Thursday, August 21, 2008
i promise to catch up on emails and read others’ writings! i will do that this week, as well as view nandalal bose and buckminster fuller exhibitions. (looking for true love in vector equilibria.)
i’m glad to have found a nine year-old boy who occasionally pens his 8’s as A’s, because i still trip over 5 and F (5ive or $f seem perfectly correct to me). also, he confuses “damn it” with “damage,” and that makes me smile, because for the longest time i misheard “catch up” as “ketchup” and thought it was an idiom particular to american playgrounds.
i guess this is related: weird to realize that in a conversation, the words’ tangible forms and their meanings don’t carry each other as you’d expect. it’s actually difficult to trust the ideas spoken when the texture of the speaking voice tells its own story. for example, listening to a brooklyn local ramble about las vegas — his voice tasted salty and sourly strange, a dark umber heavily glazed over sienna-saturated greens. i felt my way around his words and woke up by an unfamiliar sea. from damp seaweed to blackish weeds in a darkish garden, i followed his unspoken narration. (while simultaneously smiling and nodding and gaping stupidly in silence with no idea of what to say)
right afterwards i wondered why fever trees suddenly smelled of murder. i guess i was still partly lost in the landscape of his voice, and i wanted to know what had happened among the acacias in this imaginary garden.
next week i’m going to draw for myself again. i’m getting weary of assigned projects.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
verbal fragments and images drifting around the cerebral cortex at eight o’clock: queen anne’s lace pressed between the pages of a phonebook, human specimens pressed between the bedrock and andromeda. 「la vida agazapada.」 red clovers and black-eyed susans wrapped together in star-patterned foil with red string. in bed someone said「red goes to the head, so add a touch of blue instead.」se lucha contra la roja.
「운명의 빨간실은 풀어지면서 양귀비꽃으로 빨갛게 칠한 길이 됐다.
난 이 끝없이 긴 길을 따라가야 된다.
난 이 엉킨 실같이 비틀어진 길을 거러가야 된다.
그래서 난 떠나 간다.
빈손으로 이름없시 방황한다.
맨발로 방향없시 방랑한다.
바람과 비만 바라다 보면서 또다시 떠나 간다.」
“nada” in spanish and “나다” in korean have sort of merged in meaning. it is a fair coincidence.
my computer’s working again, but i’ve lost the will to use it.
so far, this is all i have scanned:
and i want to jot down some impressions of the jmw turner retrospective at the met, because i’d been anticipating that show for months. actually, i hadn’t been that excited for a viewing of art since i obsessively dreamed of michelangelo’s sculptures [and fretted that they wouldn’t live up to my expectations].
turner is my favorite romantic and possibly the only landscape artist i really adore. of course i love the mad skills of painters like delacroix and friedrich, but only turner’s explosively chromatic landscapes express sublimity to me. as much as it sickens me to view these shitty thumbnails, i want to note these… (Continued)
i still have no computer. 
i’m visiting my mother and have hijacked hers.
also, she gave me two bear claws on a string.
her co-worker shot this bear. 
i keep dragging the claws across my cheek and enjoying this feeling.
picture:
why didn’t anyone tell me to look up gestalt psychology? i want to understand gestalt theory in more detail: law of similarity, law of proximity, law of continuation, and law of common fate (four rules by which the mind processes visual data). i wish i had a button that allowed me to really “see” everything at once, because naturally our brains fill in gaps when there’s not enough information, makes classifications (re: the four laws), and makes distinctions between the parts and the whole. yes yes obviously it’s for basic survival, to get around our environments by judging space and motion. still i think it would be neat if i could change perspective easily. it reminded me of a scene in a colin turnbull book: a mbuti forest-dweller travels outside of the dense jungle for the first time and perceives bison in the distance as “insects” because they look small; as the car draws closer to the herd, he remarks that witchcraft is making the “insects” increase in size.
oh and famous optical illusions like this-
-apparently came out of gestalt studies. i loved these in elementary school! negative/positive space battling it out in your brain, neither’s more there than the other, but your mind can really only name one form at a time. along those lines, i really want to play a game called echochrome. it sounds kind of fascinating, a game of perceptual mind-fuckery.
picture:
and and and… something else mentioned in some random essay i picked up. it talks about visual perspective being culturally specific. for example, those obsessed with past/history render flattened space while those concerned with the future create more dimensional renderings. i’m not thinking of culturally divergent philosophies right now…. just a little wondering that pictorial space is really about one’s understanding of time (which of course is major element of one’s understanding of self).
the change in drawing from childhood to adulthood. for children, life is in the moment. as you get older, your thoughts dwell more on the past and forward-moving time.
picture:
hybridization? just self-fetishization or self-fetishization as counter-fetishization in the art of second generation immigrants? playing into the stereotype or finding your roots?
huff.
this is for laurie’s story (in boylove webzine): ♥ostinato♥
i’ll read the other stories when i’ve finished “s.” vol.2’s almost done, and i already fear a tragic series finale. when it comes to “real” literature, i’ll trust the author (because a skilled writer can make hurtin’ feel good); but with pulp fiction? i don’t want my heart broken by some trashy floozy of a book!
i don’t care if my favorite character must steal camels from a city zoo to escape from a homicidal plot. i don’t even care if the getaway camels spontaneously materialize, screaming, “DEUS EX MACHINA, BITCHES!!!!” all i want is an ending that is happy; just happy; and perhaps also a little violent; but in a sexy way, not in a scary way.
dear word-mongers,
just because you CAN,
doesn’t mean you SHOULD,
murder
delicious
characters –>
“난 그녀석이 불쌍해 죽겠어. 내 손으로 괴롭혀놓고 무슨 헛소리냐고 비웃을지도 모르지만 진심으로 그렇게 생각해. 필사적으로 허세를 부리며 불량스럽게 구는 모습을 보면 너무 불쌍해서 눈물을 흘리며 목 졸라 죽여 버리고 싶어져.”
“이녀석이 생각하는건 언제나 잘 모르겠다… 하지만… 시키는대로 할수 밖에 없어… 이 속을 알수 없는 남자에게서 정보를 손에 넣는건 쉽지 않다… 젠장!… 어떻게든 될거 아냐.”
….love so much this sadomasochistic pairing…
i dozed off on the subway today and dreamed about
neils bohr and werner heisenberg. (sp?)
except in my dream wernie was korean and bohr was spelled boar. also they had robot bears in their gardens because science=kooky gadgets. BUT they were essentially bohr and wernie developing quantum theory together, after much of the science community had sided with albert einstein and ostracized them. i read that their heated debates often left wernie in tears — and in my mind, which has been polluted with gay-azn-gangster-sex-melodramas, that meant wernie had to be the “uke” in this torrid love story. that meant he sobbed and pleaded a whole lot with a physically and emotionally abusive bohr (boar?), but it was not “really” rape because you knew that they were just afraid to admit that deep down inside they both truly loved and needed each other.
. . . . . . . . . 
after a bunch of melty dream stuff happened
(it turns out the robot bears are sort of useless, it is actually the hedgerows that can realign themselves to direct intruders away from the ivory tower of science historically wrongful sex. also i suddenly manifested myself into the dream and got a piece of cactus embedded in my calf)
bohr and wernie rejoiced! they had devised a theory to prove einstein wrong! my mind expressed this by showing many colorful soap bubbles exploding out of the physicists’ hands! and then for no reason at all i knew the bohr and wernie were both women disguised as men, because they wanted to be taken seriously by the science community, but each woman believed the other woman was really a man, and i don’t know if that last clause was phrased in grammatically correct form, but i do know it made no sense even to me, so i’m going to end this sentence.
…except… if they had erotic relations, how could they keep this secret…
…this was plothole my mind refused to fill with the cement of rational thought…
…i was only relieved that albert einstein was not part of the sex scenes because THAT IS AN IRRATIONAL # AND DOES NOT COMPUTE AND NOW I AM SO SCARED TO SLEEP BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO SEE WHAT I THINK I COULD POSSIBLY SEE.
and lastly, (Continued)
you’re sitting on the bus. you lick your finger and slick a strand of hair behind your ear, and try to sustain reality with these small, sensory proofs of living. but you keep feeling a little airy and lightheaded and picturing yourself as a balloon, and then for no reason at all, the string’s suddenly cut. you get detached from yourself and go floating off into some nebulous higher-up-there.
you don’t get off the bus; you watch yourself get off the bus. for the next day, week, or month, you watch your body go through the motions of normal living. you watch with the disinterest of a forced audience; even though you know that’s supposed to be you, for whatever reason, you can’t connect the dots and make of yourself a complete figure.
that’s the best i can do to describe it, even though i tried to write this email to my mother and an-ni a few times.
well, i’d rather write about smut and kitsch. 
(Continued)
for the lulz… (Continued)
오상순:
흐름 위에
보금자리 친
오 — 흐름 위에
보금자리 친
나의 혼(魂).
바다 없는 곳에서
바다를 연모(戀慕)하는 나머지에
눈을 감고 마음 속에
바다를 그려 보다
가만히 앉아서 때를 잃고.
옛 성 위에 발돋움하고
들 너머 산 너머 보이는 듯 마는 듯
어릿거리는 바다를 바라보다
해 지는 줄도 모르고 — .
바다를 마음에 불러일으켜
가만히 응시하고 있으면
깊은 바닷소리
나의 피의 조류(潮流)를 통하여 오도다.
망망(茫茫)한 푸른 해원(海原)–
마음 눈에 펴서 열리는 때에
안개 같은 바다와 향기
코에 서리도다.
if you cover your ears with your hands, the hollow cavities dammed by your palms will fill with saltwater. then you can hear your secret seas. one ear almost spills a rush of lethal memory. the other ear fills with lethe’s still black waters. your thought is the moon that keeps the waves in check. one day your moon will freeze, and the tides will push and forget to pull back. you’ll increase the pressure on your head, but the water will keep rising. so you will fashion a small boat and choose between the one or the other channel to follow. eventually all seemingly complicated matters boil down to a choice between halves. left or right, black or white, life or death, yes or no.
i was nervous about seeing live butoh, because some clips i’d seen scared the shit out of me, but this performance was only a little painful to watch. it’s not a cathartic experience at all; it’s about dying, and it looks and feels like dying, but there’s no “white light” at the end, so you leave with a throat-clogging need to cry, and your inability to do so means your chest feels oddly waterlogged for hours. still, being full of bad water is better than feeling hollow, so. that’s post-war era art for you.
sometimes, when i am sad, because i’m poor and my eyes hurt and i saw a dead eyeless cat and a dead rat on the street as well as five dead birds one of which was a baby and another which was a red pulp with a single wing sticking up in the air with all the feathers fanned out, i just look at this… (Continued)
