Skipping a day is usually not a good sign. When I wrote my “diaries” as a child, or tried to keep my regimen of a certain amount of drawings in any 24 hour period, skipping a day usually meant the beginning of the end. Looking back into the books, there was always a day skipped, then an apology for having skipped the day and then nothing. Nothing for pages and pages, up to the next book, the next diary, which would be triggered by some On Kawara event. Most of the skipped days happened to be in January.
I actually wanted to write a lot yesterday, but then the things I wanted to write just seemed so banal, so unnecessary. (Not that what I am writing now is terribly necessary.) It felt good to just draw again and scan and read, without posting and writing and telling.
The watch place from Frankfurt left a message on the machine that my watch is ready and that they will send it via mail (they did not trust FedEx, and no convincing worked. It will be German Mail, Einschreiben versichert) I had given my good old black ORIS alarm to Juvelier Pletsch in Frankfurt in December of last year. There was nothing wrong with the watch, it is just a mechanical piece that needs lubrication every two years or so. My Oris alarm had not been opened since 1996. The winder was almost stripped of chrome, and there seemed to be some resistance whenever the alarm needed to be set. (It is a wrist alarm, a minimal mechanical PDA.) My ORIS wrist alarm will be 10 years old soon, but only on the outside. The reason why I had bought the watch in the first place was its strange age discrepancy. The mechanism that runs the watch was built in 1969 by A.Schild, the same year when I was born, and ORIS bought the last contingent of these mechanisms and repackaged them in 1988. Giving the watch in to Pletsch, I knew that there would be some sort of complication, because the watch was such a limited item with a very limited amount of spare parts. (It was this moment when the entire store came by to take a look at the thing). And even though there was nothing really wrong with the watch, the Watchmakers concluded that the ORIS needs to be sent home to Biel in Switzerland to get a new glass and a new electroplating on the entire housing. At this moment it was pretty clear that this was a serious adventure for the watch. ORIS obviously did not have new housings anymore and so the entire watch needed to be taken apart, stripped to the brass and re-chromed. Everything. The winders the lugs, all of it. Then the new glass... No wonder the whole procedure took four months, during which some Swiss specialist must have done the job by hand. (His left hand probably behind his back.) I hope everything will be fine, because it is impossible to find a black ORIS wrist alarm anywhere. Not even google or eBay could provide a picture, so I will need to scan it in when it arrives. Does it really matter though? How obsessed can one get with a watch? I need to stop, right now. Sorry for that.
What really happened is perfectly described by Claire in her Loobylu blog. There is a serious amount of fear in me. I have this strange feeling that I am not doing enough. That I am not working enough, that the things I make are so far from the standard that I want to achieve that it will just take too long to get there for me to actually ever get there. Tom and I had this whole long email discussion in which I must have concluded several times that I will need to go back into advertising and just continue my drawing as a side entertainment. But I do not want to be some old Creative Director who will sit in front of a blank canvas with freshly bought oils, completely out of ideas and scared like a rabbit. The whole reason why I went into design was out of fear. I did not want to fail right away. I needed to convince my parents quickly that it was possible to survive on this stuff I was doing. This whole drawing thing.
I remember this little interview a friend of my ’s friend had arranged for me with the head of graphics of ZDF, the largest TV station in Germany. I had my little portfolio and I was full of fear. He looked through my work, which had nothing to do with design, nothing; and just started telling me how they just bought these new Computers, Paintboxes, which make a designer up to six times faster. Up to six times. Not the computer was six times faster than anything. The Designer was six times faster. He concluded that I should take the path of commercial design. The art thing could be some sort of hobby I could pick up when I retire. Six times faster.
I did not quite understand that the “faster” was a trap, set for me by life, and I walked right into it. From now on things had some timer attached to them. The faster the better. It took me a while to understand that it might matter in some environments, but it is the opposite of good in others. Making a thing faster does hardly make it better. It should not really matter sometimes how long it takes to make a thing and certain things neeed to take a whole lifetime or even longer to find a state even close to complete. It often feels as if it took a lifetime to be born. Some of us never manage to really give birth to themselves. Some just get by, almost born, drugged out by their surroundings. They run really quickly to nowhere.
I clearly need to start a new day now. This writing makes me a bit depressed.
