10:19 PM *

calls that go bad, over and over, consultants that do not do their part, over and over, employers who are unreasonable, over and over, and utter lack of pleasure. sometimes, i just get so stressed out.

but most of the time, it's a constant battle against the swinging poles: indifference and hypersensitivity. the former a relief, an ideal mental environment for self-criticism, a field full of grass. the latter an elation, an elation constantly frustrated, an ideal mental environment for creativity, a kiss with tongue.

today was a lot of both.

i never cease to marvel at how my ability to deal with always feeling everything, always in love, leads to a new grassy field, more open, and therefore completely impervious to your activity. taking a piss, there was little more sensation that that of the absence of any thought whatsoever, which i noticed. sometimes, it's like an orgasm, you need to go so bad, but not today.

or in the gym, a very intimidating fellow i have for months had only the courage to smile and return his nice hello, someone who is very daddy type, but a little bit of a predator, which is silly because i can be that way for fun too, and i think he is for fun too, but i still am not sure, and so i heasitate, and gosh i was looking at him from afar and thought it's really silly for me to get into these intimidation feelings, when he's just trying to be friendly and gague some interest, and gosh, what a pleasure it would be to let him have his way with me, whatever my imagination could conjure, because it would cause more sensation than i was feeling at the moment, which was little more than grinding routine cable rows, which i had to concentrate on so i didn't fall on the floor like a rag doll, tired of everything.

yet earlier there was a sensation of lightness, as your lungs deliver after your run earlier, a much deeper breath, the unhurried gait from computer to copier to fax machine to minion to materials library to phone call to conversation, through conversation, and ending it in a manner not merely polite but friendly, minion means darling dear, taking the time to think about what the person on the other end of the line would be tickled to hear.

or on the train coming home, always in love, never get tired of looking and smiling, secretly knowing, and wanting to reveal that knowing, that there's so much more than looking, which is not unrelated to the feeling when you know that from the person you just met you are going to get some, that the day, the night is a constant, overlapping constellation of feelings, real feelings, that causes one's world to flip so stellar.

 

9:22 PM *

the will to change
absent from my universe
the will to beat others back
melee short range

like a sewing machine
only backwards
impossible to sew you say
(you know so much more than me)

the fabric undone
the thread coils tight
the spool grows a grain
each skipping rotation

violently routine
yet quietly symmetrical
like lines about them
tracing a cinematic skein

 

7:05 PM *

> The most interesting fact about every young artist, no matter from where he
> comes_ from past or from future, from here or from there_ is that he is
> constantly afraid to be forgotten

my reply:

i'm not worried about being forgotten: that is a preoccupation i leave for others. i'm only worried about being given the title "young artist" and having the work be terribly inadequate to that title.

i'm worried that i often think about what it is to be an artist, and what distinguishes artists and non-artists, even though my predisposition, artistically, is to resist, neutralize, and even erase those distinctions.

i'm worried that my work might secretly be bad, despite my confidence in it, despite my self-criticism, despite my self-discipline. that it might be needlessly derivative, or unintentionally unoriginal, or fatuously sentimental. i want most of the steps to be in the right direction, whether i'm writing, reading, drawing, tattooing, designing, searching, modeling, building. especially the first steps.

 

4:27 PM *

welcome to my new room.

the invisibility of the host is almost laughably unmentionable. i went from california to minnesota. i think. yet the place is nearly uninterrupted, unless you caught thursday's hour of glitch, or you notice a barely noticable reduction in load time.

yet my email downloads instantly, my ftp upload is just as fast. i feel like i've moved a bit, from downstairs to upstairs, same building but completely different light and air and view. the contours of habit, the response to my click-action consciousness reconfigured.

 

12:14 PM *

there's something thrilling about hearing a good friend reinvent your favorite pixies song into a campfire favorite.

hearing it after you had dinner together last night, to celebrate the upcoming show (much less complicated than sending roses backstage, which could only end in disaster). after the waiter said something about "wanting to see a catfight" by bringing an odd number of delicious candies, which i remarked to my friend that that was odd and he play-act-aghast spills in succession:

"what! don't out me!"
"i'm not gay, i'm a scientologist!"
"you'll ruin my chances for an oscar!"
"shhh! my adopted child will be here any minute!"

and i fell over laughing.

i repent: my friends are always saying the most clever things, off the top of their head, and i cannot.

i live cement: i was held back from similar cleverness by subconsciously thinking about the alterations i was designing for the restaurant we were in, to be constructed in a few weeks.

give dirt to me: they also make better mix albums than me.

i've got lament: they also make better compilation contributions than me. at least the ones who sing for a living.

 

12:44 PM *

i didn't even have to turn the computer ON to write this entry.

i still enjoy dancing in a dirty bar.

i still enjoy writing about it.

i still think of you every night and day.

still, i haven't danced in a long time, especially not there. sometimes the room lurches and i'm almost ready to fall down, and one of my friends tries to catch me, but i'm really just dancing to the room lurch. and a little drunk oops.

i can still whip my waist into new positions, new every time for me, and people stand around at the cock checking us out. all night. it's an unfading delight for both of us.

i still think of you because i still love you.

i have admirers when our gang goes out, which i enjoy, but only because it's amusing, especially if you think about it. we're just having fun, and they're watching that, instead of having their own fun next to us. really, i'd be more inclined to talk to them if they were dancing too. we have a new mayor, so i doubt anyone will get arrested.

but i'd rather rub your neck because i still adore you.

none of the lookers' adulation is remotely as charming as a simple smile from you, one with warmth, depth, experience, and now, new happiness, behind it. a grin at the bar because something funny happens, and i look over, and you're already looking at me, yes ready to take a picture, but looking for a return on the funny thing first.

i still dance hard and weird. i still touch ass and cock. i think of you every night and day.

i took a quick stroll around the place for a second and a guy i'd chatted with earlier tugged my arm and said goodbye it was nice to meet you and he kissed me, with tongue, goodbye.

earlier, honey told me something. it was a reply to when i was complimenting her on being such a wonderful DJ, and that as an architect i orchestrate spaces for performance, but don't often do the performances themselves. she casually but expansively said 'oh but everything is a performance'. it meant more after three martinis, but it's still giving me something to think about.

the city seems to fold around itself on nights like this, around me and us and everyone, protecting us like a blanket in pleasure, with every color and thickness of light, rich and somehow durable, throwing all the people i know onto a few blocks of sidewalk, with perfectly pleasant weather, so we can stop and talk.

i still enjoy dancing in a dirty bar. i still like the audience; they strangely seem to be composed of sexier guys every time. i have honed my weirdness so that even my friends don't know what to make of me. i don't care what others think, even my friends, as long as they get that i'm having some good time.

 

8:43 PM *

Some kinds of love
Marguerita told Tom
Between thought and expression lies a lifetime
Situations arise because of the weather
and no kinds of love
are better than others

Some kinds of love
Margueirta told Tom
like a dirty French novel
combines the absurd with the vulgar
and some kinds of love
the possibilites are endless
and for me to miss one
would seem to be groundless

I head what you said
Marguerita told Tom
And of course you're a bore
But at that you're not charmless
for a bore is a straight line
that finds a wealth in division
and some kinds of love
are mistaken for vision

Put jelly on your shoulder
Let us do what you fear most
That from which you recoil
but which still makes your eyes moist

Put jelly on your shoulder baby
lie down upon the carpet
between thought and expression
let us now kiss the culprit

I don't know just what it's all about
But put on your red pajamas and find out.

 

6:58 PM *

Was an honest man
Asked me for the phone
Tried to take control
Oh I don't see it that way
I don't see it that way

it seems like i sometimes forget the simplest things.

i'm not a complex guy.

why is rock so important to me?

lou reed gave me a second epiphany, in my early twenties: child, set your intellect on a prowl.

kim deal did it again about the same time: boy, never finish modern sex open ended.

the strokes, and white stipes, sweaty fresh reminded me this week: drum drum drum, strum strum strum, make your thing happen.

I said the right things
But act the wrong way
I like it right here
But I cannot stay

the messiness, the looseness, the guitars, the shaking your body, the healthy emotional imbalance, the never correct someone else's questions, the take it or leave it, the do your own goddamned thing to feed your life.

because we're all cool with that.

we went to eric and andy's birthday party where all of this was playing, and they were all dancing to it, and we all kissed each other and drank and danced.

there, martin's friend michelle, yet another of the new orleans cadre, one of the wild ones i am shy toward but who takes to me only on the right time meeting (meaning never the first time) took to me.

without telling her anything, she came out with it, that our type of person is not about guy or girl or gay or straight but about ROCK, while having her arms around my hips.

 

10:51 AM *

thursday saw such joy: a late meeting with the client for the loft to decide, finally, the exact specification for the glass being used in his bathroooms.

the walls, curved and floor-to-ceiling, are glass. all glass, no frames.

from the beginning, the glass was to have copper screen between two very specific kinds of pattern glass, which caused the screen to either disappear or magnify because of the grid-like interference pattern. the effect was like a bright copper tartan, moving as you moved the sample. the effect was spectacular.

however, after we selected a contractor, we found out two things: first, that the copper will oxidize from the edges inward: indeed, our sample was showing signs of this. the oxidation would never occur at the middle, so eventually the glass would look like a bullseye: not a desirable look, so can't use copper.

second, the grid-like pattern glass was available only in 48x54 sheets. they thought. so they have been spending most of january trying to track this down, while we suggested new innerlayers to the client. my favorites, metallic silks, weren't pleasing to him. he wanted metal screen. so we decided on stainless steel screen, collecting mesh samples.

thursday morning i finally received new samples of glass: the grid-pattern was not available, but we found something else that made the screen shimmer bright, no matter how dull the screen behind was. because this new glass was transparent, we suggested an acid-etched glass for the interior side of the bathroom, which makes the screen (a 304 ss screen, 28 mesh which means 28 wires per inch, and 0.012 gauge wire) look like a soft linen. so he'll be showering in an enormous room with a perimeter that looks like a curtain.

after that, we revisited every other material on the table. all stayed as-is, because in fact they gave warmth to the stainless steel, because most would be seen through it. the floor of the bathroom is a sable-colored concrete tile, which will reflect a warm light through the gray and shiny screen, and diffuse that light into the ajacent rooms.

as more and more material decisions become finalized, the components of the project becomes less and less abstract. the contingencies become fewer, which gives rise to an infinite number of specific sensations. the materials begin to take their place in the mental assembly, and we're free to imagine the quotidien moments that happen around them.

 

11:42 PM *

several notes on other blogs: haphazardly collected over a period of a couple of months.

...existing in a maximum of continuous activity, activity which is of uncertain aesthetic value and which locates itself apart from cultural institutions.
(Allan Kaprow)

what are these things?

we might call them performance writing, like a written version of performance art, putting something out there that is not art because it's an experiment. but at times becomes art because it challenges what is accepted practice and creates something new.

ideas not only have material effects, they have material circumstances too.
(Frank Lentricchia, in Criticism and Social Change)

what happens: the assumption of the wholeness of a work is not challenged, but wholly ignored. the work is permanently serial, and by being twinned to people's lives, it shifts, like a person's presence does, when you're with them for coffee, and their thoughts turn elsewhere. the work is elusive, has no teleology, really has no beginning or end, and endlessly influenced by other concurrent serial works, overlapping like conversations in a room:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that have gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion vigorously in progress.
(Richard Rorty, quoted in Lentricchia, but from The Philosophy of Literary Form)

in this light, that of directed arbitrariness, the idea of awards for this or that seems redundant.

it's fascinating to catalogue the techniques employed to this end, the endless making: using the "edit" function on an entry after it's been written; automatic writing sweetly intentional peripheral entries; super-humor; writing a deluge of entries; doggedly searching for luscious things to write about in daily life; writing about making a work in a different medium, writing about love and being loved. there are so many others: this is just from my 'read every day' folder.

i really miss the daily dean.

i hardly need mention that links to my friends appear here, if only to state the obvious: they appear simply because their pages are the only ones i regularly visit. and it's also to reaffirm my devotion to each project, the confidence i have in what they do. jonno deserves special mention, not because he is a dear friend, but because before he was writing "if you must know" he and i were chatting about what it would be like to create a web project about constructed identity, and using our desires as the thing constructed. we grappled with ideas that i can only now grasp and conveniently organize: namely, that it's possible to have said project be about you, and yet generate something separate from you. jonno does it effortlessly, and i admire that.

and yet i'm endlessly marvelling at new blogs every day, the fact that they keep coming, that people want to try their hand at writing something like this. some people have an idea, or even better a sensibility, known but indescribable, and can't go to sleep until they've put it down, not complex, just pursued.

 

10:24 PM *

Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

places are so strange, because they never go anywhere. wandering through my favorite bookstore this evening, i picked up the first volume of the book, as when i lifted an identical copy from that very shelf two and a half years ago, and read the first paragraph again.

Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that i did not have time to tell myself: "I'm falling asleep."

the sense of worldess expectation. the power of the intimacy. an unintellectualized simplicity. learned yet desirous. describing experience one is cognizant of, but could never express in lines of prose.

Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a previous existence must be after reincarnation; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to apply myself to it or not; and at the same time my sight would return and i would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for my eyes, but even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, something dark indeed.

that paragraph induced me to acquire the first volume: it had captured an experience. in doing so, instead of describing wonder, it induced a sense of wonder in me. chidlike infinite wonder in the quotidien actions of living life. all i really wanted, there in the first paragraph.

 

11:22 PM *

four things last twenty four hours:

one saw bea arthur in one-woman show on broadway. while kimmo was playing at shim-sham in new orleans. i'm not the gay man i thought i was. she was good, though. yet nagging unhappiness that the breeders shows in new york were sold out so quickly i never got a chance to buy tickets.

two received no fewer than five messages from daddy and daddi from the aforementioned concert. i'm still the gay man i know i am: i couldn't sleep after that, thinking of the fun that was going on while i was trying to get to sleep. like being reminded what on the road is about while sitting on your ass surfing internet porn.

three contemplating the nature of art and real experimentation in my favorite coffeeshop, through the words of allan kaprow, in a book purchased yesterday along with a few about the Situationists.

four watched an amazing superbowl thirtysomething with L and had a great time. britney's brilliant ad for pepsi (work: simply irresitible). a last minute fieldgoal breaking a tie. and kurt warner. baby.

 

ps all work in this domain is copyright chad the minx.