Tuesday, October 28, 2008

_
i want to build


and raise new
the temples of Theseus and the stadiums
and where Perikles lived



but there's no money, too much spent
today. I had a guest
over _____and we sat together




-Friedrich Holderlin as Translated by Richard Sieburth

Sunday, October 19, 2008

hi. it's sunday. been a while since i've written directly in the blog so thought i would write and say hello. it's overcast and has cooled off from the week and the weekend. maybe this means that the winter is coming or more accurately the rain. it would be good for us. i can't remember the last time it rained but after a month of rain i might write the opposite. had a strange dream last night where i had written a list of rules that i kept going over and somehow this transformed into singing one of these rules as a song while i was cleaning snow off the windshield of my old truck. The tune (long forgotten) was so nice i woke up crying warm tears that felt good. strange. otherwise, it's been a day of chatting, with my roommate, a nice conversation that lead into the characteristics of "our" generation, and met bill and erika for a late lunch. school has been steady. i lost thirty five dollars playing poker on friday night. got clobbered playing basketball on saturday morning, witnessed parts of a gigantic corporate sponsored soap box race and went to a bar-b-q with sarah. so, yeah. i'm good. how are you? here is an interview with tim and laetitia of stereolab that i thought was interesting, particularly the second part of the interview (this is a link to the first half), them talking about process and lyrics.
Thoughts: there were some but I can't remember what they were. Some kind of pseudo psychological philosophical political hybrid that would, at first glance inside my head seem to solve every lingering doubt I've ever had and snap into place the mysteries of the universe. Instead I'm sitting here in the Public Meeting Area on the corner of 2nd and Mission, no longer trying to remember and looking around the glass atrium, waiting for a student who I'm supposed to be tutoring for a class called Form Development, an industrial design class where the students are expected to make a fiber glass shell for something like a mouse or a flashlight highly polished and finished.

Tutoring for this class might consist of going over some notes but this student, who doesn't make it to class often or on time or even really attempt assignments and I'm guessing asked for a tutor to prolong the realization or maintain the illusion that yes, no I don't actually care about this subject but will half heartedly attempt OH HEY, SHE'S HERE...We talked about her project, abstractly, the steps she needs to take in the shop and took notes; pieces of foam, ways to second guess ourselves and others, styrene speed forms, running our fingers along contours and away from the smoldering hot iron of all that, but we're moving is what's important.

Moving through and in stepping back we might see the entire picture but for now we'll keep it close to the people coming through the doors; the metal table reflecting light; a group of office women and pairs of workers eating lunch, remembering what we're waiting for. What a tragedy! Matching bent nails with famous painters instead of asking questions, admitting that we really don't know or more simply that we do.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

>Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 13:34:29 -0500
>
>
>yeah. word. my voice over the email was different. i'm not sure why but i remember when i was writing it, i thought it was kind of weird. walt whitman said something like...do i contradict myself?...i contain multitudes!...(end) or something like that. fortunately, we all live in three dimentions...

Friday, October 03, 2008

The Molten Sounds of Company (an Essay)

I sat unable to control the bitterness that is the stopper that is the cycling clamp of jaw bone, the look away to avoid intervention of the melding machine. Numbed to avoid trauma and the epilepsy of fidgeting, the master gene...

Press up against the lines or stretch what there is to say if anything to the furthest possible point. Length marked by sheer supposition, nobody knows how to calculate regards such as praise, how much we need or can possibly give out before we ourselves begin to decompose into words we do not know. This is what I would most like to turn from: regret as an instance of past reflection; my hand occupied, folding a piece of paper my mind occupied looking for signs.

Maybe this is devotion, tightly, and out of guilt. The idea that we’ll “pay” for what we’ve done. Somehow. Prison or imprisoners. We may cling to one mind known well enough to invoke out of habit; regardless, like the bones in an old man’s wrist lifting some odd thing to some odd place and by and by we make our shape, we cauterize; we canonize our better instincts (without which, our independence).

As the roof collapses without reason, opinion held right in regard to others seems to matter little as the capital of total thought becomes far more important than its origin or direction. We could ask the time or position of the sun shining through the splintered wood but for now we’ll consider its light inevitable, a fact in the matter and the matter a fact or instance of recognition.

I consider one problem to be all problems or a cigarette, a next one. Things that make sense, or I’m “full” of ideas or shoot to “thrill.” In the end we get to be “The One,” we get the idea that we can or cannot understand growing older in the summer time or a certain kind of intelligence, one that speaks highly of its contemporaries. Or in other words, now that the world has been discovered, we have no other place to go.