December 2011

Dear Diary

On cloudy days I can never be sure when the sunset will come and this means that sometimes they are in the streets before I can get back.
If I were more analytical I would be able to calculate their exact arrival, but I still use my lifelong method of judging nightfall by looking at the sky and on cloudy days this method doesn't seem to work so well.
It's been almost 7 years since I arrived here in Lisbon, Portugal to open a small yellow house on a hill and I still run from them.

As the end of the year begins to appear in the horizon I am sitting here in the office looking back over this year of the "Macumba." I would like to think that I have always tried to live my life searching for something that inspires me. Whether it be moving to a different city to breathe the air in a foreign language, trying things that seemed ridiculous and making them my career, or eating fruits with nefarious names like "Lychee" and "Rambutan."

Usually the questioning of this rarely enters my mind, but as you well know this year has brought it fair share of doubts, failures, and obstacles. It has also brought with it it's fair share of surprises and unexpected snapshots of happiness, among a rather unspectacular roll of film. If I learned anything this year it is this: The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. because it is only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, and fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die, but things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. Just thought I'd write you this quick note and share some things that inspire me today.

Sincerely,
DdD

Roman Opatka was a French-born Polish painter who painted numbers. In 1965 he began painting a process of counting – from one to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing in the bottom right-hand corner, the tiny numbers were painted in horizontal rows. As of July 2004, he had reached 5.5 million.

I love this picture.  While buildings burned and chaos reigned down on the city of Vancouver this couple were captured in this terribly beautiful scene.  This girl had just been trampled and beaten by the police.

This just makes me smile...Visual acosutics.

 "Path in the forest"  Tetsu Kondo
When I fist saw this project i couldn't quite decide if I liked it or not.  I mean altering natural paths with artificial ones seems to be a bit of an intrusion on the existing natural space.  But the more I thought about it the more I began to appreciate it.  We no longer are looking up at the woods from the ground but we can get closer to the leaves and sliver through the branches, like a low flying bird. It is a piece of architecture which exists for the woods as the forest exists for the architecture, that suprises and changes your way of seeing them.



While My Guitar Gently Weeps on Ukelele...love it.

Merry Christmas. I thought that since it is difficult for us to spend Christmas together in the real world, we could at leat imagine it.

My meeting went well, I even had time to squeeze in some sausage, egg and cheese biscuits at an American fast food chain that will remain unnamed.  I have just arrived at the office and before getting back to work I just wanted to write you a little note.  I thought about telling you how much I enjoy you every time I see you, or how I have never felt closer to somebody than I feel with you, or how despite your terrible smell and complete lack of personal hygiene I could stay in bed with you forever, licking every single part of your body until I pass out from dehydration.  But upon thinking twice, I decided not to tell you any of that boring, vomit inducing drivel and write you a short, short story instead.  Enjoy.

Bugged Out

Insects are renowned for their ability to appear in the most unlikely of places; kitchens, bathtubs, bedrooms, office buildings, and in human bodies as parasites. So it should be no surprise that one should find its way into a courtroom. What was surprising was that it should appear as a witness.
  Cliff's building was a marvel of utilitarian architecture. It was a seven story housing unit, grey with bits of obsidian that protruded in the form of small terraces. Clothes hung from most of the terraces, adding an element of life to an otherwise lifeless structure; “ accidental architectural beauty” in the eyes of an archeological sociologist, but a “pain in the ass,” to the 75 people residing inside.   There were no functioning washing machines or dryers, no heat in the winter nor air-conditioning in the summer and since Cliff had contracted some local graffiti writers to render a version of Salvador Dali´s Accommodation of Desire in the lobby, there hadn´t been a renovation since the late eighties.
Its main commodity was cheap rent...

 

  “The really magical things are the ones that happen right in front of you. A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a bit more intention, you see it.”

 Vik Muniz

Clouds here in Lisbon loom overhead pregnant with moisture. It has been raining on an off all day.  In an attempt to try and get out of the house in spite of these uncooperative elements, I thought you, me and Maria could all head to Belem and check out the Vik Muniz exhibit.   I first saw his work in a bad-ass documentary called "Waste Land."   On a trip to São Paolo, Vik was disheartened by the plight of a group of people called catadores, self-designated pickers of recyclable materials who work and live in  one of the world's largest garbage dumps, Jardim Gramacho, on the outskirts of the city.   He began taking photos of some of the catadores and then began to paint huge portraits of them with the garbage from the dump.  It's funny because when the film starts and he begins explaining his "art" project to these people they are completely perplexed.  It's a "what the fuck is this motherfucker talking about" moment and they can't possibly imagine a life outside the dumps much less having the luxury of making art.  As the process continues over a 3 year period they began to understand and actively participate in the project.  It becomes a jumping off point for many of them as they begin to see the world in a different light and for the first time start thinking of possibilities beyond the mountains of people's waste.   It's is amazing and I hope you get a chance to see it if you already haven't.  I love the idea of using otherwise discarded items and people to create something truly beautiful and inspiring.  I have to admit when I first started looking at the collection I immediately felt a little apprehension as it appeared to be heavy in a kind of Andy Warhol "pop." But the more I looked and the more pieces I came across I couldn't help but smiling.  Vik seems to have the kind of eyes that we all have as children, heavily tinted by a wild and playful imagination.  The kind of eyes that can change a plate of vegetables into a multicolored symphony orchestra.   Whatever people want to label it , it really made me feel like a kid again and reminded me how much the world at it's best is shaped by what we see in it.  I wish you could have been here and even tried to call you while staring at a particular piece that had been painted in chocolate.  I  couldn't stop thinking how much your punk ass would have loved it and how much I would have loved to been walking through the exhibit with you. Below are some of the pieces that I liked or reminded me of you.  Have a good Sunday shithead! 

                                 

  

  

Vik had a series of pieces that he made with chocolate. While he was experimenting with the process he realized because of its relatively perishable and temporary state he had to paint faster and faster to get out what he wanted, before the chocolate solidified.  This reminded him of how Jackson Pollack used to paint sometimes in what could be interpreted as a kind of dance.  So he made a portrait of Pollack in his process out of chocolate.  I am sure you would have gotten us kicked out of the museum for trying to eat this one.

 

This one is a portrait that reminded me so much of you.  Something in the expression. At first she seems to be sad and then I realized she wasn't sad, she was just looking directly at you in a state of pure innocence, emotional beauty and a "what the fuck do you want?" I literally stared at it for at least 10 minutes convinced that if I waited long enough eventually you would materialize in front of me.  It was made completely out of plastic children's toys.

The first is a portrait of a Hollywood movie star made entirely of diamonds, the second a portrait made of ketchup. I almost got myself kicked out of the museum trying to put some of this on my hotdog.

The one on the left was one of my favourites.  Vik hired a plane and had used the vapor trails to draw clouds.  There is just something pretty god damn amazing about a drawn cloud in the sky.  It's as if for one brief moment reality became a comic book.   I am glad Maria came.  She really enjoyed it. Every time I found her she was scribbling notes and completely absorbed in the work.  She smiled when I read her your text message.

 

This one is completely made of string and needles.  It was one of my favorites and also really made me think of you.  Something about that quote about architecture being a combination of science and art is really captured here. 

These were two of the the pieces that initially struck me as kind of pop, but I still loved them.  The one on the right was part of a pair of portraits.  Garbage recreations of Goya and Caravaggio.  The one on the left was a bird sitting in a dream made completely from paper cuts.

One of the other things that makes me really admire him besides his imagination is how he "feels" the world. A lot of his pieces like this one were focused on making things we normally try to ignore like poverty, injustice and waste and making the people who are most affected by them something more in his depictions. Highlighting something terrible that people should see and making his subjects believe in hope through art.  This was a series of children who live on the streets made out of sugar.

 I am going to finish this entry with a coupe of cool things I learned about him while doing some research and a quote from his movie.  I hope you enjoyed the exhibit with me and Maria.  I know I did.  You make me smile.

**Vik says his grandmother taught him to read at a young age, but according to a system that identified complete words, not syllables or letters. That meant he consequently had trouble writing when he entered school, and during those first two frustrating years of schooling turned to a more universal language: drawing.

**Vik credits the painting A Child’s Head by Peter Paul Rubens as the work of art that prompted him to become an artist, and a trip to Europe as the moment he felt he could live up to the title. Facing Hungarian guards without a visa, Vik was asked to prove he was an artist and sketched a clipboard picture of one of his interrogators holding a machine gun. “He looked at it,” Vik says, “and said, 'Oh, indeed you are an artist! Can you sign it?' After that… I could call myself an artist.” 

**He returned from Europe to New York City with about $100 to his name, a piece of plasticene, a camera and some film. Vik made a sculpture. He liked it, but having used all the plasticene, he took a picture of the sculpture, destroyed it and made a new one. Soon he had 60 pictures of the same lump of plasticene as different sculptures. A friend offered to print them for him, and the result was a 1992 solo show, Individuals, featuring the photographs alongside empty pedestals representing the missing sculptures.

**If drawing was one half of the equation, compulsive curiosity was the other. One day the Encyclopedia Britannica arrived at his house via wheelbarrow — Vik’s father had won it in a pool game. Instantly, the book was Vik’s link to the mysteries and details of the outside world. “It was like the Internet,” he recalls. “But, you know, for primitive people.”




“The beautiful thing about garbage is that it’s negative. It’s something that you don’t use anymore. It’s what you don’t want to see. So, if you are a visual artist, it becomes a very interesting material to work with because it’s the most nonvisual of materials. You are working with something that you usually try to hide.” V. Muniz

Kiss my Asimov

It was the summer of 1975 and in the small New Mexican town of Santa Fe, two very important events were on a collision course with each other. Events that would forever change the cultural make-up of our universe. One was happening somewhere in a seminal pool and the other was being written out onto paper as a work of science fiction. One would go on to become one of Isac Asimov's collection of short stories and the other would turn out to be me. OK, Maybe only one of these events would have any bearing on culture. But, Isac Asimov would end up having a pretty good run as well. As long as I can remember my mother used to tell me a story about my birth. She had said that because I was the first baby born in December, that Isac Asimov had dedicated a signed copy of one of his books to the local public library in my name. I can't say which one it was because it always seemed to change. Sometimes it was "I Robot," other times it was one of the "Foundation" series. The constant changing of the book, being the first baby born in December on the 14th and the fact that a lifelong New Yorker would dedicate a book to a child in some small town in the middle of the desert never quite reinforced the validity of her tale.
I think it was her way of getting me to take an interest in reading. I am guessing her logic was that if I felt some sort of connection with a particular author I would be more inclined to delve into their work. It was no coincidence I guess that she decided to choose an author that in his lifetime would publish more than 390 books. Maybe she just smoked a lot of Marijuana. Whatever the reason I love her for it anyway. I did grow up feeling some kind of embryonic connection with Asimov and with science fiction in general. I loved science fiction not only for its futuristic vision of the world but also enjoyed it for it capacity to explain and experiment with relatively complicated ideas. The caring for our Global environment and survival, the future of energy, the future of the human species and how we reproduce and alter ourselves, our technological devices and their effects on our culture, the clash of ancient tradition and the changing reality, these are all ideas that have created a conversation about where we are headed and what possible futures await us depending on our current action or inaction. It's a shame that it's a conversation that has been confined to the pages of a peripheral literary sub-genre.



This is a video where asimov is speaking about the future of learning and basically predicts the internet.



An exhibit I would have loved to see in London.

 "Hip Hop is the CNN for the Ghetto"   Chuck D

 (Small Caveat: It's Friday and feeling a little lame for staying in and working,  I opened a bottle of wine when I started writing this, so if it starts getting a little messy blame "Quinta Da Aveleda")
 
Last night after we got off the phone I was playing around with my i-Pad and started downloading some books so I could get my electronic read on.  I downloaded a couple I have been wanting to read for awhile, "Living In The End Times", by Slavoj Zizek,  "Toward a New Architecture", by Le Corbusier (because I am trying to impress this architectural "shorty") and "The Book of Ice" by Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky.  When I downloaded the last one, Apple did what it normally does and made some recommendations on what I might like.  These suggestions have always given me the creeps.  It's as if you were in a book store and someone, catching a glimpse of what you were browsing through,  came up and whispered in your ear.   Like someone barging in your room while having sex and asking if you would like some fried chicken.  It's at once disturbing and way too intimate for the situation.    But, this one suggestion did give me pause.   It was Jay-Z's new book "Decoded."  I had already heard of it because of an article I read about the marketing campaign which involved a digital scavenger hunt all through out New York City.   So I bought it.  Today I had to go to the police station to get my car out of the pound because of some "alleged" illegal parking I had done the day before.   I ended up being there 3 hours waiting for an email from my insurance to verify that everything was up to date and I was a respectful, fully insured, citizen.  You can say that I was more than frustrated, but knowing that loosing your temper in the middle of police station can cause you more problems than you want, I kept my cool.  I ended up taking a seat and doing the most rebellious thing I could, considering the resources I had, which was my i-Pad, car keys and various documents of identification.   I started reading "Decoded".   Take that Pigs!  Fuck the Police!  Ok, so my act of rebellion wasn't all that bad ass, but I did find the book better than I thought it would be and it has led me to today's post. 
   "No one reads poetry anymore" is a constant refrain that you hear all the time.  Scolars and professors are always eulogizing the death of literature and poetic verse.  Until today I actually was one of those people. Not that it bothered me one way or another.  I could give a fuck whether kids want to drink beer and listen to Justin Bieber instead of read Roethke, Plath, or Ginsberg. But if asked, before my stint in the police station,  I would probably have agreed with the above statement.  But as I was reading I cam across this passage in the book :

"When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow chops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch."

I read it again.  That sounded like something. Something that sounded so familiar that it all instantly clicked in my head. Hip Hop is modern Poetry. Now, this isn't something that I hadn't thought before.  I love Hip Hop and have know that the lyrics are a form of street poetry, but I hadn't really put  it on the same level of Keats or Puskin. But sitting in that chair,  I instantly realized that one day the whole poetic canon would one day include ryhmes from the likes of Nas, Rakim and Jay-Z.  That somewhere in the future those expensive, thick anthologies of poetry that we have to buy in University would surely include Hip Hop songs.   I spent the last hour our so thinking of my favourite poetry verses:

A robin red breast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage 
William Blake  

And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal.
Oscar Wilde

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
Sylvia Plath  

I've lived to bury my desires,
And see my dreams corrode with rust;
Now all that's left are fruitless fires
That burn my empty heart to dust.
Aleksandr Pushkin

I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument. 
Allen Ginsberg




Then I thought of my favourite  Hip Hop Lyrics:

Words of wisdom wail from my windpipe
Imaginations in flight
I send light like Ben's kite
I've been bright.
Common

Music orientated
so when hip-hop was originated
fitted like pieces of puzzles
complicated.
Eric B and Rakim


Truth brings light
light refracts off the mirror
visions of yourself and error could never clearer.
The truth is that you ugly
not on the outside
but in the inside
on the outside you frontin you lovely
Pharoahe Monch

I switched my motto
Instead of saying fuck tomorrow
that buck that bought a bottle could've struck the lotto.
Nas

I knew I was on to something and when I got home I  started doing a little more research and I came across this English professor named Adam Bradley.  A couple of years ago he  issued a manifesto to his fellow-scholars. He urged them to expand the poetic canon, and possibly enlarge poetry’s audience, by embracing, or co-opting, the greatest hits of hip-hop. “Thanks to the engines of global commerce, rap is now the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world,” he wrote. “The best MCs—like Rakim, Jay-Z, Tupac, and many others—deserve consideration alongside the giants of American poetry. We ignore them at our own expense.”  So in honor of my esteemed mother fuckin' professor Bradley I compiled some songs for you that I think are good enough to stand side beside the giants of Poetry and if the Poetry scholars leave them out...they best be prepared to get a cap in their ass. 

If you were a bottle of wine I would break you over a gorillas face and rape him.  

Nas "Life's a Bitch" "I switched my motto / Instead of saying fuck tomorrow, that buck that bought a bottle could've struck the lotto." This vivid articulation of hope in the face of despair could be defined as the same circumstances that created hip-hop culture in the first place. Nas's hip-hop lyrics show maturity, urgency and a vivid view of urban struggle.



I could add at least 100 more Nas Tracks.




Common "Resurrection" "Words of wisdom wail from my windpipe / Imaginations in flight, I send light like Ben's kite / I've been bright." How often does Benjamin Franklin wind up in hip-hop lyrics? When you have the ability to resurrect the status quo of rap ability like Common, expect the unexpected.




Eric B. & Rakim "Microphone Fiend" "Music orientated so when hip-hop was originated, fitted like pieces of puzzles, complicated." Rakim proudly raised the standards of hip-hop lyrics with this statement. His microphone addiction allowed us to get high off of his talent right along with him.


Kool G Rapp "Streets of New York" "It gets tiring, the sight of a gun firing / They must desire for the sound of a siren." Kool G Rapp takes us inside the violent realities of his New York environment with these melancholy lyrics. Hip-hop songs of this social caliber deserve to be studied in universities.





”Truth brings light, light refracts off the mirror, visions of yourself and error could never clearer. The truth is that you ugly, not on the outside, but in the inside, on the outside you frontin you lovely”-Pharoahe Monch, The Truth



”Make a radio hit - headz criticize it; Underground classic - nobody buys it”-Ras Kass, Reelishymn

I'm sitting here in front of my computer, smoking a cigarette and toying with the notion of opening a bottle of wine.   I am also leafing through a book that I picked up in Bilbao at the Guggenheim, called "Walkscpaes, Walking as an asthetic practice".  As I am looking through it I am realizing that this was a complete vanity buy.   It has sat on my shelf for more than a couple of years completely unread.  I think that I was consumed by the gravity of being inside that building and having to choose a book that at once made me feel intellectual and enlightened.  A book that would gain the nodding approval of the saleswoman behind her illustrious counter. As if by choosing a book so esoteric and utterly bizarre I would somehow be saying something profound and cool about myself.  I would be saying that I understood, I belonged.  I belonged in the same class as Anselm Kiefer, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Richard Serra, whoose works I had just seen.   Maybe not as an artist but as someone who understood and appreciated the things they did.  What a fucking asshole.  Anyways, I did read the first chapter tonight  and it describes walking as a type of  landscape architecture.   By traversing a cities streets and alleys you apparently can intervene temporarily in it's form.  It starts with the history of nomadic wandering moves on to something called Transurbance, created by a crazy group of student architects called Stalker, and ends with my favorite: The Anti-Walk.  The Anti-Walk was a form of anti-art.  In 1921 Dada organized a series of "excursions" to the most banal spots in Paris.  He wanted to reject the cities "assigned places" or places considered of interest.  He wanted to reclaim urban space, especially ones that were considered lost or unworthy of enjoying.  Shit, I might have to credit him with the idea of  We Hate Tourism Tours.  Anyways, after all this I wished desperately that you were here and we could do some "art walking" together.  Since we are constricted by geography I thought maybe at least you could enjoy some pictures I took on my walk last Sunday, and with the right kind of eyes and imagination we could be on that walk together.   If you were a piece of pie I would snort you like cocaine.