oolonghi

3 artists for the new year

2012-01-05T12:46:00.002+01:00

In between applications, my super-secret freelance blogging and my day job, the internets gave me some christmas presents which I thought I should share:

http://www.gerardogomezart.com/

Psychedelic explosion maker

http://www.veronicacordovadelarosaportfolio.org/index.html

Contextual artist living between London and Mexico City. Succinct, relevant, poetic!

http://aleciobraga.tumblr.com/

#artista_visual #street_art #ilustrador

Kella Gates: Nectar de Verano

2011-11-06T14:39:00.004+01:00

Rendering of Lee Hazlewood´s classic Summer Wine in Spanish, with video cutups from classic soaps.

Brief introduction to the Movida

2011-11-06T14:16:00.008+01:00

The Movida was more than just women on the verge of a nervous break down, though there were many psychic germs.
Aviador Dro will have you washing your head...

Alaska currently has a reality show on MTV España...

Meanwhile, back in early 80´s, some were shut in their houses and just didn´t give a fuck about their decomposing bodies...

The English version of the wikipedia wrongly includes Mecano on their list of Movida artists...

But hey, it was happening in the 80´s! Anyways Mecano has its charms...

Which is not to say the Movida didn´t have a softer side
or run counter to more traditional forms of choreography

And a bonus track, from 2007...

Movida, Anniversary stamp

2011-11-06T14:08:00.002+01:00

Jet pack to your skull

2011-11-06T14:07:00.000+01:00

Priors: Prepped for life

2011-11-06T13:59:00.003+01:00

The school itself was composed of formidable brick and stone buildings which impressed upon students and parents alike a feeling of order and stability. This is tradition, tradition shall be the future, and the future of your young is assured. Chapel was obligatory twice a week, and meals and sports and bedtimes and all the other hallmarks of a well rounded and costly education were non-negotiable. Underneath the expensive oiled leather facade lurked all sorts of sordid flotsam: hazing rituals involving anal rapes and broomsticks, the first videotaped high school sex scandals, secret abortions, etc.

One boy who I later went out with briefly in college had been molested, sandwiched naked between two matresses held together with duct tape and tossed out a 3rd story window. Another student, son of a much loved, very kind professor, had died a few years back in an incident of autoerotic asphixiation. Violations were sometimes taped to share, before the word meme even existed. While the administration generally took a hard look at disciplinary infractions involving drugs or alcohol, those involving cruelty or hazing were ignored, especially if masterminded by students with important parents.

…

With the beginning of coeducation, another problem (apart from the floodgate of hormonal pressures) cropped up, unanticipated by the administration: the stench of industrial food, served in industrial proportions, being vomitted enmasse in the women’s bathrooms. The cafeteria served the same slop it had for years, and nearly all the girls quickly found themselves locked into mealtimes, with an unappetizing array of options: eat the large portion of fried meatballs and spaghetti served up with a terrifying plastic spoon, either gaining weight or vomiting it up. Or one could live off the paltry options available in the salad bar and go hungry. The third option was to avail oneself to the tastier yet equally unhealthy options off campus, either a small pizza place that allowed minors to purchase cigarettes from the machine as long as they ate (furthering the cycle of weight gain and vomiting) and a Puerto Rican joint which served fried things. Or, like my roommate, you could claim vegetarianism and live on a sparse regimen consisting entirely of diet soda, cereal and apples. In the first half of the year I gained a bit of weight and by February, none of my clothes fit. As soon as I realized I was gaining weight (because I split my favorite pair of pants before going out for walk one Sunday) I too began to subscribe to rice crispies and apples method, which unsurprisingly, was not particularly effective, and also left one prone to depression and anger brought on by hunger.

The girls, as such, undernourished, undersexed and over examined by the male population, began to claw at each-other: fights, theft, gossip, rumours and plots. The ambiance was generally toxic.

Ritual de lo habitual

2011-11-06T11:56:00.002+01:00

MILF

2011-11-06T11:54:00.002+01:00

Pachamama, Masked

2011-11-06T11:52:00.002+01:00

Switched On Virgins Dream of Electronic Butterflies

2011-11-06T11:50:00.002+01:00

Anima Sola

2011-11-06T11:32:00.003+01:00

2011, 18cm x 33cm

La princesa suspira: Uau Cisne Pavo! Que cola tienes!

2009-06-27T16:42:00.001+02:00

First tattoo convention in Cambrils!!!! Tarragona

2009-06-20T10:14:00.003+02:00

hey! This just in: the first tattoo convention in Cambrils, Tarragona, home to beautiful beaches, and only 3km from reus, landing spot for all those low-cost ryan air flights that say to "barcelona" but really go to "reus" will be taking place between the 7th and 9th of August. You can check out more information at http://www.cambrilstattooconvention.com/# .... it´s a great opportunity to take advantage of cheap tickets to reus, and enjoy a convention with some of the best artists in Spain, in a relaxing and beautiful environment!

ann shenton is my hero

2009-06-15T12:26:00.000+02:00

http://www.phinnweb.org/5HT/interviews/largenumber/

strange bird; strange soup

2009-06-07T13:50:00.003+02:00

wait to fly; so difficult

waiter, there is something wrong with my soup....

archival recording of the silent and kind- missing e-6

2009-06-01T13:53:00.003+02:00

Miss, en inglés, implica “perder” tanto como “echar de menos.” Esas imágenes, unas cuantas de mas que mil que saqué con una vieja camera manual durante el atardecer de la fotografía analógica mientras estuve viviendo en las afueras de Nagoya, Japón, son las que quedan, ni desaparecidas ni perdidas. Estuve lejos no sólo de lo que conocía tanto como lo que pensaba que conocí, y lo que pensaba que conocí de Japón, como muchos, imaginaba que llegaría a un país todo moderno y pulcro con la tradicional cuidadosamente expuesta en una vitrina minimal. Sacar esas fotos fue para mí acto contra la añoranza y soledad que sentí en ese momento, cogería la camera en mis ratos libres para sacar fotos no de los grandes espectáculos ni tropos japoneses ni la multitud, sino cierta realidad propia que retratara a ese ambiente pos-industrial tanto misterioso como acogedor. Con los años han convertido en un hilo que me conecta a aquella época de mi vida, precisamente, que me permite echar de menos de justamente lo que me extrañó cuando justo llegue allí: el silencio, el no-saber si un alimento fuese dulce o salado en el momento de comprarlo, la insularidad de la vida social, las fachadas apenas brindadas con ventanas, los cables de la luz como las venas de un robot bordando cada esquina del cielo, y los contrastes inquietos de una sociedad hecha de nuevo tras un crisis moderno de dimensiones inconcebibles en el occidente.

smoking vision

2009-06-01T05:58:00.004+02:00

Misspent youth archives

2009-05-20T13:05:00.002+02:00

synthetic siren

2009-05-16T00:08:00.005+02:00

why the recent obsession with mermaids?
they are unattainable, impossible and untameable.

it is impossible to be one. it is impossible to have one for as much as they represent untold sensuality, they are unfuckable, except following my mother´s old joke:

mermaid says to sailor: "please, fuck me, i don´t want to die a virgin." sailor takes mermaid, offers a few caresses, and leaves her on the sand, beyond the reaches of the tide.

"there you have it," he says "now your´re fucked."

the heart sees all./lloro por las ruinas de mi fracaso

2009-05-16T00:06:00.001+02:00

fragile heart is never broken

2009-05-16T00:04:00.003+02:00

fecund demons arrive the ides of march

2009-03-24T15:34:00.004+01:00

The queen of hearts is flanked by her suckling pigs:

perhaps the suckling pigs are indirectly related to this sprite

our continued contamination of oceans may lead to cloven hooved carp, other mutations:

some creatures defy containment

fallas, silence, falling, fires, brimstone, party

2009-03-16T03:31:00.002+01:00

fallas are a mock war disguised as a party. fried dough, alcohol, paella and drugs are consumed in quantity, streets are vomited upon, women parade around in 17th century dress, firecrackers ring constantly. groups mill. photos are taken. giant statues are erected on streetcorners, ritually burned the nineteenth of march for patron saint joseph, patron saint of carpenters (and thus the patron saint of jesus, mine own as well?) it is glorious when it is over! fallas es la guerra comedíca disfrazada de fiesta. masa frita, alcohol, paella y droga se consume en gran cantidad, la gente vomita en la calle, mujeres vestidas del siglo 17 desfilan, el ruido de los petardos llena el fondo. grupos pasan. se construyen estatuas enormes en las cruces de las calles, según costumbre, se las queman el 19 de marzo para honrar el San José, patrón de los carpinteros (entonces, sería el patrón de Jesús, lo mío también?)la gloria llega cuando se acaba kitsch, camp, gore and the restless will to destroy

bourbon, historia, el gran actor

2009-03-15T22:18:00.002+01:00

muere la prensa: a donde dirigimos nuestras palabras

2009-03-15T20:08:00.010+01:00

Cuando era pequeña, leía el periódico todos los domingos. Soñé con viajar por todo el mundo con mi camera viendo el gran espectáculo, escribiendo unas palabras bien educativos sobre lo que vi, acumulando una larga bibliografía que empezara con B, antes de jubilar en una casita en las montañas con un jardín de hierbas. En aquel entonces, no sabía que los libros y la prensa iban a morir. Quise hablar todas las lenguas del mundo para poder entender a lo que viera y escuchara. Aquel entonces fue marcado por un optimismo falso: había acabado el machismo salvo como sujeto intelectual de las feministas, la educación nos salvaría, y los mitos serían conquistados por la verdad. Estuvimos convencidos que para peor no podría ir la cosa. Luego llegó el momento actual estamos iguales, como siempre.

Como hoy es domingo, leo el gawker.
http://gawker.com/5170088/cause-of-death-determined-for-print-media
Y sí, las noticias nos llegan: La prensa ha muerto, y nadie sabe lo que hay más allá.

"En las próximas décadas, el periodismo será un campo compuesto y trabajado a base de casos especiales de fuentes y plataformas vinculados por la red. Muchos de estos modelos contarán con gente no profesional como investigadores y escritores. Muchos de estos modelos serán subvencionados por apoyo corporativo, becas, y donaciones en vez de ingresos. Muchos de estos modelos se respaldarán en el el apoyo de niños excitables de 14 años promociando y proporcionando la información. Muchos de estos modelos no tendrán éxito. Ningún experimento remplazará lo que estamos perdiendo ahora con la extinción de las noticias impresas en papel, pero a lo largo del tiempo, puede que esa colección de experimentos nos dé el periodismo que necesitamos"

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinkin

"For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need."

....

entonces, si te ganas la vida siendo observador profesional, preparase a fregar muchos platos....

Flickr ---Ataraxia

2009-03-15T19:01:00.002+01:00

some of the most interesting photos i´ve seen in ages....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ataraxia/

Apocalypse never

2009-03-15T18:44:00.006+01:00

Apocalypse Nearer than farther

2009-03-15T18:44:00.005+01:00

So like, the price of particpation in a bukkake party has dropped to 15 euros. less than a concert ticket, a bikini wax, a cocktail in new york... Almost enough to make you believe those mayan prophecies...

pd: the refering bog post is old, but i just saw an add looking for chicks.... like everything else in the flat economy, price is the same as in 2006...

Future mutants

2009-03-15T18:39:00.002+01:00

future mutants screaming in pastel:

future mutants surveying the aftermath of a car wreck:

future mutants contemplating their gender

dear xxx (2)

2009-03-06T22:42:00.002+01:00

Dear xxx,

I have been told crying causes dehydration. My investigations into the matter have proved inconclusive. Pneumonia may be caused by a broken heart, and can indeed be fatal, lest we forget that life is always fatal.

One misplaced drop of water falling upon the water surface into a row of cups placed side-by-side can overflow the set.

“Pain is a flower...”

Positive imagery dedicates itself to sale, negative imagery to detraction, charity or fear, and the enigmatic to the sale of itself.

The purple/blue flowers of the Jacaranda fall in a carpet and are replaced by spiky stinging seed pods.

Which suffering engages me most? My own, not for lack of other suffering, simply because of its proximity to me. Subjectivity is possibly the only concept I can honestly celebrate. Sometimes washing dishes takes on a metaphysical ahistoricity, sometimes it doesn't. I wait. I sweep. Which suffering engages "us" most? There begins artistic genre.

The things I love most are tenebrous and I live in memory more than I live in the world of the living.

Alone is not alone until the world stops making noise, but it may be very lonely. As many wide lives may be netted in the catch as press attention.

regards

more dolls, with nipples!

2009-03-06T22:37:00.001+01:00

about where i live and why i live here (epistolary)

2009-03-06T22:33:00.001+01:00

dear xxx,
I ended up in Spain because I’ve been alien since birth; because I took where the sidewalk ends all to literally, and because living outside one’s native environment is essential for the aesthetic creation of one’s natural environment.

Because I live on sun, fruit, vegetables, wine, olive oil, the occasional rabbit and I refuse to drive a car, I don’t enjoy living in a shoebox; there are few places in the world where one can maintain that kind of lifestyle on a limited budget and Valencia is one of them.

Generalizing, we can say that Spanish people (and adding to the mix, in no particular order: italians, latin americans of every variety, africans, romanians, bulgarians, polish, germans, brits, chinese, japanese, and just about everyone you can think of) are loud, relaxed, dramatic, careless, gossipy, live for the day and is capable of mounting the set in the street. not all, but the culture loves a good spectacle and classically exaggerated beauty. distractions, and plenty, some curvier than others. think rococo. think small shops that sell only buttons and thread and the grandmother behind the counter sharing her life with the regular customers. it is a great place to eavesdrop, as the standard for conversational intimacy is very low. unsolicited commentary, unsolicited information, catcalls and challenges.

Think camp. think big, aggressive weddings on sunday afternoons wherein the attendants listen to the soccer match on their cellphones between courses. think crumbling buildings and well-maintained palaces. think 400 years of european underdog, still in the aftermath of catholic dictatorship and not quite ready to let go of its former imperialist glory.

I find it frustrating, difficult, inspiring and stimulating to live here, this is the closest I’ve gotten to having fun, and I don’t play games and I haven’t yet figured out what it means to play. I enjoy dressing like a tropical bird and find myself in good company here, at least sartorially, and expressing myself and thinking in Spanish has helped my right brain find order.

Japan was also interesting to live in, but I missed the chatter and open of the west; I would love to go back, but not quite yet.

And I think tickets to India for privileged first world students should be included in their tuitions; flea-bitten and bloodstained pillows not included.

Graduate school should be thought about twice, and the benefits of going somewhere very far away and working at anything and everything you can are not to be underestimated. anything can serve as a background; apparently valueless labor in near criminal, squalid conditions often refines ones vision.

Don’t worry about writing new, the need for words is constant, and every generation has its modes, media and styles. they lend us those of prior generations to keep us from jumping off bridges before we are ready. we will one day be just as stodgy, grand, exasperating, inspiring, passé and overplayed to some ser-futuro as our bibliographical references are to us.

Soap & Skin

2009-03-06T03:46:00.004+01:00

lo más impresionante que he oído en todo el año!

www.piasrecordings.com,
www.soapandskin.com
www.myspace.com/soapandskin

Soap&Skin es Anja Plaschg, cantante y compositor austriaca de sólo dieciocho años. Está sorprendiendo oyentes por todo el mundo con primer fulllength, «Lovetune For Vacuum» (Pias/Shitkatapult), 13 canciones mezclando piano melódica, sutil distorsión electrónica y las oscilaciones entre susurro y grito de su voz. Muestra una sensibilidad plenamente madura, evocador e inquietante, que ya está atrayendo muchas compariciones con las grandes canta-diosas melancólicas como Catpower, Bjork, y Kate Bush.

Cuando llegó a la adolescencia, empezó a ensayar hasta doce horas diarios, tocando violín y piano. Con 16 años se marchó a Viena para estudiar con artista Daniel Richter en la Academia de Bellas Artes de Viena. Grabó y subió su primeras temas a Myspace en 2005, y el sello alemán Shitkatapult editó su canción «Mr. Gaunt PT 1000» como parte de una compilación.

Como punto de referencia adicional, ha de considerar el «steampunk,» un movimiento artístico que toma como sus ingredientes el romanticismo, el fetichismo de la estética victoriana, y los re-reflejos de un futuro retratado en la obra de tales autores como H.P. Lovecraft hecho ya el futuro, es decir, como una fusión impecable de lo más lo-fi, y «clásico» con un punto industrial y tecnológicamente dependiente para hacer el steampunk de la música. Post-Goth de otro planeta, uno mejor y más avanzado que este.

www.piasrecordings.com,
www.soapandskin.com

www.myspace.com/soapandskin

one shipwreck and one rocky boat: el sufrir, el otro, y el mar

2009-03-06T03:15:00.005+01:00

lo escribí pensando que serías la audiencia, pero tampoco quiero que lo leas y sientes ni responsable ni culpable ni implicado ni que me compadezcas. si he sobrevivido una vida básicamente aislada y marcada por incontables instancias de sentirse que el sufrir es tan constante y normal como cualquiera sensación a la que la gente da nombre, pues bueno, imagino que sobreviviré hasta que publique algo. por lo menos. más meritoso que tattooarte. tampoco me veo viviendo en una casa ni con armas ni vigas sobre la cual uno se puede colgar, porque me conozco.

pero no quiere decir que el sufrir, y especialmente el sufrir banal de estar entre mareos y vomitos y lagrimas por todo y nada a la vez, no duele, y duele aún más en la cultura en lo cual vivimos, en lo cual el sufrir es como ser mal oliente, si vas a sufrir, hazlo de la forma más bonito posible, hazte suicidegirl, hazte puta, hazte espectáculo, cuelgate de un gancho pero sácate una foto bonita, hazte fracaso vergonzoso para alejar tu sufrimiento de nuestra lucha hacía el placer del saber que está bien y no y bríndanos por lo menos con percibir tu fracaso o de forma estética o erótica o repugnante, o a veces, de todas formas, déjanos aprovechar de tu sufrimiento, pero por favor, el sufrimiento banal es un agobio.
divago un poco. bueno, te vuelvo a repetir, todo eso no tiene una relación directa contigo, sino que no me puedo aclarar ningún pensamiento o impulso cuando estoy así sin dirigirse hacia algo que no sea otro vacío. de allí viene muchas veces mis dificultades produciendo: produciendo sólo por mi, siento como estoy dirigiendo atención y energía hacia un vacío. por eso me puedo echar una paja. cada paja es un parche sobre un vacío.

si, un parche.
una serie de parches que tapan aperturas que dan a un pozo asombroso en su profundidad. no te parece interesante que la metáfora
mas constante en mi obra visual es el labor de retazos, el patchwork de la reconstrucción y cobertura: según: soy un misil buscador de calor: quiero mi manta como uno quiere un amante.

según: me resulta tan difícil acabar las cosas porque hay algunos agujeros, roturas, heridas, que no se se tapan, porque si se se tapan caen víctima a una infección subsecuente, ahogados. tapar lo que cura mejor dejado al aire no es higiénico. sin embargo el viento cansa la consciencia, lo lleva a velada, enfría, vuela, parpadea, se pierde en el viento, en tal caso la cura hace tanto daño como el mal cuido; lo más jodida, y lo más bondadosa de la soledad es sentirse parte de la consciencia común, el canal de gris de una multitud de posibilidades en cada momento, de sentirse desnudo frente a lo que es la ilusión del congreso cotidiano. la atracción de aislarse cuando uno sufre, perderse el ruido indiviso de la consciencia en esas posibilidades, disociarse se de uno mismo como medio de escape.

luego no sentirse encajar en ninguna posibilidad. simplemente la multitud, el no cumplir de encajar, de estar expuesta a cien por cien, a cien por hora, quema algunos. no es un ciclo particularmente bonito, su único beneficio estético es que pasa por lo general, aislado y que no lo tenemos que ver.

sin embargo
sin una audiencia especifica lo encuentro casi imposible pensar de una forma convincente y comunicable, ni a mi misma. si se cae el árbol en el bosque...
es que no se cae, o más bien, que la importancia de su caída es nulo en un mundo de caídas vistas y anotadas.

hasta las piedras pueden crecer con el tiempo, piensas en una piedra, o más bien una cosa no piedra con forma de piedra pero pegajosa,
entre la garganta y el corazón que pesa más con cada revelación sucesiva, los polvos se pegan; pesa más.
se esconde cuando no está en uso. se esconde tras el esfuerzo de hacer buen animo por discreción y respeto a aquel persona o personas presente.
la compañía sugiere a una conciencia más allá la consciencia común; la compartida, ha de hacer el espacio agradable. siempre. salvo cuando no se puede.
cuando se revela como consciencia no compartida, tanto como unida por la conveniencia o la casualidad.

etsy doubts, smok-a-phobia

2009-02-28T12:39:00.004+01:00

So, it seems my sale notices should read:

lovingly created in a gas-laden prison; or similar.

or

for the record, i smoke. however, for those of who aren´t going to apply your moral hysteria against me, i only sew in rubber gloves, and carefully fumigate my breath before packaging. however, please be advised that over the last two hundred years, my studio has been lived in by smokers, pets, homosexuals, termites, mice, bacteria and ghosts. when you punch the walls, your fist will definitely break, because under all the lead paint, there is a layer of brick doom.

or

not only do i smoke, i´ve probably slept with your boyfriend. in this very dress

la bribonzuela

2009-02-28T00:58:00.004+01:00

tiene dos caras/has two faces

bribonzuela, being of course a seeringly good and evil lass of open legs

Pulpi the Amputated octopus

2009-02-28T00:56:00.002+01:00

Pulpi, whose name is derived from the spanish "pulpo," is a three-legged octopus from the mutant future. Pulpi is 17 inches long, and about as big around, and its head is hand emroidered and drawn. Pieced together from rare and unusual scraps of silk, wool and polyester, Pulpi is filled with recycled rags, and has a sturdy yet agreable texture, making an ideal silent companion for nights spent reading by the fire, under the sea or just about anywhere.

The Konki Duet- last fm

2008-04-18T17:35:00.005+02:00

El Konki duet, compuesto por Kumi, Tam, and Zoe, es un trío franco-ruso-japonés, y se ve de su interpretación liberal de la palabra duet que son tan chistosas como son melancólicas. Mezclan guitarras, teclado, violín y percusión con elementos electrónicas. El resultado oscila melódicamente entre lo dulce-triste y lo dulce-cómico. Su debut Il Fait Tout son doce canciones cantadas en francés y japonés, respiradas con una tristeza pacifica y una alegría riot-girl. En su cadena de influencias se escucha sombras de Blonde Redhead, Animal Collective, música concreta, baladas, la música clásica y el pop de los años setenta japonés. Según su pagina web, también les gusta comer chocolate, beber champán, ver a la televisión y disfrutan del sexo con sus amigos.

personal page
embajada lilliput website

digging up the buried treasure

2008-04-15T17:14:00.002+02:00

You Mean You Don't Know? circa 2001....

Call it screamcore, Appalachia-no!, porno-pop, rock-a-bully– IN[outré]DIE sounds like the Wedding Present was a Promise Ring, or, more accurately, Granddaddy met the Danielson Family at a reunion for Los Desaparecidos. This genre-bending gang of four from Tuscaloosa skillfully melds earily [sic] screeching vocals with whisper-soft choirboy harmonies, the pounding beats of drum and bass with mournful fiddle dirges to create dense summerscapes. Their brilliant use of the Würlitzer on the track "Ego-Blossom" calls up to heaven’s pond, where Walden, perhaps this identity-exploring band’s precedent, sits lotus-style picking his toe lint. Spiky glock work is backed up by drummer Lila’s emotive yelp, and contrasted with a looped sample of a thousand lockers slamming shut, presumably with the song’s alienated heroine inside.

No, I didn’t lift this from my guilty morning coffee perusals of pitchforkmedia.com–though they expend nearly this much hyperbolic energy to describe bands that sound more like "Simon and Carbuncle coffee Klatching with Kurt" than anything as exciting as screamcore. And what is screamcore, you ask? My frustrated wail at the baseball-card mentality that indie seems to foist upon the average arty collegiate and shameless inability to untangle myself from it. Chamber-pop, slowcore, shoegazer, kindercore, IDM–there is a genre for every moment, mood, and type of kidskin tennis shoe, but that doesn’t change the fact that most of the music we listen to is well, pop. But it’s new and different–yeah, exactly–indie rock turns obscurity, quirk, and cleverness into social currency the same way Seventeen turns Britney’s recipe for tuna casserole into news.

I'm not saying that commercial music is good, or indie is bad; I’m saying the attitude of superiority that "indie" as a posture assumes assures that the music works much the same way that any other pop does, albeit on a smaller scale. It hawks a different set of values, but the goal of the average pinback purchaser isn’t really that different than the goal of a James Taylor greatest hits album. A lot of indie music adds disillusionment and alienation to the basic formulas of summer nights; youth; love; carefree; wistful road trips; and city loneliness, but barely tinkers with four-chord structure. How could it, what with my expectation of four fresh reviews every morning? Groundbreaking greatness just doesn’t occur as frequently as Magnet would have us believe.

Nothing wrong with four-chord structure there–I mean, we all need a stable ground from which to grow into grad students and copywriters. But is it really necessary to buy in, read reviews, chatter, and laugh at anybody who doesn’t know the complete oeuvre of Television, and bitch that somewhere in Middle America, Bjork, Radiohead, and The White Stripes are sharing CD-changer space with Linkin Biscuit and Limp Pork to maintain our self-respect as good glasses-wearing Dec readers? And if what we want is pop, do we have to discuss the musical subtlety of Tortoise and Autechre?

I’ll admit it smarted a bit when it was announced that The Faint was touring with No Doubt–I mean, their slippery-synth-kraftwerky mix had resulted in three broken lamps, a shattered mirror in my living room, and the death of my last wine glass. Then the caffeine kicked in. They make dance music. They should be popular–unless you think the appropriate place for dancing is in your cramped living room. Friends who don’t participate in the "scene," as one perpetrator refers to it, complain that conversations about music often amount to little more than strings of names and third-rate towns, with little appraisal given to sensual quality of the sounds themselves, or how you maniacally replayed the same tape from ninth grade until it snapped one day while you [insert important moment here] and your weeping forced you to admit how excessive your CD collection really is. If we really wanted music to be an intellectual endeavor, we’d be discussing the evolution from Wagner to Stockhausen, rather than "indie" and hoping no one calls us a hipster. Indie, instead of being about love of the art, is small talk which people take too seriously, as shown by this column. You want to know what’s really obscure? Classical music. Especially the more recent stuff.

Of course, it’s not nearly so easy to pretend you know all there is to know about composers and their influences as it is to pretend to know everything about Indie, because rock stars (even the ones from Chapel Hill) are cool enough to bother being interested in. They have corduroys that fit, and a band, which implies friends. Not that there’s anything wrong with liking pop; these skinny four track vegans provide a nicely (re)packaged image of social and artistic success for us to emulate, and assure us that even people with myopic vision are ok. Except the ones whose myopia extends to emo . . . which is bad. Composers, they do what they do in the dark, all alone–and so who’s celebrating their identity?

Last fm Blog

2008-03-31T18:52:00.005+02:00

Como parte de este proyecto, os dejo ver que música me inspira tanto que, así como dicen, lanzo a escribir algo. Hay mucha información solo disponible en una lengua u otra, especialmente en las bordes de la cultura, aunque obviamente no solo tenga valor valor dentro de su contexto cultural/lingüística. La maquina de transmisión cultural suele reservar el privilegio de ser traducido y emitido aquella información que es, por lo general, lo mas comercial o ya conocido. Aquí voy con las cartas en botellas, y por supuesto, la música internacional poca conocida en español, seguiré mas adelante,con la música del mundo hispano-hablante que también merece ser destacado.

carta abierta al chupa-sangre

2008-03-28T22:38:00.004+01:00

hubo la boda y luego hubo una chica emborrachándose al lado de los gritones. por la mañana el sol la pegaba como el sol suele hacer cuando una acaba de perder la memoria dentro de una botella de orujo.

se echó por el sofá, dormía, soñaba, seguía andando así como fuera despierta sin entrar en la consciencia compartida de los despiertos, los aseados:
atados a su orden, su desorden, su desgracia, pero, en su línea.

hay diálogos que mantiene a través de los sueños
así como fuera otro tipo de visitación.

la vida es mas larga, en que añade matices a lo vació y demasiada
corta, en que la cotidiana siempre gana como experiencia sobre la
alucinación, y los sueños.

hace calor, que sueñes con los perdidos.
regalos que llegan sin motivo ni
dirección de remitente.

soy débil con lo de escribir. no me gusta contar, porque me sobran detalles: antes de perderlo por completo:

el cuello de la búlgara, un palo delgado apoyando la cara de muñeca pescada del contenedor, ella en silencio, mientras chillaban todos los 80 niños desinteresados del bautizo, pidiendo coca cola en el nombre de dios, fumó entre la freidora y la pila de mármol, sus uñas agudas pintadas de negro, bajo un sol blanco y matador.

Bloodletting

2008-03-28T21:18:00.003+01:00

Podría ser
...puede describir la forma humana tan exactamente...

El puede describir una fruta con mucha precisión, y describe una figura con tanta precisión como describe la fruta.

Imagino que el texto es interesante.

carta abierta al chupa-sangre, 2

2008-03-27T22:07:00.014+01:00

hay que arrojar los momentos mas silenciosos de los mas ruidosos

la ventana atrapa toda la luz cuando la persiana esta bajada. podría quedar así siempre, podría yacer aquí en esta cama, sigo aquí yaciendo en esa cama si me cierro los ojos en otra cama con otra persona

no habían detalles en su piso, aparte de la arquitectura, entonces es muy facil accordarlo: entrar, una sala pequeña brindada por un espejo grande, en frente, las puertas del balcon, una sala amueblada con una silla, una mesa, un cenicero cuadrado de metal, dos puertas de cristal a la habitación que contenía una cama, una estanteria y una paleta pintada de blanco con numeros indeciphrables dirigiendo una persona desconocida a un lugar desconocido en otra finca que no es donde esta colgada de momento.

uneven

2008-03-27T18:54:00.003+01:00

Checkers is played on a board with red and black squares, closer to the red of tomatoes than the purple of cherries. It is not an
interesting game, it moves in lines

....

absolutely beautiful the letter

to let you know that I always feel a bit like reality cracks open a bit at the seams every now and then

¿no?

A young Scottish yoga professor’s Buddhist name is sudaka, which is homonym for sudaca, extremely offensive slur for South American. The flier is purple.

I want the experience of you more than I want the experience of writing you.

I’ve started wearing makeup.

met with the lawyer about the “house of the falling balcony”, wearing the strange punk cheerleader dress with two count two pairs of tights, black with cocoa fishnet, red sunglasses lipstick and went to sit in a turquoise and orange bar

the sun was out and it was raining,

The chemically extruded aioli glimmered under the fluorescent bulb of the vitrina, and the peppers to left looked as though they had been cut with a saw by the dueñas grandfather who vacantly preoccupied himself around the room.

You can tell that I’m hungry and want to take off the stockings.

Varicose veins still jumping out of my flesh, stockings still responsible for an agenda full of subtly disguised men´s names.

I wish this were typewriter, I might enjoy hearing the big key go clack at the end of a row.

When I hear myself typing sometimes I expect to turn to spot my mother looking up scratching her head and taking a drag off a cigarette while she pauses to comment. The beige nubbed cushion on the wooden chair. The blinds, and the absence of sound. The feng shui of the desk always struck me as wrong. Facing the window, if there was a window, which in most American homes one’s back is always to the door, if one is facing the window. Having his back to the door has always made my father very nervous.

My skirt looks like a Christmas tree crossed with a very cheap Venetian lamp. Marie Antoinette is in. Its all greasers and skins these days.

Unchanged. I found myself watching youtube videos on pinup hair: in part because I found them bizarre- who makes this, and why and of course, it’s audience. No, because, my lost inner child, who still conceives of sexual attraction as an external phenomenon, could not have imagined such a simulacrum for friendship. Here, now, in your home, a pretty british girl showing how to wrap neatly sectioned hair around foam, and hold it all in with bobby pins. it sucked me in.

…

Although my mother is not against staring at a wall, as long as it moves.

My mother
In my memory has dirty folded up crossword puzzles in her purse in case she gets bored.
sometimes knitting, and always several crumpled tissues.

para casandra dixit excerpt

2008-03-27T18:51:00.004+01:00

i am weak writing. I don´t like to tell stories, because there are too many details: before I lose it all:

that girl´s neck: a slim stick supporting a doll-face fished out of a dumpster. She was silent as the baptism´s 80 disinterested children screeched and asked for coca-cola in the name of god, she smoked between the deep-fryer and the ancient marble sink, sharp black-painted nails beneath sunlight white and fatal.

satvic

2008-03-27T16:48:00.004+01:00

excerpt from an earlier entry, translated:

Cuando pienso en el acto de comer carne, pienso en abrir la puerta una mañana fría, sóla aun en la presencia de un amante, y me encuentro con un pájaro muerto en el escalón. No quiero ni tocarlo ni moverlo porque el amor nunca quiere acercarse a la muerte, ni tan cerca como pasar el rato atrapado en el ascensor con un perro y tres días de alimentarse solo de ajo, sin bañar, porque todavía no ha pasado ningún día sin lluvia para tender las toallas y el piso es como un baño de humo y hongos, y te acostumbras.

Pero en el ascensor o por el asfalto, no hay tiempo para acostumbrarse, y entonces, os miráis, y eso es todo, los romanos y saber que hoy habrá sol y sí tuvieras hambre, podrías comer el pájaro y enfermarte como la gente en lugares pobres que tienen que comer los muertos que arrojan.

gothic design

2008-03-27T15:31:00.001+01:00

************************

In response to the question: is there a tantra of the masochistic experience?

Yes. It is found in the insomnia of the unloved.
The dark thoughts- those which say no, it hurts, I don’t accept- invade, dampening the fibers of the mind beyond recognition. They evade dissection, because they are unique and certain in their assertions, circling about like animals recently escaped from the zoo, many prepared to bite. They saturate the dreaming mind into wakeful-ness; leave it to silent watching, calmly resentful, protecting the peaceful sleeper. I give you my lack of grace. I rewrite my love letters.

My mind writes scripts for violent films shot in the half -light of nature in which the tears answer blood and bruises rather than silence or absence.

And yes, with no insult to modesty or chastity, it’s always sexual, in the same way that eating is always shitting, always participation in the yes of decomposition, touching you is always complete, always could end in any kind of surrender.
I would suffer for you: gets longer rather than shorter as the months pass.

It’s sexual because I feel you in my body even when you haven’t touched me for years, because I feel myself slowly accepting the rhythms of your breath with my body even in your absence. And in your presence I feel nothing but you, except for the moments in which I feel nothing but pain at your eternal absence. Not only sexual: metonymic, and maternal. My appreciation for the subtlety of your body, its warm completeness and beauty: the grace of being permitted to touch even your shoulder reverberates through my nerves as if you were touching me, building on the briefest yet most intense memories of physical dissolution, of feeling bone-less.

Please wake me up.

What the editor actually does:

2008-03-27T15:29:00.001+01:00

Sit in chair and fidget
Note things down on little sheets of paper like this
Pásamelos
No
Los pasamelos
Los caramelos
Which is the beginning of an idea for a cartoon about the pasamelos, a group of super-nena pin-dolls

Look at Pictures of people hanging off of hooks…

several weeks later write an email to snow railman asking if he´ll be at the south African tattoo convention and if she´ll send us a video or an article etc…
Respond to email
Consult dictionary
Find random artists around the world their email email addresses and write them friendly letters about their auto-promotion in our magazine in exchange for material.
Correct their English
Correct their Spanish sense of time
Find the email address of “willy” in argentina tattoo convention 2007
Write him and ask for the article urgently!
To which he replies great you´ll have it in a week
Switch languages again in word
Favorite brit popist lilly allen in last f.m.
Ask when exactly was it that they sent the disc because its still not here
Find images of small Mexican demons to determine what gender they are for pronoun usage
Consult dictionary
Draw octopus
Normally I work with five tabs open
Office email, office myspace, one page at the dictionary and one page open for viewing video/quickly reading articles/ Looking things up
Word 2 or 3 files at once, of which there are normally different versions of
I need to come up with a system…
With several different files, and even so, bad documents tend to get lost, and sometimes good ones. Computers are really confusing and magical beasts. And yes I admit to pulling the English of a five page interview with a 26 year old British girl who´s tattooed Kate Moss who´s recently been in the Guardian out of the recycling bin the day before printing because the designer resisted so long to instituting a final editing ---
Picking out errata like
Mith OConnel Mitch O Connel
Holt Hold
Cierne concierne
In two languages
And occasionally making Italian into Spanish
And reading sloppy French
Hence the constant consultaion of the dictionary
Anthropological discussions of tribal tattooing techniques etc.
Bedsynky Bedsinki

And sometimes Photoshop or viewer
Then one of them always crashes and I have to close them all and write things like this evaluating the current state of affairs…
Graciously, almost no one ever calls.
What´s strange is the isolation of it from the world, I just realized I don’t normally even realize when it gets dark…Just that I have to hurry and stand in line a long while if I want to buy groceries. In between this and classes I switch back and forth between languages all day long.

What do you do all day?

carta a admirador secreto translation

2008-03-27T15:22:00.004+01:00

in response to
a secret admirer

Knowing is easy
understanding is harder.
and who are you?
sociologically i view these things as positive, that´s to say, the same as putting ships in bottles.
leaving prayers in shinto temples in Japan etc.
and like any westerners of a certain post-consumist inclination,

we could say that we have more in common than many just because of the music we listen to,
and the aesthetic it supposes

we could say that it is unlikely a footballer is out there looking for the latest 12" put out by skintone; etc.

although i´m not looking for it either

i am obsessed with music, but always as a listener, as friend, girlfriend and sister; as a critic, i don´t know enough to comment, my personal world revolves around the visual realm, that of words
and the erotic

nice shoes.

and you?

prueba

2007-02-26T14:08:00.002+01:00

Good morning says the turtle. He says quietly taking off the shell. How to explain such a long gap and so much cold.
If life was a canyon, we would have fallen longer ago than our memories, but I don’t remember anything about that.

What shrines have we collecting and dissecting:
We have one drawing composed of four abstract pen lined sheets of paper sewn together tinted painted and adorned in every sense
In every technique possible at the same time
In a fiendish desire to make a story, to always look towards something finished. Sweet even.
A cell, open inside its walls.
Encapsulating, pain is a flower.
Like this one, and that one and that one.
But small, hole, and polished. Yes forget me, screaming towards rebirth.
How they come together:
There once was a ghost, half lion and half spider. He spun a web, I fell in. In a tower, in the corner. Along came the wind, witch, wicked and unsparing and swept it all away. Before it ever began, over and over again. On the beach. Morality and mortality. Nudity amongst the bathers, nipple colored glasses in the sand.
Nights of sleeping nothing in the golden light of streetlamps
And waking up once again, days later beneath a pessimistic swan, cloaked in cast off sails unsure of the year. As if every moment had been the same had always been the same for much time or rather every moment constituted its own static reality disjunct from its neighbors, just as your neighbor could be your constant companion, were you to whittle away a small hole in between the floors. A hole is far more intimate than a window. The gradual realization that one is an alien, that one, like everyone, is a complete stranger from every other, the more intense the realization, the more specialized the construction of windows and attempts, to export ones own personal little world to the world at large. Architects, for example, are not like the rest of us.

tejido / tejado

2007-02-26T14:06:00.000+01:00

pared/basura

2007-02-26T14:03:00.000+01:00

13 thoughts

2006-06-11T19:07:00.002+02:00

The house smells like burning, the first job of a housewife is not to burn the house down. I walk in and nothing is burning in my house. Today, mild success.

I still think of him in terms of termination, I think, take, I want him to leave himself permanently except for when I need to iron his shirts or wash his dishes, I want him to leave all his desperation in my body with a gesture of quietly explosive resignation so I can do something useful with it like make a baby, I want the table to always be in front of the window, I don't need to talk.

I feel this way because he no longer exists, perhaps never did, except in memory. Doesn't every woman want to give birth autonomously, to an invisible father, all-powerful but contained within the limits of untouchable reaches of the mind.

I think of him whether the window is open or closed, but I think of him with more intensity if there is a breeze floating across my skin.

Our washing machine is Italian, it is compact and always gets stuck mid-cycle. It has a metal basin with a plastic lock, all the wet clothes settle to one side and if any water stays, it sends a charge through all the clothes and you reach in and it electrifies your whole arm until you discharge by tremulously touching something metal which reaches to the ground.

The quietest moments must be dredged up from the loudest.

The window blocks all the light when the shutter is drawn. It could stay drawn for ever, I could lie in this bed forever, I am still lying in this bed if I shut my eyes in another bed with another person and that's it, there were no details in his apartment, apart from the architecture, so it is very easy to remember: Enter, ante room with floor-length window, floor-length mirror across, one chair one table one metal square ashtray, fleur-de-lis stone tile, two glass doors to the bedroom, which contained, a bed, a shelf, and one white block of wood with indecipherable numbers directing an unknown person to its position in an unknown building, which is not the building it is in now.

We sit on the bed, an indeterminate period away from sleep which is not still grasping the sensations of waking.

If you thought this was building towards a conclusion, you're wrong: I can say that the light comes through the window, that light is light the same way realtors think beige is beige, the light doesn't change but how it reflects does. I remember the same things every day in a different order, I enjoy feeling that reality just touches me lightly on the shoulder. It could ask me to dance if it wanted; but I just told it to sit down and do another line, I just told it that speaking was equivalent to not, possibly the unsaid is richer.

I don't hear voices from the salon in my bedroom, nor do I hear the door open into the apartment when I am seated in the salon. When people sing in French, I don't hear words because I don't know French. I hear singing. I hear the baby crying in my room, the people fucking upstairs in his room and the man snoring in his room and the children shouting across the courtyard in the salon. The overheard from the other apartments mandates a certain course of action in the apartment. In my room I cough and sleep and wake and it is always cool and dark and empty and preverbal; in his room we always have sex whether we continue reading or talking or doing whatever it is we were doing. In the kitchen I always think how I would like to stay and how the calendar on the wall is as dishonest as a tabloid because i am doing dishes and watching a pot of something simmering and this activity is without time, and in the salon I am waiting for someone to come home and make noise again, because the quiet is so pregnant.

I want desire without expectation but this is impossible.

sweeping

2006-06-11T18:56:00.000+02:00

for those of you learning romance languages: in the case of a compound word composed of two nouns, the gender follows that of the first noun, becasue the second is considered to be a modifier of the first simultaneous with its role of noun.
so like, el sofa-cama, or la mesa-arbol, or el arbol-mesa...

the next question for this is when you have a compound which is spondeic both in form, and metaphorically- like for example, blue-green,or arbol-mesa, what do you call it?

what does it matter?
why does this seem to me me to be of trancendental importance and amusement at three in the morning?

why can´t i sleep when i want to. i come home at five or six this weekend, clean as a whistle, un drunk, and i run around the house for two hours clearing the table, hanging the wash, emptying ashtrays and sweeping
because i am too nervous to sleep
because my brow is permanently

I do know that the first peaches of the season here are beautiful to look at, pale, tiny as golfballs or Lolita tits, but they are mealy and over-sweet; nothing luscious or slippery or acidic, unlike mangoes.

If I knew French.

I also know that translating the gender of death from a romance language is a terrible affectation, and that gender is not so conceptual as we would like, making peach, for example, masculine, which makes for a society which allows for homosexuality.

The man in short shorts at the bar has his paisley shirt casually unbuttoned, the fat around his knees is like a woman's, but not any woman's, most likely, it is very similar to the fat around his mother's knees. In same way I have my father's legs and wouldn't fall off a horse and could carry big baskets of potatoes. In this way our bodies are both witness to and bearer of histories which pertain to us but are not ours.

I spend the last week without company, without work. The lack of continuity amazes me, sometimes washing dishes takes on a metaphysical ahistoricity, sometimes it doesn't. I drink coffee and it puts me to sleep, I nap with all the windows open in the apartment between the two courtyard which allows the sound to bounce in and out until I wake, convinced that someone has opened our door and is about to catch me sleeping. I steep cherries in lavender and cardomom, gratuitously perfect and yet I still want to smoke.

I wait. I sweep.

I still want to smoke even though my throat hurts and my breath tells me I smoke too much and I cough and I want the time to pass faster or slower but please, less like water and more like scaffolding or wood or fabric, or something with its own form which is immutable and impenetrable, something masculine, paternal and foreboding. But it soesn't pass like that it remains, open soft flexible and warm, slowly suffocating, incomprehensible.

lost grafiti

2006-03-31T04:45:00.001+02:00

pockets

2006-03-26T19:57:00.000+02:00

wow. nothing pushes the permanent liquid stomach button like the loss of money and dehli food. so i am becoming a friend to the attendents of the ladies', for a few rupees each deposit they push wads of toilet paper in my hands after i wash them, and don't curse me.

the door has a card queen on it, for women. you could say the queen on a deck of cards, as its traditionally drawn, is almost wearing a hijab. why do we call them hijabs, instead of say, wimples? right. because we forget that constant head cover only passed about seventy years ago. these ladies are friendlier and cleaner than those who greeted me in arrivals 2 months ago, or maybe we are just becoming more familiar with eachother. one of them is absolutely beautiful, the other is typically older and roly poly, and atypically spotted with that depigmentation disease, leaving her arms mottled and her paunch the same color as my mountain blonde grandmother's. she is readjusting her sari one of the times i go in; i have several, and the petticoat, and the choli, but noone has shown me how to put one on, so i stand there transfixed as she tucks and folds and shakes and tucks. another woman exits the latrine and rearranges her sari in front of the mirror, working right to left to lift the fold from the middle and into the security of the petticoat, in a process which herhaps most closely resembles the way that japanese schoolgirls fold and tuck their uniform skirts into micro minis and hide the excess beneath their oversized sailor midi blouses. a stewardess for india airlines asks me almost confrontationally, why i am watching, and i explain, perhaps over enthusiatically, that i have some saris but that i haven't the faintest idea how to wear them, and i had tried to arrange them several times and found myself tangled in all six meters of silk etc, and unlike in japan, i don't have the luxury of someone's mother wrapping me tight into a kimono, because here i'm a tourist, not a potential bride, and she dutifully translated, perhaps not convinced that i was just not staring because i was impolite.

i am trying not to eat because this pushes the button. i am trying to to think of more than one thing at once because if i do i start to cry, but if i don't i feel that, there is something to be said for the fact that india maintains an airport that has a restaurant where one can smoke, a, dubiously gracious, and has jovial military officers asking me why i am not married and saying : i am weapons expert, or india very cheap, or what do you do, and well they listened and gave me a cup of chai in the morning afternoon, and then i ahd a very strange encounter with some isrealis. admitting that you are jewish and have visited other countries and have no intention of visiting isreal anytime soon, even to nihilistic dudes smoking across the subcontinent with tanga style pants hanging out of designer jeans is akin to admitting to a middle aged indian man that you have been travelling around india with a friend, who is gendered. but not like that it all; the first produces bafflement, tinged with relief that at least you weren't born to parents so daft as to let you travel alone, and the second, cynically resentful disapointment. people in india mistake me for isreali almost as much as they mistake me for german or french. the isrealis extracted a ten minute life story from me very quickly, we were in the sun. they asked me to teach them words in english they didn't know. i taught them sagacious cacauphony and arid. and i explained that by dint of the fact that the man who had just proposed to me, again, who i am loathe to call my boyfriend, even though i love him and i see the neat apartment with the lines of straw and the records and the beautiful lanky black haired children falling into the openlegged piles on the floor, i don't necessarily see myself in the picture, decided to go home suddenly because his father is dying of cancer so in my rush to get out of india i hadn't remebered to acount for the absurdity of military time and the flight i thought was leaving at 2 in the afternoon actually had left in the morning, and here i am, jobless, homeless, boyfriends on three different continents and out 800 bucks. i keep on glancing back at all the my suitcases piled on the cart, thinking about how nice it would be to quit smoking but that the beyond the smoke, that would mean giving up the potential for confessionals outside of airports and on train platforms

the airport is all blue and yellow and beige, like airports, like if you added all the colors together and then scraped away the solidity you would have something resembling a sky. the asian stewardesses are so glamorous and vanaguard, like in the fifties, with tarted up representations of their national costumes in suit form to remind the men what they are really working for, like sorority sisters, but traveling! ahem gasp! with jobs. i am pushing my cart back and forth back and forth. taking up temporary residence in permanent day time waiting room. never any real windows in airports. because they are really after all, permanant military installations, with , everyone is herded prodded, reminded of the possibility of trouble, of order, all the lights dissapearing into lines of bluish gold, all the lines and stamps and no hint of air. like you are already on the ship. in the barracks. with rations at regular hours.

time is a man with many arms. the blue and white wall has the world drawn in clouds with five clocks.
the restaurant has blinking christmas lights, just like the lower east side indian joints with competing brothers and middling sauces.

i don't know if i lost my appetite because of the loss of 800 dollars to alitalia, or because i simply can't eat, with the same usual force that simply can't not eat or.

love and thinking of studying japanese. confusion is on the outside as much as in.

little blocks

2006-02-09T06:28:00.001+01:00

1.yosei bought a harmonica from a toyshop owner who broke into song during the purchasing, we frequently lament the lack of the md recorder. india is never quiet, not at night, maybe during the hot part of the afternoon it could be but the music is always through windows and the neighbors children are crying and the the whole family comes back from snacks piled on the same scooter like little rubber balls in a row. the coconut pile is always in the same place, the road is widened and the trees left in the middle, sand slipping over the roots. cow dung is first pressed into little balls left outside the temple to dry and then affixed to the trunk of a fat tree like toroiseshell to cure. light is stark and harsh; every place has its own strange sum of colors, here there is yellow brown, violet blue and gold, with flashes of pink, orange and poolbottom blue.

yendo

2006-01-10T15:19:00.000+01:00

it´s been raining the week entire. just wake up rain. sometimes it stops long enough to go to bar or to give you the mistaken idea that you can put your laundry on the roof but no the things i want to bring to india are all wet and soaked with acid rain and i´m not sure if i have the strength to find the one drycleaner in valencia that will take pity on me and just dry the clothes... and i want ot be comfortable leaving everything, which is little, but ... the only effort i can put towards leaving it is to do nothing and to find myself there on the plane tonight wishing i´d thought more specifically about what wanted to buy and pack and here i have the illusion of a life, some work, some friends, some clothes, some art projects, some tea, some boyfriends, some habits of going and coming access to the same shower consistently. and i am leaving it and no one really knows whether i will come back to it or if i can except that i at the very least know that i very much am leaving everything as it is the clothes in the house, the music with the friends, to hold my place. and on to the india! i go to the india!

little grey animal

2005-12-26T19:57:00.002+01:00

in shade under the sheet there was an elephant the size of an elephant but smaller, about the size of a dog, but very grey and smooth and moving as if out of cartilage in every direction, perhaps because one day i said that instead of stars, i see elephants when i fall, dancing. sometimes lights. sometimes a field of flowers.

this elephant is aquatic.

close the door on light already

2005-12-15T21:30:00.000+01:00

so there are many theories of the body. there is the statue, the monument the smooth exterior and the solid or hollow interior rooted there in the rock. the statue with the orifice of eternal slide, like in porn. the body of the mother young, bouyant and forgiving and made for nightgowns. the body of the mother old, only the arms still moving always with a purpose, and converting, everything, into piece of furniture.

then there is this image that i have of the bodies as a drinking glass made by some italian design company with little lacy holes cut out of the rim that render it slightly less than functional. pretty, until you curse its fragility, difficulty to clean and tendency to drip water everywhere and eventually its shattered and you replace it with a pint glass painted with a football helmet from a northern gas station that serves as faithfully as a labrador retriever. but this is not the body, it is a drinking glass.

the body like a drinking glass with holes: i just blew my nose and snotted all over fucking everything. sorry next set of grubby fingers that finds this computer! hope you wash your hands!

the body like a drinking glass with holes: my stomach is set to permanent liquify

the body like a drinking glass with holes: statistically, more strangers shake hands than fuck, so fucking is more intimate than shaking hands. except maybe in holland more strangers fuck than shake hands. how intimate is it if i keep thinking the entire time we are having sex like i am studying for an exam?

the body like a drinking glass with holes set to drain:
so he
says something about it being 115 and being back at 140
but i think i was in the shower at four and we were eating paella and drinking a bottle of rioja at five thirty talking about the mythology of the spanish heroin problem and what is now happening with cocaine and how the dying dictatorship used to let it all in through bilbao, to quell the radicals, and now there´s nothing because so many people died etc and then he went to practice and i walked toward home and thought about the things that i had not done today or yesterday like buy a black shirt and apron for catering tomorrow and wasn´t going to do because it was already late and bought a bar of almond cream candy, and walked for the next 2 3 hours. took my shot of coffee.
and now i am here

when i was walking. i was thinking of
memory. as a question of success or failure. in terms of loss
per usual
specificity of memories i have regarding food
neti pots
next.
i was sort of attempting to find the building where this apartment i was in once was, on the ground floor, lived in by an equally, if not more beautiful friend of edinburgo boy, with an equally, if not more beautiful siberian dog.

did not succeed with talking i can hear myself always making the same mistakes, ending verbs in between tenses so it can be neither here nor there, nodding when i misunderstand, and then being caught off guard when somebody actually stops to explain case in point:
special word for hotels in old monasteries.
comparing friends to types of fish.

exploding property values. how two years ago, if had arrived with twenty grand from japan, i couldda bought a beautiful three hundred year old apartment, with a relatively tiny mortgage, and
now well no.

there was a lanky spanish salary man who looked me up and down. one hand briefcase, the other hand joint, pants ever so slightly too short. we were walking together four blocks, in the border between neighborhoods. a rather long time to be together. he keeps looking at me, tosses the joint nervously and crosses paths with a boy of about fourteen, whom he paternally slaps on the back with the briefcase. still looking back at me.

yes maria, just picking jose up from school.

aisheteru wa because
i´m a girl i remember you telling me there was no way to say i love you in japanese.
and then learning that this was not the case frighteningly quickly

bars on my windows, bells on my

2005-11-18T19:32:00.000+01:00

-write a list of 500 thoughts you think today, do these make it? consigned, unsold?

the man in the garden apartment has bars on his windows,
and i can see him ironing to the television.
walking the dog, there is this tension that you encounter someone recently met.
the dog either plays soccer or shits.
also that the police will stop you for not having her on leash. and then they discover you don´t have your papers.
but if you take your papers, which you don´t quite have, right now, anyways, you risk loosing your papers, because you are out at night alone walking.
you run into someone every night in passing. they see you you see them.
barrio man slut looks for equivalent. you assume they remember talking to the person whom you were with. did they. the next day. ask for details. about you. you assume they did. you assume your face is relaxed and that they can smell the details. but they smoke. but you aren´t there now.
in the examined life it is necessary to not examine what is presented so much as what is present.
spend at least five minutes every day rythmically flipping the shaving mirror from magnify to accurate on its spindle because it is the only thing your life that remains fluid for free, and it allows to suppose that indeed you are shaped enough like an hourglass running out of time that you will be fine and one day richer if you skip dinner.
pink is gendered. as for salmon.
because i made a hat for her baby in salmon before the baby had its pieces together.
men have lips that are pink too.
in what ways is a thought a question.
i´m a dishwasher artist. really so nice to meet you. i´m a dishwasher engineer.
big plastic buttons on a woman with bleach blond hair and dark skin and three cellphones are worse than fake tits.
(you) exhaust me in your absence and my inability to adress you.
(you) does not signify a specific named thing
(you)exhaust me in your presence and my inability to adress you.
when you see someone eating from the container over the counter in the nude while you are reclining in the bed wishing for a more normal schedule, automatically add 15 pounds, in increments of five for all of the above mentioned ways you have been disillusioned.
the physical parts of you are only responsive to small things. person is not enough.
when i think of eating meat i think of opening the front door on a cold morning in hellish isolation with a lover and finding a dead bird and not wanting move it or touch it because love never wants to get too close to death, not even as close as being stuck in an elevator with a dog and three days of garlic eating and not washing because there has yet to be a day dry enough to hang the towels and the apartment is like steam bath of fungus, and you get used to it
but in the elevator or on the cement there isn´t time get used to it so you look at eachother and that´s it there´s nothing and the romans and knowing that this will be a sunny day and if you were hungry you could eat the bird and get sick like the people in poor places that must eat the dead that wash up.
but there are no places for dead birds not chicken or turkey, least of all on your front porch. i like the word augery. i like how it moves and how it feels in my mouth like an eyeball and that the only eyeballs i have eaten, those of fish, were hard and bitter and not all like i expected an eyeball to taste because i was thinking of what it would be like if i stuck my tongue in your eye, whether it would be buoyant and taut or slimy but i didn´t stick my tongue in your eye because i thought it might give you conjunctivitis and i try to be sensitive about things like that because i am always afflicted with minor discomfort and infections from lovers who try and probe various parts of my body with the wrong parts with no regard whatsover to basic cleanliness and that maybe this is political but i feel grateful that i did more than once end up with my tongue in your nose, with more medical danger to myself than to you i suppose. not the window to the soul that is the eye, but rare and precious and uncomfortable as a rooftop apartment without heat. in movies the couple never wakes up and walks out to argue and finds a dead bird. but in movies they dont wear seatbelts and their legs don´t fall asleep or get constipated in long roadtrips across the country. they never have lint in their asses from corduroy pants. we don´t want anything dead to threatan us. we shower to wash off the invisible bugs that we support like barons and exchange like islands in dubai. i never feel clean if we shower together because....

las pilas

2005-11-17T19:10:00.000+01:00

like i said. We trade bugs. Not that i ever feel clean in the shower because when something is wet and the drain is clogged and there´s a little bit of something left from the dish rag there on the tile, it becomes dirty once again for being wet. Would that the tile were white, but instead it´s marked with a forest of colors. Clean is absent. Wet is
what. Vector of disease. Flexibility. Something to be consumed because it fills without identity, with ease. Fabric is a flat solid which has been made to resemble a liquid through a process of miming the physical notion of an interlocking network collapsing. Women, we prefer dressed in the most liquid of fibers, as if there were no line between their own fluidity and that of the cover protecting them from nudity. We want them to dress in something that threatens to evaporate at the right temperature. Young women anyways.
I made a dress once for a boy that was like that, all ocean, or really, because i am not so pure, like the rainbow on top of a puddle after a rainstorm, dyed the silk and cut the dress and it falls off when you pull the knot like a drop of water and it has a few lines like waves to keep me floating.

blue shirt

2005-11-12T21:15:00.000+01:00

here is it possible to sit nude as if you were dressed. soaking in warmth and illusion. escape may be one of the most common mistakes made by foreign speakers of english. always, we saw him and we tried to escape the bar. absinthe. speed hash wine drawing. walking. passing. emotional fantasy transfigured into a relaxation so complete as to signify loss of control, and a fall. no light. slipping out of light. with a crash. coming to thinking first you are burning, ten seconds of horrified sobriety and gratitude for not wearing makeup, because if you were it would surely by now have fallen into tracks. and then the realization that. giving. take leave. have taken leave of ones outlines for existense a volume that is all color. all sense. all sound withrawn from structure. light like amber. light like open. this is now, it kills me.

skip rearrange recline one second of looking from above. and confusion over whether the pain is from having seen your self there without . in cold . the sound subsides scale resumes. in falling, you of course have realized some state somewhat blissful rubbing away the sharpness of the line between waking and sleeping, snatching a thought from sleep to put it back in the world of the waking (because this is really what it is we resent most about sleep: we are unaware of any contiguity of this time, we cannot construct a narrative of our dream lives, things are seen, and what surfaces to be remembered is completely without context to attach it to in its own language, and for this it remains cypher and uncountable. but i skipped this, see, there was moment of having arrived to the point of sleep and yet a limb through an open door into something else clinging to a rope with toes. this is how the prow of a ship feels.

location location location

2005-10-18T23:00:00.002+02:00

i´m in valencia, after four airports and three countries. the germans were the quietest airplane mates ever

flyer. isn't my mountain gorilla cute?

2005-10-12T06:04:00.000+02:00

some older sewing things

2005-10-10T22:16:00.002+02:00

across street

2005-10-09T03:34:00.000+02:00

japanese dog next door

2005-10-07T03:38:00.000+02:00

oh the flat blottom!

2005-10-06T03:35:00.000+02:00

nag shi ti sub way

2005-10-05T00:41:00.000+02:00

on the subject of bedtme stories and mixed drinks for the untranquil

2005-09-25T08:01:00.000+02:00

in transit who prefer to walk in circles . hurts the hind, fuzzy quarters falling from behind industrial boxes, of floating up through careers, the airplane goes in . glasses falling off in the schedule. if it's not right
send it away book mail

more about dogs

2005-09-14T17:24:00.001+02:00

the variation amongst humans could be as wide as the variation amongst dogs.
full grown adults could range in size from five pounds to three hundred, or ten to six hundred, with the bulk of this difference being a function of bone mass rather than fat or muscle and reproduce something falling unnatractively and perhaps uncomfortably in the middle of those two diverse physiognamies. ears could stretch from one inch to six, a particularly large partner might be able to fit the whole of their beloved in their mouth, provided they were gentle with their teeth. it would be impossible not to trip over people you dislike.

certified severance

2005-09-08T05:56:00.000+02:00

we thought we would name the dog long and dignified, as if by naming it after a baron years before deified in memory to the status of an apparition, it would come running when it was called in parks. we later shortened it to chico, because a dog bearing nine genderless names is a hazardous mouthful after seven if unleashed. bushes, grasses other. benches, it would sniff at the ledges of seat legs like an adolescent in a train station on his first leave from an exclusive boarding school. we should have known we found it mouth on mouse coming out from under the degrading foundation of a building that once had housed innumerable corseted sloths.

sea change

2005-08-20T06:47:00.000+02:00

better than glass house

2005-08-18T06:31:00.000+02:00

there is a grad student at MIT making herself wooden mattress.

i would like a bed of sand

sad sappy sweet hog fiddle

2005-08-18T05:23:00.000+02:00

not to date things specifically. i am the woman in the white rags and petticoats, soaked till beige with salt and waves foaming up my shins. sand. timeless like an engagement ring. wake up in convenience store, lots of frogs, cast in ceramic. plastic glass. border emporium, a special sign reminding the ladies to always keep the rest door closed. fishing lines. peanuts. their inventory list may teach someone to read without grammar. slam down youth on a slab, syrup it and pick the savory up with chopsticks. i am, two, tired silent sleepless shudders for hours fast inches away from revolving possible junkyard. granules shaking in between ears. born aged . if the median of the highway where the authorized vehicles only wait were the bay, all the mirrors and hubcaps would be my jewelery and i would never stop measuring distance over time, spitting out numbers with abreviation behind.

mind still in gutter

2005-08-17T03:14:00.000+02:00

-that boy looks like he gonna be ridden till the last stop on the train.
-new hair style: half pomp, and the tail of a fauhawk . halfpipe it is. let me get on my skateboard and slide the short skirt across your head.

men with crossed arms need to stop standing around.

ill lain

2005-08-15T18:42:00.000+02:00

down late eating airless swoln shut windows, unsleeping.
blisterfuct
new word. paint, blisterfuct on the exterior of the house.
the girl, her face blisterfuct with tears, plucked petals from a funereal daisy.
in health class today, we saw a vhs tape with many blisterfuct sexual organs. the possibilities of insomnia are endless.

open wide

2005-08-10T00:39:00.000+02:00

3 am. pregnant wife waiting.

2005-08-10T00:37:00.000+02:00

nameless suburb

2005-08-05T07:31:00.000+02:00

o ha! caw

2005-08-02T23:57:00.000+02:00

is cemetary. slugs reach out for nutrient rich plants, eat them, shit them and decompose. we grow grass over their graves, build houses over mass burial mounds. what is the ratio of dead bug to dead human. in dirt. also, when was the first syringe invented. did the techniques come from jewelry making. needle industrialism. clock craft. bypass the filter, liquify your subjectivity, and shoot up some pennicilin today! little bumps come up from current lack of uninjected time. i have not stooped imagining hand towels as colonial castles when they are crumpled on the floor.

hear is my handle, hear is my spout

2005-07-28T05:48:00.000+02:00

the heat doesn't get to me, it just makes for slower and crazier. eyelid twitches, ramadan eating hours, liquid consumption increased. yesterday . montana. we were to conquer the west. the bag has a printed sphinx next to the camel under the steamboat and the flamenco dancer. gloss your glass with the linen world. buffed sailors have nothing on island farers, beehive dwellers and salt pillar bus stops. fuct whit men with top knots. if you put a man in a box with disolvable peanuts, he would stoop breath before being dropped but i am not sure. oranges from australia are one nine tee nine a pound. assuming growth costs next to nothing, subtracting profit, i should be able to fly to asutralia for ___?$ with ground transport to an inland city, hairspray and water. also lodging until gestation. europe should be cheaper. i want pay by the pound plane tickets.

dish towel

2005-07-27T05:24:00.000+02:00

hymn a raya. him all ya . we drive to the mountains and drop the man out the back rolling the carpet rocks slide frictionless through chicory. in the heat wave i sleep walk to the white slat closet open and the door and crash hatboxes stacked higher than i can can see. but you knew my line of sight was low. slight, eyes like bed sheets soaked in the rain from an open ledger. red lines, green letters. led better backwards. loosing race to mars turns other cheek.

lawn and order

2005-07-20T05:13:00.000+02:00

are all about lines and the space race. we win . but then we have to explain the little yellow signs by saying don't eat the grass and miming death. please leave your cigarette butts in the street. i two three. so much. so very. so big. so so.

blue+red

2005-07-20T05:06:00.000+02:00

make purple. pansies, queens, shrinking violets. cheap star contact lens. sometimes someone will say they've been atop the mountain to look for good god through the smoke and gauze skirts. they don't have much to say about, exactly, peace festival in aspen, japan. except for that wondered if god was their and no now he's here or where or
god is anywhere. because i am young and everyone says i look girl and now you. and thankyou and goodnight.

this will be as hard as i thought it would and not any softer .

street fare

2005-07-18T18:09:00.000+02:00

flesh in this country works in collusion with other flesh, not the body of the bearer. geometry is new, barely held by stretch fabric, exhibitionistic, so sexually agressive that it ceases to be about the heat. or the humidity. not so sexy though, except for the occasional accidental lolita, or teenage couple. americans really have mastered the art of being fully exposed and remarkably unerotic. kids huddle, women push strollers eating fried dough, bottoms half mooning out of denim shorts, men round and bouyant. one has small clasp buried in his bellybutton for inflation. in the event of a water-landing, use your fellow passenger as flotation device. everybody seems to have on more highly ornamental underwear than clothing, skin tones complemented. empire waist tube top smocks are popular, everybody, everybody, it seems is thinking about pregnancy this year, what with the war and the impending sense of population slice. the glory of the festival is food rather than drink. no one is drinking anything but sugar water. the people are all saying eat me before i eat you, etc.

opening

2005-07-17T02:16:00.001+02:00

oolong hi is highly refined japanese moonshine mixed in equal parts with low grade dark oolong tea, typically of the pet-bottled variety. iced. a delicious travesty of both good liquor and promise proffered by oolong. but very drinkable. somehow metonomic. japan, velvet rut usa, both very drinkable, dericious even, accent on the r, but both, somehow, wasteful, riddled with holes and bottled in plastic. i meant to set up this blog a year ago to record some of the things i was emailing home from japan, but when i was there it refused to let me set it up in english. i plan on taking off sooner or later again. the middle tends towards the middle, except that now we're in the middle school pop-bottle experiment about emulsion, all being shaken.

oil and kool-aid lava-lamp. if i were better at working days than nights, i would probably go i love my sewing machine. and i'm still trying to figure out if witnessing is enough, if, as i suspect, that the most ethical path for some of us comes from a politics of the everyday and has as much to do with sightedness and not being an asshole as anything else. and voting.

why blog it? who doesn't want their diary published given that by some standards, the success of people in the arts is measured by our public access to their documents, their sketchbooks, matchbooks and the like.

funny how many consonant "l" words refer to bodily functions or negative actions- slog, slurp, blab, blather, slap, sly, slip, slop, blow. so for a while this will be running both retroactively and forward, as i sort through the last year's worth of writing, and continue.

part of this is also motivated by an obsession with the degree to which real experience is now being mirrored, -meta-ed, metastasized by the web. i don't believe in airconditioning, prefer vinyl, skirts, bone over plastic as it were

but i still find myself looking up the names of people i know late at night to see where they are, if they're mentioned, where they work. also, random strings of keywords, to see whether i or people i know have in some way been recorded or connected- red head teahouse waitress corset. sylph like new wave poetry live arts. do i exist in the meta world, as if it mattered

cape cod trailer park architecture school buddhist meditation. sexual cypher male wednesday adams. french-kissing contest charlottesville. hookah bar bad service. cryogenic indie rocker. failed phd motorcycle enthusiast.

i know a man who waxes his mustache. it seems to me that, with everything there, these things should exist again. more complete. occasionally i just look up my name (cordelia) but apparently, buffy the vampire slayer has sabotaged my parent's desire for their daughter to bear a unique and culturally loaded name. i find a lot of fan-fic. at least i never find the nudie pics. that's good i guess.

london bridge is falling down, falling down...

2005-07-12T18:45:00.000+02:00

a slightly different type of apathy. from the one i had before i left. why i came back. why i will leave again. why that is growing more difficult

i'm waiting for martial law; hemlines have dropped, etc. the times printed a really awful editorial about how the visa-waiver program needs to go, because god forbid, a naturalized european citizen of middle-eastern descent might escape from his sleeper cell and enter the united states without going through a consular interview and dropping 300 bucks on going to the embassy.

xenophobia has reached a point here where nobody is really thinking or worrying about the london bombings except for preventing them here. there is this attitude that europe is finally loosing the crusades, so we should build a wall, because god forbid, the sanctity of our consumptive consumerism be threatened. all of the japanese middle class i met makes do without airconditioning or central heating. and they love to talk about the four seasons. they know how to bicycle in the rain! their is a special device for holding umbrellas mounted. they don't have ovens or dishwashers (okay, maybe that last bit has more to do with oddly shaped dishes and the lack of women's lib than any adaptation to a less materialistic lifestyle). and they will never tell you THEY are having a bad day. it's cute, they shop all the time, but they never buy anything larger than will fit in a medium sized shopping bag. women carry their lunches in the prettiest ones for work. not that i really want to carry my lunch in a victoria's secret bag, i see peaches bruising now. but.

maxim printed a 69 reasons to love your country for july. the first reason was cheap gas. the second was nice roads. I don't even drive! i hate roads. then naked chix (okay) and cars and lawns (number one consumer of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in the country, all you super holy only whole foodsers in the suv's in virginia). budweiser. really. yes, santa says this war is being fought for your right to fly down asphalt arteries in your malarial metallic mosquito shell, the bigger and more blood-sucking the better. that's to say, apparently both the people and the media might as well be sniffing glue, and propaganda machine in full force, even before the bombings.

i don't want to get started on guantanamo. or the wierd deportations. or the denial of visas to interfaith advocates for conferences- literally knights in shining armor, who happen to have the wrong last name. or the airplane abductions of suspected in the knows.

it's raining panties

2005-07-06T06:37:00.000+02:00

just because she a cyclone
don't mean you got a be a trailer park.
in reference to the electricity prank
that "i didn't recommend"

just say no!

i eat whale! and i still call myself a vegetarian

2005-05-03T07:14:00.000+02:00

i've been a vegetarian, more on than off, since high school, sometimes vegan by accident, and spent three weeks as a raw foodist an experiment- not anorexia, i swear-
the longest stint of strict vegetarianism was when i was in spain, and ended up eating what i realized must have been an entire rabbit in red red wine stew over the course of the day when it was left oh so appealing in the pot covered by a dish towel in the late summer heat.

i was hungry. i was bony. i had been eating meat again for maybe six months, in teaspoon sized doses, which is normally what i do when social pressures, raw liver, family holidays, abject self starvation, etc. force me to eat meat. and then i ate the rabbit. now, years later, i can look back with the infinite wisdom of my friend jenny, and see that that was the problem: i had eaten the rabbit.

all of the bites, maybe not even enough to form a rabbit, had coincided in my stomach to form a complete, pristine rabbit. with fur. which gave me gout (heatstroke? but i thought it was gout the same way i occasionally convince myself that i am pregnant through an immaculate act of god) the next day.

actually, the original thought works better with almonds. you eat lots of almonds. the almonds meet in your stomach. they form a giant perfect almond egg. one almond. even better, say you eat several marzipan almonds. they solidify into two regular sized almonds, one runty little almond and a teaspoon of sugar. imagine the icons on the food pyramid and you get the idea.

so, following this logic, so long as the quantity of meat i consume is small enough, pure enough, abstract enough to not solidify into a hatchling or microscopic cow, i am free to sample while travelling, visiting family, etc. sometimes. not now though, because

i ate the whale. a small bite. then the whale ate me. whale tastes smart. leathery. anxious sour as daddy. back in the fold now, i guess

sleep unsleep

2005-04-22T04:58:00.001+02:00

sleep unsleep

i walked into to the bank there, fifteen necessary stamps and addresses and ink. spilling every time pink form, blue form, not green form , fill them out be sent back, this uncapitalized, this backwards doesn't match. your own name is not the name owned by the bank. you own neither the money nor the name. hands refusing to reform. i hated the bank, women workers calves solidifying into their pumps like bloated daikon, sweater vests. everything dropping into vaults, held down by fluorescent tracks, lipstick red stamps and the eyeglassed manager sleeping with the bee behind desk three. shame what security cameras have done to banker romances.

the man had a baseball in his cheek or maybe a softball. eyes untouched by insanity, though his shirt was untucked. would have been suspect were it not for the fateful ornamentation. just hanging there, smooth and pendulous as an implanted breast, but heavier. tumors denser than silicon. the hollow of his cheek almost concave, except for the border where it sloped into a neatly contained sphere. the mouth opened as evenly as it could have, given the muscular asymmetry. no jowls, smooth skin, just. i had finished my business. walking home showering and lying back naked on straw floor waiting to dry hearing window shutters rattle calendars as cars drove by, imagining a day when even being dressed will offer no hiding

myth of the asian overachiever

2005-04-14T06:17:00.000+02:00

2.
today, my class of ten year old boys
i asked them what cars
they wanted to drive
when they grew up
two ferrari's and a truck
the truck driver is already fat
somehow, a crystal ferrari
became you have the
grand champion biggest crystal pica
pica no , english please, say
shiny, chinko, no english please, say
cock he has the grand champion
biggest shiniest crystal cock
who does? he does.
attention wanes, someone draws
yoko ono's ass with a string
of ice cream swirl shit
dropping down ko re wa na n de su ka?
english please what is this
this. what is big- kid points
to the the drawing. i say
magnificent defecation
i te mi te say after me
this is ma g ni fi ce n t de fe ca shun
he has magnificent...

work/impact

2005-03-17T02:44:00.000+01:00

japan and america are very similar in that their insistense on propriety and fear of relaxation is generated by shame over the speed and methods through which they have become modern.

i like going to the public bath alot. it's nice to see so many old flawed bodies with circular cupping marks on their back walking around naked in such a natural way.
also, i don't have to talk to anyone.

i think one of the major conflicts in my life stems from the fact that ultimately, i probably should have been a dancer that is, i feel like my body should be responsible for my income, which is why dealing with japanese housewives after a fourty minute 9 oclock in the morning drive is not good for me

being a walking courier would probably work. which is i suppose, what waiting tables involves.

my snot is yellow. some of my students say yellow is their favorite color. i don't know how anyone can name as their favorite color the color of bodily fluids in a state of disease.

i teach some doctors at a hospital. the neurosurgeon, as expected, is the most aarogant, and properly spouts the party line about japan's general superiority...

people rage about american nationalism, but when i travel, i'm always struck by the fact that other people, ordinary people whom one would expect to have a much higher degree of skepticism are almost invariably far more connected to, supportive of and generally in tune with their national identity... whereas most of the americans i know tend to be at least a little apologetic, if not utterly ashamed and disconnected. of course, it could just be the americans i know. but the doctors man, they kill me. and they treat the one young female doctor in the class as if she were a nurse, poor thing. japan is the most deliciously delicious circumspect enjoyable country in the world.

everybody is taught the word delicious here, because the way one says food is good uses a food specific word, o i shi, and it's impossible to convince people that english speakers do not run around saying dericious when they take every bite... it's also difficult to convince them that people say please and thankyou constantly, and tip.

i start a class of two year olds in a two weeks.
yosei had a dream last night that i left him for julie delpy. really.

i don't want to change the kerosene in my heater, though i suppose it would make taking a shower far more pleasureable

open letter

2005-01-06T02:04:00.002+01:00

I graduated feeling like i'd studied the wrong things; reading derrida and baudrillard at 17 maybe a little... yeah... basically, at some point, i discovered the secret to keeping myself sane was not recording things through writing them down, but dealing with them visually.