hello and hi and why do i read histories when i’m incapable of processing the material? how can i know what happened two centuries ago if i can’t recall what i read two minutes ago? i can never get facts straight, because they all twist anachronistically. this would be my idea of a period piece: it was the summer of the 1948 winter olympics. kurosawa ran away with van gogh’s crows in the middle of monsoon season. that very afternoon the city’s atmospheric tempo accelerated from adagio to allegro to a category six typhoon. the wind blew windows out of skyscrapers, scattering glass like confetti overhead as fleeing tycoons sped against hokusai-sized waves. hearst’s inkwells spilled and rockefeller’s petroleum wells bled blackly in the tide. tammany hall and cosa nostra fell beneath their own faulty stonemasonry. it was a black tuesday, followed by forty days and forty nights of “won’t sway, no way” type of unrelentingly shitty weather.

but from a bird’s eye view, the eye of the storm was calm.

epilogue: the murder of crows hitchcocked west past the brandywine river and wheeled above a woman with grass stains all over her pink, cheap cotton dress. one landed on her overturned wheelchair and croaked staccatissimo, and four others settled in a tree to watch her crawl through wyeth’s weed-choked fields. in the woman’s frostbitten hands the grass shattered like glass, and in the wind the shards scattered like confetti.

what’s scattered on my bed right now (besides imaginary confetti):

1.drawings, 2.books i’ll never manage to finish, 3.back issues of national geographic, which i’ll read cover to cover, again and again, 4.unresolved paper icosahedra, 5.imaginary friends

that’s right, my restlessly fidgety hands are addicted to modular origami.
if i’m not around i’m probably busy trying to crease the PERFECT valley fold.

yesterday i enjoyed moroccan mint tea and mango sorbet with rose petal preserves. today i had zongzi and hi-c. i was too lazy to visit the noguchi museum and instead loitered near 5pointz, where a graffito of rembrandt remarked upon my mood.

i listened to mozart’s piano concertos and a tribe called quest and felt defensive about being uncultured — that is, not being connoisseur of high culture, low/pop culture, or even smaller, more localized subculture. i felt self-conscious about being merely feebly conscious of my social environment. but i think a lot of people sympathize with me, especially in new york, where so many inhabitants feel like cards lost in the urban shuffle, or simply placed in the wrong deck.
a tiny parable: bored with solitaire, grace of spades decided to play a few rounds — that is, to fool around — with jack hearts. theirs was not a match made in heaven, but a duel of wild deuces. time and time and a deuce of a time again, each tried to trump the other’s poker face. 「i think we’re trying to play the same game by different rules」she observed「at this rate we’ll both end up losing」to which he snapped, “i’m not a loser.” she sighed「the stakes are getting higher」to which he replied, “that’s life. you have to gamble to win, and… fuck it. i’m not aesop.” she muttered「이솝은 누구냐?」to which he sputtered “what?” 「exactly」she said. he figured that meant she agreed with him and decided he’d won… won what exactly? neither knew.

speaking of cities-
the city is the main character in 철콘 근크리트 (uuuh i have no idea how to anglicize this title), a japanese animated film. i loved the cityscapes, i loved the character of “the rat,” and white was to black what my own little brother is to me, so i bawled over a few scenes. i ordered the original three-volume books.

animation [good]:

comic [extra excellently exceptionally…good]:

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.

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:

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)