Falco Buzzcock

My favorite part of last night

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:04:27 GMT

was, having spent all day returning from Helsinki, and having eaten decadent mac'n'cheese with Salamander and friends (and also happy hour mojitos), and having walked to the Wrangler to meet an already drunken Adam--boozed and in love with summer, coming from a symphony in the park, the sun under his skin, escaping through the happy crack of his face--and having proceeded to drink, and to love each other, and be close and talk--and to be close to that missed closeness that is never far but with our bodies there face to face, closer--and having been close and happy and talking and drunk on Wrangler slushies and one dollar well drinks, close--he'd introduce me--for twelve years--the number Jesus had of disciples, the number of months closed inside the circle of a year--and having drunk and talked and closed the bar, my favorite part of last night was walking to his house, my bicycle between us, sharing the steering, leaning our heads in close to each other so we could share his headphones, listening to "Execution" by David Thomas Broughton, and trying to harmonize it into the warm dark of summer's 2am, a kind of melancholy dirge for the happiness of that close hour,

I wouldn't take her to an execution,
I wouldn't take her to a live sex show,
I wouldn't piss or shit on her, would I?
Because I love her so.

over and over, and the drunken harmonies, probably never quite in key, but close.

Appeal to the Grammarians

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 01:35:56 GMT

We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we're capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity.
For speechlessness and all its inflections,
For up-ended expectations,
For every time we're ambushed
By trivial or stupefying irony,
For pure incredulity, we need
The inverted exclamation point.
For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it.
We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot,
The child whose ball doesn't bounce back,
The flat tire at journey's outset,
The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken.
But mainly because I need it—here and now
As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-aged couple
Came strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, "See, that's why
I don't like to eat outside."

-Paul Violi

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:10:55 GMT

TECH!!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6970031.stm

I'm on German Television.

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:45:33 GMT

Das Denver Art Museum

Loop of posts

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:40:18 GMT

Responding to this post.

"Not finding in aesthetic experience, which here is primary, the determined purpose or end from which we are cut off and which is found too far away, invisible or inaccessible, over there, we fold ourselves back towards the purpose of our Da-sein. This interior purpose is at our disposal, it is ours, ourselves, it calls us and determines us from within, we are there [da] so as to repond to a Bestimmung, to a vocation of autonomy. The Da of our Dasein is first determined by this purpose which is present to us, and which we present to ourselves as our own and by which we are present to ourselves as what we are: a free existence or presence [Dasein], autonomous, that is to say, moral.

That is what our Da is called and it passes through the mouth. The Da of the Sein gives itself what it cannot consume outside, while not-to-consume forms the condition of possibility of taste understood as what relates us to purpose-lessness."
-Derrida, Economimesis

And as you say, "push this essential principle outward," --and here in this quote the medium is aesthetics--and at the moment when the "gap" is found (the meaninglessness behind any symbol, work of art, natural form), when the (aesthetic) order is found and dissolves, is too far away, is inaccessible, unconsumable (because the things out there always are); when that happens the desire for those things can either substitute ("depression, addiction, suicide," and let me add--distraction) or, in the important moment that requires discipline, weariness, self-sacrifice, an unbearable anxiety or nausea, "fold ourselves back towards the purpose of our Da-sein," back toward the root of the purpose of the initial desiring.

Self-propulsion? Is this what you're getting at?

And I see the theta waves metaphor and feel it like it's right. At that moment of utter (and sometimes desperate, sometimes the most the most get me out of my skin desperate) outward seeking the outer is found to be no solution, not a conceivable goal, an inconceivable goal, a goal whose whole premise is a cultural fallacy motivated by cultural agenda, a social power play ("The Truth is INSIDE that thing, the only way INSIDE that thing or to bring that Truth OUTSIDE that thing is known by me/us, is by my/our means."): the OUTER does not exist except as an accepted social formation, as a convenience or metaphor by which to establish INNER. And so at that moment of utter outward seeking the outer's falseness is intuited(?), and folding back toward the purpose of our Da-sein requires a simultaneous pushing outward AND back towards the beginning, towards the purpose of our original seeking, side-by-side and altogether and allatonce.

Snow Day

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:34:22 GMT

Who knew the Apocalypse would be so soft?

Outside, waiting for a bus that never came to accomplish a rescue mission I would have needed rescuing from; outside, boundaries of falling snow, the world disappears in all directions, the world a boundary penetrated by dots of snow, inside touching outside, a self-penetrated boundary; white except for a stop sign made more red for all the white. Wind chimes gonging from a nearby porch, rung more from the force of snow than wind. I'm at a crossroads. In a Kurosawa film. Death is there in the chondrichthyan passage of cars. Worry about the comfort of my almost-soon-to-be guests. Do I have enough board games. Will the roof cave in.

I want to make a room like this.

Something to hold on to.

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 04:52:02 GMT

Strange, powerful emotions, having sorted old papers and photos. The collage of memories and images--many not my own--inspired a nostalgia for things as I remembered them, and weren't. Out of the pile a strange homesickness for a proximity of moments that never existed, experiences as immediately juxtaposed as their symbols. The vague, saddly desperate hope that a discarded passport photo of Sara, a scavaged poster for a lost dog, the receipt for a now years old computer, and a high school medal might somehow form a steelcabled web of relationship through time and time's increasing distance.

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 04:24:49 GMT

Hey, could some of you Bostoners do me a favor while trying to read my mind? Go here: http://www.aias.org/forum/tours.html and tell me which are most interesting, from an architectural perspective?

I'm signed up already for the ICA (to which my heart is committed) and the Kennedy whatever it is (to which my heart is not). What's the best of the best to sign up for?

Thanks, I love you, and will tongue your ears.

From the second Duino Elegy

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 02:01:18 GMT

...

You lovers, secure in one another, I ask you
about us. You hold each other. Have you assurances?
It sometimes happens that my hands
grow conscious of each other, or else my weary face
takes refuge in them. That gives me a slight
self-sensation. Yet who, from something so unwarranted,
would dare conclude, "I am"? You though, who keep increasing
through the other's rapture, until, overwhelmed, each
begs the other: "No more"--; you who amid each other's hands
flourish like vines in vintage years;
you who disappear sometimes, only because the other
grows rampant; I ask you about us. I know
you touch so fervently because the caress preserves,
because the place you cover up, O tender ones,
doesn't disappear; because, underneath, you feel
pure permanence. Thus your embraces almost promise you
eternity. And yet, after you survive the terror
of the first look, and the long yearning at the window,
and that first walk--the one walk--together through the garden;
lovers, are you still the same? When you lift yourselves
each to the other's lips--drink unto drink;
O how strangely the drinker slips from the sacrament.

...

Rilke on my mind.

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 15:23:40 GMT

Sonnets to Orpheus, Second Part, 13

Be in all advance of parting, as if it were
behind you like the winter just now going by.
For among winters there's one so endlessly winter
that, wintering, your heart will win through.

Be forever dead in Eurydice--, and climb more singingly,
climb more praisingly, back into pure relation.
Here, among the vanishing, be, in the realm of decline
be a ringing glass that shatters even as it rings.

Be--and know as well the terms of nonbeing,
the infinite ground of your inmost vibration,
so that, this once, you may wholly fulfill them.

To the used, as well as the mute and muffled
stock of nature's fullness, to the inexpressible sums,
add yourself jubilantly, and erase the score.

---

Nietszche's self-propelled wheel?

Where love comes from.

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 03:22:08 GMT

Struck just now by a memory of my mom, on my prone dad's back, popping pimples. How fully is my sense of love informed by those private scenes. The simply inclusive power of the tactile. The mundane intimacies whose warm windings resist morals and grotesqueries.

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 16:34:56 GMT

I've spent hours looking at stuff on YouTube. Most recently researching Parkour. I love the element of urban reclamation, dynamic and fluid adaptation to obstacles. There are a bunch of kids into it for the acrobatics, but some of the older guys seem to flow through it like a discipline. Hot.

Also its connection to George Hébert and (quasi) connection to Alexander Technique.

And the alcoholiday of a week or so past was very nice. I'll having worried about having so many people here. But everyone was a light and delightful guest. School a bit preoccupying, a bit distracting from deep bacchanalia. But, eh.

Everything's going to be ok.

Sun, 07 May 2006 20:30:51 GMT

http://www.fugly.com/videos/5131/dog-riding-a-bike.html

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 16:47:52 GMT

Here's something interesting: http://www.spr.org/en/ps_hookingup.html

Sara's talked about it before, but I just heard it on This American Life. Does it remind you of anything?

The oil link I posted last has me bugging. The plan is to buy chickens, and retreat to the mountains to learn the ways of survival from my new brother in law. He's some kind of man's man survival instructor/gunsmith type. Makes his own sausage. I'll have to start eating sausage. Sara suggested a cave. I'll draw up some plans for a zero emissions love den, asap.

Hopefully I won't have to trade sex for protection. The prospects aren't good.

I'll post it too.

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 07:46:18 GMT

Now I can't sleep.

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:22:51 GMT

We got the Church and will be moving in the beginning of next month. I'm supposed to be working, but my insides are a'quaking.

Hi, I'm Penny Kings...

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 13:43:38 GMT

This is my favorite Craigslist spam artist. There's a series that never changes, but keeps recycling. The style is meandering, troubadourian. Stories that in trying to assert the woman's authenticity become increasingly unreal. Also, there's probably a language gap:

CULTURED DECENT SEPARATED LADY(28) FANTASIES ABOUT STRANGE MEN

Yes, its true, I fantasize about meeting a stranger in a crowded lift, pressing against my whole body, or sharing a cab with an unknown man who feels up my skirt!!
Hi, I'm Penny Kings...I've everything that money can buy, included maybe a husband!!!(Not that I need to, I'm knock dead attractive!)
But thats not want I desire, thats why I love my separated status, I had a cad for a husband and have no fantasy about blissful married life. I hate clinging men.
Once I take someone as my lover, he wants to be a part of my life. Where I go, what I do, whom I meet is what each one of them wants from me. My last boyfriend threatened to commit suicide! Hence I left town and have decided to shift my software business, into this city.
The fact remains that I need men for fulfilling my sexual desires and fantasies, thats all. NO STRINGS ATTACHED. I want to meet total strangers, who have good taste in beautiful women, food and wine!! (Women I mean exotically beautiful!)
My looks are very deceiving, I'm petite, with an hour glass figure and bright smiling blue eyes! But please dont fall in love! I can't stand lovesick, mournful glances!!

Please do not reply me directly , I prefer safer ground to meet up , hope you understand my stand too.. my profile id is "SOFTPETALS" and more of me on ###Spamsite### If you are absolutely confident about yourself and your ability to understand that I'm not available on a permanent basis and this will last only as long as I'm satisfied with you and you have the maturity to accept that. Please feel free to contact me. AGE NO BAR! YOur finesse is important.
Goldenly yours,
Penny!!

Drowning Myron.

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 21:09:20 GMT

I was gonna write a post about identifying this mood or tone I've been in for maybe years now. A post about attempting to be authentic, and dismantling maybe too many motivations and/or at least their manifestations to their inauthentic cores. Maybe this began in earnest with Hellerwork. Maybe Eliade really sucked the wind from the sails in showing that Real Being--as I'd pursued it--was still just will to power or some crap.

Anyway, I was gonna write this post about looking under my motivations and seeing primary motivations having nothing to do with either the surface motivation or its projected manifestation. For instance, wearing some crazy pants today because of the joy of self expression or whatever the fuck instead becomes a need for love and acceptance. At which point wearing crazy pants no longer seems like a fun or honest experience. What I really want won't be achieved so easily. So I don't do it.

And I was gonna write about how so much of me feels this sort of dullness of inauthentic motivation. Why do it if it doesn't align with an authentic experience? How the hell do I wear crazy pants that say love and accept me, need me need me need the real me? Why bother with charming? Why learn too much, talk too well, be too buff, know too much, have too much music or books when what I really want is to be like loved for being the person whose authenticity led to the accumulation of these things?

No doubt much of this is (false) fallout from Adam's Evo Psych. No doubt it's a general purposelessness. And perhaps, moving into architecture, it's better to have it come up now, where it can die.

And I was gonna sort of elaborate on this debris in a whirlwind imagery from a couple of posts ago. How Dionysian it all is. The feeling of being inhabited by an authentic Force, of being primarily and absolutely a FORCE. And how masks are constructed to give a knowable face to that Force. Where masks are at best these sort of sorcerer's foci of being. The point at which self-creation is infused with the real thing, where the mask becomes being. But at worst, and most commonly, they're just the habit and detritus of self. Empty calories. OBSTRUCTIONS. There are so many masks I've made with differing levels of success. And sort of seeing how others see me makes it clear how much a construction even those best caricatures of myself are. That seeing me from outside I'm nothing but a well constructed character. But beyond that each mask is a great investment. I've spent countless hours researching, faking, fine tuning, retracing, modifying these roles to get them just right and righter. What a waste, says my goal oriented mind, to just dump them all. If I don't have these things, this self, what the hell do I have to show for 26 years of life?

I was gonna write all this and probably more, had it mapped out in my head on the walk home. Then yes of course it became clear that even writing it was inauthentic.

So I just got so bored instead, and wrote something else.

"As the faithful, in the Dionysian mysteries, invoke the god by miming scenes from his life, I call up the visitation of sleep by imitating the breathing and posture of the sleeper. The god is actually there when the faithful can no longer distinguish themselves from the part they are playing, when their body and their consciousness cease to bring in, as an obstacle, their particular opacity, and when they are totally fused in the myth. There is a moment when sleep 'comes', settling on this imitation of itself which I have been offering to it, and I succeed in becoming what I was trying to be: an unseeing and almost unthinking mass, riveted to a point in space and in the world henceforth only through the anonymous alertness of the senses- The body's role is to ensure this metamorphosis. It transforms ideas into things, and my mimicry of sleep into real sleep. The body can symbolize existence because it brings it into being and actualizes it." Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Stock Show.

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 17:13:29 GMT

Very nice few days. Walked around behind a minivan from the passenger to driver side. There was a bumper sticker with either police or military related shields, and the words "Judge me by my actions." As I came around the driver's side was open, a man's ass was all that was clear as he climbed into his seat. He let out a great series of farts of varied texture. I wondered it flatulence counted as action.

Then she and I went to the 100th anniversary of the Western National Stock Show. omg. The whole place smelled of meat, cooking and living. We saw the llamas paraded about, some led through an obstacle course by little kids. I ate a pretzel the size of my forearm that greased its way through wax paper to stain my jeans. In the bar we pet the llamas, and learned that geldings can be raised with the sheep to become guard llamas. Their hair is very soft. Their bodies are a wonderful collision of elegance and clumsiness.

She'd gotten tickets to what we'd thought was merely (!) a capuchin riding a dog. It turned out to be an act in the rodeo. The space was huge, shaded everywhere but the central arena. When we sat the announcers announced themselves. Then the lights went out. A cowboy strung in lights rode around on an unlit horse in the darkness. He/she carrying a lit American flag. There was a video on a huge screen. More lit riders doing figures. Some firework explosions. A laser light show. Let's-get-this-party-started techno.

And then bucking broncos, MUTTON BUSTING (in which six year olds wear helmets and see how long they can cling to a galloping sheep, so funny), hog tying, roping, bull riding, barrel riding, stage coaches driven around, and a monkey in a cowboy outfit riding a dog to herd some small deer(?). The monkey wasn't actually doing anything but holding to the dog with its tail, but sometimes would grow impatient and chuck clods of dirt at the deer. The monkey's name is Whiplash. He has a website. The final show was spotlights coming up on a soldier standing alone and saluting in the middle of the darkened arena. The announcers spoke the whole whole time. And now they were saying that a cowboy is just like a soldier, or as good as, and our boys over there are all that keeps us in freedom. The cowboy handed the reins of a white horse draped with an American flag to the soldier. Music swelled. Hearts were touched and fondled.

I'm really not used to feeling out of place. Even in foreign countries I feel more in common with those I'm around. This is a distillation of an American I've never seen so much of. And it was grand. Despite the rampant sexism, racism, ethnocentrism... despite the seeming celebration of narrow minded self hood, solipsistic cowboy hood. It was primitive, and grand.

But between events cowgirls would do a lap holding the flag of whichever company had sponsored the event. A boot dealer, Dodge Ram. Banners for companies girded the arena. And is it too cynical? I couldn't help but wonder who had paid for the patriotic segments of the show. Military recruitment, I understand, targets poorer communities. Certainly this was one, and the pageantry used to advertise the military could have come out of an advertising office.

talking too much

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 04:11:54 GMT

Tonight I was the only one yoga-ing in the living room of the house where I go to yoga. Asking the instructor for some variation I got a lecture. He seemed, as he often seems, more concerned with being a teacher than what is learned. So I refused to do well to secretly invalidate his method of instructing.

But then deep breaths, and forgetting everything to sustain an ovular void between collar and pelvic wall. A clean empty; no discomfort, only the discipline of its maintenance.

[And I said to her once, You don't know what a catch I am. But things are better now, they feel so good with her. I'm not trying to prove anything, and so it happens that magnetic clusters find simple resolutions of push and pull.]

At breakfast a friend who wants me to act as the image we've co-created (me by defense, she by admittance) of myself: something wild and wise. But I don't feel it and it fails.

So much invested in presentation; but how easy self can be; debris in a whirlwind.

Here's my final

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:00:13 GMT

Kundera’s history of the forgetting of being, paraphrasing Husserl, goes something like this. The western (European) spirit first identified itself as a passion to know “not in order to satisfy this or that practical need (Kundera 3),” but in order to perpetuate itself for its own sake. Expression of this passion gained scientific methodology such prominence that it came to obscure reality. The world examined through the microscope of the scientific mind had little to do with the world that was actually present. Instead, “the real world, life that is directly lived, [became] nothing more than images; as a result these images have acquired the power of reality (Heynen 156),” but are not reality itself. Having forgotten an existence of immediate, non-scientific, non-symbolic perception, “man has become a mere thing to the forces (Kundera 4)” of technology, history, and politics; a slave to his own creation. “The rise of the sciences,” at first a powerful tool, propelled “man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self (Kundera 3).”
Why would man have hidden himself from a reality “in which perfect fullness of being flowers (Eliade 9)?” Perhaps because being confronts man with a grand terror and makes him see that what is most real “is like nothing human or cosmic; confronted with it, man senses his profound nothingness (Eliade 10).” Uncomfortable with nothingness, man creates systems imbued with an aura of permanence; paper tigers guarding himself from reconciliation to “the essential relativity of things human,” guarding himself from having “to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge (Kundera 7).” By encapsulating himself in a controlled environment defined by the artifacts of humanity, that is, of himself, man can forget in the monumentality of his solipsistic world the terror of his own impermanence.
Architecture is an important means by which man is able to adjust his distance from the terrible. More than other disciplines, architecture determines the degree to which human spaces admit the terror of being. Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation replaces terror with scientific order. It floats above the ground like a docked vessel, representative of man’s freedom from the world. Geometric intersecting of staccato private spaces offers from every perspective the imprint of human order. Even the area designated as public space—formed by the supports on which the Unite’s guillotine mass is hung—is carefully parceled into discrete parts, limiting the number of people the space can hold. A human crowd can adopt the blind power of a natural force, so Le Corbusier restricts its size preemptively. It is not a place to gather, but a channel to move through.
Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute captures, in its emptiness, something of being’s terror. The mountainous wings of the building frame a central courtyard. Standing dwarfed in this canyon one’s gaze is directed toward the infinite expanse (both emptinesses, Benedikt) of the Pacific Ocean. Connecting the human built to the infinitely egoless is a single ribbon of water, pulling the viewer with a silver gravity out of a tunnel of echoing humanity into being’s larger maw. The courtyard generously frames a vessel for public interaction and resonates a “profound emptiness” suggestive of man’s own.
By its implicit mirroring of human beings and their cosmologies, architecture frames our stance towards reality. It can either support a displacement of the world which would rather look at itself than face the discomfort of an ephemeral reality, or bridge and nurture the way to a brave immersion in being.

Poetry break dance.

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 18:15:27 GMT

Writing an essay to sum all my desires for architecture in a single page (enforced!), and listening to tunes; St. Matt's Passion followed by Anal Cunt. I love you, Accident.

This sucker punched my heart:

Don't fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge

My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?

What he doesn't know
is that when we're walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand

-Robert Hershon

And I like the words here:

Ignore that last one I sent you.
I'd really rather you didn't
try to find me.

Everything human is perfect here, round,
worn smooth. These green bottles
and the bones beside them.

They clink and shift in the wind.
I take in lame snakes.
Sometimes I sing

and the birds sit up on their branches.
Time is the boomerang of the sun.
At night the dark shapes

of island surround me; I remember myself
stupid among you, freeing prisoners
in love with their chains,

always taking, as was the custom, parts
for the whole--the body's cavities for what
they wanted: pupils

for the black opacities they saw through.
The mouth
for what it watered to surround.

-J. Allyn Rosser

On one of my favorite substances, and a lesson to better better always learn:

Back then it seemed that wherever a girl took off her
clothes the police would find her-
in the backs of cars or beside the dark night ponds,
opening like a green leaf across
some boy's knees, the skin so white and taut beneath the
moor, it was almost too terrible,
too beautiful to look at, a tinderbox, though she did not
know. But the men who came
beating the night rushes with their flashlights and
thighs--they knew. About Helen,
about how a body could cause the fall of Troy and the
death of a perfectly good king.
So they read the boy his rights and shoved him spread-
legged against the car
while the girl hopped barefoot on the asphalt, cloaked in
a wool rescue blanket.
Or sometimes girls fled so their fathers wouldn't hit
them, their white legs flashing as they ran.
And the boys were handcuffed just until their wrists had
welts and let off half a block from home.

God for how many years did I believe there were truly
laws against such things,
laws of adulthood: no yelling out of cars in traffic tunnels,
no walking without shoes,
no singing any foolish songs in public places. Or else they
could lock you in jail
or, as good as condemning you to death, tell both your
lower- and upper-case Catholic fathers.
And out of all these crimes, unveiling the body was of
course the worst, as though something
about the skin's phosphorescence, its surface as velvet as
a deer's new horn,
could drive not only men but civilizations mad, could lead
us to unspeakable cruelties.
There were elders who from experience understood these
things much better than we.
And it's true: remembering I had that kind of skin does
drive me half-crazy with loss.
Skin like the spathe of a broad white lily on the first
morning it unfurls.

-Lucia Perillo

I like the melancholy mood:

All morning in the February light
he has been mending cable,
splicing the pairs of wires together
according to their colors,
white-blue to white-blue
violet-slate to violet-slate,
in the warehouse attic by the river.

When he is finished
the messages will flow along the line:
thank you for the gift,
please come to the baptism,
the bill is now past due:
voices that flicker and gleam back and forth
across the tracer-colored wires.

We live so much of our lives
without telling anyone,
going out before dawn,
working all day by ourselves,
shaking our heads in silence
at the news on the radio.
He thinks of the many signals
flying in the air around him,
the syllables fluttering,
saying please love me,
from continent to continent
over the curve of the earth.

-Joseph Millar

Also I try to resist really liking Billy Collins because there's something so softball about him. It's pretention, on my part, and he's fantastic. And it's soft that sneaks into hard places.

At the symphony with Sara I heard sounds as if they were colors defining volumes. Poetry can be like that: an outline of volumes, a resonance of qualities.

Back to work, I'll post the essay when I finish.

HAPTIC

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:19:04 GMT

Dear Walt and Adam,

I feel it differently. All my fear concentrated into a hardness and then poof like a dandelion puff. And I get what I want. My heart sinks through the world like a stone through the lake. And I am the people I've made hump in the wood. The pines resisting the cold distance of moon. Wind on skin. Cold Cold. Flaked apart. Dissolution. And two feet, dancing to tremble an earth. And a massive dancing. DANCING! DANCING! DANCING! A dancing.

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 04:12:47 GMT

I put this in a comment, but want it visible:

"Heidegger characterizes existence by an extremely well-known formulation: in-der-Welt-sein, being-in-the-world. Man does not relate to the world as subject to object, as eye to painting; not even as actor to stage set. Man and world are bound together like the snail to its shell: the world is part of man, it is his dimension, and as the world changes, existence (in-der-Welt-sein) changes as well." -Kundera, Art of the Novel

Innocent as Accident.

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 15:56:18 GMT

I've had what I realized is a reocurringly themed dream. There are five characters and I inhabit them at different times. The characters are best described as people inside of furry raccoon shaped suits but of a single color, with openings for faces. Think Mario's Tanooki suit. The face holes are always empty except for a smile, scowl, frown or cigarette. Each has a different personality.

These characters, they're called Choos, travel around having adventures in a childish, lego-like town. The leader is a big white surly mother fucker that's always trying to be anal sexed. I think it never works out because he has aids. He smokes, and where his face should be there's usually a scowl or grimace of loathing for having been rejected for anal sex.

The smallest Choo is brown, and has a speech impediment. It's cute. The scene that woke me up was the littlest Choo reaching up to open the door of a lego-like cabin in a lego-alpine village. The other Choos were out being anal sexed, or something, dancing and hitting on ladies, maybe. The little one reaches up, opens the cabin door, and outside on the porch is a nice social worker type lady who had brought him home out of kindness. He says, unsatisfied after a list of already kindnesses, face the irresistible pouting frown of a four year old, "could you buy me insuwance fow tweatment fow my anal cancew?" Surprised joy welled in me that would have laughed for release if I weren't still sleeping at how ridiculously manipulative he was being.

I think I'm seeing the spectrumed face of my ID, and its name is Choo.

-----

This is not my first anal sex dream posted here. Note to self: wtf?

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Yesterday was fine, as in great. Sara volunteers at a women's shelter and I went with her. On the way we saw a building downtown being demolished with a crane. Another man high in a different crane was spraying everything with water. The crane was destroying it, the man was watering it, and painted enormous all across its side was a child's drawing of two flowers, and the scrawled word Grow. And the solid weight bobbing at the end of the crane looked itself like a child. So heavy, so innocent. Dented from many destructions.

And the metaphor was like this: We are all such innocents. Some small intentionality sets the monstrous construction of self careening into, impinging upon the world around. What starts a small, a quiet, ends a heavy heavy handedness, all clumsy, all bashing and smashing; ultimately childlike, as innocent as accident.

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Then cleaning up at the shelter was great, accomplishing. Sara and I the only two to show. There was a small bottle of Chanel for men in the donations we sorted through. I stole it.

[I didn't really steal it, I was offered it, but stealing perfume from a homeless woman's shelter can make the list of personal atrocities like being given perfume from a homeless woman's shelter couldn't. Also on the list: urinating in the Duomo.]

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Don't think I've mentioned: Walt and I sharing the five most important books in our lives, re-reading our own and the other's. I'm on Julian now, by Gore Vidal. I'd forgotten how much I wanted to be this man, even when my actions tended more toward the perversion of eunuchs than the austere mortification of the man himself. I'm glad I changed from Myra Breckinridge. Also glad to have changed from Zorba to Updike's The Centaur. Looking forward to its re-read.

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Today: grandparents, studying for Monday's midterm, paper on concrete for Tuesday. I think I'll be writing on Tadao Ando, who makes empty concrete spaces of wabi*, spaces adorned with light. Joys, to be active.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi especially: Richard R. Powell: "It (wabi-sabi) nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."