dot next to the number, though I am not quite sure. Maybe the red dot was just a floater in my left eye, still burned in there...
Oh, God bless them all.
I had a bit of a similarly confused feeling (though much milder) when looking at some crudely cut pieces of wood on broken coffee tables in the guts of that interior decoration store in Dumbo.
Everything in the place seemed to be broken. The flaws of most pieces of furniture were very apparent. The chairs and tables that looked whole were either incredibly ugly, or had this smirk that hinted that they might be wood-carved mass-murderers.
Some of the pieces were just indescribable. Some child in a remote village in the far east must have been forced to carve some animal with a wooden knife, perhaps. The end result was supposedly a "butter dish"... "worth" $125.
What disgusting sense of humor.
I craved a Starbucks coffee after all this. It felt as if it were a high quality item, at a super bargain price. And how insanely luxurious would it feel to put my lips onto one of those plastic "solo" covers, fresh from the polymer factory, wedged on top of a pristinely white recycled paper-cup and to suck through that tiny pill-shaped opening, some disgusting, bitter, dirty hot liquid with the taste of bad breath.
(I ended up getting a tripple Espresso with (free!) whipped cream and tons of sugar (free!), as it appeared to be the best knock-out-deal among all of the bad deals, the best $2.50 to invest as dinner replacement therapy.)
I am a bit worried these days. Todd warned me that if I continue in as shy of a way as now, I am going to end up as a really bad version of Henry Darger, I will be found on the floor of my apartment, surrounded by Pepto Bismol bottles, and on the shelves will be piles and piles of drawings and photographs of little bears and of food and of just shapes fighting and fighting for a gentler, happier world.
I guess I am running, really quickly, to nowhere (which is oddly enough built from the words "now" and "here"... if one puts one's mind to it.)
Drawing late into the night on Saturday felt incredibly beautiful actually. The entire weekend was a time filled with magic. Things are very amazingly incredible and unbelievably wonderful in many ways.
Sir David Attenborough just stepped into the apartment, with his crew, he is turning towards them and:
"This one here is reliving a Karl Spitzweg painting, all including the improper use of writing utensils, boxes and old books. Note also that he chose as his dwelling the place right under the roof of an old building, and that he does not have so much as a real bed."
If I bite Sir David now, will the moment be edited away, or just celebrated in one of those behind the scenes chapters on a DVD?...
oh and...
"how many times per day do you have rice?" "I guess two... no wait, three... often. I mean it does not have to be this way. I do not survive on rice alone. The lunch I had today just included some rice. And I am also trying to introduce some variety. That bag of basmati bought in the Indian Rite Aid on church street is bound to last for another two months or so, but I am spicing things up, mixing elements in. It is good, I think."
I had just set the rice cooker to give me a beep at 6:10 am and to have some wild rice with orzo ready for me. I used half a package of that special mix bought from the very friendly Lebanese ladies on seventh avenue.
The good thing about rice was that I could not just eat it when raw and that it would not spoil right away if I did not touch it for a while.
Okay, I think I should really clean the floor now...
It was reassuring to know where the shore ended and where the lake began. It was the memory of the ducks and the other water fowl that made it safer to be near and not enter what looked like a nicely cleaned up white plain. The lake might have been frozen underneath the snow, but why would one want to find out really? One step would mean sinking in, the second step would probably mean danger, the third would be near death?
A pigeon landed just a few meters from the shore... innocently, safely. I am no pigeon. I would just die.
I drew a line where I remembered the shore. And a skull, two crossed bones.
Death starts here...
Most birds decided to stay in trees. They tried to face the wind, intuitively working their aerodynamics.
Their guano made the snow underneath greenish yellow. Splashes of color.
The bus which I wanted to take to the train this morning did not even stop to pick up new passengers. It was packed with what looked like a mix of humans and bags and puffy jackets. It appeared as if the driver had to cut a tunnel through some fabric in order to see the white street ahead. Walking to the train was not all too bad. The snow was still frozen enough to not turn into those infamous New York slush lakes, those brown puddles that have the ability to swallow daring pets.
The train was another version of the bus picture. Once it pulled into the station and once the doors opened, it became quite obvious that nobody from the platform would be able to squeeze themselves in addition to that well pressed bunch of human sardines. The jackets looked ironed.
Certain trains apparently did not run at all and so the ones that ran were instapressed.
It might be time now to go back into the cold. I am glad to be able to regain bits and pieces of clarity. I hope that there will be enough energy in me to actually move things... into some useful direction. Soon...
It is hard to believe that it is two years her that I posted that photograph with the sockdog.
Two years... I hoped to be in a slightly different place in two years... hmm...
Maybe in two years from now?... What am I waiting for?...
Maybe there was no lake... or maybe the ice was thick enough. Maybe it is not really about the lake? Hmm... The pigeon, the snow, the lake...
I have the feeling that they are all one and the same thing, somehow...
hmm... and maybe the people squeezed into the subway car are that same thing too... I think they might be.
The wine needed about three minutes to kick in. It was a 1990 Chateau Simard Saint-Emilion and it tasted a bit like that reddish dry cork.
He did not have any real wine glasses and so that imitation plastic cup had to be it tonight.
The wine needed about three minutes to kick in. And it did kick in so incredibly well. So well.
He pulled up his far too tight queen-chastity underwear, rushed out the door and down the stairs, and past the barking door and out and onto the street and into the storm of a snow.
He let himself fall right onto his blank face, into the freshly fallen powder, his arms open, like that guy who could see his house from up there, in that Richard Prince painting. He began to swim towards the street, the edge, the parked cars. His naked skin was like this of a chameleon, it seemed, it began to turn closer and closer to the shade of the snow.
He had to use the space between the cars, just to make sure there would be enough depth in the powder to carry his almost naked body.
He swam down the street, towards fifth avenue... in the darkness, slowly turning into a freshly frozen piece of human. The lights of oncoming traffic avoiding him just barely, honking, as if they had never seen a street snow swimmer before.
Okay, not really.
He could not swim.
It was good that the temperature fell as low as it has. The two desks fished out of the high-school dumpster were very happy to let go of a half a pound of twenty year old chewing gum crust. Oh, and the snot also crumbled really well.
Dirty little desks.
I am using one to write this entry, actually. It is much cleaner now, maybe not perfect, but definitely cleaner.
"Come later." said the super, as he was pushing along the snow plow on the sidewalk near the giant dumpster.
I think I will walk out there and fish some more soon. It would be nice to score some free chairs perhaps, the names of loved girls and hated teachers carved into them. Maybe AC/DC, or KISS... yeah...
And the chewing gum comes off best when frozen...
The legs of the tables will need to be seriously cleaned... but that's another weekend project.
I think I am going to go back to drawing now. Bubble letters on tiny pieces of paper. Majik. Over and over again. and again and again and again...
Maybe the giant underground current will carry me towards the ocean tonight. That would be most wonderful. I bet the waves are more quiet on such a snowy night. They should be, no?
Was sick at home yesterday (stomach, headache, overall dizzy...). One of the gifts given to me by the forces of the universe was the sanding of the floor at the apartment downstairs. Imagine an ongoing bussing sound mixed with the agressive and superfine dust from a one hundred years old wooden floor.
The building I moved to had only three apartments. There is the great duplex with garden on parterre and the first floor, there is the newly renovated apartment, getting ready for the mystery couple, on the second floor... and then there is that special place I live in.
Walking down the stairs, I peeked into the freshly polished apartment of my new neighbors. So beautiful. The ceilings are about four feet higher than in my place, making the rooms feel aristocratic. I on the other hand feel like polishing someone's silver all the time... I wonder why?
The fixtures on the ceiling of my future neighbors look classic as well. It is not that ikea material that just recently fell on my head in the hallway. (Nothing broke, the fall was not a deep one, obviously.)
My last hope is to imagine that the neighbors are going to pay a lot more for their place, though I know that this is probably an illusion. They probably pay half of what I do, they make three times as much and they... oh well... I am so happy for them.
The Curry last night was a brilliant killer. It was just so good when eaten slowly. Once eaten too quickly it unfolded an unstoppable rage, a flame thrower that left burnmarks on the table, wherever it was too close to my belly.
The second round of food (yes, indeed, yummyumm) was then a bit of the more diplomatic sort, still the fantastic taste, just no explosives under the jacket.
Oh, and then there were the muffins...
(Did I mention that I was sick at home because of stomach issues?...)
It was good to make little clay toys until about 4:30 in the morning. I am so ready to take out those colored pencils for a ride. (We will make some donuts in that parking-lot of my sketchbook, for starters.)
I am a bit burned out, to say the least. Will probably experience the switch of the digit in a quiet and happy place... not piled up on bodies all shaking the bubbly... into or out of their drooling mouths.
Or maybe I should do the dishes... creativity comes in many wondrous outfits.
The air conditioner keeps this windowless room on a bearable survival level. The air is being pumped in here to keep me alive and thinking. A now dirty imac is staring at me with some serious expectations. Have we met? Is there something you would like ot tell me? Would you like to tell me now? Isn't now the best time to tell me? I have seen a lot. But maybe you can show me something even more exciting?
We are friends here. The phone, the mac, the round table. Okay, I actually had to adjust the positon of the electronic elements.
The phone now sits in the center of the perfectly circular wooden pond, accompanied by a crumpled up tissue. The mouse lives there too. (Though speaking of a living computer mouse is clearly a bad joke.)
The bottom rim of the mac is stopping me from typing in fortissimo.
The air conditioner is much too loud to think.
The air here takes center stage.
Had to move the monitor a bit higher.
I still type with six fingers. (Two hands.)
Maybe dimming the lights would be a good idea. I could imagine being in a plane now, maybe on the way to Europe, maybe soon to be reunited with the family. Maybe for a day or two.
Maybe that would be quite nice.
It is not going to happen. Not this year.
Next year... certainly. It should. It will happen.
The Lebanese ladies from my special food shop will get me my favorite ham. (It is the Westfälischer Schinken.) Next week. I will probably be the only junkie asking for it, over and over again. So far, they have me hooked on other also exciting products.
It is nice to walk into a store and to know that one will be able to choose something approximately... and that this wish will be complemented by a suggested item that will create a wonderful new harmony previously not expected. It is nice to be welcome. I feel welcome.
The air conditioner blows.
I want to take the train. I want to take the train now. I want to take the train now and stay in it for two stops beyond where I would usually get out.
I think that would be the most wonderful thing to do now.
The edge of the table is hurting my arms. It is cold in here. I will walk back to my place now.
Why would a tiny room like this have such a powerful air blower in it?
The phone has not moved a bit. The mouse has not moved either. The few pixels on the clock in the upper right corner of the screen are telling me that it is a bit later now. The sun might be out of sight very soon.
It is not too cold out there.
I will step out of here very soon.
All will be good.
Eventually it all will be.
There is great happiness within every thought these days.
The little water in the freezer tasted slightly flaky and light. It was almost as if it had been watered down, mixed, made into a theater version of itself.
The headache in the morning is still the real deal, so maybe it was just the illusion of lightness after another oddly shoehorned day.
A glass of real water in the morning should soften some of the effects.
Colors look vibrant again. The air is cold. There are sounds from the street. The consciousness is coming back. Or so I hope. But it is not consciousness I am looking for right now, it is the ability to see a larger picture.
Carrying a horse on my back is not right.
The sunrises are longer, they last half a day almost, then the sunsets ease in, until the long cold nights blow those daring to be awake into their houses.
Or maybe make them stay at the office?
The Broadway sign is brightly illuminated now, and so is the building breath rising from the air conditioning on the Chase branch across the street.
The tomato plant is now over 40 inches tall now. A giant living thing that smells unpleasant when touched and that has not produced anything but itself so far.
Hmm. I do feel like we are somehow related. Except that the plant has a very clear vision of where it is going. Bold and wicked tomato plant. It is going to soon carry real fruit.
I dream of floating balloons. I would love to just do that. Elevate a thin thought to become one of those clouds, somewhere over the city. Maybe many of those. Something that really can not be accomplished in the current contraption. Ugh.
Crawled into bed again. The few hours of sleep I had given myself to recover were clearly not enough. I will watch today through a thick film of mental vaseline.
Thoughts are all over the place...
and oh yes... there were thoughts about an old story... yesterday, I think?
he just wanted to crawl between the layers of asphalt, generate a warmth and find more warmth in return. It was a very easy dream really... well, there were layers to it, of course. the warmth was one felt by the skin, and there was also one felt by the heart. The head liked to be warm as well. And the inside of the mouth, the words whispered, they also melted, onto mouths and hands and more than that.
--
he was seemingly fascinated by the edge of the cherry colored table. it was not a straight edge, commonly found in such furniture. the edge was shaped to be protruding, roundish, as if the table wanted to look larger than it actually was.
Sheets filled with notes and various lines and symbols began to cover the empty areas of the table.
several family members walked in, out, came in again, just to be soon dismissed.
--
His father told him one of his verbal illustrations:"Imagine two people play chess. One keeps winning. Once, twice, ten times. Eventually he will grow sick of winning. The game has to have some balance. There should be some sort of interesting give and take. If there is none, why play?"
He did not have to think for long:"No, it is actually much more frustrating. I would like to maybe play chess, but I have to explain the rules first, explain each figure on the board, I have to then set up the pieces, just to be told that they should not be set up in this particular way. There are conversations about it, I eventually give in. We end up with a board on which the figures stand around in some strange formation determined by negotiations and compromise. This is when the sun sets, the day ends and so the 'game' needs to be finished. The pieces need to be taken off the board. The board returns to being a door mat. The same procedure is then repeated day after day after day. It is more like that."
Father:"You know what, lions should spend time with lions. Fish should spend time with fish."
He:"Even if a rabbit tries really hard to find his love for hunting, he will end up eaten by the dogs."
Father:"What are you talking about?"
He:"I don't know anymore. This game of chess is driving me nuts."
--
One of the tomato plants is now a yard and a half in height. I am worried about the lime tree. I might have injured it too much, too quickly. Bonsai training gone wrong?
The soil in my little forrest is starting to be covered with tiny moss flowers.
I hope I manage to let the avocados survive. Will any one of the 13 pomegranates make it?
I have received a precious jade plant today. The leaves are almost the size of my inner palm. They are red. The plant is heart shaped. It is beautiful.
--
A helicopter just illuminated the buildings across broadway. I think it is time to go to sleep. Tomorrow will be very serious. Two flights, several conversations. Buildings in which no private phones will be allowed.
I better get some rest...
There, the helicopter is coming back.
I am so desperately looking for shelter.
It is becoming less and less funny.
"You know, you should not say how you feel. You should write a scene in which the viewers see how you feel. That's just much more impactful, no?"
She was picking up some cash from the ATM and giving a friend some cell-phoned advice at the same time.
Or should I have not said that?
Okay, once again.
"You know, you should not say how you feel. You should write a scene in which the viewers see how you feel. That's just much more impactful, no?"
The inside of the well lit ATM area of the bank felt like a perfect backdrop for a dialogue about the dialogue of dialogue.
Better.
...
My most beautiful reoccurring dream is of scents and warmth and sounds and other indescribable sensations all between the layers of what could maybe be very soft asphalt. Thin, warm, dark grey sheets, maybe under water? A school of fish intrigued and yet not fooled by a worm simulator on a hook.
The ocean hits the shore with ever new waves in ever varying colors. Giant jellyfish. Many.
With the eyes closed, Paris appears to be incredibly close. One can enter the Louvre through a tiny side entrance not commonly known to the masses of international tourists winding their way towards the security check of the Nam Jun Paik 666 glas panel pyramide. Is this fact true at all?
Could one reenact the excitement of Victoria and Albert meeting the eyes for the first time? Maybe both should be visited. I hear there is a subway between one and the other. Wanna go?
...
My grandmother did not use bricks to get her job. She used weights. The heaviest ones available in the house.
I remember her telling me the story long before her faced collapsed to that soft and sweet something she was even when the water finally reached her lungs.
She had told me of weights. I had somehow turned them into bricks. Bricks would not have worked. Bricks would have been too light.
I am not even sure if I ever told the story here. My grandmother having to work because of her children and her freshly crippled husband.
She was so underweight that she would not have been permitted to work in the foundry... the examining physicist had a somewhat twisted way of creating his truth. He would not just write a false number in his registration sheet as that would have been illegal. He would make my grandmother try to weigh herself in her clothes, then even her heaviest coat.
When even this did not work, he suggested my grandmother eat more... her not having anything to eat really (and this being the reason why she had to go get a job in the foundry) she soon returned to the same doctor, about 20 pounds heavier... steel weight gained in pockets.
It was the weight of metal she brought with her that would make it legal for her to lift heavy metal.
It was difficult for me to understand how my grandmother could have ever been underweight and definitely undernourished. When I met her, falling out of the haze of being an infant, the underweight her existed only on tiny crumbling photographs...
I loved her so much. I would compare her walk to that of a duck. My first attempts at compliments were obviously very crude.
My grandmother would ask me very strange questions about my parents' relationship. Her interrogations were an interesting peephole into the future of relationships in general.
...
I will now close my eyes and find myself near the ocean, between layers of anthracite asphalt, near a school of fish, in a most beautiful spot.
And I will be perfectly fine. I hope...
Have not slept much in the last few days. The thoughts in my head are slowly turning nonverbal.
I look at things, but I do not see them. I listen to sounds and words, but I don't hear them. Things are falling appart...
Books are turning into pages filled with sentences made of words containing letter after letter after letter after letter. Shapes which need to be deciphered, glued together, connected, and then... no... something major needs to happen here soon.
It is not that I do not see the forrest because I am looking at trees. It is that I do not seem to regain the ability to even see trees, because I am trying to see through bark...
Certain things will probably take a bit of time. I hope to be able to find some help in an early monday morning conversation with myself.
I crave to spend the evenings on a sofa, overlooking a corner filled with fresh air. And all the colors of the known emotional universe.
...
"You know, you should not say how you feel. You should write a scene in which the viewers see how you feel. That's just much more impactful, no?"
I think I have been trying to do that quite openly for many, many years now.
"You know, you should not say how you feel. You should just get the f*ck out the the business of writing plays altogether. You have not the slightest clue what you are doing, my friend. Get out of it, as long as you still can. This might very well be your last chance. Get the f*ck out."
yeah. that's better.
I remember walking home on an autumn afternoon in 1974 perhaps, and feeling that I was the most unfortunate boy on earth. It was very clear to me that I had no chance to get anywhere, I felt completely abandoned, it was really an incredibly overwhelmingly sad feeling. There was not a tiny piece of hope left in me.
I cried. Though I cried a lot and often then.
I tend to combine this seemingly random memory of me walking home crying from pure desperation with the one of seeing a cat that had survived being set on fire.
The cat had only patches of green fur left on its body also the tail was half torn off, the ending dark red, a part of a bone sticking out of the dried and shriveled skin.
The animal avoided me. Clearly it had not been tortured by other cats.
I remember the exact location where all these thoughts collapsed over my head. Maybe the memories are combined because they were triggered near the same building, just a block away from Wielkopolska Street, 17, where we lived.
There were no mistreated animals here today, the city was New York, it is 30 years later, but the overwhelming feeling of helplessness was on the edge of more I could possibly handle.
Maybe what I am feeling is the presence of a negative force?... Maybe I am soaking up some crazy horrible something?
I am feeling as if I were in the absolutely wrong place right now. Completely wrong. All wrong.
Yes, about as bad as it felt when I saw that cat.
Maybe some of the feelings that flow through me are not even my own?... Maybe I am just like a detector of forces?...
That would be a really horrible discovery.
I sometimes wonder if rivers have lanes. I guess they do. Rivers are like water highways. The water travels at different speeds, dependent at where it happend to flow in the half pipe towards the ocean.
Some water particles on the side, near the shore, sometimes just hang out, swirl around, are parked, quiet. They are the observers, they are the ones who play softly with the plants, perhaps?
Some of the water deeper in the river bed probably turns over boulder after boulder, creating sand and pebbles and other exciting round things.
Sometimes a highway could be an ocean.
I like smart particles. Supreme smart particles are my favorite. They are the ones that define the flow of things.
I like when the tiny particles change their mind. I like the glow. I like the flow. I like the unpredictable connection of things.
All one organism. A river is just a very brief manifestation of something much bigger.
Everything is everything. All at the same time.
How long does it take for a water molecule to get from the source to the ocean? My feeling is that the chances of this actually happening at all are incredibly slim. Yes, we see the river and we make the assumption that the water from the source pours into the ocean, but this would only happen if the river were a completely closed pipe. And maybe not even then.
The water that makes it into the ocean is a very often transformed, evaporated, refilled, reinvented river.
What seems to survive is the motion, the move in one particular direction. But even this direction is only clear when seen from a very particular angle. (Which really tends to change...)
No man steps twice into the same river.
No river is stepped in by the same man.
No step is the same.
The simplified idea of it all lets us survive, but it is all a deal we make with our brains. We decide to simplify the universe to a level at which we think we are the thinking rulers of something... the universe?
While in fact, we ourselves are an ever evaporating, transforming idea, one that is only held together by very thin, tiny, flowing particles of information.
All flowing towards some sort of an ocean,
which is maybe like a highway, or maybe not at all...
but certainly there always, long before, long after, maybe forever... now.
Oh, and remember that piece of information about women being the re-builders and re-inverters of genetic code... and men being the mere carriers of that same old piece of information... destined to eventually run out of ends to lose?
Hmm... what else happened today?
How are you feeling? Hope the dizzy feeling is gone.
I really hope things are feeling better now.
after several attempts to write something that would flow the way it should. I am giving up. I am giving up to be able to catch some of the thoughts and to push a little needle of sense through them and to align them on that attached string. And certainly at the right speed.
My days are really making my brain get some extra folds here and there, and so in the evening, when on my own terms, I am barely able to write anything that could make real sense.
Hmm... so I work to buy time. Then I take the time purchased and I invest it in things that others spent some of their very special time on. Then this experience makes me fall back in time on one hand, and yet thrusts me forward in time, or maybe aligns me in some other places in time. Just like that. It is a very strange thing that happens. (Or at least I hope to believe it does.)
A giant box brown arrived today. The cut lines on it were drawn on it by hand. "Open here, carefully." I did. I cut very, very carefully, along the sharpie drawn lines. The box eventually opened. Inside was some overkill of packaging material, some thin special catalogues with pictures, and... a giant brown envelope. The tape attached to it had a red piece to be used as one time handle. I tore off the tape... I pulled out a red envelope, also about 25x30 inches or so, sealed inside of its own special waterproof environment.
I put the envelope back.
I am not even going to peek.
I put the giant sturdy envelope between a dresser and a file cabinet. One of the worst places maybe. That's all I can offer for now.
The giant envelope has a little hand written marking on it. Muniz #9.
I had actually bought #8 originally, but I requested #9, as I think it is a really magical number.
I am somehow thrilled. It feels like this is not really for me at all.
I just bought something that is not for me. It is for the me who will understand what just happend here some time in the future.
I also have another #9. The other #9 is much more precious. It is so precious that I dare not even to think that I took a glimpse at it. (I did.)
It is a 9/39... and the magic does not stop there.
And it does not begin there...
the magic is so much stronger than one dare to think...
yes. It is definitely beyond thinking. Way out, out of sight.
Traveling through time is really amazing. It is a choice. It is a choice every split second of our being. Time travel might have a clear starting point and a clear final destination, but the variety of possibilities in-between... wow.
I tried this very silly experiment again today.
I got into the wrong subway car. Not the usual one. Not the one that gets me out of the station as the first guy, who then can go to the grocery store (called blueberry farm btw,) to get some very important fruit or something else.
Today I just got into a random car. The doors opened at the right station, except that I was nowhere near an exit.
I then slowed down even further. I walked at about half my usual speed. And it is not as easy as it sounds.
It is not very hard at first. The difficulty increases with every second. It is worth a try. It can be done with anything.
Try to do exactly what you are doing now. At half speed. See how long it is going to be possible to do that without going back to "normal".
How many seconds did the experience last?
See, that "normal" speed is not that normal at all actally. It is a daring race, it is the skipping of the "less important" stuff, it is that shortcut laden current step in one's development...
Eventually our bodies slow down by themselves. Everything does. Things are slow at first and magical, then they speed up, we go as fast as we can... and then the magic catches us again... and we slow down, slower, slower, slower...
and then completely new processes begin... Sometimes we happen to be still alive.
Certain things have to happen at a certain speed. A cake can not be baked slower than it should be. Or when it is thrown... throwing it at half speed will miss the target for sure... among other things.
Certain processes just need their time. Certain things devour time. Certain other activities give birth to time...
I think good conversations give birth to time.
And good art also gives birth to time...
maybe giving birth is the completely wrong picture...
good art is probably more like a time generator... and somebody who makes the good kind of art... is a saint... or at least a blessing to us all...
I went to see How to Kick People with Todd Levin tonight. I believe. It was, so I believe, quite excellent, again... brilliant. And I will go again next month.
Except maybe then I am going to go in person. Dependent on the theme of the evening, of course.
So yes, I am giving up writing, coherent writing at least. I also tried to draw today and it was really very sad. I barely managed to stay on the line.
And I will end this post now. And I do not recommend that anyone read it at half speed. I read it at an even slower speed while writing it (I am a slow typer,) and I do not think that this particular one is worth being read slowly...
how about a previous one or one on a different site?
Or maybe one in a book, written hundreds of years ago?... somewhere very far away... or not very far away at all.
(because, how else would that ever work?)
It could have been the tripple espresso con panna that turned this past night into a short moment of maybe three quiet hours? It could have been 10 minutes, of course. I am thinking of sliced bagels here. Lost in space and time.
Slicing... slicing... Just remembered that dream too. It was the small finger missing on my right hand that was a bit alarming at first. Then the middle finger of my right hand was half gone.
I was very at peace with the idea that my hand would soon loose all of its fingers. It wad the right hand. I am a lefty as lefty can be. And it is the fall.
When I woke up, I checked if I was still all in one piece.
(Then I shaved.)
My dream was created in my brain because of a one handed delivery man in the street, right here in front of the office, i think.
The missing hand had been removed very cleanly. The skin had a different color where the hand used to be. The stump looked somehow beautiful, it looked as if it were waiting for spring to return, so it could sprout a new hand, more beautiful than the one before, one with seven, nine, thirty nine fingers?
(Though... a one handed delivery man?)
Three most spectacular letters arrived here yesterday. Little glowing gems.
I am not really good at replying. I have a really horrible track record when it comes to replying to letters. Any kind of letters. I have lost many friends because of that.
No bad intentions.
I am really bad.
maybe this time?...
The main post office is just a few blocks away from here. Across the street from the main post office is a commuter diner. It has some fancy sounding name, there are golden stars qwetsched into the design.
The place is supposed to look realistic, to keep lone-Gailanders off the manhattan streets.
"The key is to go to Jamaica, then Babylon." (The guys at the table next to me were discussing yesterday's power outage.)
"So she takes oaf her shoe, and starts pounding on the window. She keaps screamin' :'the diesels should go, the diesels should go', and so he oapens the window and says: 'look lady, there are seventeen trains ahead of me, what do you wanme to do? I can't just go like that."
Man-dance stories, experts at work, and play... They were just making sure they still had that friendship flame going. The one that had started with those giant golden baseball-themed rings. Though it was important that that friendship did not go too "far".
"Went through that Chelsea area the other night. Disgusting."
"Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Even in the sports bars there. All men."
I had some truly perverse pastrami sandwich. The pickles: Tripple sour. The coke: Purest, Highest, Fructose (and or sucrose... such-rose...)
Boy, I got really cute stamps. I will now start sending real letters again. Please email me the newest address. I have lost them all. I really do not have them anymore. Not quite sure what happened.
It was in the middle of the desert that I pulled out my little book. And it was blank. The names were there. Gone were all locations.
The most beautiful part of that other dream began when I remembered to check the walk in closet on the right. It was in the second guest room, in the quadruplex.
I came across a little blue box in the left hand pocket of the green suede jacket.
In the box: a key.
I went to the third floor.
I saw a small cabinet near the hall closet.
The key turned with a click.
The orange inside was most plump and perfect one of its kind...
because it was a dream, I was able to eat one half of it without even opening my lips.
The other half of the orange somehow ate me.
because we now levitated, the expression "flights" made perfect sense.
so as half an orange, I levitated down two flights, into the laundry room, towards the dryer...
just to my delighted surprise, find my truly other half.
How could any color ask for more?
(though orange tends to win.)
It is tempting to make wonderful assumptions about the personality of others by the way they enter one's life. It often appears far more revealing how a person exits one's life however.
Maybe those who's exits are good could be compared to good books or good wine. Those who enter with glory and leave with a stank are probably like bad sitcoms and cheap candy.
(I am probably the cheap candy type.)
I never bought a second issue of nest magazine. I think if I buy the last available now, I am going to have the most completely incomplete collection: the very first and the very final issue.
The church of St. Paul the Apostle is actually a really groovy place, I think. The wedding ceremony I had the honor to observe as a guest, was actually a magnificent event. The location was fantastic.
I crossed my arms to receive a blessing and not communion, even though I am a Polish Catholic... or maybe that's why?
The Lotos Club is mighty groovy too. The library actually contains some great (and real) books, the third floor has this really great sound blocking leather chair... The mirrored salon was a wonderful location for a spectacular nuptial dinner. (Congratulations J+D)
I felt a bit odd when I found out that my buddy Christian was going from Germany to Hawaii to surf (the web and the waves) for three full months. I just found out yesterday, over breakfast, that he is going for five full months. Great.
(Check out his site. )
The moon snuck around the buildings this evening, as the days are shorter now, and he is more visible for longer.
An almost full moon probably means that horses are dying somewhere, at least according to Haruki Murakami. (thank you A...)
I really wish I had been at the drawing center yesterday. Would have loved to have walked through the crowds in Chinatown afterwards. It would have been lovely to spend the afternoon not far from the back of the Beacon theatre today.
I will probably soon not even know where I would really rather be...
The vivid dreams of spectacular architecture right across the street of the Cooper Union were the happier moments of this Sunday morning.
It might be time to get some rest. Not feeling well. Sleep brings back health... and is the poor man's drug and heals all wounds... or was that time?...
Sleep will tell...
standing up to the neck in water, in a heavy bathing suit, the thick wool pockets filled with led-sculpted "survival tools". what was he waiting for really?
he should have figured out that he was not really able to swim... probably before he went in?
and his family on the distant shore, cheering for, with brightly painted boards, urging him, their only "swimmer" him to go deeper, "GO IN DEEPER!" they said.
Not one of them has ever made it this far from the shore.
Not a single one of them ever managed to get to that point where holding the nostrils above the salty waves becomes a real, a major, an overwhelming challenge.
They pranced in the sand, they pointed proudly in his direction, they waved their stupid signs.
Their striped ponchos, hand made out of colored sheep-hair. The sun would burn freckles onto their almost transparent bodies.
He knew that he was in very deep. His toes hurt from barely holding on to that one turtle shell he managed to hold on to for a while now.
He knew he had walked all this way here because he himself had chosen to...
Nobody ever told him how to swim. He had invented ways to wave his arms in ways that looked pretty much like real swimming...
Heavy, thick wool. "So the water is not cold". Heavy thick wool. "Because that's the way to do it". Heavy thick wool. By now he should have gone further perhaps? Heavy thick wool. Thicker now. Each fiber filled and filling more with salty water.
When he closed his eyes, there were vast landscapes, an immersive experience.
Levitating above the evaporated lakes with dried toes and fibers locked in them, he felt that this was so much closer to where things should be...
But how could he possibly know?...
no matter what direction he would step into now, the water would fill the space over his head... there would be no oxygen for him for a while...
no matter where he decided to step now...
the water was not only deeper... it was rising... rising... rising... the wool swimming suit was soaking in more and more and becoming heavier and heavier...
...
that's when he threw up.
I can not help it. I find beauty in an ironing board. Well, maybe not in the board itself, but in the idea that led to its purchase. And in its purpose, its function.
Twenty-hour light-bulbs are maybe not great for the environment, but God, are they sexy. Not by themselves, but definitely as the idea of light used properly for twenty hours. Concentration plus creation equals time spent truly well.
Even the idea of a piece of paper can be most erotic when its fibers are important enough to be rejoined after being scratched by a frustrated cat.
I can not help it, but there is beauty locked in ideas and activities and the use of objects that somehow show a certain respect for moments, for work, for time, for the little vibrations of the universe that push some of us upstream.
My dream is to be close to beauty. My dream is to be embraced by it. My dream is to be closer to it than close.
And I know that it is not something that just happens. There is probably no easy path there. And I am glad that it is this way.
And I do not believe in shortcuts. I do not believe in instant gratification. I do not believe in: easy to use and number one and most sold and billions can't be wrong.
I find ironing boards exciting, and slow drawings, and even slower paintings. And I love it when there is silver paint that does not want to behave the way it is supposed to... when it just keeps going...
Let's turn off the lights and see all this much more clearly. yes?
It was okay that the battery in the camera was almost empty. This was not about taking or making pictures. This was about an amplification of good energies perhaps? The right things happening at the right time to the right people and objects and thoughts...
In a perfect world, there would be two drawing tables (at least...). And there would be striped table cloths (with stripes saying more than words, perhaps?)
And there would be a sky in all rooms (and the sky would be a memory of what the walls were like before they became themselves.). And there would be a rim right under the sky, from which images would ripen slowly with just the right amount of altered light and love and care and skill (and even though time would be involved in their creation, the perfect results would be very, very timeless). And there would be peace (in perfect palatable amounts, and also the kind that should rule the world.) And there would be unscripted and yet perfectly brilliant stories (and they would be like magic, that glues humans together, not the other kind that tears them apart.) And the food would be just spectacular (because it would also ripen with the same love and attention as the images of its relatives). And we would not need to even remember the exact names and times of things as time and things would just not really be all that important in a perfect, beautifully perfect world...
The sniper helicopter looks almost cute from here. A red and white toy, with the side door open. It is in no rush to circle over manhattan.
An old green tanker truck, the logo on the side a cute lit match, just made its way down on Broadway.
A train that will not stop in the station makes so much noise it overpowers the street sounds even here on the 8th floor.
I think I will need to go to the park again, at least for a little while perhaps. It looks like my brain somehow refocused and I am having some trouble to see beyond the obvious surface of certain things. Need some slowly applied re-calibration.
Just swam through the warm waters of an imaginary lake. Swam minutes after sunset. Just managed to reach the island, the small patch of land. The center of the body of water. The sounds of the shores seem far from here. The voices of others seem distant and muffled.
The sky above seems to rest on an open trap, ready to snap shut. I feel as if I were the tiny human bait, sitting, soaked, waiting for the animal to be caught?
Something is telling me that the moon is not going to come out to even see me tonight.
I will now curl myseld into a small, compact object. And wait for the sun to crush the silly setup.
Will the moon still make the waters let me float on a soft wave towards the not so dangerous shore? Let's really hope it happens, let's really hope it happens.
The greenish waters are rising.
All of the pins have been removed from the wall. What remains are tiny holes leading to nowhere. The pet Orka is going to get a good scrub at home. The universe as we know it is contracting again, we will speed up processes and then reappear stronger and smarter on the other side of the warm warp door.
Is this one of the original ideas of the universe in general? In order to survive, it has to change at all times. Expansion and contraction and some direction are the basic important states of things. A never ending transformation is on the way. Always, at all times, everywhere.
The metal surface of my desk pretends to be made out of a giant slab of wood. The image is of wood, the texture is of polished stone, the temperature is clearly plastic coated metal.
Orka has seen a lot. Orka will get to see more. Do you remember w-orka?... I think he is a workaholic. ; )
An article in a recent issue of Der Spiegel, pointed out a strange little assumption. According to the writer we are fooling ourselves into the illusion of progress by further and further compressing our music. Yes, we all know that an MP3 contains much less information than the original recording, but we have been told that it does not really matter, since the compression happens in the part of the spectrum that we are not able to hear anyway. I had no idea that CDs actually were already a compressed kind of data carrier. There are supposedly some super-CDs out there and also audio DVDs which also contain the frequency range that are somehow closer to what we used to hear when putting that needle on one of those giant disks, called, appropriately: records.
There were two more issues which concerned the writer of the Spiegel article, (Spiegel means Mirror, though it is more like the guardian,) if we believe that our brain is not able to catch some of the frequencies that end up being kicked out of the handy and quickly downloadable MP3s, then maybe the recordings are not done in a way that would preserve that inaudible part of the spectrum as well, making it somehow difficult to ever reconstruct the full and amazing effect of the entire music, which could become so very useful once one of the generations after us finally manages to use talk to other species,
(Like cats, or dolphins, or maybe even squirrels,) and would like to use some early 21st Century recordings to do so.
Oh well, so the frequencies are missing. We should not really care too much. It makes more commercial sense to pack 10000 songs onto a little portable device than let's say... 100... the music that fits into the pocket does not need to be perfect "just fine" is just fine enough.
The second interesting issue, and this one is a very nice theory based on some home made non scientific experiments: supposedly our brain craves those missing frequencies compressed out of the music. I know it does not seem to make too much sense at first... How could the brain possibly miss something it never heard in the first place?
Apparently some tests were made and it appears that listening to MP3 compressed music was more tiring than listening to those old giant black disks.
It was almost as if the brain used some of its energy to fill in some of the blanks created by compression, as if it were trying to recreate the original, uncompressed music experience. It was as if the brain were busy decompressing the music we hear, in real time, as we hear it.
Okay, this is really all very unscientific. I hope no government will ever use this post to preemptively attack some country made part of the axis of compression...
but it somehow does make sense. I mean... just looking at this screen in front of me it does.
I remember the very first time I pressed my nose against the thick glass of the vacuum tube of our giant Russian TV set in Poland. Gone were the happy adventures of Jacek i Agatka, my handmade early childhood on-screen heroes, and what appeared were little lights, the red, the green the blue, blinking at some intelligence bearing frequency.
I stepped away, and there were my little heroes again. I stepped closer... again the blinking lights. The illusion of closeness to my little friends only worked when I actually stepped away from them. Intimate distance...
A similar experience at a Helmut Kohl election poster a few years later in Germany. (No noses pressed this time.) The giant, self acknowledging smile of a politician with a PhD in history when seen from a distance, turned into a dirty mosaic of yellow and magenta and cyanide, with maybe some little specks of black here and there, when looked at from up close. (I later learned that Black in printing was named Kontrast but that's beside the point.)
Clearly the manmade visual world around us is a compressed illusion of what we could maybe find in nature.
We have just recently learned to imagine our world as something translatable into megapixels.
So when we look at a JPEG, with its blocks of "good enough" approximations, what is our brain busy with? Is this why looking at the real thing is so much more relaxing?
I know... the things we do not really get to see are probably not really relevant to that daily life stuff anyway... The stuff we do not take pictures of, does not really matter, much of it just does not even exist... (ahem... no I don't know that.)
But just the thought that whatever object is around us, I mean the real thing... I mean... everything around us and in us has an almost unlimited resolution, doesn't it?
Anything we touch, or all the other things we never get to touch. All of this stuff has a resolution far, far, far beyond what we can probably imagine.
It is probably a bit embarrassing that I even express a fascination with the resolution of the things around me... this is the thing we are supposed to shed when about four years old, I guess. After pressing my nose against that TV set and seeing my childhood heroes disappear, I should have gone on and kill some time, some toys, something... and never press my nose against that TV again... (Why do I remember that there was a time when it fell?)
Some 30 years later, my eyes are getting worse and worse. I spend my days and good portions of the nights in front of some sort of screens, or looking at some sort of other man made things, presented with better or worse compression...
I read things that are most of the time just emailed to me... and they arrive in front of me on the same screens... all 72dpi, maybe 100dpi when in front of the right computer...
I have not even noticed that my eyes got worse... my eyes were good enough for the man made environment and are even good enough now.
And a similar experience with the hearing. The iPod is the loudest of the MP3 players because of Steve Jobs' hearing...
If I can not hear something well, I also crank it up.
I wonder if such compression and adjustments happen even beyond of what we see and what we hear.
The thinking in general must also adhere to compression and decompression standards... the world is no longer made of little thoughts and fragile, subtle emotions, it is made of the good guys, and the thugs, the friends and foes, the prosperous and the evil doers.
Even me thinking so immediately puts me into the fuzzy and the soft category I guess...
but that's somehow fine I guess? I don't mind? I guess?...
Sitting at the table in the living room, the shades closed because of the overwhelming brightness of the sun, I am looking at the roots of this plant in a glass of water right next to me. (It is here, no pictures, can you imagine it?)
Over the last few days she has developed these pink roots with hard, bright red tips that look as if they were filled with fresh blood. The tips are slowly crawling out of the water.
The roots themselves are covered with barely visible, soft, pink hair. The plant is developing some spectacular air roots as well. They grew from a few millimeters to sometimes 10 centimeters. Red and brown and pink. Their bark looks like old skin and it flakes like after a sunburn.
A new leaf, still enveloped in a dark red hull looks almost moist as it is getting ready to unfold into another one of those chlorophyl factories the size of my hand.
There are little droplets of dew, or whatever this might be, on some of the stems of the plant.
The original remains of the plant, which was cut off its original roots because it seemed too large for its pot, are spawning a little green plant as well.
This is all really insignificant stuff when it comes to the future of most of us, so they say, but boy... it is all happening in real time, uncompressed, at an almost unlimited resolution, and probably accompanied by sounds that are far beyond the reach of whatever is attached to our heads.
And that's just a "simple", brainless plant...
And I will have to draw it tonight... as it feels the right thing to do. Create something that is not compressed but rather a new arrangements of ink on some paper, inspired by the existence of something far beyond my comprehension...
I guess that's how things can work...
Am I glad I never threw away this little plant. And I am glad my eyes are still good enough to let me see it... or is it really just the eyes?
"It is a bit of a problem," I explained to a friend who among other superpowers has the ability to really listen... "the problem is that I do not remember what I have told and what I have not told. It is really very strange. I have written so much over the past few years that I really do not remember which one of the stories I have already told and which one I kept to myself because I wanted to tell it when there was the right time to tell it."
"It does not really matter," was the answer, "a story retold is always a new story. Jut imagine that each one of your entries is your first one. You are a different person than the one who wrote the other things anyway. You should not worry too much..."
Hmm. Indeed. Why are so so incredibly obsessed with the "original", the "one and only"... it must have something to do with the industrial ability to multiply objects as if there were no laws of physics.
And with the web... well the web allows to just copy and paste information in speedy and effortless ways...
hmm...
or maybe the need to have original content is just a really silly idea of mine... maybe this is all wrong. The most popular web destination are the ones that provide commentary on stuff others talk about...
It is all about pointing the finger at something and saying something that has enough edge to split the opinion into supporters and those who do not agree... and popularity is polarized...
This really works best with masses. Masses of clickers. Did anybody ever point out that if computers knew how to think they would probably find us to be rather dull devices that need some of the slowest interfaces, like antiquated keyboards and that really dumb pointer...
A story told several times become a new story...
a drawing drawn several times is always a new drawing...
even photographs... the medium that is built around the very idea of reproduction... even photographs of the one and same object could potentially be a thing that develops... yes... it does.
Maybe my not remembering what I have written is a bit of a problem though... it feels a bit tough to even remember how this entry here started... Or did I just point it out?
I will try to close my eyes... for a little while. What an exciting non activity that is... and always very different and new... isn't it? ...
All my eyes seem to have seen in the last 48 hours or so are the insides of my eyelids and this screen. And the screen is the clear winner in this one.
In a room with pulled shades, with the air conditioning on, drinking some cold water now and then and listening to either some random music or just the humming of the fans, I have been pulling together little bits and pieces of past time spent in front of this and other screens...
And all this is done, so I can spent even more hours looking at screens... Amazing things we do to be able to afford the doctors and lawyers of the last few years of our lives. Unbelievable really...
How was your weekend?...
3: "Wow, look, the sky is so incredibly blue."
1: "I think it is because of that very reflective building over there, see how the sky creates a contrast with the reflection in the glass?"
They both look at the moving clouds. The sky looks so blue, it does not even look like sky.
2: (coming from across the building.) "Is somebody jumping? Who is jumping?"
4: "Nobody is jumping. We are just really impressed by the incredibly blue sky."
2: "Oh, that's because the air is so dry. It is very rare that the air is so dry on a summer afternoon in new york... So nobody is jumping, heh?" (out)
3: "The sky is so blue."
1: "It is the wind, the wind is so incredibly strong. It blows away the dust particles and so the air is so clear over the city."
3: "Isn't it amazing how we tend to admire the reasons?... it is very odd how our minds work. We are somehow programmed to find explanations to anything and everything. How interesting that we are destined to make connections, assumptions, conclusions, explanations... I sometimes do not want to think about any explanations."
1: "I still think it is the building. And you are being silly. If we only admired stuff without trying to explain it, we would probably not even be human. And there would definitely be no progress."
3: "I guess..."
and across the street, a woman on her cellphone, stood in the window and complained about the dirt in her room. And just a few floors down, maybe on the 6th floor of that hotel that lost some bricks during the winter storms earlier this year, there was an older lady, her back against the glass, her shirt's design perfectly created for just this moment in time. The climax of its existence.
Down in the belly of the skyscraper, a man broke up with his girlfriend over the phone, while urinating in the wide stall, not really set up for any of his actions.
Several tourist kids bought fake kate spade bags from the man who used to be the fatest runner in his village as a kid, but not after his leg was slashed in an argument with a drunk soldier, who happened to be a kid as well.
A bare arm of a lover pulled down the shades, one by one.
ConEd workers pulled out a cable from under the asphalt of 50th street, the driver of the truck talked on his walkie-talkie phone to somebody on the other coast.
Right next to them, the old toothless woman begged for money or cigarettes. And today she was not alone...
No time was wasted here. Not even by those who thought they tried.
And above it all. The brilliantly blue sky. (Well, behind the brilliantly white clouds, of course.)
"Your love of gardening will take on new meaning in your life." Who writes these fortune cookies? This might have been the best one yet. What incredible coincidence that I got to open this one... especially since I have recently been discovering that some of my drawings really are like... growing entities. Their "creation" works from the ground up, not from an overarching, predetermined composition... I mean there are healthy constrains, of course; the drawing is not very likely to end up on my hand or the table, the tiny elements in the drawings are certainly part of my program. But I do not compose most of them. They just grow out of very simple rules; sometimes even less than that.
A little piece of information manages to convince me to finally be put onto paper. It mutates into something that actually makes it to paper. Then this piece of information, now outside of me, becomes a word in a dialogue I end up having with the piece. The system needs a lot of steady energy to end up as something that looks like a finished piece to me... but actually... is there a plan?... There are no sketches... And the thoughts are often just slowly counted numbers. One, three, five, seven, three, five... eleven?... and different times and speeds... short, short, loooong... and long and back and long...
Our brains are pleased with systems, patterns, programs. Our brains are most pleased with harmonies that are patterns, predictable, recognizable... some easily, some not so... happiness itself often appears nothing more than a riddle that finds its desired solution... happiness rarely comes as a surprise... maybe?... is happiness the answer to a harmonious hope? A pattern?
... but between every two patterns there is an infinite number of the other. Not less bad, just unpredicted, somehow, in some ways... there are universes of non-patterns, or growing things that are overlapping textures of often multidimensional patterns...
Ripples in thought and time and yes, space...
And it all happens one little tiny mutation at a time... or at a place, or at an idea...
And it is a bit like gardening, because we all are gardeners, aren't we? Trying to control what would otherwise be just a wild flow of the universe through us. We are groomed and grooming. We bonsai-train the world around us and ourselves in the world. We turn ourselves it into something we can comprehend and even harvest...
I am not sure why, but today feels as if the growth had reached some bizarre critical mass. It feels as if I were standing in an imaginary garden and it is just the beginning of things, the very early morning of a giant push out of the imaginary soil... But it feels as if it is going to make much more sense now...
And so that message in the fortune cookie is a good firefly on a warm evening... and it is one of the rare things that makes me smile today.
It could also be some strange fluke of a thought that lost its right path and is simply passing through my head....
That spoon of royal jelly in the morning should be a habit, not the last straw when the refrigerator contains nothing else but packets of ketchup, water, some shady looking dressings and, well... that several year old royal jelly jar.
My royal jelly looks like ear wax in a plastic jar. It flakes and melts onto the little spoon and really tastes delicious. It probably tastes delicious because it is really time to eat something now. Anything.
Whatever happened to those edible packing peanuts?
I won a camera. It is a little DV Sony and it is maybe 5 years old. I did not get a tape for it yet, but I was able to zoom around with the zoom button and also to snap some silly candid pictures onto that memory stick thing.
I really do not know what I am going to do with this thing. I turned on the night vision function and I looked nothing like Paris Hilton anyway. Good thing.
I am a bit afraid of moving pictures. I know very well how to hide things in stills. But movies? Movies are tougher. And they are somehow not as solid, and they eat up sound and such things... I am not sure I am ready. But still... winners should not complain... (Except maybe about some missing cables.)
Oh and royal jelly is good. And playing around with Alias sketch leads to rather bizarre returns to scary cuteness... .
Please forgive... ; )
Broadway looks so very empty this morning. There are even parking spaces available on the freshly rain washed "great white way". We are further uptown, where tourists usually arrive in loud speaking red double decker busses and it is the day after the day of the happily exploding sky and other joyful celebrations.
It is monday and it is a workday, but seemingly only for those who do not get wear the very white collars, those that do not even have blue stamps on them. And so the rush to the subway reminds me a bit of the mornings of my childhood in Poland. Groups of men with their eyes glowing from behind what looked like overly dense black mascara, would be returning from the nightshift at the mine. By the time I would be outside, those from the early shift would have already left, quietly, with their freshly prepared sandwiches wrapped into cheap wax paper.
They would not only sacrifice the day, just as the nightshift had just sacrifice the night, but sacrifice it in a milder version of hell, tearing out black rocks straight from the soil, thousands of feet below the earth's surface.
The people I see going for the subway stop might not be on their way to an underground pit, but their outfits and even the tempo with which they move their variety of bodies somehow makes me know that they did not just wake up in one of the penthouses around here. Or maybe some did. Maybe I am getting it all wrong.
Maybe it is just the chirping of sparrows through the thickly gray air mixed with the distant sound of train-wheels on some far and invisible railroad tracks that trigger the memories.
I think I will just get out of the house now, and I will walk uptown. Maybe this will somehow clean at least parts of my forehead, which is still glued together to one cushion of sleepy semi-thought.
Hello fifth of July.
Uploading of pictures is broken. Maybe it would be interesting is certain other functionality were broken too. In more general terms even. Maybe if I tied the hands behind my back and holding only a pen in my mouth and if I wrote letters this way, maybe this would be a very focussed and slow activity. And things would take forever, and there would be a lot of pain involved and the results would be filled with struggle and yet with attention as well.
It might be just the very wrong way to assume that whatever is instant and fast and easy is a good thing. Maybe the things that take forever and are dangerous and can not be achieved by oneself or only by oneself under extraordinary struggle, maybe these things are the true valuables of our lives. Maybe most of the other stuff a bit of a supersized version of brain-nutrient deprived, bloated hull of what pretends to be good for us?
I have to think of those works lacquer, which I like to visit now and then, at the Metropolitan Museum... elaborate objects, created with a very poisonous material, an unforgiving material, so very slowly, so packed with intense labour. Is this part of what we admire about them?
I sometimes wonder how whatever I am doing here, the visible and the invisible things, would translate, if we used struggle as a factor, to one of those lacquer buddhas at the galleries... would the years spent touching keys of a keyboard and the thousands of times a shutter was pressed, and the miles and miles of lines drawn by pens and brushes... would they result to something? Would they result to something if I had not been given all these amplifiers of our age, like the pens and cameras and computers?...
What is the worth of what we are doing here and will the worth of it be ever perceivable to anybody?... And I do not mean monetary worth, because this one is the most deceptive of them all...
Maybe the way I am thinking about this is too simple again. Maybe a different angle would be better...
For example, if I draw a little circle with one of the drawing tools I have here... the result will be instant... but what if I were without the computer... what if I used some other, simpler tool... what if I did not use a tool at all. No tool. Not even the tool of knowledge of what a circle is?
...
Maybe this goes to far...
So I can not upload pictures right now... (actually the error message is one that tells me that I can not create thumbnails for images..majick is broken? What might be the problem here?)...
So maybe it would be a good exercise to write more for now... maybe even there, to reduce the vocabulary, then maybe try to write only in one tense, from the perspective of one particular person...
Maybe this ability to do things quickly is a bit of an illusion...
Hmm... what was it I was trying to say?... Or was I trying at all?
Each one of the entries should perhaps be accompanied by the technical specs of how it was created. How much energy is being burned right now, just so I can see the letters appear here in front of me, somehow slowly still, one by one, blurry, greyish, behind a layer of disturbing floaters.
I turned off all lights. I put on the headphones. I should be able to focus now. No. I am not really able to focus.
I watch probably about 15 minutes of television per day. Maybe less. Still, some of what I see when I try to think reminds me very much of flipping channels.
Just had o think of the cold blade of the knife my neighbor would press against my forehead after I managed to hit something again. I somehow thought that she would cut off the red bump growing on my head. She would always only press onto it, very strongly with the broad side, the cold metal, it would hurt as much as the original impact, except that now there was this giant face of a very thin woman with transparent skin, curly hair and a breath like a ashtray looking at me through the rims of her 1978 glasses. click...
When I finally bought my first mac, it was put onto an oven. It was a very old oven I had found in the street and dragged the two flights to the apartment. There was the kitchen, the place where the cats ate their gradually more disgusting food, and then just a few feet from there, the computer, all fresh and beige.
It was far enough from the bookcase when it collapsed. The entire wall collapsed. A giant wall of paper and other objects just toppled over into the room, crushing a table, chairs, almost hitting a little cat. click...
The cleaning lady just picked up my styrofoam cup with the remnants of some sugar, as well as a very oddly curled piece of paper. click...
I should have written on Wednesday. I could have sworn that I saw at least two homeless men on cellphones. Good... all homeless people should have cellphones in New York City. And it should be a public service. If they do not have homes, at least give them a help-line... and maybe right into their hand...
Oh, such a bad idea, isn't it?... Too much control? Too naive of me?
no bread thus cake?
click...
She said that she lived two hours away from the city. She would thus spend four hours every day, staring at the landscape moving past the window... I hope she gets a seat every time.
I asked her what she did when on that train. And she admitted that her thoughts would just drift away. And I imagine he reflection travelling with her, the eyes closed sometimes. Sometimes open, but not seeing... sometimes seeing a lot and yet choosing not to understand.
Her thoughts traveling from her, to the reflection and then just ton off and left behind on the train tracks... until things became completely quiet again and even the vibrations of the tracks would stop...
click...
Allergies would easily kill me...
click...
my hands would be completely cold...
click...
i almost drowned...
click...
before going to sleep, my legs would walk up the wall, until they could not walk any further. I would remain in this position until the world around me would start to pulsate in the rhythm played by my heart.
I still like the moving shapes on the ceiling of the bedroom.
I should be on my way home now and get some sleep.
Hmm... maybe it is just time to wrote on and sit in front of a very different device... let's see where and how this is going to happen...
They will just completely disappear... these things we still call computers in one way or another...
And computers will disappear. The screens will disappear. The keyboards will disappear as well. Some of them will. Or at least they will pretend that they will.
And they will be everywhere. Once it becomes as cheap to make a surface intelligent as it is goign to be to add a coat of paint, then... well, actually much earlier than that... they will just blend in, will be worn, will be inhaled, injected, looked through and with and at unintentionally.
We take information for granted. We take music for granted. We take light for granted. We take heat and cool air for granted. We take transportation for granted. We take color for granted.
And we will take computers for granted. They will become the surface and the subsurface of whatever will be around us and on us and in us...
and it is not going to matter too much...
Stating the obvious here... next...
Timetimetimetime... barely any here, rushingrushing rushing through the mini clicks on the keyboard, and more and more and more wedges in the calendar... the days feel like jumping over a herd of sheep again and again and again...
but we are winners again. Just received a call that we won an award in Cannes... and it is a very happy moment... (though mildly so, as we do not want to be overly ecstatic, do we?...)
What ever happened to Wednesday? Nice Shoes? Modigliani beyond the myth and right next to the pita bread... If I only had more than 90 seconds to tell the story, I probably would... scary moments of overworked winners?
I guess...
Around this time, the dogs still roam free in the streets of the Upper West Side. And the birds can still be heard. It is still possible to get a bigger booth at the diner, even when just walking in as one person. It is almost quiet. Well, not here and now, just in general.
The guy next to me ordered whatever I am having except with an additional bowl of strawberries.
Oh, and he also has no potatoes with his omelette... or bread. I am sensing a low carb diet here. Comfort food has been replaced by comfort therapy. A sense of control over the belly in times when the world appears to be spun out of control completely... Away of preserving sanity in an environment where food is going to be plenty tomorrow and the day after that.
Crazy.
When I visited an artist camp in Poland in 1995, one of the Polish friends reminded me that no thinking and no development was really possible if there was food on the minds of the. What he meant then and there was of course, that there was plenty of people in Poland who had no time to think about great ideas, as they had to think about ways to get the next meal. “Mit leerem Magen denkt sich schlecht.” (Thinking is bad with an empty stomach… is a German saying.)
I wonder if declaring war on Carbohydrates might have a bit of a similar effect, what a brilliant coincidence. The stomachs may not be empty and that feeling in the belly might be fear, not hunger, but boy, does it take off the mind of whatever else there is.
How much of the thought real estate in the head of a large part of the population here is set aside for nutritional matters these days? How much is taken by matters related to looks? (and this includes those whiter and whiter teeth, I think.) How much is taped off for that danger zone called career?
How much of the emotional and thought real estate remains available for actual independent thinking and for this really stupid thing called dreaming?
How much remains open for that thinking that is just seemingly useless and not really translatable into anything that could be sold or bought or… outlived.
Whom am I fooling here... a lion share of the world’s thinking has to be brought down to a ritualistic celebration of the mundane... not all parts of a car can be the engine, as my father would put it...
Should I probably drop the sugar and investigate the advantages and disadvantages of sweet'n low? Though I have the feeling the Equal, with its blue packaging is speaking more clearly to my light blue set of my mind...
Oh, and could the guy behind me please stop reading his bills to himself out loud, with all the rubbish commentary? I understand it when couples argue about money, but if a couple is trapped in a single middle aged body, then matters are more serious, I guess...
It is still relatively quiet right here and right now… and this is why I will now get out and take a walk for another 40 blocks or so. The rest of the day will be spent in an office. No dogs allowed. Forget the birds.
I had had some of that fermented red grape juice. The picnic in the Empire State Building was really great. Seeing old friends again is always a comforting experience...
A tourist couple in front of the ESB was taking turns in taking pictures of each other. I offered to help. Decided that the picture needed a flash, made a cute photograph of them posing in a very happy way in front of the giant building. They were ecstatic. They did not speak any English, it seamed, but they were so incredibly happy as if it had been their very first picture together in New York.
Oh, and I love This little entry on Sarah's Blog.
Can we please just start doing more good things to people? I mean tiny little good things? More of them? Every day? Could we please do whatever we can to make the life of others in some tiny way easier? Not just friends. Everyone.
And could we not even talk about it too much, just do? Just help out? Just for the helping's sake? Preferably anonymously?
Maybe there could be an anonymous blog somewhere with things that have been done, just to allow others to have ideas as to what to do? I don't know...
Listen, it took just a few days of working to get me back to a semi stressed mode. Bad. And it has been the deep kind of work, a bit like the moments when there is a leak in the hull of the ship and we can all see the island and the giant shark just crushed the last piece of wood that we gave to him... and maybe it was all but a dream.
So I would dive into the little slides I brought with me from the desert and it felt as if a tiny piece of Death Valley were really in them, right there and then it felt a little better... for a brief moment. Good...
Other than that... portions of the last few days have not been as glorious as they possibly could be... and I really failed in some areas in which I should never fail. And that's bad. (Nothing work related this time... worse.)
And I really wish that tonight I could just take that elevator and just go...
but... it is not going to be this easy, you know... oh, how did I get this confused this quickly?...
Some streets across the river felt as if it were a summer evening in Frankfurt, perhaps, then Offenbach, then... not Germany after all, then the night in Katowice, then... hmm...
Bought a drawing in Chelsea on Saturday and it is a really silly one. The drawing is a bit odd, probably from the late 60's. A young man holding up his arm to welcome a falcon. The falcon is shown in three flight phases. How could I have possibly paid any money for a piece like this?
I think I liked the slightly imperfect tip of the young man's nose. Probably also liked the very good technique of the artist. I think what made me actually buy the drawing was the fact that the man is attached to the falcon by some sort of band... yet his hands are bare. Imagine hunting with a falcon without having gloves on. Now we're talking interesting.
The drawing is currently in its ripening stage, I tucked it away, I am not looking at it. I will come back to it. I might take it out of the house altogether. Some pieces only work in a certain context.
When I used to design records (and later CDs), I would often take the dummies of the product to houses of friends. I would place the designed object somewhere in this familiar to somebody else environment, and often the design would reveal subtle and often not so subtle flaws.
One of the dangers of designing on screen might be the fact that the screen is a very set and in itself designed environment.
This goes beyond browser compatibility issues here. When designing something that will not be used on screen alone, one should always take it out of context.
And even when designing for screen, one should also either take a look at the work at somebody else's computer, or even print the stuff out and take it to the park... or under the shower, or well, maybe be the shower is not a good idea.
But maybe taking the piece and looking at it at a dunkin' donuts will reveal different elements than when the piece is looked at at a starbucks..
Hmm... so yes... letting falcons fly, and not wearing gloves... now that's not very smart. That's like trying to eat a pretzel while completely drunk, maybe...
Buying a drawing out of some strange impulse might also be one of the not so smart things... perhaps.
Oh, and Saturday was really amazing... I will have to post some of the pictures taken from that roof in Dumbo... but I am really, really too tired now...
and the falcon might come back any minute now... oh, here he comes, like a speedy bullet.
Cancelled the paper a few days ago. It was a bold move, away from the piles of yet to read sections of the Times, the half solved friday crossword puzzles (is it still a lie if it is as obviously untrue as that last statement?), towards a cleaner, nicer place, a virtual folder in my browser bursting with links to articles and linked entries and overall the electronic, digital, internetational future perhaps? (Let's click harder, my friends.)
Oh, and there would be fewer dead trees as well. Less time spent sitting with the giant printed sheet of pressed pulp in front of me on the floor in the morning. Less brutal imagery flowing into my brain, even without electricity.
The paper was cancelled. ("To suspend your subscription please press one now.")
That was two days ago. And it took just this tiny step to realize that what I thought I was getting from the web and from the news sites on the web was not actually what... please excuse me while I go and try to catch that thought. I seriously thought for a brief moment there that the digest that I serve to myself in this very browser here is the actual real thing I remember. I mean... what was it that I meant?
During a short brainstorming session yesterday, some of my memories that triggered ideas were actually from... the paper. I even remembered the location where I read the articles I remembered. It was as if I were speaking of moments in the past and then this smiling face of a friend would pop into the memory again and again and again (oh, I think I need to use the phone...)... how incredibly strange...
Right now my perception is that my reading of the online editions of the press is at best a bit of a booster shot, something to remind me that the world is still turning until I get the next paper at my door, around sunrise, and so the world slows down a tiny bit and I can see badly printed images, even if not of them quite joyful, yet without electricity and I can sit on the sofa with a giant sheet of printed paper in front of me and... well, the tree thing can not really be turned into anything positive at this point.
How does recycling really work at this point in time?
Is my wanting to get the paper back just a manifestation of the same pattern of addiction that is hard wired into a child that does not get a constant stream of confirmation, just a mild tap, now and then, a very addictive little biological mind trick common to some substances... that biologically hard wired circuit about which I read just recently... in the paper?...
I hear it is dangerous to misinterpret this "paper knowledge" litter in ones brain for the actual thing... (wars were fought because of... well, but wars were also fought because of women, which does not make women bad, now does it?... oh dear brain, what are you doing to me?)
My New Yorker subscription will expire in February 2005, I am seriously worried right now...
And clearly nothing beats reality as a source of misinterpretation, not does it?...
Please forgive this confused writing style... I spend much too much time clicking on links and other virtual things... (Ever wondered how I earn much of my living?)
Wait, was I just reminded of the tragic angle of this silly situation by viewing This brilliant classic Spot for the Guardian, written by Frank Budgen, over at Gorgeous?...
I really do not know... or at least not right now... .
really like the little air bubbles on the stems of the flowers in the vase on the table next to me. Would love to stay here and take a better look at them, maybe just tilt my head and stare at them, but I have to run out now, right now and I will not be back until much later today, I guess. So what is going to happen to the bubbles?... They will certainly not care if anybody will watch them or not.
Does every bubble of air contain the memory of time past and is it the traveler into the time to come? And is each pone of them just a temporary state of being that was is and will be only never in this particular shape and place again?...
Aren't we all?
: )
Why this entry?... It felt weird to have this page start with a four letter word... you know... okay?
walked into the office of a friend and he looked a bit guilty. on his screen was some familiar site... he immediately admitted that he had found it among my links. So he was reading this page. He felt as if he had been observing me through some special device.
I tried to explain that it was really okay and that whatever is written here does not really represent a reflection of what I really do...
or does it? I have been losing track of certain thoughts lately. I do not quite remember what I have already written and what I postponed, wanted to write later... and it is scary that I seem to remember less and less.
Will I soon dissolve into this website and exchange my real self for an illusive version of me, put here into strings of little words in my third language? Am I possibly in the midst of this process already?
All of the waiters at Pigalle, the little French bistro across 8th avenue are Russian. Pigalle actually seems to be a Russian restaurant. The conversation I had with the waiter should have tipped me off... the hostess and what appears to be the owner actually looked somehow familiar as well... Hmm...
There is one user connected to my iTunes right now... but I think it is time for me to go home and to take a walk... and maybe I should not log on anymore today... maybe I should try that. Something is telling me I will not really be able to resist... ...
I can hear the sound effects of IM in the offices next to me... typing, the bells again... more typing.
I think I am not the only one who is turning into the idea of themselves...
that's just so pretty. so nice, so good. ignorance is only bliss when there are no discrepancies in ignorance levels between those involved... and since we humans just live for the comparison... we actually can't really perceive anything but comparisons... well... ignorance is not really bliss...
unless...
we all have not much of a clue about this one thing... and if not that... then something else. Big time.
Brought to you by a simple evening mind, fueled by several cups of coffee, mixed with other, highly addictive substances. All legal, no worries, cheap... actually free.
The week is not over, of course. Mittwoch, or Sroda, means... the middle of the week... but the amount of work that flew over my screen here feels like much more than a week. And it was good stuff... pretty, nice... blissful.
And I should not say more about that.
What language do you think in? I know some old "friends" who think incredibly well in numbers. Large numbers. Their numbers.
I like to think in sounds... maybe an occasional picture, here, there... sometimes there might be some little idea mixed in... fun stuff...
The path is a nice and happy one for me... mostly. And I was not shown a map, so things look different and new and I surprise myself over and over again... who would have thought that I would be able to bring things to such a complexity... who would have thought?
Silly... such silly thoughts... I should go get a cab now. ... are we enjoying this entry somehow?
A police car sounding like a bitten monkey just rushed past the building towards the river. The cheese from the morning sandwich does not feel right in my warm mouth. The coffee was too light and too sweet, but I should really not complain, because no matter how hard I tried I could not have made coffee myself. Or milk, or sugar, or any of the ingredients. Including the tasty paper cup, the most prominent of the flavors on this one.
I have had the strangest of dreams for the last few days. They all somehow involved places I somehow knew in Germany. Most of them featured some real loss of control. (As in driving a car, not as in personal hygiene.) As if the reality of things left behind had not been enough of a bizarre beast, my brain manages to somehow create incredible variations of the situations past. Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud would have had a ball at the party I attended last night. The images were as clear as they were murky. The visitors had tongues as sharp as their hearts were dull.
I woke up to a feeling of complete failure. Why would such bitter ghosts choose to hunt me down all the way to this actually not so unhappy place on the upper west side? What have I done? Or what have I not done?
I will now close this little browser window and get on my way through the bellows of this beloved city into the bellows of one of my favorite skyscrapers, to work on one of my favorite projects with some of my favorite people who happen to be part of one of my most favorite agencies on the planet.
Who is trying to send these disgusting vibes my way? (It is always nice to blame somebody else for very private feelings of "Angst". Well, whoever you are... please stop, okay?)
The paper bag in which my sandwich came is called Joao de Sousa. I like that they all have their names.
Will we ever know if the police car made the monkey sounds because it had to get somewhere, or just because the boys inside really wanted to run a red light? Good morning silly thoughts.
A half inflated mylar balloon just flew by the window and offered a free reflective surface for a very brief moment. I did not take this free offer and just remained seated on the couch with the orange Sbritt t-shirt next to me and in direct extension an empty glass filled with the memory of a self mixed screwdriver and some plants sitting in the window in cups filled with new york tap water, and the water tower and the hudson river new jersey...
i should be on a train now, i should be in the office now, i should be finishing an interesting portion of the new project... which is fun... except that it does overlap slightly with the things I tend to write here, which makes it harder for me to write anything here, as I do not really want things to overlap in such a way. Two objects can not occupy the same space at the same time, so what about thoughts, ideas?... or can objects also occupy the same space if the space is only turned into ideas first?...
i am not even in the t-shirt and i can not be in the same spot as the t-shirt, but we are both certainly in the same room and the hudson river is here too, and even the mylar balloon, which actually never was here, suddenly occupies the same thought space. "las palabras son mentirosos" said Miguel, and indeed, it is possible to squeeze just about anything into a construct made out of words...
On a completely unrelated note... I have been really enjoying the richness and depth of this... Interesting Source of knowledge and inspiration hmm...
so fascinating...
I wonder what happened to the balloon...
--
oh, and I was just shown this and it is some scary piece of working with words...
The saxophone player outside deserves some music lessons. He can hold a tune for just a few seconds then he moves on to the next one and the next one and the next one and so on...
I was just about to turn off my iTunes, when the software told me that there are users connected to my library. I checked and indeed. Two of my neighbors are listening to my stuff. Good for them. I just with they would share too... maybe they will... some day...
The Saxophone player has to go... soon...
So if I missed the sunrise mass this morning, but celebrate the sunrise dozens of times throughout the year... what could this mean?
If I go to places of worship very often, but tend to escape if there is a mass... what does that mean?...
did I ever write about this one time when I was "locked" in one of the front seats somewhere downtown and there were people, then a pastor, then an entire mass with me just sitting there, my palms pressed against my eyes?...
45 minutes or so of a rather bizarre experience... mainly an audio experience for me... but what did the others think?...
They must have assumed that I was a real "case"... I looked at them afterwards, as they were having good conversations outside of the church...
I was "invisible" to them... and maybe it is a good thing... well, they probably used it as a way of protecting themselves from me... the strange man in their midst... and I went away... i actually went away...
it was a very odd day... I wanted to be very invisible on this particular day...
there were many messages on my answering machine that day... many... progressively angrier messages... I remember picking them up from locations farther and farther away from home... (or is it further?)
is there such a thing?...
so what about the sunrise?... can I just celebrate it without some of the layers that make me feel trapped?...
The sunrise is one of the most beautiful places... can you hear the birds?... I mean... close the eyes... can you see the transformation of everything... and can you hear the birds?...
i think there is a sunrise hidden in each and everyone of us... isn't there?
the window sounds as if it were a sail and we were on the open ocean maybe south of chile somehow. yes it is night. and it is cold outside.
"Kwiecien plecien, bo przeplata troche zimy, troche lata"... was the saying I remember remembering many times as a child in Poland... "April is a weaver, for he weaves some winter with a bit of summer"... and so this is very much the case today... this evening...
And I would much rather like to be in a completely different place right now... but I am here... and just slowly regaining a certain level of consciousness...
I am so very much looking forward to visiting the west coast again... soon, very soon... and it will certainly be incredibly beautiful...
it will be like hair, opened up, at a certain point in time, just the right time, always... is this what the clouds are reminding us of?... the moment of complete letting go?...
and i realize that i will probably have to rend certain portions of my equipment, will have to have some little timers repaired, so a second on the shutter of my schneider angulon lens does not take three seconds to pass...
and i managed to finally buy the "olympic lens" today. it is a little marvel of optical engineering, developed in the early 1930's for the berlin olympics... it is a Carl Zeiss Sonnar 2.8/180... a heavy piece of equipment, solid aluminum, painted black... now still in slovakia, in another place where streets have no names... so strange to be in such different places at the same time... some thoughts are here, some are there...
maybe one of the most confusing posts...
but maybe it is about weaving some of the warmth with some of the uncertainty of the cold weather...
maybe the best thing to do now is to smile and close my eyes and to imagine soft hair... yes, i think i will do just that... soft hair, opening into a cloud of strands, expanding on maybe white sheets, mostly out of focus, except for maybe here... and here... and maybe here as well...
It is easy to spot out of towners even at night, when they curse at taxis with their signs turned to "off duty." There were plenty of these and those tonight. And it is a short night and it is a Saturday night and these are especially challenging. Saturdays are a challenge for most, the mini olympics. Saturdays are a decisive night somehow... there is the Sunday morning, the morning after... maybe that's why...
And the projected images in the Australian restaurant were so incredibly distracting, and I could not hear every second word spoken and the drummer sat on my jacket and I would have loved to find out more, about so much, from so many... and it was just too loud... and the party is still going on and I am at home now, with the glowing keyboard and the warm piece of metal on my lap... and the cars on Broadway sound like the waves of a steel ocean hitting the concrete beaches of the sidewalks... and there are little glowing lights in the man made cliffs...
and my thoughts are somewhere else right now... and it is quite nice... somehow... really rather nice...
And the camera would now pull away, or the page wold turn to a new chapter and it would show our hero, on a giant foaming horse, riding very quickly, in circles, loops, maybe other geometrical shapes in an enclosed little canyon, dep in the soil somewhere out there.
There would be dust and sweat and exhausted, painful noises, the man and the animal almost at the end of their powers... and from time to time, a visitor would come to look at the two, observe them for a little while... maybe even take a little snapshot, maybe tell others about it.
Our hero would not stop during the hottest noon hours, and he would not stop at night. An ever ongoing battle with the various distances within the geometric space... pushing this ride to the limits... barely eating barely sleeping, just riding, riding, riding in circles and loops and maybe other geometrical shapes... over and over and over again...
What could possibly be the reason for all this?... What could possibly be the reason?
and it would be nice to be able to just stick out the nose into a very different dimension and to just have a tiny breather... nothing major, just a quick reassurance that things will be okay...
Or maybe it is the other way round. Maybe this place here is that more difficult, more viscose, colder, not really the most friendly environment... maybe, after a rather long dive, one will end up in a very different looking place, where gravity is different and the colors and somehow most of the things...
hmm... no talking under water, kids... at least for some of us...
And he was relatively good in flight, and yet he was asked to walk. And he was a quite good swimmer, but they made him dig a hole. And he really liked to listen, but they made him say it all. And he really liked to change things and they ask him to please not to. And he liked to be alone and they made him run in flocks. And he really liked his fish, and they made him drink and fast.
And it took some time to get to the point where his body just wanted to not fly, not swim, not listen, not change a thing, and just drink... alone...
and he ate his own feathers until he did not even look like the others...
what else?...
Is there such a thing as a completely man made environment? Is there a place where each and every visible element is man made, artificial, controlled, manufactured, designed...
maybe the thinking that such places exist is based on a thinking that is limited to a very particular, human scale... maybe even the man made and designed elements are just the reshuffled elements of a much larger something...
is it our self centered way of seeing things that gives us the illusion that we can actually "make" something?...
i guess it is important for us to imagine that we can control certain elements of our environment. It is important to create shelter for us, for our thoughts and for our ideas.
Shelter for memories, shelter for the imagination.
I guess we like to create systems that please us because they are man made and they are somehow predictable and protective... these can be objects, but they also can be complex idea environments like religion, art or science.. perhaps?...
It is nice that we look to and at other planets... It is nice that our closest star gives us all this abundance of energy...
not feeling the healthiest today...
there is a certain excitement in being awake before sunrise. There is a certain anticipation, a firm knowledge that the day will come... there is the memory of past mornings... and then there is also this different mind, one that has not experienced a day yet... does the world look more real right before sunrise?...
which is a 24 hour event, just in different parts of the world?
(Sunrise here today: 6:22AM)
Not far from City Hall, water falls through metal gates into an area in which is is collected only to evaporate, so it does not bother those who go underground to not be hit by the water from above... and the water evaporates and it moves back up through the gates and eventually it comes back to the same location, just to evaporate again. Or is it different water? It certainly is different water... but the area was created to collect the same water... the water that comes in through the metal gates... and it always does... well, when it rains it does... and it always rains... only the amounts vary...
and so things are much more similar than they are ever different...
even if all that happens is subtle or not so subtle change.
And some seriously described it as an act of heroism when the boy snuck out of the house and did not tell anyone, and flew far, so he could secretly shoot some pictures with those whom he and others had sent into fire he had ignited...
And the other boy, hiding in a hole, he was turned into meat, just because he had not played the right game, he was turned into meat not quite as badly as his sons before though, they had been blown up, cutup then sewn together again, just to be presented to as many as possible. (And it is possible that they have done similar things to others in the past.)
And those waving around swords tend to die of just those. Those with guns in their hands often die with bullets in their heads, and those who like to spread fire... well...
And all of the ones involved used to be kids, back in the day, boys mostly, and they used to play with toys and dream of things that certainly did not include world domination. How old does one have to be to want that? Or is it just the scale that changes... do boys always want to have, to drive, to control, to manipulate...
And many people were killed... and I have no idea how many were crippled... and then there were the hopes, the ideas, the love, the...
I clearly do not know how these things work...
maybe the most beautiful thing would be to remove language, remove the written word, to remove the need to be in a place that is good for the future or something rather distant.
Maybe it would be most wonderful to just appear in a location where the sun is a mild mannered, giving giant, where there is the open sky, the trees packed with sweet fruit, where we could just fly, and explore, and not a word spoken, just songs, those songs in our heads, they would just come with us... always.
And we would live much longer and we would not even be humans with a livespan. It would all be incredibly beautifully simple...
Perhaps?
And life here feels very complicated these days. Snow again tomorrow? And maybe there is a way to imagine a warmer place... let's hope there are ways for that... and i think there are... and then language... words... they might be quite good... somehow... maybe, as a start?... hmm... so much more than I could possibly manage to say...
The red box with papers was free... daily. Especially before sunrise, when it flew uptown to meet the other free boxes for a little chat and also to refill on papers. Once the dangerous sun came out, the dangerous scorching star, the destroyer of all living things, the thief of red and red boxes, once the sun came out, the box had to be back at its post, and it had to be secured. It had to be protected. A friendly man was the protector of the box. He made sure the sun could not steal it, burn it, destroy it. He protected the red box by using a magic chain. This magic chain, used by the man with the key, was what actually ensured the freedom of the red box. Without the chain, the box would be swallowed by the sun, the scary sun, bringer of death and destruction.
The man was a real blessing. And the chain was good. The chain was the ultimate protection. It was very necessary to keep the red box free. Daily.
But the chain was not cheap, of course. Only a very special magic chain was good enough to ensure freedom from sun-destruction and so freedom by chain had a certain price. Doesn't everything have a certain price? Exactly. And so freedom also had a price.
Red boxes usually do not have a lot of savings or anything of real value, really, and so the red box, in order to be able to afford the protection from the sun, which was provided by the friendly man with the key to the lock on the magic chain, in order to be able to afford all this, the box had to work.
The box had to sell papers, which were free as well, of course, but it had to bring the papers to the people, it had to be empty by the end of the day, so it could be free in the morning, before the sun arrived, the dangerous, killer sun.
Aside from the fact that the sun was a real threat, and that the box was exposed to this dangerous star with its killer UV rays all day... this was a beautiful, urban, cultured, educated, interesting, free life.
The question someone asked (and it might have been that stinky subway ventilation pilar on the corner,) was, how free the box really was... after all it knew exactly that it would be chained down again and that it would have to return to the same sign after the so called "free" time with the other free boxes before sunrise... so the box was probably free, but not free of its habits...
and then the paper... always the same paper... the corner... always the same corner... these were all choices made by the box. It was maybe free, but these habits made this freedom completely worthless... what would be next? The box would choose to sell its body to advertising, just so it could afford to have the papers delivered, so it would not have to leave the corner and never be removed from the magic chain? So it would never have to meet with the other boxes ever again?
All in all things turned very confusing from here on. Nothing changed physically really; the box still flew to meet the others in the morning, it would still come back to be chained down, there would still be new ideas in its belly every day...
But nothing felt as perfectly right as before... the whole world seemed to be trapped by its evil habits... and nothing and nobody seemed very free at all...
hmm... at least there was the magic chain... because of the sun... oh, and rumor was that some cars were also out to destroy the red boxes (somebody near a video store had seen recorded evidence) and that...
oh, these were incredibly dangerous times for the free world... and not just the red boxes...
Pieces of wood, held as elegant extensions of the hand rather than their interruption. Beautiful proportions in all dimensions, stillness and quiet, amazing beauty... and then there is the snow and the music is here now as well, and it is as if the rain wanted to go right through me and were warm and nourishing, and it is a very happy place into which I want to bury my heart... though too shy to admit it... and the ideas, the images, those... ah... why would I even try to put it into words?... build towers out of feathers?
I will now just close my eyes and smile... so very happy...
oh, thank you...
It was the smallest world wonder. It was so tiny, so subtle, so beautiful, so fine, so incredibly tiny, so... well, it was rather small. It was so small that nobody ever noticed it. Nobody stopped to call the media. Nobody ever called anybody about it. Nobody ever told anybody about it (except here, but I don't count.) It was the smallest wonder in the world. The smallest one in this world at least. It was not as small as some of the wonders that happened in other places, places that were even smaller and not even considered "worlds" or sometimes even "places."
And so the tiny wonder happened. That's the story. Nothing more.
And it will never happen again. So there.
But then again... who knows.
"I am hot, so hot!" said the tea, as it was being poured into the little green cup.
And the cup embraced the tea and cooled it down, allowed it to rest, settle down, partially evaporate.
They both began to become lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter and...
"The amount of fire that was needed to turn me into a cup, would turn you into an invisible little cloud...", said the very light cup...
Down on Broadway, a Policeman is using the speaker in his car to command people outside of it. "You there!, come over here! Hey cabbie, pull over."
Most of my plants are completely out of shape. They are overgrown, not well trained at all. I am being bullied by plants. Not a nice thought.
The trash bag sock in the closet contains a lump of crumpled up yellow plastic-bags.
Laundry is dropped off. Some of the shirts should be just dropped off in a place where they will not come back to me, but that's okay.
My left thumb is healing on one side and hurting on the other.
The lip decided to slightly split. It hurts. It will be okay. Or I will get used to not being able to smile.
I should be drinking water, not coffee. I do not even like coffee.
Poland Spring, the water in plastic bottles from Maine is now Poland Spring Brand, owned by the Swiss Nestlé birds and the water in the bottle in front of me actually comes from three different sources... perhaps, states the label.
Mixing things up. It tastes like plastic.
It is night in many good places... The globe is turning into position, the sun will soon be exactly above our heads. I will not know when this will be the case exactly... though wait, I just got this really nice software for this...
My College just sent me an email, they are considering renaming themselves from the German "Hochschule für Gestaltung" into "Academy of Art and Design"... this makes me smile... ouch... it hurts my lip.
Pressed the release of the camera about 30 times today. No drawings. Several emails. One conference call. One missed deadline. One bill paid. About 4 miles traveled. Vitamins eaten, cup of Nestlé water drunk, 70% chocolate eaten, cherry tomatoes enjoyed, yoghurt with strawberries, carrots... no coffee...
really worried about my current inability to keep up friendships to people I actually very much care about.
The universe is constantly shifting... hope some of my dearest new friends will understand that I sometimes withdraw for a little while to just recreate portions of myself.
I really miss long conversations we would have on afternoons.
Enjoying language at its best used to be most pleasant... a real part of it all...
I will have to hold on to my thumb now. The water is nice on the table but it will be much better in my system. I will go see the sun. I will turn on some music now. Will close my eyes for a tiny while...
There is a universe between the plastic bags and the completely overgrown plants... and yeah, that police man in his car is definitely part of it... who knows... or maybe it is not even about knowing at all...
knowledge is probably overrated...
Leave the light on for me please, as I will be flying back to the city tonight, through the fog, the thick fog, straight from the clouds and through the glass, through the walls and straight into the room, the little closed off little room, the one where the light will still be on for me, the tiny glowing light. Unless you turn it off, of course, unless you turn off the light. Then I will be guided into a different window, a different room, a different life, a different path... and they all seem to be moving slowly, they all oscillate in the same rhythm. When I fly through the foggy city very slowly, when I slow down time enough, then I can see the pulse of electricity flashing through all lights, an energy flow, on and off and on and off... and please leave the light on, when I fly back to the city tonight. I would like to be able to curl up in that little room and close my eyes and know that you left it on for me... whoever you might decide to be, then, in this very particular moment...
The sky, last time I saw it, was a brownish, chalky, milky kind of coat, seemingly high above the skyscrapers, but actually probably all around them, in them, in me, here, now.
And now... in you as well, though with completely different colors, and certainly completely different skyscrapers... and certainly a different me...
and it is quite allright...
The air looks as if it could cary the weight of a careful swimmer. Maybe two, moving their bodies in a smooth motion in a synchronized rhythm. They could move slowly over the Hudson river, up the valley, more and more acquiring the color of their surroundings. One of the great advantages of swimming in air is the simplicity of breathing. One never needs to surface, never needs to hold the breath...
There are no careful swimmers out there, not right now, not humans, only pilots and passengers and insects and birds. (And some other natural aviators...)
We took off the pillows. We waited for the sun to slowly set. It was nice to try to take the last picture, before it became impossible because the light meter told me that the film would not be able to see...
It is good to take that last picture for the day... slowly... as if it were a really long stroke of a swim, high above a river...
Oh, and the image below has not much to do with the entry above... it is a completely different story... maybe... because there must be a connection between the shadow of the invisible object (which is an organ, i think), the missing pillows, and the unconnected electrical outlet... and the scratched negative...
And maybe, just maybe, maybe the picture itself is the actual connection of these and more elements...
some of the best moments probably drove through me when my eyes were closed, even if the things around me were the ones I so much hoped to see.
With the eyes closed, turned into a single point, focused, there, here now.
Feeding the eyes is really a great luxury... pulling the stimuli to a darker chamber might be another one...
I wonder what it would feel like to dim the lights in the city, my maybe just 20-30%... would we be more scared? Would we be more focused? Maybe just stay at home...
I remember walking through Kraków a few years ago, at night, and I remember that there were some serious gaps between the islands of light cast by the little lanterns...
And even more recently, when it was clear that it was time to leave my old apartment on 73rd street and to move one express train stop further uptown... I remember perceiving the new area here as much darker, much more quiet... I had to walk carefully, slower, the place here was a bit foreign to me...
Another time, when I walked into an actually closed gallery at the guggenheim... or when I entered the completely dark staircase of the woolworth building in october of 2001...
Oh, and it is beyond Junichiro Tanizaki's shadows... it is beyond that...
I wonder how much time of our lives is actually spent with our eyes closed... and how much of this time is pleasant... or at least somehow... oh, I don't know...
He had been cutting down trees since he was maybe 5. Around this age his father gave him his very first toy-axe. It was completely carved out of one single piece of oak.
He eventually grew up to afford a better axe, a much heavier one, a sharper, more lethal, metal one. He went on to study wood carving... thus it was very natural that he was presently into logging. Cutting down trees was not his main profession though; he dealt with clocks and their elaborate inner workings to make money...
This money allowed him to travel. Wherever he went, he brought with him his newest: a neat, foldable, beautiful, polished, Japanese chain saw.
He loved to chop down trees for fun, he even got to sell some freshly sliced wood cubes now and then, some of them had even been used to build some modest homes out on the island.
He liked that some of his logging had opened some views on some valleys, cleared out some paths and nicely shaped some hills. It also inspired others to sharpen their axes and to go out into the woods...
He ideally wanted to run a successful clock repair business, maybe even a watch factory, then wanted to spend much more time cutting his way through fun international forests, maybe Borneo, Brazil, Papua New Guinea.
He hat learned, that a mundane tree can be turned beautiful, if only cut off at the right angle, at the right height, at the right time of day. One could play with a tree, by cutting only half of it off, or maybe just the branches, or maybe chopping out the center, or by stripping down the bark.
Like the professional loggers in the commercial forests, where logging was permitted, he liked to place his saw at a good angle and pretty close to the ground, then he would fire it up and just tear right through the bushes.
Oh, and one more good advice: try to cut the trees nobody had carved or cut in before... An old unwritten rule among all new chain saw loggers...
How did he possibly manage to find mahogany trees in a city parks and jersey forests?
Stains and sometimes furniture polish could be very helpful, when applied in the right amount... (mixing with imported material is a no no.)
........
Not all loggers are created equal. Some do not even cut the trees...
Some enjoy the creation of intricate carvings, some leave behind the legendary trees.
There are legends of saved herds of engangered species, lost puppies and kittens.
There is the magnificent blue sky.
(And lightning, or whatever the devil uses to brighten up the world at night...)
And yes, some loggers like to cut only at the roots...
I personally like the ones who take their work quite seriously and slightly slower, paying attention, letting it ripen, grow, unfold.
It might be some an secret, but some of the most beautiful trees grow the slowest and are infrangible in many ways. Some of the most beautiful landscapes are not actually created by cutting trees, just by feeding them the right food, exposing them to the right light, providing the right kind of soil...
and yes... time... time is so incredibly important...
clearly the last entry can not be the last one for today.
good night...
"It was a bright cold day in February, and the clocks were striking 1:00 PM. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him."
Reality will not unfold as if it were written to teach us. It will be influenced by those who do not have such intentions. Certain images will probably be avoided, yet others, others do work really well. Or actually, even better.
"The vapours of the substances contained in this tube are known to cause cancer in the state of California." (Boy, am I lucky to be on that other coast, nothing can happen to me here...)
This reminds me of the one time when I called the 1-800 number that was on the back of a little toothing toy I bought in a pharmacy a few years ago. (It was for a co worker friend, so she would finally stop chewing on my ball point pens, making them look like... no I can't write that here.)
Witold: Hello, I bought this toy here, and it is a very nice toy, it is filled with water and has little animals floating in it. It is cute and soft and most definitely made out of PVC, now I am a little worried if the chemicals that make the toy soft might in some way harm the child if they decide to actually chew on your cute little toy?
Operator: Are you in Canada, Sir?
Witold: Ahem, why are you asking?
Operator: Are you in Canada, Sir?
Witold (looking out the window onto downtown Manhattan): Oh, let's say I am in Canada...
Operator: Sir, please take the toy away from your child immediately.
Witold: Right now?
Operator: Yes, please, Sir, please take away the toy.
Witold: Wow, these are very strong words...
Operator: Sir, please take away the toy.
Witold: Okay, well, what if I am not in Canada... let's say I am in New York.
Operator: Then it's okay.
Witold: Wow
Operator: Yes, the toy is harmless.
Witold: But not to Canadian children?
Operator: Not in Canada Sir.
Witold: Is it a different toy for Canada?
Operator: No Sir, it is the same product.
Witold: So the children in Canada are just more sensitive?
Operator: It is a legal issue, Sir...
...
Maybe Canadians read Something like this, while in the US one would visit a site that is a Phtalates Information Centerďż˝ (Why is there a ďż˝ on Information Center?... maybe it is time to call Canada...)
Have I posted this story once before?... or twice?... did I chew on that toy?
There was a reflection of the sign above me glowing in the building in front of me. Slight changes of color made the marble look blueish, then reddish, then a glowing, morning-white. The dow jones ticker repeated bravely messages of death and failure. The billboard on the building suggested I could print my own postage, on my own printer, now. (wow, like, now?)
I was welcome in the Surfer shop on 42nd street. The door handle, a brass surf board had a sign on it that apparently welcomed me. It also welcomed me as I was leaving the store, to go back into the street.
The subway was incredibly packed, a recorded voice repeatedly "apologized for the unavoidable delay." The man right next to me kept coughing into the crowd, as if he were a new biological weapon. (Was he a superspreader?)
The supermarket charged me $9.99 for a bottle of Pomegranate Juice. (I will live a longer, poorer life.)
Broadway is honking outside of the window. I wonder why police cars have syrens that sound like a pack of wild monkeys.
It would be nice to look at some starry sky tonight, maybe somewhere in the desert, from the roof of a slowly cooling car.
As the metal cools off, it makes these cracking sounds. Yes, this would probably be what I would like to do tonight. And I would probably never write about it...
as writing about it would probably be the last thing on my mind...
It is strange how the reporting about anything we do requires a certain mental infrastructure. One needs a particular interest about a situation first, the moment needs to be special enough and somehow fit the expectation to be put into words or pictures or sounds. Then these need to be chosen wisely... somehow...
Maybe the very best moments of one's life are really the unrecorded ones. The best moments usually do not happen when we have a pen ready or a camera... or whatever it takes to record and store outside of us...
What makes us think that we can find beauty on the pages of books, or in the frames of images if these were written and made somehow far from the actual moments of beauty?... I know I will never write about my most beautiful moments... and I certainly did not take any pictures and I probably will not...
Oh well, one could still try to reinvent these moments, stack up some words in some language... take or make pictures in a way known to the contemporary (wo)man... make these re-inventions of something that could resemble something that is close to the actual experienced moment... hmm... does not sound very easy to me...
If this is such a difficult task, why would anybody waste any time (re)inventing anything else but beauty?
I wonder if anybody here is going to tap me on my shoulder some day and just tell me that what I am writing here is utter nonsense?... (And I wonder if it mattered...)
A soft kitten under covers on a spring afternoon in Vermont.
Puppies in a basket out on the porch protected from the rain in Eureka, California.
Monkeys solving complicated puzzles alone on live camera in Borneo.
Robots making little clay kittens while playing Franz Liszt.
Bloggers fixing their von Dutch hats in their Dumbo lofts around sunset.
A sweet puppy rushing through fluffy snow in slow motion in upstate New York.
A beautiful looking stranger on a plane reading the same book, just an earlier page.
Warmth in a good place in the middle of the night.
The little grain of sleep under the eyelids after a long day of successful work.
The funny joke.
Reflection of water ripples on the ceiling of the hotel room in which the sheets are no longer anywhere near the bed and in which every smell is most familiar though now much cooler.
The 5th gear in an SL 55 AMG.
A slow walk through the forest at sunrise.
The hug from a long lost friend in the dark.
The water.
The "little water."
The first touch.
A solved puzzle.
The chirp of a bird sitting on an outstretched hand in the summer of a Mediterranean vineyard.
California.
Paris.
Sylt (the northern part.)
The last words your mother told you just before she hung up the phone last time.
Long exposure with a new camera.
Long exposure with an old camera.
Long exposure with no camera.
A very secret touch.
There.
Here.
Then.
Now.
tbc...
No strings attached, no safety net. I turned off all of the spellchecking buddies and all of the warning lights in the browser. It feels about as dangerous as those times when I accelerated the car to run at full speed on the autobahn at night and then turned off the lights*. Okay... maybe not. This here is not quite as dangerous, I guess.
The risks of getting hurt are just turning into less and less and less... if the pen is mightier than the sword... how mighty is a website entry?... how mighty is a link? How close are pleasure and danger?
Is a word still the mightiest weapon... even if not even spoken?...
And is it still one of the most healing devices as well?
Happy Valentine's Day... the site should have probably turned pink... or maybe green or gold... oh happy day... what a perfect day to make more art...
done with words for now.
*do not attempt, professional storyteller on a closed course, based on a true event, not necessarily true as told. Might cause serious or fatal injury.
The old man was not doing so well. He had done enough in his life, really. His thoughts now were rather confused, and contradicting, sometimes just bitter, sometimes very sweet. His eyes had slowly covered themselves with a layer of brownish sticky dust. His organs had grown thinner and weaker and his blood just barely resembled the substance it used to be.
He had created so much in his lifetime, so many ideas had come from his tired head. There had been so many beginnings in him. Some even thought that the very idea of "beginning" was one of his inventions.
He tried to remember some of the things that he had done. Some of his experiences were written in the deep layers of his skin, just for that reason.
He felt that he was about to collapse, he was about to have another internal injury again, another implosion of one of his many weak parts.
He wanted to ask for help, somehow, but the words that came out of his tired mouth were not as fresh and joyful and positive as it was fashion these days. He was not even sure. Or... oh it was just all far too confusing by now.
Was it something in his diet? Should he eat something else? Should he drink some magic potion? Should he just put on another layer of makeup? Hide from the sun, somewhere? Pull up the pants higher? Sleep? Die?
Therapy was decided on the other side of the room, behind thick glass, that probably looked like a mirror. There were young doctors, their methods rather experimental, their ambition endless, their brains freshly hatched. This one was bound to be quick. Just a nip here, a tuck there, some low carb diet, some botox, chemo, come viagara, some chemical peel, some laser eye surgery, fresh set of ceramic teeth, some quick and easy search for tumors...
They spread him out on the table, it took minutes, no resistance. They sent their best to perform the surgery. They used the most advanced new methods, they cut right through the old and patchy skin, they grabbed the liver, they grabbed the heart. They removed the cataracts. They shaved the head, they cut the nails, they put in a new set of teeth, they declared their performance as a great success, live on international television... the process looked great. (Especially surrounded by happy tickers and those ever flowing graphics.)
Yet for some reason... he was still an old man, with the same old habits, some much older than the doctors themselves. He was even older than the methods they were employing to sedate him. Some of the methods were even his very own invention.
He would survive, of course... but he would be a different himself. However he would never become a young and dynamic surgeon who thinks that he needs to always cut in order to heal...
But that was okay... he had been there, he had done this himself... in the past... pretty much the way they did it to him now...
It was now just slowly coming back to him. Partially... in some ways...
His body would eventually accept the medication, it would grow a new organ around the forgotten scalpels and tools. His body would eventually grow even older, there would be more memories drawn in the deep layers of the skin as well...
In the end... it did not really matter... the bigger picture was far beyond the old man and the young inexperienced brilliant surgeons...
in the end... there really was no end...
just as much as there had never really been a beginning... (it was just one of those early ambitious inventions...)
It took pretty much exactly one hour to get home from midtown. Now please excuse me while I go to sleep early to practice dreams of unsupported flight.
I am going to place myself onto a nice street corner, will first turn invisible and then slowly move up and higher and higher. It will be good, I have no doubts.
I might actually swim in one of the water towers, perhaps, the cider ones. (Are they all made out of cider?) And the water will be perfectly warm and calm.
It is interesting to want to go to sleep before 8:30... this is about six hours earlier than I usually would... at least recently.
And this might be one of the reasons why I felt so distracted... recently...
and before I turn this here into a haircut story, why don't we all just imagine the beauty of invisible, unsupported, self-propelled, safe and quiet... flight...
Just like that.
Who knows what happens next... will we all just disappear, one by one, who's first?..
The moment we realize that there is a present, it turns into past. So is our present a universe shaped by formations of memories, ours, those of others? Are we constantly shuffling around what we remember and does this make us blind for the world around us? Will the future be a present shaped from our memory gathering process? (Yes, dear anonymous... let's start with your comment... or a version...)
Can we see the present? Here it was, just became replaced by the next present... and the next... could what we would like to pinpoint as a present just the process of current events becoming past, filled with the anticipation of things to come. (And in our jumpy, ballistic minds also a string of relevant events, glimpses of relevance, memory triggers.)
We very often see the present as a confirmation of all of our learned experiences. It is rarely that we actually realize that there is a stream of new and pure time flowing through us, completely, aging every cell in our bodies, transforming us back into the planet.
The moment we are born, we are destined to die. We might be the only species here that has the ability to express this awareness of finality common to each and every one of us. Culture is a way for us to help forget that we are so very incredibly mortal.
We are constantly moving... ahead, backwards, sideways, in memories surrounding us, lika a cloud, a bubble... some of them personal, some of them collective...
Based on these memories, on these preprogrammed filters for our world experience, we base the way we see the world...
We need mutations in perception, from time to time, to wash clean our eyes, to extend the horizon, to revisit, to redefine... to help see again...
Art is supposed to help here... but it is also man made, part of culture, the shy attempt to overcome mortality... so much of it just grasps to what is there, bases itself on what "works" not what might open new paths, avenues, or maybe old ones, those that have been closed because they did not fit in an image that might have been somehow correct in a mind? in a time? is it now?
layers upon layers upon layers upon layers, moving...
Imagine what will happen to you when you just give in to your sweet sugar addiction. Just let it all go, comooon, just one more time. The sweetness will melt on your tongue and right between your teeth, there will be an instant satisfaction, a burst of pure energy. Oh, how delicious. What else would you need for the day? With just one single bowl of that stuff, mixed with some background providing milk you can cover all the bases, get the home run and even prevent strokes and heart attacks and get some extra free air miles... Oh, and then there are the beautiful little stories and ideas... oh... such goodness, such fun, such delicious memory plantations.
Mike still likes the stuff?... but of course...
And then imagine the deal you are getting here, the Jumbo, XXL, giants. They are so plump, they make so happy, they will give you vitamine B and they will boost your energy, will make you invincible, and bring your friends and family together, back to that great fire (the one you made, man!). Yeah... sizzle baby... there they are, the giant flames. Hot, hot, hot... and low on carbs and damn, this is clearly a great value... gobble up those proteins (add �99 for kosher)...
Pure pleasures of a sweet and salty virtual reality... what is the percentage of reality left in these particular products and how much of the appetite is actually for the stories and memories that surround them?...
And then imagine the deal you are getting here, the Jumbo, XXL, giants. They are so plump, they make so happy, they will give you vitamine B and they will boost your energy, will make you invincible, and bring your friends and family together, back to that great fire (the one you made, man!). Yeah... sizzle baby... there they are, the giant flames. Hot, hot, hot... and low on carbs and damn, this is clearly a great value... gobble up those proteins (add �99 for kosher)...
Pure pleasures of a sweet and salty virtual reality... what is the percentage of reality left in these particular products and how much of the appetite is actually for the stories and memories that surround them?...
Some of the best moments might be the ones that are left to be just that... moments. The ones that are not measured in time, words, brightness, anything really. When one manages to achieve the level of complete presence, a full awareness of the now... oh how incredible can this all be. No thought dares to cloud these moments. No ideas shout for attention. Wow... yes...
The next level might be perhaps that which is the seriousness of a child at play. It is that, "zone" you know. That ocean of a line, or maybe the talking puppets. The leaves, the sky, the little stones. Anything has a life, a personality, a role. They might be not the most complex ones... but they are often more powerful than the things themselves. Wow, not bad...
And then there is the very well calculated, the planned, the executed, the strategically positioned, the smart, smart thing to do.
There are the plans, there are the memories, there are the lost moments, captured... but not by our minds or hearts, but by machines, or by devices of wonder, things that were imbued by others with some magic that we, after purchase, can also just unleash...
It is the planning and the calculated thought and intrigue that have brought us to the high places in which we now reside, isn't it? We planned ourselves here, we saw the target and we did whatever it took to get here.
And now we celebrate the path, we look back at it and we admire how primitive those look whom we, the great thinking ones left behind.
And we put those who experience the pure moments into glass boxes. Those who draw and follow their playful instincts are put on medication... and only those who truly sneak their way into the rhythm of contemporary expectation, only those are then chosen to become our leaders. Because they look so darn good at it.
And they capture the moment... and then...
what will anybody ever do with that incomprehensible captured moment?...
will we call the experts?... a committee?
What if we just imagined what we really are... without anything that was given to us by those who were here before us and without anything stolen from those who will come after us?... what if we just imagined that... just very briefly...
suddenly... well, I don't really know...
I just do not think we really went that far...
and maybe it was not even a "progression"...
For a minute or so the heart spoke loudest. It just made sure I heard it. I did, face down on the sheets, putting breaths between the beats. Boom, inhale, boom, exhale, boom, inhale, boom, exhale. The cushion on my head, there was no street, there were no lights, just this barely controllable sensation of a slow motion pirouette, lights off, a beating four chambered drum, my own, deep inside, boom, exhale, boom.
Can the head feel like a sore muscle? My eyes are begging to stay closed. Eventually they will.
Spirit will not move for several weeks, but we have landed Opportunity in a place never before seen, well, not even now really...
Why did I think about something silly like the possibility of a return from the red planet. Will there be a ramp? A launch pad? An airfield?...
Or more of a song, sung next to a flag, perhaps?
Will they all just fall off once they find the edge of the disk? What if they stay attached to the giant magnet that makes the needles all point north? Where is north in space?
I looked at some of the images and wondered why nobody had painted anything onto the landers. We scribble on bombs... why not on something called Spirit, Opportunity? Who forgot to brand these little buggers?
Can we please design some logo for the next one? In the beginning was the word, I guess... and without it there would have been no "beginning" anyway.
Blur had composed a song that would have been the first one to be played on... well it became a hit.
A friend recommended that I put together an about me page very soon, just to make sure that the casual reader of these pages knows that I am not insane... (I am a very sane person, I promise.)
For now, there might be at least a little picture -->
, as a sign that I am an actual human being. It is a good thing to know, isn't it, three quarters water, some of it ... sapiens?
I sometimes wish that Spirit and Opportunity were all in one single organ,... and maybe they are, maybe this is not beating, just knocking. A blurry wish to just come out and play.
And we should probably really listen to some good old Holst... ...
, as a sign that I am an actual human being. It is a good thing to know, isn't it, three quarters water, some of it ... sapiens?
I sometimes wish that Spirit and Opportunity were all in one single organ,... and maybe they are, maybe this is not beating, just knocking. A blurry wish to just come out and play.
And we should probably really listen to some good old Holst... ...
Is there anything that guarantees that time spent in smelly little rooms, chopping at a huge blocks of soap actually will turn into a decent piece of something useful? What is the reward for running really quickly? I mean, really, really quickly. Does it matter what the direction is, or does one just need to chop and chop and chop a little more? (Maybe even make others chop. Or hire those who hire those who hire those who chop?) Is this the time of the obsessive compulsive winners and the brilliant tiny spark in the pan losers? Is quantity here to stay and quality to go straight through the stomachs... once?
Are the better things to stay, or those that could be created cheaper in larger amounts, and brought to more households wrapped into a thicker coating of delicious high fructose mind syrup. Information laquer.
Is this a really old question? Is it as old as thinking humanity itself? Do we need to hope that those who manage to create a lot of soap flakes eventually turn around and help to elevate... accelerate... oh, never mind... chop on...
It was very early in the morning not so long ago. The place was just outside of Eureka, California. Many seemingly very happy animals were getting ready for their day, which they would, as animals like to do, spend hiding from the humans. I think the factory in the background has something to do with wood... it was nice and warm... and peaceful. Some fishermen were just returning from their fun filled trips.
Eureka it is a beautiful place. I would like to go back there... maybe hug a giant tree nearby... maybe some time soon... maybe... some day...
There are limits, of course. One can go so far, not much further.
Sometimes things are good, then great, then spectacular, then they are too much. One can walk to the peak of that mountain... walking further would not really be walking, I guess. Some have managed to do this in the past, they are now famous, people kill each other to spread their message...
Some of us just make it to the first base camp. Some just watch mountains. Some read about them. Some think they suck.
The beach, the beach... life is not supposed to be a mountain... life is supposed to be a beach. No climbing, no deadly attacks of the mountain goats, no avalanches. Beaches are supposed to be fun and relaxing and filled with happy looking friends.
And then, at the end of that walk on that beach one can say... well, one can say one walked on that beach, and everybody will just understand. (sunset.)
So back to the mountains. The peaks are usually cooler than the lower parts, the views are better up there, the air is thinner, there are fewer visitors...
and at the end of that trip... when back at the beach.. one can just say... well, and not many will understand...
And there are limits, of course... and sometimes we just get really tired and would love to just rest. Just for a little while. Just a second...an hour? a year...
I guess I will need to do that soon, because all this climbing without an oxygen mask or a map is making me a little dizzy... (actually very dizzy.)
No purchase necessary. Free trial with a $10 purchase. Easy to use. Play now, get cash back, no payments until march 2009. Just 0.666 APR...
Where did I read that toy stores were not places where parents should look for toys for their children? Toy stores were for those busy uncles and aunts visiting from abroad. Those who did not really know the child, or culture, who needed to make a quick, age appropriate homerun. ("Say thank you to uncle Shlomo for the golden bongo."... ..."thank you uncle BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM")
Toys given by parents should be the beginnings of stories, not the final word of such.
Do you remember the packaging of your very favorite toy? (I don't.)
Do you remember the packaging of your most useless toy?... The one that was the biggest disappointment when pulled out of its promising box?
What happens in a time and place where biological parents technically become the aunts and uncles, the rare visitors who only come home for the highlights? How many tv commercials show parents observing their children from a safe distance, while the superbly focused kids interact with some sort of device that perfectly replaces true human interaction?
Sometimes a pet is present: a drugged kitten, a loving puppy or a fascinated, cheerful, freshly changed sibling.
Children themselves are often seen as something that comes pre-packaged with pre recorded messages that just need to be activated and many well accessorized fun activities, and a whole bunch of matching clothes to buy for.
And God forbid that perfect kid turns out too active, too tired, too heavy, too fast, too slow, too different... too something that was not covered on the back of the box or in the manual...
oh, wait... things can indeed be adjusted these days... most conditions are the result of a chemical imbalance of the ingrediens anyway...
try me... press my heart, gimme that, feed me that. Or as a one 5 year old hyperactive boy recently put it while pretending to hit me with the hand that did not hold a starbucks hot chocolate: "I did not take my pills today!, I did not take my pills today!, I did not take my pills today!!!" (What appeared to be his grandmother was a neighbor who only borrowed him for a day, to overcome her own depression after the death of her husband 13 months ago, as she told me... and so the story continues.)
The weather was perfect. The conditions never changed. There was never any wind or rain or anything like that. The days were the same length. Always. The nights were quiet and peaceful. No danger, no danger at all. no predators, not even a food chain. Perfection, long life. State of the art conditions. Steady, predictable, just right.
Nothing one could ever complain about.
What else?... Not sure. What else was there?
Maybe something behind that shimmering wall?... nah, that was a dark and dangerous place.
The window of attention became smaller and smaller in the last few days. It was a few minutes at first, this turned into a minute, 40 seconds, 10, 9, 3 what was I writing about?
So odd, I could not keep up my curiosity levels either. and then the ability to...
what happened next was the appetite.
Were we ever able to draw?
How come the desk is so messy?
A rhythm keeps hammering into my skull and it is not a good one. It might be one that is produced my my own body, but was it requested? Shall we ask again in a few minutes?
Will this entry go to draft? Will I ever publish it? Maybe not... should not. Wait a second...
It was after a longer walk that I came across the sumatran rhinos. The taxidermist arranged the young rhino to look at the yellow note describing the species. This should teach the stuffed baby a lesson, shouldn't it? Maybe if the stuffed skin with the plastic eyes were made to stare at the yellow note long enough, for let's say 200 years or so, it would learn how finite a species can be... as long as it is not human...
now that was not quite the idea, I guess...
The window of attention became smaller and smaller. For some reason it became very difficult for me to hold a single and clear thought.
It must be the lack of sleep.
I think my body is about to crash... let's see what happens next...
Not much will happen to the baby rhino... enough has happened to the baby rhino... not much should happen anymore. How many animal artifacts are in that building anyway?
And who shaved the Sumartan Rhino? (See also here...)
we sat down for lunch in a place where the picture on the wall was a photograph of a city with many bicycles. somewhere in the sky area, right over that motorola-wings advertising on one of the shops, was a dead fly. it must have been trapped between the glass and the picture for a while until somebody just smashed it. now it was there forever, looking pretty much like a fighter jet with an exploding cockpit. a horrible thought either way.
all the bicycle riders seemed to stare at the explosion in the sky.
though they never met, in any way, well they did, now, somehow...
the question over lunch was if it is a better idea to turn oneself into a bright and fragrant flower, one that could be known among bees for the right reasons and among dung bugs for all the wrong reasons, or if one should just take things down the more winding path and just work towards becoming a tree.
I was definitely for tree... I was not very discouraged by the bright and attractive flowers around me. May they have petals the size of dinner plates and be as fragrant as chanel #5... I was not worried...
And so the lunch was not a bad lunch at all.
On the way back to the office, I picked up three seeds from the street. A truck must have crushed their protective hull and they would certainly not turn into anything major on that concrete corner of 50th and 8th.
They are still in my pocket. I will push them into the soil later this week. It will take them months to turn into those brilliant little guys... I think they will be fun. Their mother tree looked like one that still remembered when the neighborhood was packed with gangs. west side story...
i wonder if that fly, in that picture, planned to become something. and i know we all agree that it did not. but who says we ever actually do? Staring out into our three second attention windows... (They were three seconds weren't they?)
some days are filled with bursts of energy, and some of it makes sparks that fall onto these pages.
Some are not, and it does not.
Today was certainly filled with a lot of work, but the results might be more subtle and behind the scenes...
And because it is on days like these when we should go to bed with larger questions... here is one... as seen just a few days ago... yes, it is a little blurry, but does it matter? You decide...
For a really long time there was a little sticker on my monitor at the office. It was from a fortune cookie, but it was still a really good one: "Things are admired because they are great or because they are new."
The sticker prevented me from falling for whatever happened to be the greatest and newest thing on that particular day. Or at least it made me think twice about things... did I like them because they were really great, or were they just new and would seem pretty silly in a few days or weeks... or... well once they stopped being new.
I had to eventually get rid of the monitor, as it was neither great nor new, but I think I still have the "great or new" fortune cookie message somewhere.
I used to pair up fortune cookie messages with photographs for some time... and some of the pieces were quite great... hmm... today appears like a very odd kind of day... could it be possibly because this is clearly a new year?... How long will it take this year to be a really great one?... Let's work on it...
We all know this is going to be a great one...
don't we?
the walls should be orange, maybe just one of them, maybe the floor, parts of it, the ceiling, a light? How about orange sheets, could the curtains be orange, stained glass? The scent could definitely be the one of orange peel. I would like to hear orange sounds and to look out of the window and to see the sky incredibly saturated, magical. It would be a very nice thing. Really. Very much so.
I would love to wake up to orange and to close my eyes... well, you know...
From time to time it might be a good idea to visit a place with orange soil, or maybe to just put on an orange robe and to beg for rice with a little bowl made out of orange wood...
and there was rest. nothing really happened, so it seemed. the mind was left to travel happily to locations displayed in kind words and tiny saturated pictures. I liked the view from a speeding street car, droplets on a window, behind the slow looking glass more water, a river, I forgot the name. Another picture, a glimpse of an academy. The academy, we shall say, the one where Beuys and Richter and the Bechers and who else... Lupertz (is he still there, acutally?), Penck, Immendorf, Oehlen, Trockel, Ruff, and who else... oh does it really matter now?... seriously...
we traveled further... a kitchen, all tools arranged according to some very successful formula... apples, oranges, other exotic fruit and all of it noted with the help of Ludwig Sütterlin... the one who's beautiful looking writing was prohibited in 1941...
And we bite off time in little sweet chunks, they are delicious. And we are not quite sure why nothing really never happens, even when there is rest... and nothing really pretends to happen all the time.
--
update... Hmm...
one just needs to wake up and look out side at the right second to forget that there is anything other than beauty. The light, just a few minutes ago, was so indescribable, it wiped out all memories of last nights dreams and replaced them with some pantheistic lump in my throat, glowing, growing, ...
the magical light has moved on now, we are back to a greyish looking new york, with a combustion engine soundtrack, but what else have we learned from making pictures than to experience the world as a series of unique, decisive moments... oh, look, here comes another one...
We sat down on the roof of a brownstone and looked into the back yard. that bag that had been hanging in the now leafless tree was still there, waving, the dogs still ran around in the back yard in little circles, there was still this subtle smell of creeping mold, fading, as if the air were marbleized with it.
The decoration in the windows across the back yard was turning away from trash bin recycling, towards the architectural digest faux heritage style.
Some of the ones we did not see now were very close together. Some even closer. The couple on the sofa on the third floor of 273 west 74th, was closer than that. For at least a little while.
For them we appeared as very small, thread shaped clouds, rising through the cracks of a brownstone roof... across the back yard... to which they certainly did not pay attention anyway.
because he introduced himself as an inventor and a discoverer, they would often ask him about his (hopefully maginificent) accomplishments. what was it that he had invented, or what was it that he had discovered? would he share, would he let them have some of the adventure, without the risk of being eaten, burned or pulverized?
they would usually think that he was an impostor, or a liar when he told them that he was in the process of inventing them and himself and that this in itself was one of the larger discoveries. (not unique perhaps, but that did not seem to matter.)
they were expecting him to be the discoverer of things that had managed to hide from the robbers of past centuries. they secretly wanted him to be a similar grave robber, a thief of secrets so incredible, nobody even knew of their existence.
and inventions? inventions were mostly as good as their potential profit. They wished he were the inventor of a device that would allow them to move their motionless bodies from location to location, maybe levitating? Or he could be the inventor of the matching, miraculous, effortless, simple diet. He could be the inventor of something that would allow them to broadcast their brilliant ideas of the world to every single person on the globe, or the man who finally found a way to prevent others from spreading their poisonous propaganda...
it was a large disappointment to hear him say that his inventions and discoveries we shy and tiny ones, some even in a parallel universe, one without injuries, and gain, and death.
many considered it more exciting to listen to those who spoke louder, more shockingly and offered great solutions on how to really kill... at least somebody or something, and let it be this thing called time.
They touched a radiator. She told him she did. Touching the hot metal was less painful than not being able to touch his face. He was in a completely different location, remembering his head, the back of it, hitting a radiator after being thrown through the room by an urge to escape from his father. He had fallen into a tunnel of memories, filled with moments when his scull or the scull of others, was hit by much heavier objects than it should be.
He remembered the stone he threw, the single one, and how it tore open the skin of a running boy, he remembered the cut, the consequences.
Then there was the other boy, holding on to on his back, laughing loudly, until his skull accidentally hit the bedroom wall.
In another image, it was him again, falling down, holding on to a friend, his friend falling on top of him, his head against concrete, the pre-manufactured walls of a future building.
He remembered the dark spots against the sky. He remembered the large knifes pressed by women, against his head.
He had traveled far, he had managed to cross much more than a river, or an ocean, or whatever that water was that could easiest be crossed by voices...
It was to be their last conversation. If he managed to fall through that tunnel in the midst of a simple chat, how far would he fall if they continued to talk. She clearly had the power to trigger very powerful images. It was like magic. He would never tell her about it. He would never tell her about anything else either... not the other, much stronger sequences of memories and forward flashes that followed...
Even if their conversation must have appeared very light to anybody who accidentally happened to observe it... the reality of it was that of two very different trips, taken from very different starting points... and ending up in quite dramatically different locations...
He looked at his hand. Under his fingernails and on them was his own blood.
Maybe they were both trying to do the same thing.
He hoped she was okay. And yet he would never ask her about it.
whenever it is too cold to even step close to a window, one can just try to open the doors to the other rooms, the ones never really opened, the ones in which the furniture dressed up as ghosts, or animals swallowed by large cushions...
a door opens, we listen to the dusty walls, each step is a real discovery now. The smell here is one that has been composed by stillness and time. And the first touch of things might just turn anything into a living creature, or so it feels, at least now. Is there a ceiling? Are there more rooms? How have things developed? Will we open another door?, Will there be a wild explosion of color and laughs and other exciting sounds?... Quite possibly yes... or no?...
As the year is coming closer to its end, there are many places that have been somewhere, happening in a not disclosed location, somehow...
And it is just that my head feels as if it had been filled with a styrofoam replica of a human brain, an object imitating a thinking organ. A model, very light, filled with a little led core... to add to the effect...
Things are quite wonderful, if only seen from the right angle...
And it is a good thing to close the eyes as it does not really matter where the body happens to be at this time... so the eyes should probably be closed, as we imagine that it is too cold to even step close to a window, as we try to open the doors to the other rooms, the ones never really opened, the ones in which the furniture looks like ghosts, or animals swallowed by large cushions...
a door opens, we listen to the dusty walls, each step is a real discovery now...
okay, this movie was not supposed to have this many sequels. I thought that things would somehow turn into a light flooded tunnel at 26, (like they did for Egon, you know, my childhood hero). And yet things still keep going. The engine is still running, we still have takeoffs and landings, it is still going on... and things are actually getting better... better to the level of great. I would like to knock on that virtual wood here, but this was the best year of my life, I have met some of the kindest people (some of them again, some again and again), we had some of the most spectacular moments (some of them a year long, some a bit shorter, some... a click...)... oh, and not only people, of course... If this is what life is supposed to be like, then please keep going. I expected a lot, but I got sooooo much more.
Thank you! This life thing... it is pretty darn spectacular!
Next to me are little pieces of stationery, small pouches for incense, paper fish for sending money, a paper flower that also serves as a pouch.
The pieces not only traveled for thousands of miles to get here, they also had to be manufactured, they had to be invented, their idea must have traveled for centuries. The fibers of the paper alone have been through so many processes, the idea of the paper however has spent a lot of time on other pieces of paper and in heads and...
We appear to have arrived at the crossroads of many parallel journeys. There is the journey of the idea of things, as well as the journey of the actual pieces... as carriers of ideas. (and there is more... isn't there?)
And then the pieces of paper are actually just a temporary representation, a harmonious collection of molecules. The molecular building blocks used to make these little pouches and pieces of paper, ready to be made more obviously unique with ink... they have traveled for millions of years. They can quite possibly have passed through landscapes, through bodies even... these being as well, temporary travelers.
One of the letter sheets has a drawing of flowers on it... and the idea of flowers alone is a really complex one.
I might be able to begin to grasp the complexity trapped in a sheet of prepared stationery, I do not seem to turn this understanding into this here, the linear string of words...
And to make things even more odd, I took one little pouch, shaped like a leaf, filled with fragrance, out of its pouch...
I placed it onto a round metal tray. It took three matches so far to burn the little leaf. It is now a strange looking black mini sculpture that sits in brown sweat, on a metal tray, next to three used matches.
And even though it would be easiest to describe this little leaf as gone, it is everything but gone... Not only did it light up in bright flames when I set it on fire, it also released some of the fragrance the incense... in a beautiful, slowly unfolding flower of smoke. It was a very quiet, very amazing spectacle...
And the fragrance... yes the fragrance is quite beautiful too... It turned the room into a quiet place, independent of time and space...
And I am aware that in order to smell anything, there have to be molecules that enter my body, touch the right receptors... so not only did the little leaf burn, parts of it are now part of me... and the idea of them being part of me is now part of anybody who chose to read so far through this attempt to translate something that just can not be translated... because not everything can... and not everything should be translated into anything that appears to communicate it faster...
a piece of paper can be quite possibly best experienced as a piece of paper...
and an incense can be probably best experienced as an incense... and a flower, best be left a flower... though leaving things alone would certainly make us less human... as we seem to be programmed to have the urge to transform...
as we are somehow just particles of an unstoppable transformation...
Did anybody out there see some time for sale? I am not sure I could afford to buy a lot of it now, but I would please like some, maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks... an hour perhaps?... minutes? just to be able to catch up on sleep... perhaps. A friend reminded me yesterday that I have not really slept properly for the almost two years that we know each other...
It is almost 2am again and I would really love to read about Urushi, as there is a truly beautiful article in the most current issue of Kateigaho | International edition.... but I will now be taken away by a slightly spinning cocoon of powerful sleep... one eye is already closed... see?...
(If this entry is too short and tired, please scroll down and read something more enthusiastic and glowy...)
oh and... "One gram of sumi (charcoal) possesses a surface area of 300 square meters."... how about a sumi brain?... oh... sleep...
did he really ever even move his wings?, or was he just floating in?, suspended on an invisible air-stream? Embracing air.
don't you dare to look back, buddy, there are tons of pigs and donkeys, right behind you, on that trailer. you are moving on into the one and the only direction known to man, you are on the right track, in the front seat, in the cockpit, up there, on top, most powerful machine under your behind, crowds cheering, here, there, everywhere, right? lights beaming, copilot giving good direction advice. others have been here before you, others have tried to achieve some sort of greatness, but hey, they only messed up the seat, they only somehow pretended to be driving higher. you are different, you are pressing on that gas pedal, are burning that diesel like it should be burned, you are very well equipped to look at the road ahead and to drive the whole load right into a slow motion supercrash, with a big and joyful smile. go buddy go...
just remember to sometimes go home, park the truck, have a snack.
relax, at least for 28 days or so...
writing this with slightly stiff hands. went out to the ocean before sunrise. a storm seems to be coming up, a cold something was brewing over the water. it will hit the coast soon. I am indoors now, ran out of batteries on the camera... there is a coffee on my little table... let's see what happens next...
(just some time later, the sun beaming, I am closing the windows, will go home now, slowly... get some more sleep?... or maybe go through all the tiny notes and names and thing?s... try to remember in a better way... will touch snow tomorrow...)
Her new office was gigantic. It was so huge that some of the walls had to be covered with thick, textured foam, to somehow crush the sound-waves, to somehow prevent the echo from reaching cathedralesque proportions. The room looked a bit like a place of worship indeed, but did it really have to have the acoustics like one as well? Preferably not.
She liked it when her voice could be heard clearly by anybody who entered through the giant iron doors, hundreds of them daily, sometimes many more. Some were warned. Some were required to take a specific route over the tiles on the floor resembling an emotional map of the world, not one of those simplistic ones put together by primitives who would just apply rulers to coasts. Or to their thrones.
Her freshly arranged desk was uncluttered, stylish. There was a large display, some input devices, some paper... ink.
She had about 21 little ink bottles, some red, some blue, lined up in front of her, ready to be fired, thrown with deadly precision, at anyone, anyone who's sum of character flaws was too dangerous for the fragile world...
the not so dangerous ones, she could simply ignore... their petitions piling, collecting reddish dust in front of her office doors.
Though her office was miles above the vast and old city, a dove would sometimes find her window and just simply sit and stare amazed (I know, a staring dive is a truly rare sight). Pigeons would get the ink.
Once the bottle would hit the bird, they would both travel like a blueish pile of bricks, hitting the ground minutes later, turning the entire city into a shaking, swaying ship at sea.
Such earthquakes would occur every two weeks perhaps...
But one really does not know too much about any further detail... we might need to travel there, to find out ourselves... April?
The activity log showed that somebody used the Google translator to read the entries on this page. For some odd reason, the "wow" title of this entry came out as "Wimmern" which means... "whimper, moan, whine" which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what I am actually saying here. Is this how wars get started? How do generation long conflicts start anyway? Could it be through blunders in translation?... and I do not only mean words...
this entry is just here to bookmark the day. what started with missed trains and spilled coffee, bloomed into a pandemonium of international thought and some really great ideas. It is raining in New York... but what about all the other places that happened to somehow subtly touch this screen today?...)... wow........ (thank you sooo much.)
When I wrote here first, it was a bit too late to use my brain, tinkered with with two screwdrivers and some quite interesting little snacks at a place that selected an anvil as their logo.
Now it is the morning after, the time when I should be able to somehow put together the puzzle of the positive little pieces that fell on me yesterday, I am barely able to do that... and so I will just rush forward and just write the next entry, about the terrific, stunning new day...
(For Google translators: Happy, happy, smiling face.)
there are layers upon layers upon layers of brilliant surfaces around me, left right and on this silver table. photographs and drawings and books (some prints). little three dimensional objects, created by many very different people are also here with me in this room. (hello.)
i will move them around a bit today and maybe move myself out of here as well. the sun is out there, offering some good old free radiation.
all good today, all good today, all good...
oh, and I woke up in Berlin, and it was a truly good experience. now it is time for coffee and a sandwich and some orange juice...
feels a tiny bit like the future. and i like that...
it must have been a whole pack of police cars and a bunch of fire trucks, all rushing down broadway at 4:30 am...
I have been staring out the windows since...
and now the sun will slowly turn this perforated dark mandscape into a spectacle of golden light... any minute now... the sky is already this brilliant navy blue, some of the buildings are turning from ebony to mahogany to bronze to gold... slowly... very slowly... or at least it appears this way seen my human senses... my scratched and greasy lens of perception.
I guess being alive means being chained to a cell called point of view?
Dear reader, it is quite possible that I wrote about this before, but it is always nice to point it out again. Anything that you type into the search field on the right hand side, ends up in a log file. I check the log file now and then, just to see if anybody might be looking for something. Some users arrive here from search engines and look straight for little kittens, or roosters or combination of both. Some try to speak to the search field in plain English, and look for pictures of little kittens, roosters, or various combinations of both. Some take the call to action quite seriously and look for themselves. ("me" appeared several times in the last few days... I do not really know who you are, my dear. Please look for your full name, address, phone number. You might want to check if I posted your Credit Card number by typing... no that's a bad joke, don't.)
I also do not know:
2003.11.10 22:51:30
Search: query for 'where did thomas adams live'
2003.11.10 22:52:19
Search: query for 'where did thomas adams live'
I will however try to answer the following question(s).
2003.11.13 17:45:57
Search: query for 'how long will it take to go around the world'
2003.11.13 17:46:33
Search: query for 'how long will it take to go around the world'
2003.11.13 17:49:17
Search: query for 'what is the sound to go around the world'
2003.11.13 17:53:32
Search: query for 'to travel the speed of sound , how long will it take to go around the world'
(It took our seeker seven minutes and thirty five seconds to ask this interesting set of questions...)
Well, what is the sound to go around the world?... And how long will it take for it to get around the world?... I thought I could find a really simple answer to that... just divide 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 kilometers) by the speed of sound (which is 340.29 m / s)... but then I realized that there is so much more that needs to be considered... Take a look at all the factors I almost forgot.... So even though the simplistic answer would be that the time needed at sea level around the equator would be ... almost 33 hours... (no way, really, this long?) and that the time it would take for the same sound to travel just a little deeper, in water, would be about 8 hours, (The speed of sound in water is about 1500 m/s!)... these answers must be wrong...
If the same sound had to travel around the world outside of the atmosphere... then it would take it exactly 24 hours... because sound does not travel in a vacuum... (imagine how loud the sun would be...) so the sound would just wait in one place for the earth to turn... the sound would travel by not moving... hmm...
But wait, does this mean that we should calculate earth rotation with the other equations as well?... I am clearly confused, can not solve a simple mathematical problem... and I guess I will just need to go to somebody's blog and type into the search field:
"How long would it take an object, moving at the speed of sound, to travel around the world, and what would happen if the object were actually a sound, an informed shockwave, and it traveled through environments of different media with different density, maybe even with different temperature?...
Hmm... we all have these really powerful calculating machines in front of us... I wonder how long it might take to get some real answers... (Or are we asking a really silly question?)
it is easy to be thrown off when things are subtle and tiny and gentle and soft. the bold, the loud, the agressive, the destructive appear to just grab attention, arrest it, keep it... for a while... maybe again, again, again...
the fastest way to become famous is to kill somebody famous. but is it the best way? is it at all important to claim any kind of fame?...
the slow and the subtle and the gentle may not be the best way to grab anybody by their throat and to show them what the way could be through here, out of here, or wherever...
but it might be the best way to get to hear the little sounds, the slight changes in color, the ghosts that make up the magic that is transformed into what the screamers then might claim to own...
and yet they never really do...
i think i like the slow and magnificent growth process more than a jerky explosion of anything...
it can be all quite calm, as long as we assume that the others could carry a big stick, no?...
oh, and never stop to listen, never stop to learn...
i think we will be fine... ; )
Looking at work of Students at the FIT it was good to see how there are certain heritage specific vocabularies in their visual language brought here by students, how these vocabularies survive in their thinking in their view of things. This energy of ideas from all around the world is what makes cities like New York so rich and interesting (among other things, of course)... and it is always a good experience to see this energy shine through all tiny cracks here and there... (even though it also screams sometimes, of course.). Some of the visual languages spoken were easier to understand, to listen to, than others. Just for me?... for others?...
It was also interesting to see how computers are now integrated into the design process, how it is easier to swing around several thousand dollars of a cursor in a software environment than it would probably be to move around the tip of a 50˘ pencil over the surface of found paper...
Hmm... ideas should probably still be born inside of heads or on pieces of paper, not on screens and inside of "creative suites"... hmm...
Also, how do these two points of view mix?... On one hand there is a very local and location specific view at things and on the other hand there is this technological filter which uses a bit of an "international technology style" interface... hmm...
it is 6:30 and i have yet to eat. this will happen now, after a day of pushing up a round boulder up a hill, just to find out at the end, that there were already several on the summit. who would have thought.
i am entering the phase of the day in which the dried out lips begin to hurt, the stomach becomes more demanding and the head just floats on top of the very weak body.
It is not as cold as before, there, outside, where I will go now... to hunt down something that will taste wonderful, no matter what it will be.
I still dislike speakerphones... too bad a certain portion of my work has to take place in a dialogue with them...
typing into this tiny text entry field feels so comforting now... (you can't see it, I can now...) hmm...
Really wanted to mention it earlier, yet there was never really a right moment, and now maybe is the wrong moment too, but it appears to me that for some reasons the Right socks are the better survivors, or maybe they are the ones who just want more stability, the ones who return to the drawer, who want to flock. Left by their Left socks, they are the Right socks, but yet they are left behind. (that does not sound right.) What I mean, I have half a drawer of paired up right socks can you believe that?
How do I know the difference between my Left and the Right socks? I like to wear so called Runner Socken, manufactured by a very excellent company from Germany, Falke. The thing about runner socks is that they are fitted for their particular foot and that they have not only the shape but also a little red letter on their noses. The right socks carry an R, the left ones an L.
I do not wash my socks myself, the friendly laundry place across broadway does an excellent job in my absence. It is quite fascinating to find new combinations of socks after each and every wash. It appears that the right socks are more now (the ratio is maybe 2:1 or something like that). They like to hang out together, they come back paired couples... how odd. Left socks like to go missing, they just disappear, they seem to wander off, they leave.
One special pair, that was a so called "walking" Socken pair, a slightly thicker kind of socks, actually never even made it into the wash. The Left sock left the Right sock before they even got to go down and around the block and into the laundry place. It is a truly odd little event and observation. They are obviously made for each other, there is no doubt about it. They are very different than all the other Left/Right socks, they never even get to go to the laundry place, where they could possibly get lost while having really close encounters with other socks or pants or who knows what... and still. The L sock leaves. The R sock possibly feels completely useless... sad and tired and really out of place.
Let's talk about what Germans call "Handschuhe", hand-shoes... the English word for that is... gloves...
When I was a boy, I used to lose my gloves at a higher rate than the Polish economy could possibly manufacture them. It was quite odd as well. How could one lose a glove or mitten. It was not like I had to take one off to sign some treaty or document of capitulation. One mitten would always get lost. I imagined it alone, somewhere, in the snow...
My parents eventually connected my mittens with a special, semi elastic string. The string was long enough to go right through one sleeve of my jacket, behind my back and through the other sleeve. Even if I took off one of the mittens, the other mitten would still hold on to it via a very primitive model of the internet. (Smart mitten, dumb network, remember? A telephone network would be a mitten with two strings.)
Maybe such a string could possibly be an idea for my socks, now that I am older, and can dress myself? I could attach my socks to a string that would go up one pant leg and down the other, connecting the Right one with the Left, making them a unity forever without them having to be attached by the hip.
Just a thought... and i wonder how comfortable or how silly this would feel. (Should I possibly patent it, would I like the friction?)
My problem with the Right walking-sock the one left behind is far from being solved, of course. I still somehow hope to find the left sock, lonely, somewhere in the wash. (Probably busy chatting with the other socks?)
Socks seem to really enjoy it being united by their necks, don't they? It is as if their union created a model for our multidimensional universe. And maybe it does? Could we be onto something here? The universe could be like two matching socks, connected with the perfect string.
(I bet this whole trackback thing does not work for me, so yes, I was reminded of the issue by a much better post by Shauny.)
it was a bit of a disappointment this morning when I arrived at the last page of a book I had been reading for the last few days on the train. My thoughts were something like... she is touching the handle of that portfolio with such delicate attention, if the train were not so loud, we could certainly hear it purr. Clearly I was not paying attention to what I was reading. Not a good thing, as what I was reading was again one of the books in which every sentence is like a layer on top of the previous one and so on... so I have been looking at letters, playing with that highlighter in my pocket, but only the punctuation marks would resonate with the sounds of the train and find their little homes in the back of my head. Not very useful.
This is why I like looking at pictures, when on the train I guess. Here we have a thousand words, all completely disorganized, forming what appears to be a familiar impression. I tend to look for the flaws and hints left behind by those who made the images. Look at photographs and try to discover the human factor... It is interesting that writers do not get excited about their typewriters or word processors. Photographers on the other hand are not only divided into particular brands, they sometimes even sign their photographs with not their names but the name of the camera. Machine operators...
Looking at images on the subway and looking at the little flaws that make me hear the voice of the designer saying nobody will notice if I just clone the background here or what if I blur that hair here... but these people are not photographers, they are photoshoppers, editors...
No wonder I can not read on the train, or barely read anywhere else for that matter. I tend to fall into the little spaces opening up between the words, little loopholes in the Os and As... and the Ps as well...
Soon I will be listening to the songs hidden in the sentences of the people speaking to others (i already do that) then probably to the songs hiding in voices speaking to me...
and if all this progresses... I will probably somehow need to find a therapist, on who's sofa I will just take a nap, listening to the sounds hiding in the walls, my own breath, the breath of my sleeping therapist, on the chair near by...
It is sometimes the best thing in the world to pay attention to those things that do not really matter... but at times... now I forgot what I wanted to say...
; )
One of the grand achievements of consumer culture is the dissatisfied shopper, the one who gets really upset, the one who demands the money back, the one that gets her or his way, the one that walks away with a fixed new item, a brand new something. Or money back. Money back is also very popular among some. One complains long enough and back comes the money, the same money that was in the wallet before... it just returns. (In most cases it comes back sans the shipping and handling and the interest accumulated on the credit card and we do not even want to start about the hours or days or weeks spent on the actual process of complaining....)
I can't complain. I am not really good at it. I was not taught how to complain properly, I love to suffer, I guess, just wait and see and look for the solution... passively... actively, certainly (or I could pray, or wish, or hope.)
So when my new PowerBook arrived with one little pixel screaming at me with all its brightness, I went to some site where I found the manual for Apple technicians, found the story about dead pixels, found out that I would need to have at least three of those bright ones, or four of those dark ones in order to get an exchange... and so I did not say anything... I sometimes place the pointer of my mouse under the dead pixel, then it looks as if it had a green, glowing eye... we talk... it is sort of fun.
I read an article today about a new petition regarding an apparent flaw in the display of my PowerBook. I checked, I have it, indeed... I am not one of the 650 people who signed that thing so far, I see some white blotches, yes, but I am going to wait right now, not go crazy about something that really would not make me smarter or more handsome, or live longer if it were fixed. (Actually, worrying about this stuff, could quite possibly shave off a few days of my probably pretty short life.)
Complaining is a really nice new way of self expression. Some cranky "experts" just lustfully jumped on some of the new features of the new mac operating system, some write as if they were really, physically aroused when they can complain about some practices by companies like google. Others are truly, deeply upset that some fonts do not ship with some free software...
I am just really glad that I am alive tonight...
There must be a bit of a misunderstanding here, some of us believe that pointing out of issues is a great way to stimulate progress.
Large discussion groups emerge, hundreds of users enjoy the brilliant observation skills of the complainer.
Complaining feels a little anti productive to me... it does not appear to be a really creative process... and it is really not to be confused with constructive criticism which is actually something really good...
It is a bit like lamenting about a blown out candle, pointing out that it smells and does not illuminate the room, or that the room now disappeared, or that the moths have nowhere to fly...
Or one could just light the candle again... or just a match or something...
Silly, simplistic thought, perhaps?...
Is complaining the great power of the consumer?... Is the role of the complainer the same one that used to be one of the court jester, perhaps?...
I have this slight beginning of a feeling that complaining about things and their flaws is the direct response to what expectations are packed into the now more expensive toys we call products...
We tend to buy fantasies that surround a product, the actual item is then just a material representation of the expectation... anything that does not comply with the promise... is obviously a large disappointment... to the one who really believes the promises in the first place.
I guess I am still too much of the boy who was very amazed about the possibilities of a piece of paper, or a plastic cup, or plasticine. I did not grow up in a world that promised me that I would be able to draw like Leonardo if only on the right sheet of paper, or that the water would be the most delicious if drunk from this or that particular glass, or that the clay would turn into art in my hands, if only purchased in that bright and pretty special pack.
Most of my toys could probably be considered rubbish, or dangerous, or maybe both. I played with knifes, with caps of bottles, with dirt, with dirty snow... None of these items came with some predetermined world, stories, instructions, a sales pitch, which could annoy me, or just bore me... I had to turn the bottle cap into a racer on a track I drew into the dirt with my left shoe. That knife was not really dangerous because I knew that pointing it at myself could injure me badly, of course...
My job as a child was to "inform", to "transform" things, anything really, and to thus turn it into something that was as complex as my imagination.
I remember coming to the west and discovering that the packaging of toys was the best thing about them. The promises printed on the outside of the colorful boxes were really rarely kept... and they also were a but like panic flaps put onto a horse. Even lego was pretty disgusting in the west, the packaging contained pictures and predetermined outcomes of maybe three stories per package... this was all really disappointing...
So I can understand quite well, why anybody who was born into a world that tends to bombard us with legally backed up promisses would focus as much as possible at the disappointing flaws of things... It really is a bit of a creative process, a breaking beyond what the manufacturer wants us to see...
Though wouldn't it be really beautiful if we all somehow had that power to invent new things and ideas and just charge forward and explode into the world as a burst of completely new ways of looking at the silliest little things?...
(rather than believing dome marketing pitches, and then whining that the promises were not completely kept?)
How great would it be if we managed to just take the energy of the blessings we encounter by the million every day and just ride it into the next unscripted day?...
This is not very fashionable... sarcasm and irony are the king and queen of the contemporary thinker...
Hmm... how odd that this little entry could almost be read as a complaint...
; )
Btw. I am still amazed that this piece of software here checks my spelling on the fly no matter if I write in English, oder ob ich mal schnell was auf Deutsch schreibe, albo nawet po Polsku, (obwohl ich mir da nicht so sicher bin...)
Amazing... I find it all amazing...
I am stunned by the tiniest of things...
I can't complain... we are so darn lucky to have what we have. So darn lucky... and I sometimes have to pinch myself, because I must be dreaming...
this all goes far beyond my boyish imagination...
On certain days, there would be such fog outside of our window that it almost appeared as if somebody had painted the glass white. There was nothing out there, not a thing, just this shapeless whiteness. I would stare at it for what appeared to be hours, trying to make anything out, anything. We lived on the 8th floor, far above the tree line, of the young trees planted in the freshly made dirt around our buildings. It would sometimes take more than an hour indeed for the fog to settle, branches would eventually emerge from the whiteness, then the faint shapes of flat looking crowns of trees, some transformer box here, a street lamt there, then headlights, then cars.
There were other days on which I would lock myself in a seemingly perfectly dark room, ... and then wait for the first shapes to emerge. It would sometimes take more than 10 minutes for me to be able to see the bathtub, or the photographic equipment of my father's darkroom. The darker the room, the longer the period of pure anticipation. Did I really see something, was I just imagining it? I knew that I could exit this voluntary blindness at any time, by just opening the door, just stepping back out into the light.
I think it was only once, in the mountains, at our weekend house, in Koszarawa Cicha, in Poland, where the light never became enough for me to see anything... I stared at where I knew there was a ceiling, I looked over towards the walls... and there was nothing. It was a complete darkness, one that did not seem to be out there, but inside of me, not in front of my eyes, more behind my eyes. I tried to reach into it, but it felt like nothing... I think I was pretty scared.
I remember waking up before everybody else in the house on the following morning, into a complete darkness again, I waited patiently, it took a really long time...
In the place where the window shutters had been closed, red ovals eventually appeared, they then turned somehow less bloody, and they slowly became the branch circles in the wood of the window shutters... My brain used this tiny amount of light to somehow reassemble the room for me, I began to see the inside of the house again... I was able to find the door.
I am not sure if I looked straight at the sun on this particular day, but I know I used to, sometimes. A blue and green disk would appear in front of the glowing star, A shaking blueish disk, obviously my eye trying to not go completely blind.
The blue disk would then stay with me for quite some time, the after image of the sun, one that only I could see and that I could then follow, as it was jumping, seemingly randomly wherever I was about to look.
If I managed to relax enough, the burned in blue circle would just slowly sink to the ground, like a deflated ghost friend who became tired of jumping around the apartment... as soon as I became aware of this observation however, he was ready to jump around again, of course...
I am not sure why a rainy morning like the one today would make me think of some of my childhood's eye-games...
The rain has been pushed forcefully against the window for some time now, if I step close enough to the glass, I can see the world exploded by thousands of little water lenses. A bit like the slow glass photographs by Naoya Hatakeyama...
Time to leave the house again. Just a few more minutes left here...
At the end of my money I smelled the dust on the brown linoleum in my living room next to the two red chairs which I had found in the street just a few months after moving in. I somehow wished that the metal shelves, filled with books and toys and probably just trash, could cave in on me, just burry me, just make sure i was killed. quickly... by Astro Boy, or Goethe.
I played with the tears on the floor, little salty drops that turned into trails of dirt under my fingers. I made crosses, triangles, no circles...
I ate Matzo bread and onions, since they were the cheapest thing I could find, I froze juices diluted with water, to make a taste last longer. I so wished I maybe had a dog, or some pet that could maybe just eat the bills from my mailbox, and then maybe me, once the shelves caved in, buried me, smashed my stupid skull in, at last.
A friend came to visit, we had been paired up to work on a big project together, a few months prior, it was supposed to be a big one, I had spent the thousands in anticipation of the great success. We failed so miserably like never before and never since. The company paid me a symbolic dollar to just make sure I do not say they did not pay me for the weeks and weeks my partner and I failed at visualizing our really lame ideas.
So here we were again, in my living room, my tears wiped, the matzoh on a plate, the empty kitchen closed, we on the chairs, far away from the window, staring at each other silently.
I took her in my arms and carried her light body into the other room, the one that was just bare with two found tatami mats on the floor, no futon, really cold. Oh, there were hundreds and hundreds of small photographs, near the ceiling, but that's a completely different story.... She looked so incredibly fragile, barely there...
We stared at each other with a most desperate completely silent intensity. I think we might have kissed, though we probably have not. Or did we maybe touch each other's bellies? No we did not.
Then she just left. I do not even remember how quickly or really when and how. Oh, I remember her probing her thin limbs into the sleeves of a flimsy worn out t-shirt... Her translucent skin less and less visible under layers and layers and layers of fabric.
She later, much later, told me that she had been pregnant on that day when we met, in my pathetic apartment of unpaid bills and rent.
She had lost the baby shortly after.
It was as if somebody had been listening to my pleas to bring death quickly into my apartment, and the reaper came to visit, rushed through the rooms, found us staring at each other, on the mats, on the cold linoleum floor... and then he killed, and he killed the weakest one he could possibly find...
Dear God, why are you making me think of this right now?
As the sunbeams illuminate a strip in the façade of the building across Broadway, I can see glimpses of families in the morning. A father trying hard to read his paper, his little son fighting for his attention, and yet distracted by the little girl, jumping around like mad, closer to the television set on which they tend to play video games for hours at a time.
Just one flight above them, a mother, dressed in only a thin white nightgown, is holding on to a large white cup. The woman is barely visible behind the little plastic pumpkins and books and stickers in various colors and shapes that adorn her living room and kitchen windows. Are her two boys still asleep? Maybe they are not even in town, she appears very relaxed...
I wonder if these families ever meet. I certainly do not know my neighbors from downstairs or upstairs. It is quite possible that to the families on the other side of Broadway I am as grouped in a theme as they are for me. It is quite possible that there is somebody above me or below me, who now also hides their hands behind the screen of a laptop. Somebody who peeks out of the morning shadow cast by this building, somebody who is rarely there to enjoy the evening sun when it nourishes the plants in our windows.
It would be fascinating to be able to observe events and people and thoughts without a set point of view. It would be so most incredible to be everywhere at the same time, without the choice of the floor or direction or even time of day...
As long as one is trapped in the physical world and as long as one is contained in a certain point of space and time, one can only imagine such a state...
and it is not easy, because our thinking is based on being somewhere, at some point in time... (perhaps?, I do not know enough.)
Or maybe the imagination of such a state is reward enough... hmm...
What happened to the extra hour? Where did it go? It is late again, my body seems to trust my watch more than itself. How odd, how odd. Did you go to work and hour early today? Did you notice the extra hour in any way?...
So strange, so strange...
Well, I really do not know much about the Hajj, just little bits and pieces... what I know is very humbling and very important, feels like an extremely important experience for anyone involved. I had no idea that the event takes place only once a year, I did not know about most of the symbolism. It is all really amazing, amazing...
Have you participated in the Hajj? Are you going to go? Do you know anybody who has?
My parents went to Mallorca for two weeks, or was it three weeks? It is a bit difficult to keep up wit their European style vacations. Both of my parents get 6 weeks of free time each year. My mother even gets a little more. She works so incredibly much.
My parents sent me two postcards from Mallorca. My mother has the handwriting of an elementary school teacher, she used to be one, first to 8th grade... well ,that is beyond elementary, of course. My father writes like a little printshop. He used to design things, now he builds things, he always had this iso italic handwriting....
The first postcard was written my my mother only...
Dear Son,
We visited the house of Frederic Chopin, here in Mallorca. It is all incredibly impressive. Most impressive about this place are the letters he wrote to his parents. His handwriting reminds me of yours. It felt almost as if I were looking at letters from you to us.
Hmm, I wonder if my mother was trying to tell me something yet again...
My father only started to write the second postcard... he then gave up and gave it to my mother, so she could apply her finishing psychological touches...
"Dear Parents", this is how Frederic Chopin would begin his letters to his parents. There were many, many letters here that started with these words "Dear Parents"...
I recently got immunisation against such tag team reminder attacks... Spending some days with my parents was a really good reminder how much we all need each other and how much we need each other... I looked at both postcards... I turned them around. I looked at the blurry photographs of Mallorca, looked at this black and white photograph of Frederic Chopin, which explained in a split second why we know him mostly in profile...
I looked Frederic into his postcard eye and somehow he seemed to smile. I smiled back at him and imagined how interesting it would have been if all the letters had been in his final residence in Mallorca, simply because he never sent them. What if they had been a silent, brewing, self-therapeutic attempt to heal the wounds that even his compositions could not heal... I imagined what the letters might have said...
Dear Parents,
the weather here is really horrible. I do not think you should come visit me this next month. Yes mother, I know that the diet here is not quite as good as your incredible recipes. Yes, my piano play is improving, dad, though I will probably never be as good as your old friend Jasio... please send my regards to my good old piano room, I hear you converted it into storage...
Something like that, I guess... I will just start all of my phone conversations with my parents with a "Dear Mother and dear father," there will be Chopin in the background, well, maybe this.
There are layers upon layers of paper on the shelves next to me. vast landscapes of thought, photographed, turned into linear, slowly developing lines of written and printed language, drawings, charts, page numbers. All pressed so tightly against each other, waiting for the moment of liberation. They are worthless unless looked at, they are worthless unless decoded, the layers of black and cyan and magenta and yellow ink, covering various areas on both sides of pages. Advertisements calling out to buy products no longer available, offers no longer valid, points of view burned into pages, published, now preserved, frozen.
There are very peculiar combinations of information on that bookshelf next to me. Wayne Thiebaud's Paintings press tightly against some observations made by Laura Hoptman, pressing against Gursky's photographs, against William Eggleston, against Helen Levitt. Thiebaud painted uptown, downtown, really, Levitt went Crosstown. Gerhard Richter painted for forty years, the back of the book quite abstract, next to him, Tufte, Envisioning information, then Andy Warhol's brilliant drawings from the 50's, next to the twilight of Crewdson's photography pushing against Georgia O'Keeffe's portraits taken by Alfred Stieglitz, resting on Struth 1977 2002, next to Ansel Adams at 100... next to the wall... below all this some Bulgakov, some Bachman, Rilke, E.T.A. Hoffman, J.Pawlik... Goethe on Gingko, Murakami, more Rilke, more Goethe, Heinz Edelmann, Sagmeister, Paul Johnson, Thoreau... gosh... this is quite a wild bunch, right here, right now... I should probably not even spend my time looking at this screen here, but grab these pages again, when there is daylight, and just read a little more again, not using any electricity anymore... just mine the words and little dots that make pictures, and just dive and swim... not surf...
But I will probably close this universal book here again in a few minutes, turn off the light, stare at the stripes projected onto the ceiling by the cars driving by on broadway. They will move like pages of a book, they will wander like the links on some schematic view of a site... they will remind me of the nights when I was in my room and when I had not the slightest clue that any one of the books next to me or in front of me ever existed or would ever exist...
And I will probably try to just slow down to this particular private pace, and then watch the hours and hours of stories concocted by my own brain from what I fed it all of today...
Hmm... so many stories waiting, everywhere, everywhere... always.
the world slowly melted into something that became just one single thought. A large thought, one that can not be simply expressed by language or drawing, or song or any communication tool available to us...
The world simply turned into one single thought. It was that easy. And it was only possible because there was no need for an explanation, no need for reason or outcome or anything like that.
or were there two thoughts?... were there maybe three? Three that somehow felt like one?... Hmm... just the idea of being able to grasp these thoughts and counting them seems absurd... even calling them thoughts, or ideas, seems absurd... I will thus not even say anything about those non translatable and uncountable ideas, thoughts, whatnot... hmm... but if they can not be counted and can not be summarized, captured, grasped anyway... hmm...
could it be that this hypothesis is completely true then?... except that maybe melting is not the right expression here... and describing any process as slow or fast certainly also involves some sort of comparison not really needed here...
hmm.... yes. I think the answer is ... yes...
(I guess.)
The lamps cast interesting shadows on walls and ceiling. The sounds of Broadway could almost be mistaken for the beating of waves against a high, rough ocean coast. The air has cooled down substantially. I am sitting in a chair far away from the slightly open window and I can feel how the cool air is spilling into the apartment. My head is too warm, my lap is hot from the powerbook... even my right foot is warmer than the left one, the one actually resting on the carpet.
I am holding on to this Sunday. I know what will have to get done tomorrow, it will be a manageable amount of work... I know where I will have lunch tomorrow, I will finally return the camera with which I shot that Selfportrait with Sockdog...
My mind feels like a pendulum right now, swinging from the past, quickly bypassing the present, into the future, just to return in the same rush, pass the present and to return to the past... I should have gone to sleep more than an hour ago, calm down this silly movement, try to let thoughts rest in the present, real time. But maybe this is what some part of me is afraid of?...
Could this be what makes living easier sometimes, for some of us?... Do we like to somehow imagine worlds ahead of us, and dwell on those behind us in order to just somehow sneak by the things we should be really doing now?...
Sleep, sleep is what I need right this minute... and no more writing for me today. Not even some short little posts. Good night. : )
Last week knocked me out quite well. So little sleep, so much work... so many worries... Today I just closed my eyes on the sofa, next to my powerbook reading a book to me and next thing I knew it is four hours later, the book seemed to have closed itself...
Not many emails have been coming onto my mailbox lately, maybe because I have not replied to so many... why would anybody write me if I do not reply?
The mail application filters out junk and spam, so I checked up on that folder just to find an old email from a bank, reminding me in a typically edgeless tone that my statement was now available online... (a week or so ago...)
I managed to log myself into the secure area where they were hiding the statement from me, just as I had requested, originally with the intention to maybe save another tree...
I was expecting a positive balance on the card... yet what I found looked more like a bloody crime scene. I had obviously assumed that the account was in good standing for a while, had not paid and now there was a huge number there, and many little red numbers. The tone of voice here was not quite as edgeless, more of a sharp one, like broken glass... finance charges, increases of rates, all the things seem to have happened at the same time... so weird.
I felt a bit like the man in this British commercial I saw just this past friday.
The first scene is the face of a calm man in greenish light, asleep, the voiceover is calm: "This man, will die in his sleep tonight. He is warm, comfortable, surrounded by his loved ones." (Does not sound too bad, does it?)... then the camera zooms away and we see that the man is indeed surrounded by his family and warm and comfortable, but only because he is in a speeding car on a highway. The greenish light was coming from the car's instruments...
Okay, it was not quite as bad... but it was still very odd to "wake up" to something of a slightly negative surprise...
Oh and one more odd observation. The chapter of the book was almost finished when I woke up. Not completely finished though... so I must have woken up and turned off the reading. I returned to the point in the book which I remembered from the moment before I fell asleep... Now what was read to me appeared completely new, as if I were hearing it for the first time... only now and then, every 15 minutes or so, was a sentence that was completely familiar, absolutely clear and just somehow seemed to make sense in the context now created by the minutes and minutes I must have missed because I was asleep.
I know I am jumping around here, but I recently read about a study in which overly tired men in Germany were tested in a driving simulator. They were observed as they fell asleep for just a second or two. The dangerous "second sleep"... The men would then be asked how long they perceived to be asleep. Some were not sure if they had been asleep at all. One of the men thought that he had fallen asleep for about two seconds, had been asleep at the simulator wheel for a full 45 minutes... Now imagine he had been the pilot of, let's say, the Staten Island Ferry...
Today's experiences somehow reminded me that I sometimes ask myself how awake I am when I am convinced that I am awake. There are some days, some weeks, some years even that appear to have taken place as a chain of small, aware events, connected by whole passages of sleepwalked life...
How much of what I have written here is actually based on anything that I can truly say that I fully experienced?... Hmm... the warmth of the powerbook on my lap is telling me that I am awake... the smooth keys under my fingertips are suggesting the same... but... hmm... now I lost the thought... ; )
If the jacket had been a little larger, if the time were a bit more abundant, if the skill were a bit more there, he would have certainly just sailed away, for miles and miles. effortless. right through that open window...
his eyes focused on that legendary horizon, the place where the sky meets the earth, not the water-towers, the roofs, the man made mountains with cut out holes for light. Oh, there would be a sun, up there, high above the milky soupy clouds...
being outside is a luxury onto itself. he had spent the last days and days in rooms, staring at windows he could move around, and open and close, but never really reach into. there was a mouse under his hand, but birds? birds were just visitors frozen in photographs, memories.
if the jacket had been a little larger and if the time were a little more abundant and not already completely spent and rented out and sold... then he would probably just take off...
next time...
please let there be a next time...
Frank B. was a true artist friend of mine when I was 15 or so. He lived in the basement of his mother's house, he had two rooms, the bedroom had a pile of clothes in it from which he would just pull out random pieces of clothing, in the dark, every morning, he always looked the way I thought a real artist should look like. Including wrinkled everything.
His idea of painting an E and a Y between the B and the U and the U and the S of all BUS lanes in the city, (making them Beuys lanes), sounded like just the perfect project. (I still think it is a pretty brilliant little idea.)
One other little thing I remember him telling me was the thing about glass. He claimed that glass did not quite have a cristaline structure like, let's say, a sheet of metal. The molecules in glass were frozen in an organization that resembled something closer to a liquid. He claimed that if measured with the appropriate devices, one could see that large sheets of glass, like those in department store windows, for example, were thinner on top and a tiny bit thicker on the bottom. Glass was like a really, really slow liquid. Really slow, dripping its way down in every single window frame, giving in to its own weight.
Hmm...
a clear plastic bag just floated by the window, as if New York were an under water city, the cabs its yellow lobsters. I almost swam out to play with it... well, I did not really, I knew that I am not the best air diver... not these days at least..
This past week passed in such a blur, such a quick succession of kicks and puffs and other punches... at times the feeling was as if I were running against the current of a large herd of buffalo. I would return to my desk after just a few minutes and there would be many, many messages, friendly voices pulling at my skirt in all the possible directions. (No, I do not wear skirts, it is just somehow a more fitting picture than somebody pulling at my pants, don't you think?)
And so Saturday is here, it arrived with the heavy thwomp of the weekend edition of the New York Times at the door, it arrived with five phonecalls from my father, telling me about his new fascination with this thing called os X... and that the neighbor died... after saying good bye to his wife, hugging her... he knew... oh and that my mother keeps telling him that I left the house much to early... (My father likes to create potpourris of messages, to make the sad not too sad and the happy not too goofy... he is a libra...)
A good morning... though I brought work home, I will look at it after breakfast. Now is the time to just go through the piles of things that need to be sorted and given to others who need them more now. (The gigantic DaVinci book now actually has its own place, for example.)
I received another first day cover from Britain. It is the one to celebrate the birthday of the British Museum... on the back is a very nice quote by Russel Lynes a Cultural Critic who lived through most of the 20th century (1910-1991).
He said:“There is a distinction to be drawn between true collectors and accumulators. Collectors are discriminating, accumulators act at random”
Hmm... i sometimes feel like a collector of everything... I am very discriminating, just have broad interests...
Hmm, shall we raise some funds and get just the best items from this upcoming event?
My head is abviously still spinning...
A few transparent shadows hushed by my office yesterday. They were not even shadows really, more like areas of changed focus, as if the air had the density of water, spontaneously, in the shape of some creature, maybe for a split second, here, there. It happened more than once... then again.
My heavy head feels as if it were attached to the body with just a few quick stitches.
Upon arrival at home last night, I fell onto the bed, face first, and woke up an hour or so later, just to fire up the PowerBook again and to play catchup with my overdue projects. (And they are good ones, and I love working on them.)
I closed the machine at around 2am... slightly numb...
This is a very temporary condition, I know... the seasons are changing, Septembers tend to be difficult? It is the jetlag?
All will be good.
Why do some of us sometimes become upset that they have to wait for the flavor of the tea leaves to become part of the water that surrounds them?
Why is there this need for immediate results?
Such a behaviour must have something to do with the contemporary distance of origin and destination of things.
The tea and the water and even the clay of the cup did not start to exist a few seconds prior. Ordering a cup of tea did not create either one of them. (Though some economists would certainly argue that the need for them did.)
The tea leaves traveled far from a field from a seed from a tree from a seed for billions of years, touching, dancing, kissing the soil, the rain, the wind...
The water around the leaves traveled just as long... and so did the clay of the cup...
The heat that was used to bring the water to the right temperature was a sacrifice of resources to allow all the parts to meet in what we perceive as a perverse harmony.
When waiting for the tea to develop the right flavor, it is helpful to imagine that we are much more temporary than the water in and the clay of the cup.
And the flavor of the tea?... Where does it really come from?...
Home. The Dalai Lama is speaking in the Park now. I am sure his disarming laughter will make the massess of people I just saw, crossing Central Park in a cab from the airport incredibly happy.
It is okay that I have a headache, it is okay that my stomach is really upset with me and with itself and ultimately with the world which I presented to it by odd combinations of airplane food... it is all okay... I am finally home, it is noon, my body thinks it is 6PM... all good, all good... what will now have to follow, will be pages and pages of coded descriptions of micro events on this other old continent, spent without online access... and actually... no phone... can you imagine that?...
Under my fingertips are the soft and familiar keys of the PowerBook keyboard. They are as smooth and soft as they can get after three years of extensive use. In front of me is the slightly messy surface of my PowerBook screen. Because of certain design issues, there are some soft keyboard imprints on the surface. It all makes the screen feel a bit more like a slightly less than perfect piece of paper. Not a sheet of paper, more a piece, really...
Underneath these familiar surfaces, around this familiar and so friendly user interface of Movable Type is a freshly furnished virtual space, furnished nicely by Apple... It is a fresh installation of os X... Jaguar, 10.2.6... nothing personal really... I have tried moving some of the sensitive data to a backup disk, folder by folder... just hoping the dead drive would not hit that corrupted sector again, flip out, drag the entire setup into a crash...
I was able to salvage some work files, some personal files... only to discover yesterday that some of them were randomly corrupted... this will be a longer walk home...
Data loss is fascinating, because it is so clean. The outer shell of things looks really the same. The data deprived environment is a pristine space, happy, ready to be used and furnished.
It is amusing how a few days ago I imagined what it would be like if digital interfaces had some of the qualities of real life objects... riiiight.... here... and then a bit later, I lamented about this unquenched urge to paint...
I will need a little time to readjust, please be patient... can we be?...
the drive just made the clacking sound again, the computer crashed, the drive does not want to show up anymore (again). We are back to square 1.5... except I am exhausted... this was a horrible day... and it is bound to continue...
I was too happy, too soon?...
I am currently at the apple store getting disk recovery software and a backup drive. My PowerBook broke down last night (drive made loud CLACKING sounds... and then everything froze.) I really hope that at least some of the vital data can be recovered. Sorry for sharing such sad news... at least for me...
Even though I barely remember any of the little details that were so new to me and so strong when we escaped from Poland in 1981, I will never forget that one map. It was the map of Austria. We had crossed the border from Czechoslovakia and were on our way to Rome. We stopped at the very first highway gas station, just to look at what the West actually looked like. I mean there were all these legends about the incredible mountains of actually colorful products. The eleven year old me wanted to definitely find out if there were indeed as many Matchbox cars as hinted by the numbers on their little boxes. We looked at the map of Austria. It was all in German, all pretty colorful and all roads seemed to lead to this very interesting white blob. It was a hole in the map actually, rubbed through the paper by thousands of fingers that somehow wanted to touch their immediate future. The blob was called WIEN, Vienna and we were also heading towards it, though it was not our final destination, just a centre of gravity that was about to propel us onto our actual orbit... (which was not Rome.)
Whenever I see a map with a rubbed out place, and there is a lot of them around New York, especially on the subways, I have to think of Vienna.
Vienna, the place that looked to me like the largest pile of broken washing machines and burned out cars. It was a narrow road between two landcapes of 1981 style recycling... I guess we never actually drove into the city.
The outskirts of Vienna actually looked a little bit like that hole in the Autobahn map...
And why am I thinking of this little fragment right now? Is it because of the shiny greasy spot on the spacebar of my PowerBook?... maybe it is because of those three "Get Mail" envelopes, which might be the most often clicked little icon in any application on my mac. It is a bit like going to Vienna, except that it is the other way around, it is as if random voices were summoned onto my screen from so many various corners of the world...
The odd thing is that whenever I hit that little button with the pointer of the mouse... it does not rub off a bit, no pixels go missing, there is no hole in it... nothing.
I once got really upset at Jeffrey Shaw when he was giving a lecture about his then quite ground breaking virtual reality art installations.
I was maybe 20 or so and I got up in one of his lectures and burst out that his work was not really worth anything, because it did not allow the user to leave any marks, to leave anything behind, to comment to scratch in anything. He looked at me (and not only he looked at me) and did not understand how I could be so pumped with adrenaline about such a silly, unimportant thing...
Nobody leaves his marks on the Mona Lisa... those scratched marks on historic landmarks are a rather disturbing side effect of human interaction with art...
And yet, if there were no fingers pointing at Vienna, ever... if there were no eyes wanting to stare at the Mona Lisa (or, 1911, that space), if there were no massive amounts of humans streaming towards the places others make or build...
Would it make sense to make any of these at all?...
One of the second generation Jade plants received an "architectural" look today, as I removed about 30... counts... fifty!, fifty leaves of it. Does anybody know a recipe for Jade plant salad?, I am holding about a pound of bio matter here. Lush, large, juicy Jade leaves, some with a red rim.
I think I will give them water and see how many will make it into grown up plants. The one from which they were harvested used to be a little branch just about a year or so ago. It now stands 14 inches tall, has 7 large branches and more than 100 leaves.
I am looking for ways to make the stem of these plants a bit more tree like, more covered with bark, I hope that removing the "trunk leaves" will have the desired effect.
We shall see what will really happen.
The mother plant is now completely out of control. She must have some 500 leaves, perhaps, she is almost two feet high, and maybe three feet wide.
I will need to find a way to somehow groom her better or she will topple over kill herself with her eager growth. I was able to turn her branches into about 14 new plants... this is all getting out of hand. And then there were these saplings she herself started to plant. I just found a leaf with roots and even a stem put onto the branch of a close by leafy plant. The nutrients in the now limp leaf were almost exhausted, but it was clearly a baby we have here. (Now in water, soon in soil.)
I am actually glad I do not breed kittens... can you imagine?...
as I moved my feet in a slow continuos sequence, turning my head left and right, the little city walked right through me, the houses passed through me, the trees, the decks, the flowers on the frontyards did. Waves of air turned into sounds as they rushed through my head. I did not really change my location much, it was the surroundings that moved, I think... I stayed inside, quiet, afraid to make too much of my own noise and also afraid to be too visible.
And it feels as if the universe has began to collapse into itself just recently, a slow implosion that will devour me just seconds after I realize that there is no outside, just the though...
There are shiny spots on the printed imitation wood of my desk. Right under my elbows. Polished edges. Reflective now. The space bar on my Powerbook has an incredibly shiny spot on it (left hand side). This is where the right side of my left thumb likes to rest and just move the cursor forward, whenever I want to take a written breather... (like... now). Most of the keys are shiny. Their imprints on the LCD screen will never go away.
The sides of my little mouse are also smooth. The headphones are falling apart.
The PowerBook sometimes falls into a sleep so deep that only a restart is able to bring it back... when we are all relaxed and lucky.
My ten year old leather mouse pad has seen many mice, many rooms, many table tops, many computers. The graphic tablet stayed in my bag today.
Managed to start a little drawing on one of the deeper pages of one of the many Moleskines.
Tired. We are all too tired to make any real progress today... but maybe it is not all about progress anyway.
Hoped so much to be rested and spring loaded. Instead, I feel as if heavy stones had been placed on all my limbs, my head, and even inside of me, piles of little stones on the heavy heart and lungs and soul...
I will try to smile a lot this evening. If I just try hard enough, there will be a series of joyful drawings here, when we all wake up to a new day tomorrow.
Tuesdays tend to be the busiest days anyway.
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(Sorry, could not resist.)
It was not very far from here, inside of a Wal*Mart, right next to the HotWheels cars, right next to the Barbies and the dancing giggle Elmos, about 3 yards from there...
Racoon urine spray (Link provided for illustration only). "Guaranteed to cover up human scent." Right next to it camouflage clothing. Gun Bullets, 12-pack. They were in the same plastic bubbles as the little dolls just around the corner. I was expecting a button in the back "try me" or "watch me kill". Across the isle: Bows. "Don't open the bow boxes." this is not looking good. Right next to the bows were the arrows, of course. Right next to the arrows, were the various weights of arrow heads. Scary, spooky, disgusting little pieces of engineering. Spring loaded razor blades on a sharp piece of metal. Loading device included. Razor blades with little teeth, designed to spring open when needed. Above it all, a 3D-deer, made out of "self healing material" a "replaceable vital area core extends the life of target significantly." Easy assembly, three pieces. A near-perfect replica of a 130-pound Whitetail Deer, made for bow hunters who are "serious" about their shooting..
At least the guns were in a locked glass box, like watches. The most expensive gun was $350... (Maybe they were air guns? "fun")
Attention Wal*Mart shoppers... now you can killer savings in isle 13!...
Oh, I am not kidding...
Can you imagine living here in New York and not leaving the city all Summer long? I mean look at me, I recently started writing confusing little posts commenting on other confusing little post, posted at confusing times, drifting. I pretty much snapped yesterday, sent some really adrenalized (I know this word does not exist) emails, I am turning weird.
I do not think that I am going to end up like the gentleman downstairs who spread himself all over the sidewalk with his coffee and who smeared the butter off the bagel onto his face (he really managed to get it all over himself, even into his hair), but I obviously need to leave the city for at least a short moment.
And this is exactly what is going to happen. I am going to leave this place and take a ride in an actual car, (not a subway car,) one with a combustion engine, take that ride across the river and upupup... for a day or two. I seriously need that. This means that I will fall behind even more on my 360 drawings and the stories and all... but when I come back... expect great things... miracles. (Okay, maybe not.)
While I am gone, can you please find out some things? Some are really silly...
1) Is This Gentleman possibly related to Paul. (Sorry for deep linking, Eliot, your photographs are a true inspiration.)
2) Does anybody out there speak whale, and can you please find out what really happened here... I just do not believe this ridiculously human-centric (not a word, right?) point of view in this sad Story. Especially after reading this article. (I mean: A scuba diver even landed on the whale and shot video as the leviathan dove. Comoooon!)
3) Can you tell me if you managed to go This event... or maybe one of these events. (This question was actually for Alaina, who's little typepad site I like very much.)
4) Can you explain how a package (and it's content is going to be explained on more than one site, I promise) can travel from New York to Anchorage to Shanghai in a matter of hours, be delayed in China and still make it back to New York for a late dinner?
5) Would you be interested in hunting down a lost edition of some of the 360x360 drawings?
6) am I completely insane for liking This? (why did they make the price of it so ugly?)
7) Can you please forgive me?
So why is this post called "Prince of Whales?"... obviously because of poor Migaloo... the "white fella" (this is what his name means), that should be just left alone... (though things seem to be pointing into a rather different outcome.)
Sorry again for this very confused and confusing post. Have a glorious weekend.
it appears that drawing is a bit painful but still somehow possible in the evenings. Stories are best brewed up freshly in the morning, before coffee, before water, before even the alarm rings.
And things will probably appear more steady in the long run than they actually are. This means that I managed to add three images last night, and then wrote their little accompanying remarks this morning... Not the greatest way to interact with the readers here, but it just makes more sense for me... oh well...
Took a new look at the improved William Wegman World this morning, and I had to smile. Not because of the admittedly sweet dogographs but because of the way Wegman writes about his work (like an actual nice human being). It is just so nice and straight forward that I could not help but smile... Read Art - School and Drawing and Writings... and Painting...
Yeah, this is more like the guy who took those really funny and inspiring Photographs... back in the day...
He does sound like a really nice guy, doesn't he? (And there were no pictures of puppies, see?) : )
Could this possibly be electric-radiation-deprivation? Could I be suffering from something like that? Could a night spent in a Manhattan apartment without electricity, only filled with microwaves from cellphone transmissions and the unavoidable radio signals (allright, there were quarks involved as well,) have such a long lasting effect? I feel as if I had traveled through several time zones and ended up in a parallel New York that appears to have all the elements of the city I love, but which really is a completely different place.
It must be me. The tiniest disruption in my silly routines makes it barely possible for me to draw, to write, to do anything... seriously...
This is really quite odd. (Maybe it is the peanut butter and Jelly?, the avoidance of perishable foods?)
Who would have thought that my ability to do things could be so dependent on outer factors... wait no... who would have thought that my perception of my ability to do things could be so dependent on my perception of what influence outside factors have on me... who would have thought that my perception of the perception of... (aagh, stop that.)
(Am I just looking for something, or someone, to blame?)
I should probably close this entry now...
Please disregard, please disregard, draft mode, draft mode, delete, delete, delete...
The attempt to avoid perishable foods (or at least those needing refrigeration) for the next few days is making me walk down culinary emergency paths I never thought to have to explore. Today was a historic day for me personally because I actually enjoyed several slices of toasted rye bread with ...( achtung, achtung), peanut-butter and grape jelly.
Haha, this entry should be posted somewhere in the depths of 1974, shouldn't it? The four year old me should have been the one to discover that the taste of pulverized formica is "the good stuff" when put on top of a toasted slice of bread and under the layer or otherwise pretty cheap blueish jelly...
And it should have been the same four year old me who should have been fascinated by something that sticks to my teeth and palate...
But I grew up in the southern Poland, not in the south of the United States, so when American children were having their cereal and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I had my bread with butter and Cabanossy, or maybe Krupniok, or Leberwurst. There were days that started with Kasza, and some that had to be the most horrible ones, as they were kicked off by a bowl of milk soup. (Yuck.)
Eating meat products for breakfast was a serious luxury, of course... but don't we all like to remember the best of times?
So today was the very first time that I enjoyed Peanut-butter and Jelly on toasted Ray bread... what will happen to me next? Will I order a BLT? or even try to enjoy marshmallows? It really appears that my life is quite a serious scenic path on all levels... cheers.
A massive package of paper just hit the bottom of my door... outside there is the regular honking and the screeching sounds of the subway. I think we are back in Business, dear New York, I think we are back to a fairly regular Saturday...
Will I have a cheese omelette for breakfast today?, or should I wait for a few more days?...
How quickly can one be turned into one's own grandparents, who used to keep their money under their mattress and unbelievable amounts of canned food inside of the musty smelling closet?
I am considering adding a torchlight to my daily bag of wonder in which I carry my Powerbook, the mouse, the power supply, the mouse pad, the pens and pencils, erasers, a pocket sharpener, several sketchbooks, 4 Japanese brush pens (one with only water), a black Leica Minilux, several rolls of film (I am so analogue), the serious black swiss army knife (the ultimate size), printouts, forms, stuff... Yes it is a heavy bag and yes I carry it with me every day.
I am hoping to be able to cut out the laptop soon, as it is a heavy piece to lug around...
Hmm, let me walk over to the door and see what the New York Times has sent my way...
__
It is actually two papers. Yesterday's paper had not made it up the stairs, and so now I will need to catch up on looking at pictures and reading the captions. Not sure I will get to do much more. The amount of information appears massive.... ; )
Jade plants do not appear to rest at night. They look pretty much the same in the morning as they do at night. They are growing quite seriously. The ten new ones I separated from the mother plant are looking quite healthy still. They are developing roots and will be soon ready for some soil.
This little red plant which had been dead for several months and then shot out of the pot with three new activity centers also appears to not care if there is a sun or not.
What I thought was a Tiny Mystery Plant are actually five (!) Acacia trees. The oldest one is now about two feet tall. I had to administer the first pruning yesterday, just to slow the little guy down a bit.
Acacias seem to rest at night. All leaves are neatly folded and the plant will not open until the sun returns.
The first Ahuacatl (Avocado) Plant actually died. It was a very sad sight. The plant turned into a straight leafless black stick. I put another avocado pit into the pot, did not even cover it. The pit eventually (after 3-4 months maybe) split into two and I now have a new, much healthier little avocado plant. Avocados also seem to be resting at night. The leaves are all folded up, the plant closes up...
My rather large (about 4 feet now?) Potato plant, (Patti Potato... more about her some other time) also appears to be resting... (Leaves folded into a night position.)
I will now also take a short nap... and then continue with my tasks...
"So you will be only posting these little stories to your drawings?", Todd is back from Vancouver and we can again talk in person sometimes, not via ichatAV with me pacing around the room, shouting at my powerbook and him somewhere relaxed looking at the ocean.
Things have been a bit much in the last few weeks. All I end up at the end of the day is a square of virtual paper in a very moody Adobe Illustrator, a wacom tablet of the old sort and a thus slightly shaky virtual pen.
Last night the software and I stared at each other for a pretty long time, until I decided to walk over to my bookshelves again and to make another one of those crosswordpuzzled drawings. There was just nothing I could think of, no story of my own. Many of my friends must think I am avoiding them, or that I am going crazy. I ask for lunch plans and then have to cancel, ask for some time to relax and then am too stressed to keep my promise. Not a good thing... At least I know that it is temporary.
When I looked through some of the old emails and paper diary entries, there seems to be a pattern. I tend to go through phases of incredibly dense work, followed by phases of good and calm observation and learning. I guess it is a bit like swimming upstream, perhaps? And I will just need to keep swimming... Just try not to die somewhere upstream, or be eaten by bears...
So will I be posting anything beyond drawings and stories? Oh, absolutely. For my own sanity I will... or is there anybody actually reading this here?
It must be the combination of humidity and airconditioned air. All of the parkett tiles on the floor make every step like walking on egg shells. Crackly, crackly, crack. The flowers on the table are still alive, despite of their water being a bit foggy. The wild garden by my window has new light green tips, telling me that somebody grew again, or that everybody grew.
I do not feel as if I grew or kept myself alive very well.
Yes, the water in my vase of the day appears to be foggy. again...
the train, the night train, the chain of bright lights, the rushing through landscapes, the speed, the speed, the urgency, the rush, the heavy heavy rain, the mountain side, the tunnel, the distance, the distance, the distance, the headlights reflected in the silver stripes of the tracks, the rush, the rush, the rush, the speed, the speed, the speed...
A conversation. A bottle of bordeaux St Julien. An invigorating little snack. A whisper. A hand protecting the words from their reflection in the blur filled black window. A soothing rocking motion. An accidental brush of fingers. A very red red wine. A private space. Attention. Affection. Amorous tension. And then...
the rain, the rain, the rushing, the wind, the night, the steel on steel, the tunnel, the bridge, the valley, the light, the blur, the hundreds of wheels, the sparks from the wires, the high voltage electricity, the rush, the rush, the...
All of the above...
Made a dusty pile out of pillow shaped coal pills today. Cracked open a nascar branded white plastic bottle and added some of that odorless lighter fluid to my crude creation... Opened one of those little paper pockets with cardboard matches. Did not quite follow instructions, flipped over the cover, grabbed the head of one of the matches and pulled it out as if it were already hot and burning between my fingers. There, a soft whispered sound, a little flame, ready to go, ready to spread. Just a little magic touch of the flame and the coal sculpture and *wooopieee* larger flames jumped up for their wicked dance.
How could I ever forget how I loved to play with fire. I am a fire sign, after all. I would spend evenings playing with a single candle. I was a fire child. A single, fire loving boy, in an apartment with a sleeping father, a mother who was not there to watch me, as she had to teach a class of other probably also fire loving kids.
Imagine little me, all alone in an apartment with a gas powered stove, four open burners and a plastic melting oven. I had the matches, I had the "zimne ognie" (what is the name of these magnesium powder covered sticks that are called "cold fires" in Polish, but are anything but cold, are actaully able to burn holes into things, are actually able to melt into bizarre shapes when just brought together, those things that burn like little hand held suns on their far too short wire rods that get so hot one would want to just throw them at the carpet?)
I used to burn and melt and toast things almost daily. Once I discovered that it was possible to make nearly invisible yet quite destructive flames by burning mail polish remover drenched magazine cutouts, I spent entire afternoons watching landscapes and objects and sometimes just random photos with some strange looking politicians turn into incredibly light, incredibly black, incredibly brittle leaf like objects.
I was concerned about safety, of course. I would burn things only in the bathtub. The shower head was always ready to fight an out of control inferno.
Some more dangerous experiments involving combustive mixtures of chemicals took place in the safety of the always flushable toilet.
I was also the child that enjoyed a casual black snowfall in the kitchen, when a plastic cup turned into probably quite cancer causing airborn fallout.
I guess it was good to get all this out of my system before I was five or so. This way I did not try to blow things up once some more potent flamable objects became the rave with my friends in school. (I only heard some scary stories of some kids blowing off their limbs if they were lucky...)
I also remained quite cool when years later my otherwise peacefully organ playing friend Stefan would set up elaborate chain explosions, destroying entire armies of plastic soldiers in his little playhouse in his parents' backyard in Groß Auheim.
It was pretty much as if I had forgotten that I am a real fire sign until today.
I saw myself waving a paperplate at a pile of red glowing choals as if I were a desparate bird trying to take off with one far too short little wing.
I made the flames come back several times. Sparks drew little messages into the air. I watched the black coals go from black to red to almost white.
Oh, such simple pleasure, such deep satisfaction.
I will need to buy some really good candles. Maybe it could be the right time to take up a welding class?
I smell like a smoked ham right now. Happy, satisfied...
Do you like flames?
when drinking my green tea at lunch time, just a few blocks away from here, I closed my eyes and very actively listened to each one of the remaining senses. Holding the little cup in both my hands I felt the rough underside with the slightly cooler holding rim being in stark contrast to the hot ceramic on my left hand fingers. My right thumb found a little imperfection in the rim of the handy cup. I could not stop my skin from seeing this imperfection as a large interesting characteristic, as a unique fingerprint of this cup which would have allowed me to recognize it among a hundred others without this mark. The rim in general was glazed and smooth. My upper lip touched a glossy surface, while the lower lip met with the roughness of stoneware. This is also when the heat of the tea welcomed my face. The temperature felt just perfect. Maybe 60C maybe a little more. Not a temperature I would like to spend a lot of time in, but just the perfect temperature for green tea to enter my body.
The smell of the tea was very distinct as well. It was not really the smell of a beverage. It smelled like the back of a clean hand of a loved one perhaps? Such a good and familiar and yet distinct smell, or the feeling of a smell.
I slowly sipped a little of the liquid. A tiny bit, really, not a lot. It felt as if my body had been preparing for this moment. It was such nourishment, such good vibration that went through not-described areas under my skin all over my body. I let the tea travel through my mouth. A small, measured amount of warm, delicious, nourishing liquid. I hesitated a bit, then swallowed the elixir. I heard how my body accepted the tea with a whole sequence of unique sounds. I felt how the liquid traveled through me, radiating little shock-waves of good.
I leveled the cup, moved it away from my mouth. Still felt the temperature of the vessel, still felt the little imperfection under my thumb, still smelled the seductive body, still tasted the delicious nourishing liquid...
It was then that I opened my eyes.
The cup in my hands, the lightly greenish tea with little floating particles of leaves, the dark brown outside of the cup, the crackled green glaze on the bottom of it, the light spot with missing glaze on the rim, the steam coming from the cup... the sight of them all took over my perception. Everything was there in front of me, beautiful, subtle, and yet somehow louder than what I had just experienced...
What I now saw was still the same object with the same liquid, but it felt as if the other senses did not want to compete with my sense of sight. Seeing is such an overwhelming, such a strong experience. It is sometimes quite beautiful to have the luxury and time to play blind and to listen to what the other senses have to say...
Phone conversations with my father are like two streams of consciousness flowing together to make a powerful stream. My father likes to be a serious and very wild river of thought. I like to listen and laugh. He reminded me today of how he used to teach me how to draw by recommending to draw circles until I see something that makes sense. Or maybe some straight lines, just to get the feeling for the drawing tool. He would more often make me draw circles though. (I really wanted to learn to draw as well as he did. So I would always bug him about drawing in general.)
I remembered our little exercises and began with drawing circles on circles on circles while on the phone with him.
I ended up with the drawing below... I emailed it to him right away and he had a really good laugh. And so did I...
Gosh, blogging under the influence again... ; )
It really all started with circles... Here the Outline view of this particular image. (Yes, drew it in Adobe Illustrator.)
Wow, why am I even posting this?... ; )
some aphorisms:
Der Pater: Ihr seid Manschenfresser, ihr Neuseeländer.
Neuseeländer: Und ihr seit Gottfresser, ihr Pfaffen.
The : You New Zealanders are cannibals.
New Zealander: And you clerics are Godeaters.
(the above was written some time between 1789 and 1793)
"Gottfresser" is such a strong word... Godeater does not quite give it justice... or does it? (fressen is not to eat... it is to devour...)
life sometimes turns into a single point of , so tiny and dim, so barely there... just a single... it.
then it can unfold and turn into the thinnest silky strands, like hair, long hair quite deep below a glistening surface of an ocean.
then clouds of strings, as if paint first met a glass of cold clear water. A body almost, an illusion of one perhaps?
At times there're solid ribbons of life, rich and ornate and strong.
Then there are sheets of interwoven fabric, silk perhaps, sometimes, then again a carpet, and...
Thick curtains, lush heavy softness, the colors somehow...
Then solid metal, a wire, a string, a rope...
quicksilver,
platinum,
led...
and again layers and layers of translucent skin,
a wind?,
an upward movement?
edible air?
a sweet pure thought?
which one of the many shall we ever wish for?
where are the words that say: life?
could they possibly be hidden between these layers and layers
and layers of layers?
Something in the air is making me feel like a bit of a winner this morning. What could it possibly be? Maybe the dream I had, which included a meeting with some of my old friends? Or was ist just the time I spent sleeping. Two hours more than the usual 5 hours of rest?
Today does not quite feel like Monday. But I can imagine that this bubble is bound to burst in just a few air conditioned hours.
Good morning... what time is it?...
Another Tuesday, ladies and gentlemen, the day when visitors come to this page, maybe because they were able to survive a monday? It could also be that Tuesdays are just days when search engines send out their bots to read all the things we write and look at all the things we managed to collect. I do not know. It would make sense. The German word for Tuesday is "Dienstag" which very much feels like a marriage of Dienst (service, ministration) and Tag (day.)
What a perfect day to do check up on things... and not only if the Sunday (Sonntag) was sunny, which it was. (Yes, something is telling me that the right side of my brain is not in today and the left side is obviously also running late.)
It really does feel like it. My brain feels like a giant cotton ball that somebody stuck into my scull, for the time while my actual brain, the friend whom I know longest, is out for a thorough cleaning or something. Wash, rinse, spin? My thoughts are not very organized as it is, but the cotton ball just does not do as good of a job as my original, sly less bleached matter did.
I did not recognize myself in the mirror last night. There are large mirrors where I looked. There was a man staring back at me, who looked as if he were somehow related to me, but he was definitely not me. I tried to calculate the years. Did another seven pass? 7,14,21,28... 35... no, not yet... so what the heck is going on?
A cotton ball is soft and certainly well wired, but please, if you come across the ticket from the cleaners, please let me know where I left my brain.
I might need to read some Oliver Sacks again, just come to terms with what is going on up here on my top floor.
Good morning.
Just saw the sky and it is so incredibly spectacular and saturated and beautiful. There is a mark on one of the windows on the other side of the building. It was me, pressing my face against the glass, wanting to turn into a cloud of tiny particles that could forever just follow the sunset... It is comforting to know that one day at least a part of me will be just that. and maybe it will be two of me... one following the sunset while the other will rush around the planet just minutes ahead of sunrise.
Silly me, I think we all make the sunrises and sunsets the way they are already by just being part of this eco system, by breathing, by evaporating little by little, every day... an even more comforting thought.
Where the heck was I while this band made all the albums with all the songs? How could I have missed a band that named themselves after one of my very favorite writers?... And it is not even the Rilke poems I love, but some of the short stories of which I do not even know if they exist in English... Oh dear, they do not even appear to be available in German... Hmm... Or do you know an English translation of "Die letzten"? Should I perhaps translate the story for here?... Once I get home, which might be tomorrow?...
Obviously "Rainer Maria" is not Rilke, but it is still a really good thing to not only stumble into a whole world of music I really like, but also to make it remind me of the literature on my shelf at home which I forgot that I actually really missed a lot.
Hmm... found via Leah, who has one of the best about her pages out there. (Though my favorite "about" page might actually be the one of rebecky. Who is neither forty, nor a , of course.)
Where is my about me page, you ask?... Wandered completely off topic now, haven't I? Hmm... let's be honest, this is a personal site, I can not just keep posting little stories with drawings... (though I am not going to stop that, promise.)
the batteries claim they will last for another 15 minutes or so. There is so much I would like to write now, but I will never be able to pack it in 15 minutes.
Well, not really... it is just an excuse, an easy way out by looking sideways. There will be a lot of catching up to do... so many emails to reply to, so many drawings to be posted... hello weekend...
Now I feel like an American TV station (okay, some). Not offering any real programming, just procrastination and announcements. "Stay tuned, find out more, hear the full story, the shocking, breaking, exclusive news... when we return... to announce more... right after these important messages..."
hmm... later today, okay?... for now, "enjoy the encore presentation of our favorite on demand programming. Anything you want When you want it." (Just scroll down the page...)
; ) (Sorry, had to write this some day...)
Two birds were having a strange dialogue before sunrise. They were telling each other the same two stories, again and again and again and again. The stories had nothing to do with each other, perhaps. But maybe they were looking for their continuations? Maybe they were the beginnings of stories that waited for the next, missing part. Andno bird was there to tell it. Two storytellers who spent an entire morning looking for what is next in their stories.
And there was nobody to continue, nobody to reply, nobody to comment...
I know, an overly romantic view at things. What sounds like a birds song to me is probably more of a "My left foot hurts and I am hungry", or "Get off my tree or I will pick you so hard, you won't be able to fly," or maybe "Hey ladies, look at me, I can build the finest nest and have the loudest voice and largest wingspan."
Hmm... pretty much like blogging, isn't it?...
I remember that evening of November 9th 1989. I was alone in my good old horizon blue Mercedes, returning from Offenbach, to Hanau. I had just turned onto a straight piece of the road, the railroad tracks to the right, some dark, sleepy houses to the left. The old blaupunkt radio was on, so was the heat, the engine made this purring relaxed sound, we were cruising. The announcer on the radio interrupted the broadcast. I do not quite remember what he said exactly. It was something about the Berlin Wall coming down, or the border between Eastern and Western Germany being opened. I do not quite remember what the announcer said. I just remember that I immediately had tears on my cheeks, my immediate reaction was to cry. I was alone in that same car, driving on that same road, except things were blurry now, I was crying as if somebody had removed an incredible weight off my chest and told me to go home.
We had escaped from Poland less than 10 years prior to that evening, the world was now a different one, suddenly, without a proper warning. So many of the fears and limitations had been turned into a page of a history book within seconds. For me, personally, in that purring car between Offenbach and Hanau. The world changed indeed. I do not know how I could explain how deep the emotions were that swept upon us back then in Germany in the days following the announcement. On both sides of the previously impenetrable border there was joy and an indescribable outpour of human emotion in general. I can not think of any comparison or description of what we were feeling. It was such a raw and just unscripted real emotion. It was incredible.
The reason I am remembering this moment and trying to remember what it felt like to be in a suddenly soon to be reunited Germany, is what happened today. (Well, yesterday.)
58.5% of the Polish population voted in a referendum today (and yesterday). 77% of those who went to the ballots voted for a united Europe, voted for Poland joining the European union. 22 years after we escaped from a Poland that was about to declare Marshal Law on itself, that same country is about to become a state in a union that will include what we called the "Zachod". I should be really touched again. Poland will be part of Europe, a peaceful decision, a choice of the people, an idea impossible in 1981, an idea somehow natural in 2003.
There is barely any mention about this incredible event in the American media, of course. It is understandable, there is an entire ocean between here and there. There is actually a quite good article in Times this morning. (Also take a look at the BBC-News article.)
Only a very private perspective allows me to compare the fall of the Berlin Wall with the decision of the majority of the Polish population to join the European Union. The climate of both decisions is a completely different one, of course, the decision is made in a very different world.
Hmm, a very personal, very private comparison of both events...
I guess they are both gigantic steps towards a more open world... does this make me compare them?...
Btw. If you do not know what happened on December 13th 1981, check the entry in this blog. Yes, there is one.
When on a walk on November 9th, last year I collected some strange looking seeds on the path to the bay. There were maybe two berries among the seeds maybe, one seed looked like a funny hat, some looked very much like little stones.
I put them all into a semi-clear 35mm film container, to maybe later put them into soil. I have no idea how this little container landed in the drawer of my night-stand, but this is where I found it, a week or so ago. Inside was a sour smell, sly fruity maybe, more like wine gone bad, there were some serious mold spores, the white camembert kind to go with it. There has been obviously some fermentation going on here, the little oxygen left in the container had been probably eaten up by the little mold plants. (Dear biologist, I am not one, please feel free to correct my caveman-assumptions.)
I emptied the container into one of my "experiments and found things" flower pots. It is a pot with good soil into which I drop some of the remains of plants which for some miraculous reason might have survived the pre-supermarket radiation treatment and which I could as well just throw out...
I covered the seeds with barely any soil, I moved the one with white fur into a deeper indentation in the ground. And I forgot about these fellows again.
It was yesterday that I noticed a little three inch tall plant, in a very joyful spring green lurk its two wings from the blackish soil. The wings were leaves of course, but they appeared as if they were something else. It appeared as if they were protecting something between them. The plant grew over an inch since yesterday and I can now see that the two leaves were indeed somehow just there to protect a more fragile content from being bruised as the tree-to-be poked through the surface of the soil. The two fleshy leaves are now open, the seemingly main portion of the plant appears for now to be four leaves, each one of them consisting of about 18sub-leaves. It feels like an incredible miracle. I do not have a camera that would allow me to post an image here right away. I tried to draw the little buddy, but it is not easy due to its size. I put the largest magnifier onto my camera lucida (12x) and attached the 19th century tool to the wacom tablet connected to Adobe Illustrator. Without being able to really monitor what I am doing, I at least tried to trace the proportions of this new guest. (12x was too strong actually, I ended up using 10x).
As I was drawing the outlines of the new tree, I was so close to the flower pot that I could smell the moist black soil. And it reminded me of the smell of the forest in which I had found the seeds seven months ago. If plants could smell...
But they can certainly take in nutrients. Maybe what I smell is what makes the little buddy go.
I will need to take pictures... just won't be able to post them right away...
instead of going deeper into interesting matters, there appears to be a series of little jumps over the last few days, again and again we go, skipping four days almost of drawings to be posted. And there are more activities right outside the window, there is more going on under the waves. It might be time to get back to that. ; ) (just saying...)
"Film mi sie urwal..." My would use this expression, which is Polish and means "My film just tore...", whenever he would fall asleep in front of the television set, or just on the chair, or on the sofa, or just anywhere. He would just fall asleep out of nowhere, it bordered on narcolepsy.
My used to work in a coal mine, underground, often in nightshifts. We also had a nicer apartment, because sometimes this special truck would pick up my and some of the neighbors and they would speed away, syrens howling, to work in a fire, somewhere in a coal mine. He explained to me how fires are extinguished underground when I was four or so... and even though I had some nightmares about it for a little while, I think I eventually accepted that coal is more important than lives. (Extinguishing a fire in a coal mine in most cases meant to build air tight walls around the burning area. The bodies would be retrieved later...)
So my dad was really overworked most of the time, he would just fall asleep on me, in the middle of a conversation sometimes. One more reason why I would draw so much as a child... it is a very quiet activity after all.
I am writing this because I just woke up, sitting on the sofa, just as I sat down on that same sofa last night. The tv was not on. My film still ripped, the world I saw as I opened my eyes was a blurry foreign place.
I am now about as old as my dad was when he used to pass out. I certainly do not have to rescue miners out of burning coal mines. I do not have to work the nightshift. Maybe age has something to do with it as well...
Good morning. I am writing this also, because we are here alone again. The masses from the first day of the publication of "The Scar" seem to have moved on. I think it will be a little easier for me to write again. (What a silly entry...)
There was a car accident on 49th and 9th. A car cut off a cabby. There were big yellow streaks on the side of the black car. The driver did not want to deal with it, it seemed, neither did the cabby. The men just shook hands and continued their journeys.
At the amish market, the sandwich man made a very bad joke:
"We have a special tonight: the Honeymoon Salad. It is Lettuce alone and no dressing." hmm...
A puddle of dried blood with a very fresh glowing red center was being ignored by pedestrians on 46th between 6th and 7th. The Ambulance was there already. Somebody was being kept alive.
The Harvard Club has a new addition to it. The man in the elevator (the one in brown socks in sandals) was very excited about the new extension of the building.
Eliot Spitzer gave an excellent (intelligent and entertaining) speech..
I was the only man in the entire building who did not wear a tie and a jacket.
Hmm, it barely mattered... after a while and some wine.
Forgot my power supply at the office. One battery is empty now. The other has barely 30 minutes left. Going to get some real sleep instead.
Please take care of yourself tonight. Okay?
Code Orange again. Will it ever turn to green?
As I was looking through my drafts folder, looking for a little piece I started a few months ago, I came across this little fragment:
It looks as if the wind had had great fun whisking the pink layer of clouds across the bright blue sky. The sun is setting now and the colors are turning more dramatic by the minute. Soon the now colorful clouds will be just dark shadows, empty areas in the carpet of stars. The last boats are crossing the bay. Their s are on. Their engines seem louder than usual. Large passenger ships seem to be pasted on the edge of the horizon. I can see three now. All of them are facing south. One by one there are little s visible in the windows of the buildings around the bay. Each one of the s turned on by someone who thought that it was time. The s here are off still, but it is time. It is time. I will turn on the in a few seconds. And then for others around the bay this place will turn into a tiny man made star on the façade of a building. Good Evening Sunny Isles.
I am not really good at relaxing. Relaxing makes me nervous. And I can not relax unless I stop relaxing and do something, even if the ?something? is some sort of relaxation. (11/30/02/6pm)
Many readers of this blog really seem to like Victor Stripey Hugo (He is the one with "witold" in the picture. He is a sock dog, he is a one of a kind guy, hand made by the incredibly talented Anna of Absolutely-vile.com. So while I can not quite share the actual toy with you. (VSH is busy protecting the house.) I can still share images or maybe some tiny little pictures for your desktop. So here we go, I made two little icons of Stripey for you, dear reader. You can download them and use them for your private icon needs. They are a gift for you. They are not for sale. They are not to be used commercially.
I can not guarantee they will look good on your desktop. If they do, please send links to screenshots. If they do not, please let me know. I am not sure I will be able to fix anything, but I could try.
The icons work probably best in Mac OS X. The largest picture below is the actual size of the actual icons. If you do not have the newest Macintosh operating system, you can still use the icons. You will only get to see the tiny size though. (Until you upgrade or Switch.)
I also made versions for Windows™XP®. I do not have this operating system here, so I have no idea what the little sock dog will look like on your PC™®. (Let me know...)
Again. I am not responsible if you decide to delete all files on your hard drive to make room for the dog. I also can not take any responsibility if the dog bites or pees or does other funny things (no, wait, he will not, he is a sock dog turned into two little icons). He is a virus free animal (as long as you get him here). He was originally hand made by Anna of absolutely-vile.com and then drawn for you on my little PowerBook by me.
Macintosh users: Sitting Stripey or Standing Stripey.
Windows users: Sitting Stripey or Standing Stripey.
If you would like to know how to use the icons on windows and or would like to get more icons, visit dotico.com, I think it is a division of The Iconfactory, one of the greatest sites for mac users. So if you are a mac user, make sure to visit The Iconfactory. (They are also the makers of iconbuilder pro, the filter used to turn Stripey into a desktop icon. I could just go on and on about The Iconfactory, but you probably are not even reading anymore, but playing with your sock dog. I am happy for you.
Enjoy your own desk top sock dog. Have a great week.
My sight sight Ht night Ht night RIGHT WRIST hurts quite a bit so I decided to me this Appu inkped tedmgy to write tm's post with ng uA howl HAND on a wacom tablet lt 1h N my sbw ml it does not M< 100% IT IS ALL VERY SLOW AND DOES NOT WORK 100% AAAAARGH! H took me 10 Mimuts to write Mis! WRITE THIS! DO I HAVE To CAPITALIZE EVERYTHING 1% ORDER FOR IT TO WORK? GRRR...
Layers upon layers upon layers are between me and the cold. And yet we still shake hands. She sneaks into my gloves, both pairs of them and touches the fingertips just sly at first and then she grabs them one by one. Then the kisses on my face, the tip of my nose, the cheeks, she sucks on my lips. Enough already. She finds a place where I did not tuck in my sweaters under my jackets and her hand goes right there, straight onto my skin, straight for my back, right there. Oh please. I pull my hat over my face. Nobody can recognize me now but her. She still goes for my neck, she still embraces my legs, she even... well, you know.
So I just go from door to door to door, trying to avoid her advances. But once inside, for too long, I miss her.
Winters are really tough in New York.
Waking up in the middle of the night is not always a beautiful thing. Yes, amazon.com is open and the mac is listening to various radio stations, yes, the city does not ever sleep. Broadway just called through the open window. “Come, play with us, we are up all night.” Police cars and the trucks with fresh deliveries from upstate and north Jersey rush by the windows. The sky just turned dark purple again. And because there will be plenty of work on my plate today, I will need to force myself back into the land that can only be entered with the eyes closed. Now, please, I would like to go back. Show me what my mind is digesting. Thank you. Let’s go back, shall we? Good morning, good night. Just two more hours, please.
Having my very first (this year), very special, not so happy allergy “attack”. Nothing too wild, except that I can not see with one (left) eye and it looks as if the skin around my iris would like to burst any second now, oh, and I can not close my eyelid. Nothing serious really. Not both eyes. It does not hurt anymore, at least not the way it did just a few minutes ago. So things are turning for the better. I completely forgot about my allergies. They got so much better here in New York. Did I mention that this is one more reason why I love this city? It does not give me 10% as many allergies as I used to get in Hanau, in Germany. There in mid May, cars get a neat coat of yellow pollen. I remember not being able to breathe, bad asthma attacks. It is not a good thing when it is so difficult to breathe that the things begin to dim and that there is this certain mild sense of panic.
My allergies were gone completely once I moved to New York. They were really gone. I did not realize that I spent the first two years in an office, working like a madman, 16 hours a day. Every day. Nature was the picture on my desktop. So once I started to understand that this “life” will cost me my life, and once I started to get out of the office again, the allergies came back. Not as harsh as in Germany or in Poland, not quite so bad.
The swelling on my eye got better already. I am able to close the lid now. Tiny happy pleasures. Closing the eyelid is certainly one of them. There is this famous Adam Mickiewicz quote, the first few lines from Pan Tadeusz - Ksiega I
Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jestes jak zdrowie;
Ile cie trzeba cenic, ten tylko sie dowie,
Kto cie stracil. Dzis pieknosc twa w calej ozdobie
Widze i opisuje, bo tesknie po tobie.
Or in (almost plain) English:
O Lithuania, my country, thou
Art like good health; I never knew till now
How precious, till I lost thee. Now I see
The beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.
Not that I have lost Lithuania (guess why my name is Witold?), or lost health, it is just in moments when the body overreacts, or plays some tricks on me that I remember that whatever we perceive as the background, the status quo, the day to day body experience is quite a miracle we should always be thankful for. Really. Being able to walk and talk, me being able to write this, you being able to read this. It all is quite a great, fantastic, unbelievable miracle. This is why it is incredibly important to see the beauty in the tiniest, most normal things.
Swelling almost completely gone.
Now I can think much more clearly. Or so I think.
Skipping a day is usually not a good sign. When I wrote my “diaries” as a child, or tried to keep my regimen of a certain amount of drawings in any 24 hour period, skipping a day usually meant the beginning of the end. Looking back into the books, there was always a day skipped, then an apology for having skipped the day and then nothing. Nothing for pages and pages, up to the next book, the next diary, which would be triggered by some On Kawara event. Most of the skipped days happened to be in January.
I actually wanted to write a lot yesterday, but then the things I wanted to write just seemed so banal, so unnecessary. (Not that what I am writing now is terribly necessary.) It felt good to just draw again and scan and read, without posting and writing and telling.
The watch place from Frankfurt left a message on the machine that my watch is ready and that they will send it via mail (they did not trust FedEx, and no convincing worked. It will be German Mail, Einschreiben versichert) I had given my good old black ORIS alarm to Juvelier Pletsch in Frankfurt in December of last year. There was nothing wrong with the watch, it is just a mechanical piece that needs lubrication every two years or so. My Oris alarm had not been opened since 1996. The winder was almost stripped of chrome, and there seemed to be some resistance whenever the alarm needed to be set. (It is a wrist alarm, a minimal mechanical PDA.) My ORIS wrist alarm will be 10 years old soon, but only on the outside. The reason why I had bought the watch in the first place was its strange age discrepancy. The mechanism that runs the watch was built in 1969 by A.Schild, the same year when I was born, and ORIS bought the last contingent of these mechanisms and repackaged them in 1988. Giving the watch in to Pletsch, I knew that there would be some sort of complication, because the watch was such a limited item with a very limited amount of spare parts. (It was this moment when the entire store came by to take a look at the thing). And even though there was nothing really wrong with the watch, the Watchmakers concluded that the ORIS needs to be sent home to Biel in Switzerland to get a new glass and a new electroplating on the entire housing. At this moment it was pretty clear that this was a serious adventure for the watch. ORIS obviously did not have new housings anymore and so the entire watch needed to be taken apart, stripped to the brass and re-chromed. Everything. The winders the lugs, all of it. Then the new glass... No wonder the whole procedure took four months, during which some Swiss specialist must have done the job by hand. (His left hand probably behind his back.) I hope everything will be fine, because it is impossible to find a black ORIS wrist alarm anywhere. Not even google or eBay could provide a picture, so I will need to scan it in when it arrives. Does it really matter though? How obsessed can one get with a watch? I need to stop, right now. Sorry for that.
What really happened is perfectly described by Claire in her Loobylu blog. There is a serious amount of fear in me. I have this strange feeling that I am not doing enough. That I am not working enough, that the things I make are so far from the standard that I want to achieve that it will just take too long to get there for me to actually ever get there. Tom and I had this whole long email discussion in which I must have concluded several times that I will need to go back into advertising and just continue my drawing as a side entertainment. But I do not want to be some old Creative Director who will sit in front of a blank canvas with freshly bought oils, completely out of ideas and scared like a rabbit. The whole reason why I went into design was out of fear. I did not want to fail right away. I needed to convince my parents quickly that it was possible to survive on this stuff I was doing. This whole drawing thing.
I remember this little interview a friend of my ’s friend had arranged for me with the head of graphics of ZDF, the largest TV station in Germany. I had my little portfolio and I was full of fear. He looked through my work, which had nothing to do with design, nothing; and just started telling me how they just bought these new Computers, Paintboxes, which make a designer up to six times faster. Up to six times. Not the computer was six times faster than anything. The Designer was six times faster. He concluded that I should take the path of commercial design. The art thing could be some sort of hobby I could pick up when I retire. Six times faster.
I did not quite understand that the “faster” was a trap, set for me by life, and I walked right into it. From now on things had some timer attached to them. The faster the better. It took me a while to understand that it might matter in some environments, but it is the opposite of good in others. Making a thing faster does hardly make it better. It should not really matter sometimes how long it takes to make a thing and certain things neeed to take a whole lifetime or even longer to find a state even close to complete. It often feels as if it took a lifetime to be born. Some of us never manage to really give birth to themselves. Some just get by, almost born, drugged out by their surroundings. They run really quickly to nowhere.
I clearly need to start a new day now. This writing makes me a bit depressed.
There is a great strategy employed by Camper, the great little Shoe brand from Mallorca in Spain. Whenever they open one of their new stores, and they usually try to open them in high quality areas, they do not wait for the grand opening, they do not wait for everything to be clean in the store, to be prepared for the first customer. Once Camper gets the lease for a store, once they get the keys, once the phone works, they pull out the shoes and start selling. And they just close little portions of the store, or work at night to build that place. And so they sell shoes as they build the store. This is a bit how I feel now. The move is basically done. I have migrated all of my almost 300 ramblings into movable type. Movable type has a completely different way of thinking than blogger. It is going to take quite a while until I understand what I am doing here. Please have some patience. I really want to make this blog a good one. My old blog was missing interaction. Users could not really leave any real feedback. Some of the readers would write me comments which I would post as new revelations. How much nicer would it be if each one of you could just reply to what I write here?
Well, now you can. Each entry is a separate item and so below this entry there is a little comment form. Go ahead, say something. Another thing were the permalinks. I could just not figure them out. There were some archives somewhere, which were basically a strangely broken page. This is much better now. Because each entry is its own page, it becomes possible to link to each one of the entries. Then there is XML. I do not even know what XML really is.
And this is just one of the things which I do not yet understand. Blogger worked with an HTML template. When I started writing my blog, I knew what was possible in HTML, knew all this, but I had always worked with Content Engineers and programmers and information architects. Tom told me how to make a link. Josh told me how to set a target for a page. I was using Tom’s cascading stylesheets. Movable type runs on CSS... when I imported this page into GoLive, it looked nothing like what I expected it to look like. So all I managed today was to add a little accent on top of the page, to add the familiar links on the side. CLicking on the top bar links to the homepage as well. I know this blog does look nothing like the rest of the page. This will change over time. I need some time, some help for sure... But eventually all will be ok again, only this time more user friendly, much better organized. And there are so many more entries which still need to be added... so much more to happen.
So here we are. A new place. Everything is movable, especially the type. Everything can be set in motion here. A beautiful little place. Suddenly it is possible to post comments and to link to files and do all the crazy things not possible before. They probably were possible, it is just that I had not the sest clue how to make them happen. And now...
Continue reading quite moving....
Leaving the house... No blogs until later tonight... but then plenty. (I hope)
