August 2003 Archives

Honestly... I could not code my way out of a little brown paper bag. Anybody who looks at the code of this page will notice that it is a mix of the good the bad and the really, really ugly. I simply do not know how to code.
And that CSS stuff?... Hmm... only those with strong nerves might want to look at the stylesheet of this page... (not even the site, I think... hmm... not sure.)
So it is a really big deal for me that I somehow managed to add this little miniblog on the right hand side of this entry... (Okay, Chris Tom did help a little, but not much...) It was all long overdue... where else could I share my passion for all those things everybody else is talking about... (You know, all those New York Times articles we all love to link to and the Wired articles?) or something like that...
Oh, and I also removed the "10 most recent entries" pulldown. (Please simply scroll down the page from now on.) The pulldown was a good one (Thank you for the code, Chris), but I had to keep my entry titles really short and cryptic so this page would not simply explode...
Enough now... (I still need to figure out how to allow comments on those mini entries... without blowing the fuses...)
Look dad, no hands...

as I moved my feet in a slow continuos sequence, turning my head left and right, the little city walked right through me, the houses passed through me, the trees, the decks, the flowers on the frontyards did. Waves of air turned into sounds as they rushed through my head. I did not really change my location much, it was the surroundings that moved, I think... I stayed inside, quiet, afraid to make too much of my own noise and also afraid to be too visible.

And it feels as if the universe has began to collapse into itself just recently, a slow implosion that will devour me just seconds after I realize that there is no outside, just the though...

He had chosen the best teacher available. She had experience, she knew the insides of the culinary business like the back of her wings. Or the bottom of her feet...
Still, making letters with the tongue, ("a requirement for any job in the business"), sounded easier than it ended up to be. He really was at the end of his wits. He wanted to eat, thus he had to find a place to work, frogs could only get work in the restaurant business these days (so the teacher), this was a very tough business... he had to know the correct lingo... had to learn "tongue spelling"...
The lessons were not going too well, he was becoming hungrier and hungrier...
The teacher was not very happy with the progress...
All bad, all bad.

There are very soft layers of whitish ribbons in the sliver of sky I can see from here. The smell of the air is the softest, sweetest, late summerish kind. There used to be many bird sounds just a few minutes ago. Now there is a single bird, making one single sound. It is still good. The panels of the blinds are hitting the books on the window. Not very far away from here, a soft wind chime is trapped in a series of harmonious sequences.
The plant on the air conditioner in the window seems much taller than the trees in the distance. I guess this is how the world works anyway.
I think I can hear the train, parked in the station about a kilometer from here. It is the last stop. The operators never turn off the trains.
There is a new bird now, a different song. The chimes, the train. A car?... silence.
I woke up this morning and was surprised to hear that my neck sounded as if there were sand trapped in my spine. Just moved my neck again... and it is still there.
I think I wish I could turn myself into a tiny blue object and just float to a place where all things appear to have the same size. All larger than me, of course...
It might be time to walk out into this sunny, cool, quiet day...

The ice cream truck played its nerve wrecking song in front of the laundry place on the corner. There were no children buying any ice cream however. A group of maybe twenty or so young men stood between the laundry place and the truck, obstructing the passage. They were discussing something loudly, they seemed like two groups, even though the discussion seemed to happen between two of the men. They were the ones at the centre of a pack of friends, both had their supporters, observers, witnesses with them. Not sure how long the argument had been evolving, but it really felt as if something was about to happen, right there, within the next 30 seconds or so.
They were louder and louder, the words became more serrated more like sounds...
and there it was,
the first punch. Every person in both parties now started to scream something, at the same time, louder, louder...
What happened next took about four seconds. The guy who had been punched grabbed the attacker by the collar of his flashy trainings jacket, spun around with him, as if they both were about to perform a wild dance, he then smashed both of them against the large launderette window.
This was not a movie, these were not paid stuntmen, this was not a scripted moment...
This is when the large window burst.
It was not one of those slow motion motorcycle scenes in which a person in a leather jacket rides through a shower of little pieces of security glass.
The window broke more like a sheet of thin ice, large pieces, obviously sharp edges, the top portion of the glass caved in behind the two young men.
It really was as if both of them had been thrown into a bucket of cold water. All of them, the entire group went silent, surprised?...
One brave bystander pulled both fighters out of where they had landed in the launderette. Both groups moved out of the way, away from the scene, now shouting something else...
The ice cream truck never stopped playing this annoying song...
The owner of the laundry place might have been the one who called the police. Their syrens sounded after about 10 minutes... it was too far now to see what happened next...

It was a little challenge, every single time. They would take her out of the bag, load her up with unexposed memory tape, then wind her up and yey... show her stuff. She got to see so much. Did not want to miss a thing. The kids growing up, the travels, the landmarks, the Mona Lisa.
She had to memorize everything, as well as she possibly could. Sometimes they allowed her to blink 15 times a second, sometimes even more often. Whenever she was allowed to blink slower, the world in front of her turned into more of a dream. Layers of color, steaks of light. Such fun.
They would then take out her entire memory, send it away somewhere... and then later, watch it. They loved to watch the world as seen through her eye.
She was their favorite child...
At least until this one summer... when they left her in the hot, hot car...

He considered himself a healthy mix between a Mustang, an especially crazy horse, a human at core and... well, there was this other half. There was this part of him which he did not quite understand. It was a bit as if something had been switched when he was being manufactured, it was a bit as if he were destined to some day run into the opposite of himself, which would be more like him, the same part, complimentary, they would probably not understand each other at all, even though they would be made of exactly the same material, wait not exactly the same, the opposite, the same after all?
He just wished his brain were distributed better, maybe all over his body, so he could think more in terms of a we than in terms of a they...
He should have probably just spent more time on the prairies and less on the stages... but that's a completely different story, now is it?

They had traveled for weeks. They had to hide between trees, in the valleys, between rocks, in tiny tunnels they dug into the shaky ground, often in the middle of the night. They had to wait for the sun to set to come out and eat, anything, anything they could find. It was an incredibly harsh time. Very exhausting for all. Earthquakes, land slides, streams. The climate in this area was horrible. The rain was mixed with chemicals, hot, disgusting winds. Floods, were often followed by dry seasons, were followed by horrible, often deadly mists.
Most of them did not make it. Some were swept away, some were poisoned, some just died of exhaustion. In the end she really felt as if she were the only survivor, in this endless forest, on top of this incredibly deadly peak. She was tired, she was pregnant. She waited for the night.
She dug herself into the soft ground... and laid her eggs.

Why is there no outcry for what happened in Scotland today? I wonder if the event will even make it onto American Television... Castle gang snatches Leonardo... Wow... Did somebody order the crime after reading the "Da Vinci Code?" Hmm... Who will be next, Lady with an Ermine out of the Czartoryski collection in Kraków?
More here.
And a quite bizarre combination of article and advertising here... hmm...

Sixty eight degrees Fahrenheit (or about nineteen Celsius) is pretty much the nicest temperature one could hope for on a morning in New York. Things tend to get a bit extreme here, as we all know. It might be bad to walk straight into what feels like the humid mouth of a dog in the summer time, but freezing even under layers and layers of various garments in January might be worse.
The Subway still felt a bit toasty, not crowded, it appears that many New Yorkers are making this one an especially long weekend.
Those who rode the subway with me today were like little books of human character speculation.
There was the forty-something gentleman with a Leon Trotsky beard and some rather peculiar medical condition that made him look beyond the kind of potent any man might ever want to be. He rested a gaming magazine on that area, there, as if it were his favorite reading pillow. He sometimes scratched his head of freshly dyed jet black hair. (Something was telling me that he had to hide this magazine from his mother...)
The last page of the gamer publication screamed at all of us announcing that he could be the winner of a Million Dollars. I just imagined how he would decide to invest this king of cash, or if his mom would make these kinds of decisions, and how he would react if he in fact won...
Next to him was a lady in her sixties maybe, she could have been 80, perhaps older. I do not quite remember now what she looked like, she was the kind that used her makeup as if it were skin colored stucco. Then there were the jewels.
Large gem stones, dark, larger than life.
To her right was a gentleman of probably 70, his head barely covered with any hair, his neck very much like a human sized version of a water-turtle's neck.
His shirt was far too open. He seemed refined, interested, guided by what he saw, not by what he thought to see. After a few minutes he pulled out a little inconspicuous book. I could not see the author's names, the title was quite clear... "Geriatric Psychiatry".. I tried to avoid eye contact.
His neighbor was dressed in a shirt that seemed to be made out of the finest checkered cotton table cloth. His hair looked like something on the head of a 15 year old Swedish soccer player, except that he was maybe 40... He stroked over the top layer of his hair as if to make sure the velcro stuck to his scalp.
Something made me think that he could have been British. I do not quite remember what else he wore, but his features, his demeanor, it all pointed to some place where princes like to spend their time hunting foxes and other little animals.
The lady next to me had her ripe summer-picnic-banana ready, it was on top of some tupperware, inside of a rather old Bergdorf Goodman bag. Her fisherman pants matched the checkers of the English gentleman, except they were the salmon and white, not blue.
In front of us, at least for the last few stops, a man from somewhere in South America (what a wild guess). His too tight black pants seemed to attempt to befriend that Bergdorf Goodman traveler. His body appeared as if it were a soft and air filled dough, spilling just about wherever it could in ways permitted by his outfit. The Canary yellow tennis shirt met his pants in a place that was incredibly confined by a thin, shiny, leather belt. Even his sunglasses, placed around his neck, not on top of his shiny, shiny hair, were seemingly cutting into a soft mass of a body. The man with a soft outside and possibly a hard core also wore one of those pieces of clothing not visible to the human eye... a rather heavy cologne. It spilled freely all over the subway car, spread out and tickled all of the somehow tired strap hangers. Whenever the doors opened, there would be a new mix of fragrance. I was quite glad to finally reach my destination. As I was leaving the car, I noticed an incredibly beautiful African American woman, deep in the corner of the car. I only had a split second to see her, so I could not imagine any story as the ones that for me surrounded all the other characters.
Outside of the station the weather was still the perfect seventy degrees. The skies are blue and clear here in New York, I think I might need a little coffee...

He was the one hundredth sheep. He was the jumper that rarely got to actually jump over the fence. He barely even made it into the lineup. His brothers and sisters were the ones that got to do the fun work, jumping the fences, riding bicycles, performing magic tricks. He was just number one hundred. Everybody knew he was there, they knew that one day he might appear somewhere in a rerun of their performance, maybe even sing some cute song... but for now... all he could think of was the theory that he was not the only one. There was a second 100, somewhere, hiding, among the flock...
Well, well... maybe one day they could meet...

Ahem...

Some of the most annoying entries known to blogs are shopping bonanzas. Somebody buys a new toy and just keeps being excited about it for days, weeks. We all anticipate the arrival of the new baby camera, the new baby computer, the new baby who knows what. Then it arrives. Then we all experience the beauty of it, it is so cute, it is the best thing since the invention of the blog, it is just all that... then the next thing follows, often a complaint about the bad monay situation, the lack of food, then the site just goes offline. Okay, I made up the last few steps... but isn't it annoying when somebody goes on and on about their shopping experiences? Wasn't shopping invented to happen in private, secretly, for undisclosed amounts of money, diluted by very personal discounts, secret handshakes, hidden extras... hmm...
Why am I writing all this?... Oh, because nobody bought any of the cameras on my wishlist and because I somehow have the feeling that not having a digital camera these days is like having no radio in the 30's...
(Now I feel a bit stupid...)
So... I did not really think as high end as Florian's Nikon D100, as it is a serious professional camera... And don't we all wish that Sigma SD9 were built by somebody who would allow us to put Canon or Nikon lenses in front of that Foveon - X3 chip?...
I had to think of a more portable solution this time, something that would for easy happy snaps...
I was thinking a bit about this sexy little Leica - D-LUX (Since I really love Leica optics, and trust them in general.) But for more than $800 I would have loved to have the option to work with uncompressed files. Oh well...
So what about the loved Canon G5... It does look really nice in all the pictures, doesn't it?... I played with it at B&H and it was beautiful, but still a bit bulky and still somehow said loudly that it was a serious camera...
So what will I end up buying? It looks very much like it is going to be the Canon S50, wicked little guy, as seen in Digital Photography Review...
I will probably get a 1GB micro drive for it... and some other stuff, maybe not this thing..., most definitely one of those...
Hmm... Did anybody need to know all this?... Probably not... it will certainly help me buy the items...
Oh, and the Canon S50 is the camera used for Slower.net what is there not to love?...

Another case of me not speaking or reading any Japanese and coming across a brilliant little site (or three.) Take a look at these cute goods by hmm... Boo-Doo-Chang?... via Hiroshi Yoshii, apparently sometimes uses a crazy software called ZBrush... wow...

This entry should have been here this morning, when wild masses of international readers clicked their way through from Shauny's Mac Moron site. Harvey, her little iBook friend (700MHz/20GB/12inch) made it back home, healthy and in one happy piece.
So what happened and what did the story look like from my side of the screen?
Shauna's iBook died somewhere around the 4th of July. The symptoms that accompanied his death were too familiar. First there was this high fever, then there was the coma, then there were the casual blackouts, then there was the death. I hoped that Harvey could be just fixed in Scotland, where he and his incredibly gifted owner currently reside, but the estimate returned for the necessary repair was just obscene, dirty, an insult to any mac lover. The authorized Mac shop in Edinburgh charged Shauna £50 or so to tell her that the repair of her little white apple friend would cost £870! Absolute insanity. This is (according to the always "happy" captain euro) about $1,400... to have a computer repaired? Maybe?
This was not about to happen, my friends. Harvey did not travel from Taiwan to Australia to Singapore to Frankfurt to Edinburgh just to be fixed for an amount higher than the price of a new model...
I asked Tom if he knew a shop in London that could fix Harvey for les than, hmm... £300... He actually found some expert, who was willing to help, but then ended up not returning Shauna's calls. (thank you very much.)
This situation was just ridiculous. I asked Shauna to ship Harvey to New York, because here were at least two places where he could get help quickly and for less than the cost of a new computer.
Harvey arrived nicely wrapped, accompanied by a little diagnosis sheet a few days later. He was about as dead as they get. He did not want to start up, did not want to even make a sound. The screen remained blank...
At least for a little while. I have spent so many years dealing with macs, I know that it is sometimes important to just be nice to them to make them come back from the dead. I complimented Harvey on his shiny surface, the blinking lights on his bottom... connected him via firewire... pushed his big button and voilá, the screen went on and the little computer opened up to me completely, showing me the content of his harddrive. (Attention users of osX, Jaguar: If you think that anything on your hard drive is protected by this "password" you use for a log-in... think again. You are just one of the folders on the drive when it boots up in target mode... the only thing that will protect you is the discrete nature of the visitor... I did not look at any files...) I powered down harvey, wrapped him back into his protective envelope and decided to bring him to Tekserve, the trusted name in Apple repairs, since before there was an Apple store in SoHo.
I arrived at Tekserve during my lunch break on the next day. My number was 84, I waited for about 30 minutes or so, just to be called in to sit across from a guy who really tried hard to look as if he knew what he was doing. Harvey did not like him at all. The iBook did not start, it did not make a sound, the "expert" created an info-sheet based on my description of the issues... He then told me that the repair would cost $360... this was the standard fee applied to all repairs that needed to be sent back to apple. I asked him if it would be cheaper for me to bring the computer directly to Apple.... and he told me that yes, this would be about 50-60 dollars less... Ahem... what an honest soul... hmm...
I signed a waiver that confirmed that I refused to have the computer repaired on 23rd street... Next stop would be the Genius Bar at the Apple store in SoHo.
(As I was walking out the door, there was a little mountain of "Harveys" (exactly the model) for $800 each... check that out, Scottish repair man...
A day later, in a different setting, we found ourselves on the second floor of the nicely smelling Apple Store. Left and right from us were parents with their little Harveys, as dead as my little buddy... same symptoms, same panic mode...
The young lady who's iBook looked more dead than dead let me go ahead of her, as I was a bit in a hurry and the Genius I got to talk to was Pax. Pax means peace, of course, and this Apple Genius was really very relaxed and not worried about things... was he a real genius? would he be able to heal Harvey?... To my great surprise... well, not a great surprise, but still, Harvey just started up. It took a tiny while, some little spinning action, a few minutes of this, a few seconds of that and Pax and I were looking at Shauna's log in screen. This is where I realised that I did not know the password. I felt as if I had stolen the computer, dragged it here and wanted to perform some apple laundry scheme... Did I mentioned that Pax appeared very relaxed throughout the procedure?... When I told him that I did not have the password... (among other things... I did a lot of nervous talking...) he just typed something on the keyboard once... twice... and then simply stated: "Oh, it was ••••••• how funny."... (Did I hear an angel choir sing hallelujah? did the "genius" logo glow? Not sure, but this Pax guy was indeed an Apple genius.) How funny indeed, this guy needed just two tries to get into Shauna's private space, on a computer which looked all bright eyed and bushy tailed to all of us. Pax, the genius, did not want to accept an obviously healthy machine. He gave me some time to crash Harvey, while he brought away some left overs from some other customer...
I tried really hard to crash Harvey right there at the genius bar, I really tried... I wanted him to break into sweat, to break down in Photoshop, to go blank, do at least pretend to be dead...just for a minute or two? Please?
He only fell asleep... nothing spectacular enough to have him stay the night at his secret home in SoHo...
Pax created a case number for me, to make things easier once I had to call 1-800-APL-CARE, the place where he would have sent Harvey anyway.
I took the little iBook home with me again. Turned him on...
dead.

I must have been the first caller at 1-800-APL-CARE the next day. The dude on the other side of the line gave me the slowest tech support experience of my life. He was so quiet, apparently staring blankly at his screen?, that I suggested that there should be some sort of sound, letting me know that he was still there...
"I hear a sound..." he replied...
allrighty then... he had my case number, I knew the resurrection of Harvey would cost $299, so what was his problem?...
I spent 30 Minutes listening to him do something close to nothing. His conclusion was that harvey had a broken LCD... I repeatedly had to tell him that the iBook sometimes happened to start up fine, with a shiny, beautifully bright display... silence...
He prepared me for a number which would be the price for the repair... we waited in silence for another few minutes... "$690"...
Oh, comoooon.... I asked him if he would mind to take a second look at that calculation and if there could be any shadow of a chance that the special $299 fee applied to this kind of incident... silence...
"In this particular case..."... he paused... "you might be right..."

Harvey's ambulance arrived on the day of the blackout. It was a very nice fresh brown box, it contained a little room made especially for harvey, he also got a little pink sleeping bag. All I had to do was put him into that compartment, close the box, using enclosed stickers, remove the shipping label, revealing the return address in Memphis... and just give it back to the AirExpress guy...
Supersimple...
I was not sure where Harvey stayed during the 2003 blackout... he definitely made it to the repair center in Memphis, then to the Apple Store in SoHo (apparently sharing the ride with some other happy macs?) and was then sent to me...
Healthy, happy, resurrected.
There was a little note enclosed, stating that real Apple technicians were able to fix harvey by exchanging three real Apple-parts... A bill would follow in a few days...
I should probably knock on imitation wood now and hope that the Apple dude on the phone actually managed to put Harvey into the $299 emergency procedure slot...
I shipped Harvey back to Scotland on the following day, last friday. The friendly people at Mail Boxes Etc. on Broadway and 96th got a real kick out of Harvey's story. In order to save Shauna from the burden of improper taxation, the lady at the store wrote a mini letter outlining what had happened to harvey and how he had been manufactured in Taiwan, bought in Australia and was now returning to his owner in Scotland. This would have been a simple happy ending to my side of the Harvey story... had he not tried to make another funny intercontinental jump. Apparently addicted to travel by now, Harvey faked a little mini trip to Shanghai, via Alaska... but only for a few hours. Despite of "delays" in China, he was able to get back to New York, just on time to be shipped to England, where he spent a day on a truck, celebrating a british bank holiday on Monday...

So now Harvey is back in Edinburgh, he is a little helper to Shauna. I am certain that he is happier now, having traveled pretty much completely around the world, at least virtually...
I wish I had had a little camera to show you all the places Harvey saw, at least under my watch (nothing dirty, just pure Apple fun...) but that's a completely different story... and we shall continue it some other time...
: )

She was a real (looking) gun, just $9.99, or even less with a mail in coupon (Buy one, get a second one, for FREE*.). She was the loaded kind, ready to kill some time. Ready to see some action, ready to make sure there was great excitement, some realism, some preparation in the games played today. She was ready to point and shoot, to being pulled and to blast some tiny tunnels into the bodies of friends and pets and things... this would be such great fun...
And if she got the right people, if she got the right amount of people at the right time, in the right place, if she only worked hard enough to be effective, quiet and precise... then her owner could maybe make it to television, into the papers, onto the web... it was all about fame these days. Fame was good. Publicity was good. It was all really good, declared good, paid well, celebrated, on the covers, under blankets, in big printed sheets.
She was looking forward to being the beginning of someone's career.
Fame, fame, here we come.

* equal or lesser value, second toy unloaded, allow 28 days for delivery, please include 8.99 for shipping and handling.

This one is a little bit like that old question we used to ask each other in elementary school in Poland. "You arrive at two gates. One gate leads to heaven, the other to hell. Both gates have guards and both guards look exactly the same. You know that one of the guards is a devil who will always give the opposite of the honest answer and the other guard is an angel, who will always tell the truth. You are only allowed to ask one single question. How will you find out through which door to pass?"

I received the email below this morning. It looks like a reply to an email I sent, with an attachement that I sent. It is the Sobig.f. virus that is attached to this one, so we are talking about some serious action here. This is the virus that shut down networks of rather large companies (including the New York Times, I hear), it is a bit of a celebrity of viruses. The most powerful guy ever (so far...). So what made me send it to a friendly person at the UCP in Florida, A Program of united Cerebral Palsy of Central Florida?... nothing made me do it. I am on a Mac here, using several virus filters on top of that. I do not have the attachment that came with this email anywhere on my Harddrive. So... there are two possibilities...
Either the person who seems to be returning the email to me has now an infected computer and for some reason had my email address in their address book... the computer had been left on and performed the virus distribution by itself. (So if you work for UCP in Florida, scan your drive please.)
Or... and this one would be the slightly more vicious version of the event, somebody is using my email address to send spam, or viruses or what not, to users like the friendly person at UCP...
I recently found comments on somebody's blog, which were signed with my name (and they were not kind comments...), so such "soft" identity theft is quite likely.
Hmm... so what was the one question we should have asked one of the guards at the doors to heaven or hell?... You know the answer, don't you?...

There was not a single cloud in the sky over Manhattan, or over the river, or over New Jersey and the hills and somehow the entire rest of the continent. At least it seemed this way. The view turned slowly, just the way it always does, for years now, though it is less and less a view and more and more of a round trip between windows of offices and hotel rooms, condos.
There is still a relative wide sliver of a vista left facing New Jersey, which is in the west from there. It is the not so developed place where the sun sets. The large, orange, glowing sun. The large star behind layers and layers of glass. First there were the windows, of course, the serious strong windows, as they have to be on the 48th floor. Then there were these slightly curved sheets of glass, right by the tables, a barrier of sorts, preventing the guests even if beyond drunk, or angry about the $6.50 charge for non hotel guests, preventing them from just falling into the wrong direction, breaking something after the fall. Perhaps the neck?
As the nearly empty view turned its vacant seats towards the sinking orange sun, a whole group of serious photographers came forward to show the magnificent event to their very smart looking cameras. There was the Danish couple, both men agreeing on the little previews flashing between the graphic interface of their large lensed range finder camera, a quiet woman with a large black SLR, snuck between the chairs as if the sun were an incredibly rare, shy bird. The batteries in her camera must have been super fresh, as she flashed the sun with such powerful bursts of light, over and over and over again... I wonder how much of the actual sunset will make it onto her film.
She was the most professional looking one of the many who were just there, flashing the glass barrier.
In the bathroom, the concierge was very hesitant to offer a paper towel to the chef, who came here in his large white hat. It was good to see that the food professional used his towel and not his hands to open the bathroom door.
Outside by the elevators, a group of tourists from Switzerland contemplated about the great advantages of having numbered streets in a city like New York. The subway system did not seem to be as clear to them however. One lady admitted having been lost... several times. She now made it a habit to study the map very well before leaving the house. She did not want to appear as a tourist, of course.
I knew she was one before I even saw her. (Gell?)
About 44 floors below, the carpets and the music could have been ripped out and imported from a las vegas casino. Twirling leaves and rectangles in complimentary colors intertwined to a maddening composition, amplified by the castrated muzac pumped through the omnipresent hidden speakers.
It was a bit of a psychedelic experience, only healed by a slow escape through the hidden and prohibited fire emergency exit. There it was, an oasis with unpretentious lighting and no disturbing music. So beautifully calm.
So good to just stay there. Calm. More than calm. Happy. A short break in a successful escape from organized madness...
Then the door on the ground floor... "I Heart New York" T-Shirts for just $7.99, thousands of tourists, again, all drunk on the lights and sounds and ultimately themselves.
Such different spaces, right next to each other... so good, so incredibly good...
And the sun? It is now busy setting over the Hollywood sign... will it come back for more?... I bet.
Will there be photographers flashing at it? Most certainly yes.

There are shiny spots on the printed imitation wood of my desk. Right under my elbows. Polished edges. Reflective now. The space bar on my Powerbook has an incredibly shiny spot on it (left hand side). This is where the right side of my left thumb likes to rest and just move the cursor forward, whenever I want to take a written breather... (like... now). Most of the keys are shiny. Their imprints on the LCD screen will never go away.
The sides of my little mouse are also smooth. The headphones are falling apart.
The PowerBook sometimes falls into a sleep so deep that only a restart is able to bring it back... when we are all relaxed and lucky.
My ten year old leather mouse pad has seen many mice, many rooms, many table tops, many computers. The graphic tablet stayed in my bag today.
Managed to start a little drawing on one of the deeper pages of one of the many Moleskines.
Tired. We are all too tired to make any real progress today... but maybe it is not all about progress anyway.
Hoped so much to be rested and spring loaded. Instead, I feel as if heavy stones had been placed on all my limbs, my head, and even inside of me, piles of little stones on the heavy heart and lungs and soul...
I will try to smile a lot this evening. If I just try hard enough, there will be a series of joyful drawings here, when we all wake up to a new day tomorrow.
Tuesdays tend to be the busiest days anyway.

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(Sorry, could not resist.)

It was not very far from here, inside of a Wal*Mart, right next to the HotWheels cars, right next to the Barbies and the dancing giggle Elmos, about 3 yards from there...
Racoon urine spray (Link provided for illustration only). "Guaranteed to cover up human scent." Right next to it camouflage clothing. Gun Bullets, 12-pack. They were in the same plastic bubbles as the little dolls just around the corner. I was expecting a button in the back "try me" or "watch me kill". Across the isle: Bows. "Don't open the bow boxes." this is not looking good. Right next to the bows were the arrows, of course. Right next to the arrows, were the various weights of arrow heads. Scary, spooky, disgusting little pieces of engineering. Spring loaded razor blades on a sharp piece of metal. Loading device included. Razor blades with little teeth, designed to spring open when needed. Above it all, a 3D-deer, made out of "self healing material" a "replaceable vital area core extends the life of target significantly." Easy assembly, three pieces. A near-perfect replica of a 130-pound Whitetail Deer, made for bow hunters who are "serious" about their shooting..
At least the guns were in a locked glass box, like watches. The most expensive gun was $350... (Maybe they were air guns? "fun")
Attention Wal*Mart shoppers... now you can killer savings in isle 13!...
Oh, I am not kidding...

He would have loved to swim into that harbor, during the day, would have loved to get some fresh, delicious fish. He would have loved to swim by the side of a fisher boat, happy, jumpy, singing one of the current hits.
But whenever he showed up anywhere near a man made place or thing, and anytime there were humans who somehow even just peeked, there would be things thrown at him. Ropes and swimming rings. Somebody once even threw a boat. A boat!
What was wrong with this human species. Why all this throwing of things, why him, why him?
In the beginning things appeared relatively funny... a family on a little boat, threw him a rope, he grabbad it and pulled them out of the harbor... This must have been what they wanted, or no?... He pulled them for hours and hours...
A few days later, all they were throwing were pieced of wood and digested food. Disgusting...
So now he avoided any human interaction... definitely during the day. When humans could see him... they were such overly visual creatures...

At night things were different. He loved nothing more than finding lovers, embraced, in the not so deep waters by the beach... he would then... hmm... we should probably interrupt this story right here...

Looking young was so last century. Stupid little bimbos trying to remove the earliest signs of wrinkles and lines in their dumb little faces. Then all that body worship bulls*it. Those 60 year olds longing to look like 16 year olds obviously wanted to have that "unexperienced look" for a reason. They had peaked in high-school, college, maybe early in their law or medical jobs... They wanted to keep their look, did not want to accept that their bodies and their brains were becoming more and more experienced. They paid to make themselves forget. It was all about forgetting. Forgetting the years, the years passed by, the ones yet to come...
He was of a different breed. He was the next generation. He was ahead of his time, by at least 50 years or so. Waxing his head to make it look like natural, decade long hair loss was maybe one of the least painful procedures. It was quite difficult to find a dentist who would perform what needed to be done.
Aging the skin was a painful process, involving many serious chemicals... and many visits to Dr. Z...
The eyes... what insanely bright light had to be used to make the insides and the outsides of his eyes seriously deteriorate. He now spent days peeking between his private floaters.
It took a serious while for him to reach that ancient gentleman look. He stood out in a crowd of less forward thinking 22 year olds for sure... They did not know what they were about to do with their lives, he had at least the look of an experienced, serious man... He had made sure that not all of his body was aged... and so he was quite convincing in dances with those insanely young looking 55 year olds...
These were truly the good times... the blurry, barely heard of times filled with delicious soups and soft vanilla cookies...
No, not really... he made sure to enjoy the things he really liked... but that's another story...

Can you imagine living here in New York and not leaving the city all Summer long? I mean look at me, I recently started writing confusing little posts commenting on other confusing little post, posted at confusing times, drifting. I pretty much snapped yesterday, sent some really adrenalized (I know this word does not exist) emails, I am turning weird.
I do not think that I am going to end up like the gentleman downstairs who spread himself all over the sidewalk with his coffee and who smeared the butter off the bagel onto his face (he really managed to get it all over himself, even into his hair), but I obviously need to leave the city for at least a short moment.
And this is exactly what is going to happen. I am going to leave this place and take a ride in an actual car, (not a subway car,) one with a combustion engine, take that ride across the river and upupup... for a day or two. I seriously need that. This means that I will fall behind even more on my 360 drawings and the stories and all... but when I come back... expect great things... miracles. (Okay, maybe not.)
While I am gone, can you please find out some things? Some are really silly...
1) Is This Gentleman possibly related to Paul. (Sorry for deep linking, Eliot, your photographs are a true inspiration.)
2) Does anybody out there speak whale, and can you please find out what really happened here... I just do not believe this ridiculously human-centric (not a word, right?) point of view in this sad Story. Especially after reading this article. (I mean: A scuba diver even landed on the whale and shot video as the leviathan dove. Comoooon!)
3) Can you tell me if you managed to go This event... or maybe one of these events. (This question was actually for Alaina, who's little typepad site I like very much.)
4) Can you explain how a package (and it's content is going to be explained on more than one site, I promise) can travel from New York to Anchorage to Shanghai in a matter of hours, be delayed in China and still make it back to New York for a late dinner?
5) Would you be interested in hunting down a lost edition of some of the 360x360 drawings?
6) am I completely insane for liking This? (why did they make the price of it so ugly?)
7) Can you please forgive me?

So why is this post called "Prince of Whales?"... obviously because of poor Migaloo... the "white fella" (this is what his name means), that should be just left alone... (though things seem to be pointing into a rather different outcome.)
Sorry again for this very confused and confusing post. Have a glorious weekend.

Possibilities were endless? Almost endless... Having an incredibly clustered and branched out brain had maybe incredible advantages theoretically, but practically... hmm... a completely different story... Millions of completely different stories... all of them calling for attention... most of them brilliant...
He would often have elaborate conversations about the silliest, tiniest things, really. Lifting a leg soon became impossible. The consequences of any action, (lifting legs was one of them), were just too grave, too complex to be simply accepted, executed, thrown into the mix.
Lucky players who had to deal with primitive games like... chess. There was a finite number of possible moves in chess, a very limited game... Life?, any action in life? Moves in real life?... The place that does not consist of 64 black and white fields and does not not only have a black and a white army of 16 (15+king) but billions, and billions of players with their almost unlimited variations of possible legal and illegal moves... The interaction of several living beings? Yes, the possibilities here were also finite, but the quantity was so much higher that the calculations and predictions of any series of events became a more than serious task... a paralyzing, immobilizing task... aagh...
now what about breathing... the beating of the heart?...

A lady from the office of the dentist I went to visit a few weeks ago called me yesterday. She was speaking with a slight, cold Russian accent and really tried to push some kind of button on me.
"You missed your last week's appointment!" She sounded as if she were the bad mother I never had. "Where were you?"
I was ready to jump into my time machine and go back to that date which I apparently missed. (Why did she call me now? So odd...)
"The Doctor will have time this Sunday."
She was obviously a woman used to speak in important, yet simple sentences.
I had to somehow stop this Stalinesque conversation and told her that I would have to think about this whole thing and that I was not even sure if I would be able to ever see the doctor again. I was not quite ready for the visit to the dentist just yet. I had really forgotten all about the date.
It was after we hung up that I realized that the appointment I had been given was for the removal of a wisdom tooth. The doctor had decided to pull my wisdom teeth one by one, in four separate fun sessions. I was not even ready for the treatment in general. I have been shown x-rays of my wisdom teeth so many times. I have to say that they look better every time I get to see them. One of them might be a bit pushy, but the othes are turning really more and more into pretty healthy mouth citizens. They just happen to be a bit late for the performance and this only got the cheaper seats in the house, ahem, mouth. Oh well. Doctors obviously love removing large teeth. They can not quench their desire with those large front carrot cutters, so they have to settle for the next best thing. The teeth of wisdom. As if those were to give the one who pulls them out some sort of intellectual advantage. (Are they magic teeth?, do dentists have rooms in which the walls are packed with taxidermic plaques of wisdom teeth, the same way a hunter might have a room filled with antlers and ivory?)
This particular doctorchik was just very particular in general. He and his assistant looked as if they had been tele-ported from a Russian version of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. I was really expecting Capitan Nemovitch to enter any minute, as I was sitting there, on the slightly uncomfortable chair, waiting, for about 30 minutes or so.
The bearded assistant entered the room after a while and began to clean some instruments. I thought that I could maybe start a conversation and asked him how long the practice had been in business. (I expected him to say something like... 1866...) Instead he answered about himself. He had been in the country for a year or so. He then continued to tell me that he was a very important professor of dentistry in Moscow. I was almost intimidated. No I was not.
The Doctor had an even more fascinating background. Once I actually got to see him and once he told me about his plans to pull four pieces of wisdom out of my living mouth, he replied to my serious concernes about the procedure in a way an auto mechanic would have reacted (dude, I have fixed Ferraris, I will be able to soup up your Camry.) He told me that he had performed much more complicated operations in Russia. Serious reconstructions of jaws and very complex cosmetic procedures were in his past in Moscow, ... I then helped him to find his pen.
The entire experience was really something of me being a lab monkey in a State subsidized experiment, abandoned, things going wrong, the scientists being high (low) on tranquilizers, the whole big package. It all happened weeks ago, I did not want to write about it then, but it is still in my memory as a very oddly fresh experience.
I still remember how the tool that was supposed to be used to clan my teeth fell apart, how the doctor pulled out some serious wrench and reassembled the whole apparatus with me sitting there, the light still on my open mouth, the suction tube still gurgling in my throat.
As the doctor was cleaning my teeth, he told his assistant about the army spending the entire morning trying to reconnect matter and time. They both laughed as if it had been a real killer joke. I made an asking noise. The doctor repeated the joke for mem now in English. I still did not understand... he then said that I would not be able to understand, because it was a linguistic kind of a joke... "You will not understand, because it is a linguistic kind of a joke."
I thought that matter and time and something being a matter of time and that time mattered... well all these connections did make sense, and it was very nice that they all did... but to laugh about it, as if it were the greatest joke under the sea?... hmm...
I think I am glad that I completely forgot about my appointment last week. I think even if the lady had called me on time... I would have probably kept my wisdom teeth to myself...
Matter and time?... or was it Rhyme and reason?... Why the army?... The Russian Army? hmm... will I ever discover the hidden joke inside of the hidden joke? Will the laughter that is going to follow going to be harmful?... Healing?
Will I grow a beard? Find captain Nemo Nemovitch Nemanov? So many questions... no answers. No answers. At least not now. Too late...

it appears that drawing is a bit painful but still somehow possible in the evenings. Stories are best brewed up freshly in the morning, before coffee, before water, before even the alarm rings.
And things will probably appear more steady in the long run than they actually are. This means that I managed to add three images last night, and then wrote their little accompanying remarks this morning... Not the greatest way to interact with the readers here, but it just makes more sense for me... oh well...

Took a new look at the improved William Wegman World this morning, and I had to smile. Not because of the admittedly sweet dogographs but because of the way Wegman writes about his work (like an actual nice human being). It is just so nice and straight forward that I could not help but smile... Read Art - School and Drawing and Writings... and Painting...
Yeah, this is more like the guy who took those really funny and inspiring Photographs... back in the day...
He does sound like a really nice guy, doesn't he? (And there were no pictures of puppies, see?) : )

Standing on the shoulders of giants was so last summer, worse, so last two summers ago. Beautiful George picked a tired and quiet giant, made his way all the way through his pants and shirt and climbed to the very top. Now he was standing on the head of his giant. The view was much better, he did not have to listen to his stupid pedestal, he did not have to say anything either. This was the perfect place to command a view, to battle the elements, to win the hearts of those who were as clever.
The only thing he needed to do now was to keep his giant standing, walking, maybe even running. Who cares if one stands on the shoulders or the head of a giant, if the giant is so tired and burned out that he needs to sit down. Or can you imagine standing on the head of a giant who collapses? Better not think about such stuff now.
Let's play with birds.

Three little animations for BBC Three, by Lambie-Nairn. Oh, these are going to be burned into your memory, I promise... especially the second one of the three... Terrible damage... yes it is... (thank you Tom)...
(More info Here...
Oh, wait, there is more... BBC - BBC THREE - Blobs (Holy Plastiloni.)

Could this possibly be electric-radiation-deprivation? Could I be suffering from something like that? Could a night spent in a Manhattan apartment without electricity, only filled with microwaves from cellphone transmissions and the unavoidable radio signals (allright, there were quarks involved as well,) have such a long lasting effect? I feel as if I had traveled through several time zones and ended up in a parallel New York that appears to have all the elements of the city I love, but which really is a completely different place.
It must be me. The tiniest disruption in my silly routines makes it barely possible for me to draw, to write, to do anything... seriously...
This is really quite odd. (Maybe it is the peanut butter and Jelly?, the avoidance of perishable foods?)
Who would have thought that my ability to do things could be so dependent on outer factors... wait no... who would have thought that my perception of my ability to do things could be so dependent on my perception of what influence outside factors have on me... who would have thought that my perception of the perception of... (aagh, stop that.)
(Am I just looking for something, or someone, to blame?)
I should probably close this entry now...
Please disregard, please disregard, draft mode, draft mode, delete, delete, delete...

They had all a great past, and an even grander future. The box from which they all came said it loud and clear:"Certified Non-Toxic * Brilliant Colors" and most importantly: "Never Dries Out!". Perfect.
Each one of them made it to be an elephant, a monkey, a bird, a car, a thing, a man, a dog and then again some sort of other monstrous thing. New shapes every day, new adventures.
They all came from the same box, there were mixing instructions on the back (right next to those "how to make a turtle" instructions,) but they never actually "mixed". They remained in their "Richer, Smoother Colors!" state. They changed shapes, they did not become one.
The white piece seemed most afraid of being crushed into the others. It somehow had this weird idea that it had some extra kind of shape, even when it did not, well, that was funny for a few days or so, but then it just became annoying. Even now, the white piece was claiming to be an elephant. Comoooon, what kind of elephant is that, where is the trunk?, where are the ears? It maybe used to be an elephant, maybe a few days ago, but they all had been all sorts of things since. Just to avoid the argument, the other three agreed, that white was an elephant... he had to promise not to make elephant noises though... and yes, whale noises also counted as "elephant".
Dark green had a very different issue. She somehow read somewhere that she was not even supposed to be part of the box. She had been manufactured to roam free, to climb up walls, maybe go into standup (work as silly-putty.) That was obviously a pretty strange idea to her three siblings. She was the same thing as theys, just got a bit more dye after (after!) they had been manufactured, following the same(!) recipe. She did not want to hear that, tried to escape several times, now carried the scars of these attempts, the pebbles, the dog hair, the who knows what, the dust, supposedly even a quarter. (Nobody had ever seen the quarter, she just claimed that it was a california one... oh well...she saw it as "savings to be used for her later life", the others just saw it as a figment of her imagination...)
Bright green was a bit of a name dropper. Who the hell wanted to know about somebody called: Fra Luca Pacioli, Giorgi or this guy Brunelleschi... Then came some talk about Platonic Solids, Kepler, Rudolf Steiner, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz...
When light green started about Carlo Suares and some anthropocosmic ideas they were still able to bear it... Claiming that Copernicus had been wrong and that "Light Green" was in fact the center of the "known universe", seemed so outdated and bizarre that the others just hoped for the day somebody would just step on light green and turn him into a two dimensional object...
Beige wanted to be less than that. Beige imagined himself as a moebius strip at first... an elegant one, thin, almost translucent.
He then dreamt of turning himself into something even less dimensional... maybe a moment in time, a dot, a blip, a spark of a thought, a distant memory?...
He was also the one who somehow foresaw that not only would they all end up as a grayish, plump piece of modeling clay with some enclosed dirt, well, they would probably end up being mixed with the toy soldiers, which they would then slowly by surely dissolve, since "Never Dries Out" meant that they had this hidden, quite destructive superpower of greasing and softening their surroundings.
He hoped that maybe some of his ideas of self removal would survive, once they turned into a dirty, hairy, forever soft boulder...
Maybe this was the solution... if they just turned into dirt, maybe they could just mix with some potting soil, turn into nutrient... die?...
No... death was unfortunately not really an option. They were created to be "moldable" forever... somebody would probably find them in a few hundred years and shape them into something that was going to prove this person's theory about the current times, the thing all four of them called "now" (at least for now)... "Never Dries Out" meant being moldable forever, slaves to the good and more often really bad ideas by others, others who even though barely ever really born were always allowed, had the privilege, to actually die.

Verizon wanted my money, T-Mobile wanted my money. I happened to have a username and password for T-Mobile... from back in the day, when I tested the access point in the Starbucks, just across half Broadway from me... So I am back, I am paying for not even a frapuccino... the connection is incredibly fast.
(Wasted on my typing here.)
I am on one of the benches that are placed on center lane of Broadway, above the subway tracks, on every street. I a, facing south. With me on the bench a gentleman reading a printout and a man who appears to be slightly dazed, half asleep. Could this be his corner?
Across 93rd Street, a group of five gentlemen, they are having lively conversations.
Cars are rushing past us. Uptown downtown.
Advent Lutheran Church invites: "Come Share Spirit."
I could not log in on West End Avenue. Users seem to use passwords wherever I tried. Are they experts? Do they know what they are doing?
Am I insane for writing here, connected to a paypoint, when I should just walk two more blocks, go home and post from my own desk?
It is just so much fun to sit outside, to watch the city turn dark, punctured by yellow rectangles. It is fun to listen to tiny pieces of conversations...
Five more minutes please...

It was a very brisk walk down by the river. The sun set now, I think, just a few minutes ago it could be seen behind high buildings on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River.
I assumed that the Boat Community on 79th Street would have an open WiFi channel, but not yet. I had to walk up to Riverside Drive, and happen to be on 90th street... the Signal is very strong, the access point is just a default setting of a linksys router. My favorites.
A security officer with a radio walked just past me. There will be thunderstorms in the near future. He also gets the best reception here on the corner.
I would have liked a bench, but this fire hydrant is just fine for now.
The officer is moving on.
I am breathing in this fragrant evening air. The trees around here are just turning into black silhuettes. There is a singing sound from chirping insects. Cars make noise too, of course, somewhere over the river was the distant whisper of a helicopter.
But this is a very quiet corner here, well groomed plants hug, no kiss the pre war apartment building. There are perfectly manicured flowers here too. The street is patched in many ways but still manages to look quite elegant.
(I saw geese by the river. They were enjoying their grass... A monarch butterfly swam through air towards the monstrous Trump condominiums.)
Some joggers are returning from their evening rounds by the water. The cars have all their lights on now...
I will now continue my walk...
Next Stop... West End Avenue... ? (perhaps)

A souped up, white BMW 7 just pulled up to the building entrance here. The licence plates look as if they were not even American, the windows are all dark. Behind the main car, a large dark van. (Bodyguards.)
The "important guy" got out od the BMW and walked smoothly like a dressed up cat into the skyscraper. He was sporting a white trainings outfit with large blue and yellow triangles. (Enyce.)
Two bodyguards got out of the van and followed him... in a good distance.
The cars are still parked there, their lights on... the "important guy" brought back a woman, a few friends, they are talking. She is using her cellphone.
We are all relaxed here, the weather is perfect, there is a light breeze. The light has this soft shimmering quality to it. If I could live off air, I would probably like it prepared exactly this way. Soft scents from nearby restaurants mixed with other natural and designed fragrances. Perfect temperature.
I will now close my PowerBook and take a good walk... wanna come?

There was no internet access from the office all day. No email either. A virus had brought down the servers, the firewalls, the whole nine yards. All PC users will need to restart their "units" in the morning, accept new patches, virus protection, and if all goes well, things will be fine again tomorrow.
But what will happen a week from now, a month?... Will there be a new virus, new obstacles put into place to "improve" the security of things?
I am writing this from a park, from a bench. I just picked one of four available WiFi networks. The access here is free. I am certainly not being secure right now... but I am also allowed to write...
Will the future be a mix of "secure" networks that will become the bait for those who will want to attack and bring them down and those "insecure" completely open access points to almost the same thing?
Will it be like being able to buy some special designer water in a very fine place, designer water which somebody will try to poison, while just a few yards further there will be a well, an open fire hydrant of information?
How long will it take those who provide the "better" services to claim that what is available for free is "dangerous"... is this vilification already taking place?
I could be inside of the starbucks now, paying for internet access, per minute, or I am outside (really just 10 yards outside) and I can access the web and post this here via "default"...
Hmm... what a future this will be...

The first few pages were already curling to the outside, slightly greasy from being opened and touched with just slightly sweaty fingertips too many times. The texture of the cover, now smooth, leathery, still soft, printed in more than four inks. So much information on the front, such a burst of typography and oversized color photographs, even though the model on the cover appears cool on the outside, yet really, really hot inside. So hot, in fact, that the front is only protected by a mesh of sorts, 35% air (inside info), one can almost sense the two large pulsating brains inside. Wow. Much more slender than the last model, cooler, much sexier, smarter, the smartest ever, most incredible ever to sit on the desk. Remember the commercials? Some dude just blown away, out of his house, through walls, past the kitchen, through the answering machine. And she, as cool as the next generation could only possibly be. Right on time, right here, ready for that ivy college lab, ready to crunch some serious numbers, all day, all night, so much smarter than all of us, and yet ready to play with us. Gosh, so hot, there are 9 different cooling zones in her...
I had to borrow the issue of MacWorld, read the story about the new G5, then about that new kitten: Panther, then about Quark6... This is really a wild new moment for all of us, isn't it? Geek Porn for all those speed hungry freaks who spend their dark days in basements, windowless offices, or maybe in places that only have three flimsy cubicle walls x1K. Oh, the dreams that this machine could bring them to a paradise of mindless 3D creation fun, DVD surround everything, all imaginable ports on the back, some important ones in the front. We imagine some Pixaresque fur in Maya being crunched by those two large looking G5 units, kept in mind by 8Gigs of Memory... wow
I remember the cover of an older issue of MacWorld, when there was an F15 in the picture and I think a girl, barely dressed, on an inflated raft, floating next to an incredibly fast Mac fx...
A few years later, me, barely holding on to my chair, friends visiting, to see my "wombat" a wickedly fast Quadra 800.
Why am I so excited about the G5 being shipped now? The fastest booting computer in my home still seems to be that Powerbook100, the most trusted one is my soft and lovely little PowerBook Pismo (G3/500/1GB of Ram)...
I guess I am just really excited for all of us. It is one thing to play that bombing game on the iPod (what scary stuff), but maybe now, finally, we will all be able to take that simulated tank through the streets of Santa Barbara?, just as some of us did, filled with excitement, when we tested out that big oven sized SiliconGraphics Reality Engine equipped machine, back in 1992?...
Boy, I really feel old now... my comparisons span too many years...
Wait, next year, next year will be even better!

He was a rebell. A serious killer. A major and historically important machine. The box had a painting of him on the cover. It was a real oil painting, there was fire, there were powerful, heavy, long killer attachments under his wings in that painting. He was somebody. A real marvel of progress, a true climax of advanced engineering. His specs were printed on the side of the box. His famous pilots were mentioned, right next to the "decal options"...
He saw all this information very clearly as he was being reassembled. He must have been taken apart to fit into the box. At least this is as far as he could imagine what happened. His oldest memories were from the moment when his body was being welded together by some polystyrene melting substance.
This was also the moment when he tried to explain to himself why his pilot was so incredibly powerful and yet slightly uncoordinated. How were they supposed to fly missions together? He was obviously not large enough now to carry even one of his pilot's fingers, let alone the entire plump body...
It must have had something to do with that 1:72 scale. It had obviously been used to transport him (and some other friends and foes) over long distances, to those special locations of secret missions? This was quite obviously a very secret mission. He had been chosen to be built in a very well camouflaged hangar and then turned back into the 1:1 scale again? The mission was so secretive that even the battalion markings were crumbled and turned more abstract before they were applied to his unpainted body. The glass of his cockpit was made cloudy to further disguise his true purpose. No weapons were attached, some other parts were also not affixed, as they would have probably played too much with the fine balance which allowed him to be placed on a clear plastic stand... and on a very high vantage point inside of the hangar... It was maybe not the highest point, but pretty high...
From here he could see the landscape inside of his pilot's world...
There were images of battle situations on the walls, the entire floor seemed to be the result of some serious bloody conflict. There were images of destruction everywhere.
There was a window in the hangar, rarely open. This would most certainly be the point of exit, the starting point of future missions. Once out if this room, he would be somehow turned back into his 1:1 scale, then the jet engine would roar, like in the picture on the box...
Or maybe not?... It was then that he remembered that his engine was in fact one of the "options" listed on the box...

It was in September of 2002 that I wrote a little post about Walter Smith, a very gifted photographer located on 526 West 26th Street here in Manhattan. Back in September his work on his site was buried under layers of a very overpowering interface. Now it is much more accessible, the site looks clean and is about the work. Take a look at some great photography by Walter Smith.

He did not remember the exact moment when he stopped thinking big. Big as in big context. Big as in changing other's lives before changing his own. It must have been roughly 10 years now since the world around him, or at least the world as he saw it, began to shrink. Getting rid of television was a good step, the paper was the next, then music, mail, electricity, water, air... no he still needed air... but barely. He barely moved.
Most of his universe was now confined to the few cubic inches of his still active brain. He was working on making its activity more of a relaxed one. More relaxed every day. Slower, slower, slower. He hoped to maybe one day turn his world into a single tiny point, a pinpoint, a one single photon size loop hole through which he could crawl to the other side of the universe, explode in new and unspoiled fresh ideas. He was preparing for that. Just that.
Any day now, any hour now, any minute now... he would somehow manage to stop even the tiniest thought in its tracks. Stop his lungs from wanting to pump air, stop his heart from beating. It was a tiny, tiny spot through which he had to squeeze himself. It would be worth it. Certainly...

The attempt to avoid perishable foods (or at least those needing refrigeration) for the next few days is making me walk down culinary emergency paths I never thought to have to explore. Today was a historic day for me personally because I actually enjoyed several slices of toasted rye bread with ...( achtung, achtung), peanut-butter and grape jelly.
Haha, this entry should be posted somewhere in the depths of 1974, shouldn't it? The four year old me should have been the one to discover that the taste of pulverized formica is "the good stuff" when put on top of a toasted slice of bread and under the layer or otherwise pretty cheap blueish jelly...
And it should have been the same four year old me who should have been fascinated by something that sticks to my teeth and palate...
But I grew up in the southern Poland, not in the south of the United States, so when American children were having their cereal and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I had my bread with butter and Cabanossy, or maybe Krupniok, or Leberwurst. There were days that started with Kasza, and some that had to be the most horrible ones, as they were kicked off by a bowl of milk soup. (Yuck.)
Eating meat products for breakfast was a serious luxury, of course... but don't we all like to remember the best of times?
So today was the very first time that I enjoyed Peanut-butter and Jelly on toasted Ray bread... what will happen to me next? Will I order a BLT? or even try to enjoy marshmallows? It really appears that my life is quite a serious scenic path on all levels... cheers.

She was not built to cover long distances, not built to be pushed between offices, not built to go dangerously close to staircases, not constructed to roll in and out of meetings in and out of bathrooms. She was not built to be touched by feet, or the head, the face. She always hoped that she would never have to be touched by large areas of naked, more than warm skin (and even this happened more than once). It was all too much really, seriously not part of what she was told she would need to endure when she was manufactured.
What she also did not know of was the slight weakens in one of her five legs. There must have been a bubble in the material perhaps, something that could have happened a long time ago, long before she was actually built? She would not really call it a flaw, more of a hidden secret issue...
And maybe the issue would have never turned into a problem, had she not been put through such strains and wild movements, such unexpected attacks onto her actually pretty well designed core.
So the leg snapped off, it simply broke off, in a moment of incredible, unpredicted stress. She fell, then fell down, down the stairs, tumbling, hitting something, someone, something somehow, somebody again?, down a long, long bank of stairs, slow, fast, slow, fast, slow again.
Things turned quiet as quickly as they had turned violent... she somehow felt comfort in finally not having to move... for an entire night... half a day.
She was found by a cleaning person. There were screams.
Hands arrived, she was given as much attention as everybody else involved.
She spent months in the offices of an insurance agent, next to other pieces of injured furniture. She was stared at, examined, scratched, parts were extracted from her, she was ready to die.
She was then moved into yet another room . She stayed there for the longest time. Maybe a year or so, maybe ten years? It definitely felt this long, maybe longer.
It was not until much, much later that she was picked up again.
She never understood why she was being rescued in such elaborate ways, at night, quietly. Oddly enough, she was not discarded... she was not put into one of those destructive trucks she heard about... and, frankly, was very afraid of.
She was given a new set of legs... shiny, polished. Her soft parts were shampooed, vacuumed, cleaned. The wood was polished, and so was the chrome...
It was all a very mysterious set of events.
Nobody ever sat on her again... but she felt complete, quiet... maybe a tiny bit confused... so incredibly happy...

Each one of the songs was a perfect hit. No misses, my dear. All of them were quite beautiful. All of them hit the right spot. Wherever she chose to sing, wherever she chose to let others hear what she had to say, there was less violence, increased plant grow, riper fruit.
She flew from forest to forest, inspiring generations of Chickadees, and not only her own species, others too. Soon there were bears humming her songs and rabbits dancing the dances she proposed. Foxes were writing down her scores, deer ran for miles to just hear her sing.
She was a true blessing to forests and parks... so good, so good.

A massive package of paper just hit the bottom of my door... outside there is the regular honking and the screeching sounds of the subway. I think we are back in Business, dear New York, I think we are back to a fairly regular Saturday...
Will I have a cheese omelette for breakfast today?, or should I wait for a few more days?...
How quickly can one be turned into one's own grandparents, who used to keep their money under their mattress and unbelievable amounts of canned food inside of the musty smelling closet?
I am considering adding a torchlight to my daily bag of wonder in which I carry my Powerbook, the mouse, the power supply, the mouse pad, the pens and pencils, erasers, a pocket sharpener, several sketchbooks, 4 Japanese brush pens (one with only water), a black Leica Minilux, several rolls of film (I am so analogue), the serious black swiss army knife (the ultimate size), printouts, forms, stuff... Yes it is a heavy bag and yes I carry it with me every day.
I am hoping to be able to cut out the laptop soon, as it is a heavy piece to lug around...
Hmm, let me walk over to the door and see what the New York Times has sent my way...
__
It is actually two papers. Yesterday's paper had not made it up the stairs, and so now I will need to catch up on looking at pictures and reading the captions. Not sure I will get to do much more. The amount of information appears massive.... ; )

It was a place where the inside was exposed to the outside. Two sided mirror, facing the street, intimate presentations to oneself, to others? to both.
So nice to call them matches. Such ready to burst greetings, wrapped in this paper made transparent material. Keeping the cover closed was not really an option. Tearing one of the paper sticks, grabbing it firmly between the sheets of rough paper and then pulling out the coated side, quickly...
light...

"What did you do last night?"
I took a cab from east harlem and the cabbie looked like one of the friendlier guys somewhere from the Caribbean.
"Last night? What I did last night? Oh it was a good night, last night! You know I rent the cab and it is $150 for the 12 hour shift, so do you know how much I made on top of that? I mean I drive a cab for 12 years now, and I drive the cab only two days a week. So yesterday, I had to go. Many drivers went back to the garage, because there was really bad traffic and they were scared. You know, we cabbies do not like traffic. This is why you will never see a cabbie go slow. We want to pick up and drop off and pick up and drop off, and fast. This is the only way we can make money. So many went back to the garage, but I had to go. Do you know how much I made after rent and the gas?"
He pulled out a bundle of money, some pieces of paper...
"Here, CitiBank, I made a deposit today. Look: $1020. I made more than a thousand bucks!"
He showed me the yellow deposit slip. (It was for $1020.)
"The traffic was really bad. Really bad, in the beginning. The first customer, to get from downtown to FDR, it was 1.5 hours! Just for 7 blocks. Really bad. The first four hours were really bad. But after that! It was good. Those people in Connecticut have money, I kept going to Connecticut. Round trips. Any price I gave them, they pay. This one guy gave me $200 and then a $100 check! One hundred dollars tip! Crazy money. Another one: I had six people in the cab. Four in the back, two in the front. We went to Westchester. It was a good night. And after 10 hours, most cabbies were out of fuel. They were just on the side of the road. Waving... but I was not out of fuel, because I knew that there was electricity in Connecticut, so I took a guy to Connecticut and refueled. I went through the entire night.
I could have maybe went longer, but I needed my 8 hours of sleep. This was a really good, good night."
What a man...
Another cabbie told me a different angle of the story, he had stayed at home. Because he lives in Brooklyn, he would have not made it into the city anyway. He said that most of his friends who drove last night made $800-$1000 but that was only because they were charging pretty much illegal flat-rates. He was very strongly against those increased fares. ... of course...

The weather is quite beautiful outside, warm, sunny, warm... just like the inside of the refrigerators in the bodega on 95th and Amsterdam. A little foot thermometer points really deeply into "SPOILAGE"... (It is the large yellow zone.)
I bought a few of the drinks that never spoil. Sugar water with artificial flavoring, some of the better stuff money can buy right now. As I am paying I notice that the counter is still filled with Ice Cream and other little perishable sweet gems...
"Too bad you will have to throw these all out now."
"Oh no, these good. Funny, many people ask about the ice cream."
"Hmm, interesting...", I did not want to argue with her on this one... "How was the night here?"
"I was not here, the boss was here, protecting the store, with another guy. Next door they smashed in the window at the jeweler at 5:30."
"5:30am?" I imagined a group of well prepared attackers who singled out the store after a night of searching for the most vulnerable spot...
"5:30 PM, daytime, they did not wait for no night."
"Wow." Now I imagined a bunch of drunk guys with a brick.
"The owner shot his gun, they ran like crazy."
"Glad nothing worse happened."
"I can see in your eye, you do not believe me with the ice cream."
"Well, I don't quite trust it."
"We checked the milk, we checked the juices. It is all good. Maybe because we run 24 hours. Always run..."... she paused.... "But I will not drink the milk either."
"No Milk, no eggs..."
"No eggs, no? Oh no, I had an egg sandwich today..."
"It will be fine... it will be allright..."

The pawn shop next door has indeed a smashed in window.
Duct tape holds together a constructed barrier on which somebody wrote "DON'T TOUCH"...
Otherwise, things look like any regular summer Saturday (more quiet than a Friday.)... It is odd to know that all thermometers are pointing to "SPOILAGE" all over the city... and I also wonder when it will be safe to buy ice cream again...
(Maybe it never was...)

Woke up at 6am, because of a dream that the light was back on. It was not. About an hour later, the Dunkin Donuts sign across Broadway was showing off its "open24hours" again. There were four policemen in front of the shop, tapping each other on the backs.
Looks like things are almost back in order.
My cable connection is not working yet. (And yes, the local TV station appears to be still down.)...
Let's hope everybody else is okay as well...

Wolfram was a hot, hot kind of guy. When attached to the right circuit, he could be like a little star: Hot, hot, hot. He was a truly bright guy too. Smart, natural, maybe a little on the reddish side of the spectrum, but wasn't this the pride of his family anyway? Back in 1879, his ancestors looked pretty silly, they had round heads, died quickly. He was the new kind, the smart kind, the 100W kind, the seriously advanced kind of guy.
He was able to attract some really good attention. (Not just moths, mind you.) It depended solely on him if somebody looked good, or did not look at all.
It was his job to inspire, illuminate, guide. One of his ancestors even became the synonym for ideas themselves. Who else could claim that?
He was an honest, serious guy. He could make criminals talk, if only left with them for a little while. He could make scary places look beautiful, he could make the invisible very obvious.
He was the sun of the night. He was mighty, truly the center of his universe.
Which made him certainly not believe in a "creator". Those who make their own shadows do not believe in that kind of stuff.

(Don't tell him that, but Wolfram feels relatively transparent and actually slightly lightheaded, if not even empty-headed... being able to shine the way he does, usually comes at a high price.)

it is so incredibly dark here in new york. Outside there is a whistling of the police directing traffic to red candle light. at least they look like candles. There is a mass of people walking mostly uptown. Laughter, whistles, bus sounds, conversations. Police. It is a different city tonight. The sounds are very different. I thought that this was pretty much what Y2K was supposed to be like. Nothing is really working... no ATMs, no cash registers, nothing that needs refrigeration will survive the night.

When I had lunch at a japanese restaurant today, there had been just a new delivery of tuna. Half a fish, an entire huge muscle, it seemed, so incredibly fresh... so incredible. The chefs were debating how to place some of the important cuts...
It will be rotten tomorrow... it will be gone.

JUst made a huge dinner, with whatever I thought could go bad in the refrigerator. It was a good candle light dinner...
the battery power is running out on my powerbook... I will need to stop posting now...
Good night... let's hope the night will be quiet and peaceful...
oh, and New Jersey has Power...
The sky might be too muggy to see the stars tonight, but the lights in New Jersey, certainly look as far away and as fantastic tonight...

managed to get home... the server in Texas is obviously up, Earthlink is also working, so is the phone, so I can post here. Will see if I can post more later (have very limited battery time).

So far, the lights just went dead at about 4:30... I began my walk home about an hour later. Not I am here, safely. Towels with water are cooling things down.
All seems calm so far.
Candles are in place...
waiting for the night.

They were casual drinking buddies, stuck for years in the same cupboard, telling each other the same old stories over and over again.
There were the good stories, those about being kissed by the lips of a very beautiful house guest. There were the ugly ones about being left in the sink for weeks, about the consequences, about throwing up mold, the pathetic decontamination scrubbings.
There were also the stories of loss. Each one of them used to belong to a set, back in the day. They used to have brothers, sisters, many, sometimes 5 sometimes even more.
The bordeaux bottle in the back was the saddest of them all. She knew that she had been stored the wrong way, she knew that the little sip of fresh air she had had a few months ago had caused irreversible damage to her body. Since she arrived here a few years ago she had hoped to find herself doing things with the last riedel glass in the group, on pristine white sheets by candle light.
Now she somehow had the feeling that what she had been saving for so long would be used in salads, mixed with oil, pepper, salt... (That's if she was lucky... )
Not only would they spill her into things to give them acidity, she would also probably be moved downstairs, with the pots and other uncultured kitchen items... (The stories she heard about shrink-wrap and zip-locks were just disgusting.)
At least for now, she was one of the happy drinking group. The survivors, the vagabonds, the experienced, sexy ones. Her stories were still about a beautiful past in France, her travels, her ripeness, her lush glowing insides (though containing sulfites)...
The riedel glass wanted her so badly.

When I finally sat down to have lunch at around 6:30PM, I was greeted by a very friendly hostess with the dinner menue. Pigalle is a little disneyesqe French restaurant on the corner of 6th avenue and 48th street and despite being a 24 hour simulation environment, the food they serve there is actually not half bad. (At least the 2.5 dishes I have tried out so far.)
I was given a seat right next to the window, behind the little pulpit of the quite possibly Russian reservations-hostess. (Not the one who handed me the menue)
I smiled thinking she might be of Russian descent, since Pigalle could be seen as a Bistro, or a little place that sounds so french but actually has a Russian name.
I think it was during the 1814 occupation of Paris and the Cossacks, who obviously must have spoken Russian that "Bistro" was born. "Bystro", means "quick"... so I guess the soldiers demanded faster service... Or maybe some restaurants advertised with their fast service?...(Fast Food?) The word supposedly made it into French dictionaries by 1884... pretty "bistro" if you consider what the French call "video recorders" or even "computers", not really incredibly new inventions, these days.
"You appear to be in a hurry, Sir?", the waitress was actually very nice to me. I would have loved to have a glass of red wine with my dish, but ended up drinking an "Olof Palme", which the waitress suggested as an alcohol free alternative, without knowing who Olof Palme was, only what it was: lemonade topped with a layer of ice tea. Why this drink is named after the hero of Swedish social democracy is beyond me, but it was quite good, especially since it is to be drunk with a straw. (Pick your layer and hmm...)
It was not really dark outside, but because it was "dinner time", my table was given a little candle in a glass. (Third hostess?) It was one of those tiny white ones, nothing really exciting in itself... at least not until I looked out the window.
I was again incredibly lucky to sit in the perfect spot to have the illusion that the reflection of my little table-light was burning inside of the tree trunk of the Acacia tree outside of the restaurant.
Had I filmed it, or taken a picture of it, it would have looked very kitschy, but because I saw it with my eyes, and because it was coincidence that had composed the image for me, the situation was one of those really brilliant perfectly private miracles.
There it was. The little dancing flame in the tree trunk. And because we were still in New York, and it was still 8th Avenue at 6:30, there was a good amount of foot traffic between the window and the tree. The reflection of the flame jumped from tree to tourist with strange camera, to woman on cell phone, writing down numbers, to man in a yellow t-shirt, waiting for woman with cellphone to give him her matches, to a woman waiting for somebody. Unsuccessfully...
Back to tree... there it burned and waved, quietly...
My dinner arrived promptly and because I was in a hurry, the main dish was on the table in front of me much faster than usual.
I could write an entire story about the staff trying to prepare a take out order in a way as if it were the very first time in the history of the restaurant. (Except that they kept repeating that it was "exactly the same order as last time...") So it must have been at least the second time in the history of Pigalle...

I was in quite excruciating pain the entire evening. Maybe the drink I was given to taste actually had a name only related to Olof Palme? Maybe the little flame was a reminder of something that will happen...
Maybe it was just another harsh day... this I actually know for sure...

People who tend to use their left hands more than their left side of the brain tend to have difficulties with language. I guess this must be right. I barely manage to solve the crossword puzzle in the monday New York Times... Tuesday?, I looked at all the hints and just smiled. I do not think I got one right. I am looking forward to tomorrow. Who knows, maybe my brain will find it impossible to solve any one of these progressively more difficult puzzles until hmm... not really. I wonder if there could be a cross word puzzle for lefties. I wonder how it would work.
A moth was hiding on the subway window. The animal was holding on to the inside of the glass. It looked like three square inches of beautifully natural bark, right behind the heads of commuters. A beautiful, somehow scary animal. Asleep?
The woman who obstructed my view of the moth, was pretending that she had to pick something up. Maybe she was just trying to see what stations we were passing. She was doing so even when there were no stations to look for, very odd. On the inside of her wrist was the tattoo of a blueish star. It looked more like fashion than meaning. As she was leaving the car, she glanced at me with a strangely promising smile, as if she were taking away some toy, for now, but definitely promised to bring it back.
I just wanted to see the moth.
One of the Posters advertising a university had a picture of a clearly well educated stock photography model saying something like: "If it wasn't for this and this university..."... somebody crossed out the "wasn't" with a ball point pen and wrote "weren't"... this made me smile...
A woman next to me was clearly making somebody very unhappy by complaining loudly in Arabic. Her voice was so penetrating that I expected her sitting right next to me, not two seats down, next to her completely silent, worn out husband. He did not say a word, all he had left was his quiet stare.
The woman right next to me was actually holding the copy of today's cross word puzzle. It was the same Puzzle which made me smile about my inability to solve it in any way, except by maybe connecting the numbers.
She was filling out the squares as if they were the address section of some sort of order form. She glanced up from the paper to maybe think about the exact address or the exact name of the street, but it was not a pondering, it was a short nibble on the back of her permanent black pen. She must have been so bored by the simplicity of the hints that she chose to fill in the squares in a pattern. The words in the center were first, then the ink spread intelligently into the corners of the little black and white mosaic. I had to leave the train, but in the short period in which I was able to observe her, she must have solved at least 7 of those wicked little questions.
Impressive. The woman was maybe in her late 40’s had no star tattoos on her wrists, she had however reddish hair, she wore very fine glasses...
How many different New Yorks are there really and is what we call the city a multiplication of all the abilities or just a mere lowest common denominator?
I guess it really depends... hmm...

The world was a fluid assemblage of colorful fields, all doubles, overlapping, dancing, speaking, interacting. He would just relax his eyes and observe them. He attempted to see in a way that would remove all references to actual objects from his field of vision. He wanted to see the world as if he were completely drunk with life, just emerged in a parallel universe that is completely painted, not drawn.
He had no idea that it appeared to others as if he had been staring at something one should rather not stare at...
He did not see it coming... and when things got slowly back into focus, they did not look too good...

The girl on the 6 train stuck out her tongue. I was already outside of the train. The doors were already closing. She stared at me and stuck out her tongue. And because she was so close to the window, her tongue turned into a pink shape on in the glass. She licked it.
I smiled back.
Her mother did not see her...
the train began to move.

Dear anonymous friend. Your incredibly thoughtful package arrived today. It was a complete surprise. Really very much so. I opened the package with scissors without damaging anything. I was very careful. There were no injuries.
I followed your instructions and gave the DVD to somebody very kind. (He was so incredibly happy, surprised, astonished... wait till he watches it... he has not a clue what is coming... I told him to please pass it onf. He will, he is one of the nicest guys I know.) The movie you sent is my favorite movie, and so I watch it from time to time and also have indeed given it to others... (There were very mixed results, for odd reasons.)
I have not even heard about the two books you sent I think... I know of the author of the "national bestseller", as he is a very famous person in the book design world...
I see the other book for the first time...
I will need to explore more... so exciting...
... just wanted to thank you now, anonymous friend. You have a very expressive handwriting, I like the envelope you used for the note. There are so many tiny clues here... Fascinating, fascinating... you made me very, very happy...
(I very much like the kind of "stamp" you used...)
Hope you do not mind that I am thanking you here. I did not know how else I could. I will turn off the comments on this entry... I could imagine that if you decided to stay anonymous, this decision should definitely be respected.
Thank you again. (wow, really, thank you!)
-witold

When he was younger, he wanted to grow up to have the looks that would match his abilities. He would have loved to have some sort of disguise, a mask perhaps. He imagined himself running into a phone booth and changing into a really tight outfit that would seriously show of his then serious muscles... maybe there could be a large logo on his chest. His own logo, feared, often projected onto the night sky over the city.
But all of this just did not happen. He did not get to change secretly in some phone-booth, and he never really went to the gym enough to make any spandex or rubber costume worthwhile.
He would have probably opted for rubber anyway, as most of his power sat in this old knitted vest made by his mom. It gave him his superpower... but it also made everybody in his class laugh. It also did not exactly excite the kind of girls he liked... What're you gonna do?
There was always a price to pay for being a super hero.

Jade plants do not appear to rest at night. They look pretty much the same in the morning as they do at night. They are growing quite seriously. The ten new ones I separated from the mother plant are looking quite healthy still. They are developing roots and will be soon ready for some soil.
This little red plant which had been dead for several months and then shot out of the pot with three new activity centers also appears to not care if there is a sun or not.
What I thought was a Tiny Mystery Plant are actually five (!) Acacia trees. The oldest one is now about two feet tall. I had to administer the first pruning yesterday, just to slow the little guy down a bit.
Acacias seem to rest at night. All leaves are neatly folded and the plant will not open until the sun returns.
The first Ahuacatl (Avocado) Plant actually died. It was a very sad sight. The plant turned into a straight leafless black stick. I put another avocado pit into the pot, did not even cover it. The pit eventually (after 3-4 months maybe) split into two and I now have a new, much healthier little avocado plant. Avocados also seem to be resting at night. The leaves are all folded up, the plant closes up...
My rather large (about 4 feet now?) Potato plant, (Patti Potato... more about her some other time) also appears to be resting... (Leaves folded into a night position.)
I will now also take a short nap... and then continue with my tasks...

He was not interested in flying himself. He could fly, of course. That was not the issue. He could just spread the wings and go. Anywhere. No big deal. Most birds know how to do that.
He also heard of a colleague who knew how to fly without any wing movement. This was all pretty cute and all, but he was thinking beyond that. He was thinking bigger. (Much bigger.)
He noticed his gift one day when jumping from stick to stick inside of his golden cage. There were some sparrows down on 5th avenue and they were just too dumb to see a perfectly fine cookie not very far from them around the corner.
He tried shouting to them, letting them know in his quite sophisticated language what kind of delicious meal they were missing, but the heavy glass, the traffic, the Metropolitan Museum visitors... it was all too much, even for his quite well trained voice.
It was then that he got a little angry and noticed that when he only focused hard enough, and focused in the right way, he could make the sparrows take off, fly around the corner and find their stupid cookie. Just like that. Pure mental power.... Brilliant.
He did not want to believe his own abilities at first. It could have been a coincidence, maybe his ability was more something like foreseeing the future? Did he just know exactly when the other birds would decide to fly and happened to imagine that he wanted them to fly at exactly the same time?...
He needed to find out...
In his spare time he developed a series of rather simple experiments. All of them returned successful results:
He controlled the flight pattern of sparrows. Then pigeons. Then owls. Then Hawks. Even squirrels jumped from branch to branch guided by his mental commands.
He became obsessed with his new found ability. He would let birds fly in formation of 3, 7, 21. In the evenings he would pack the trees outside of his condo with as many birds as structurally possible. He would then let them fly off with the drop of just a single pin-pointed thought.
He would race pigeons around central park. He would reenact scenes from the swan sea (when the record happened to be on) on the reservoir... Nils Holgerson... hmm...
It was an incredible fun, to say the least.
Such amazing power.
After a few years of daily practice and a constant inclusion of more and more exciting species. (Racoons, horses, a coyote...)
He decided to try the ultimate challenge.
It was a very risky plan, as it involved beings from which he was not protected by several inches of glass and golden wires of his cage...
He waited for just the right moment, on a sunday. The feeder came over to talk and sing and change the sand...
He focused on the wingless creature... looked her deep into her beakless face... and...
Without a word... without even looking at him... the cage door was opened, a hand was extended towards him... he hopped on it gracefully... the hand carried him out of the cage, out of the room, out of the apartment, to the elevator, past the concierge (hello), past the doorman (good morning), out of the building, onto the street, across fifth avenue, past the obviously very interested crowds of tourists, south of the Museum, past the bronze bears (no wonder they never reacted) past the large tree, onto the hills he loved to look at so much since his childhood...
Here he made his feeder stop.
He looked at the unobstructed sky...
A color matching formation of 137 wild birds flew over them, just as he had planned...
He knew that this was truly just the beginning of things to come...
The gentle sunrise on the first day of his personal creation.

There was an incredibly angry man at the diner yesterday. He was maybe 40, tall, was wearing black rimmed glasses, a checkered shirt, khaki shorts. His short blond hair made him look even more like a low ranked military guy.
He was one of the very clean people. His legs were even shaven. He was incredibly angry. He was angry with the waiter. He was angry with the busboy, he was definitely angry with the chef. He would get up in the middle of his meal and just stare with this bitter freezing expression into the direction of the kitchen. He was really saturated with negative energy.
When a little boy in the booth behind him kept jumping on the seat, he actually got up from his chair and told the boy to be quiet, pointing at the face of the boy. I have maybe seen parents talking harshly to their children, but having a tall military guy go loud and serious with a pointing finger towards a 4 year old... this was new. The boy cried. The parents carried him out of the place. A mother in the both not far away used this opportunity to teach her daughter that it was very important to behave...
Should there have rather been somebody to tell the angry lonely guy to behave? Should somebody have scooped him up and just carried him outside and told him that pointing and instructing other people's children is not the right thing to do, especially not in family diners?... I thought I should have said something... I was a bit too shocked to say anything. (The man finished his meal, btw. He made sure to tell the waiter that the "food was awful" and that he would "complain to the manager"...)
Oh well...
On the train this morning, an older lady was clipping the most exotic coupons out of the paper. She looked as if she actually wanted to just have a slow morning?... I really wanted to invite her to have breakfast with me... but it was only a thought. I have not managed to actually say anything...
Hmm...
The first homeless man on the train had the nicest shoes on I have ever seen on a homeless man. They were brand new light suede shoes. He was a fast talker, he collected some cash.
The second homeless man, who was collecting money so his "wife could put a warm meal on the table tonight", had also quite nice sandals on.
The third Homeless man, who ended up not getting any change at all, was wearing very old black sneakers. The man was missing his right leg. Somebody had written a large red 64 on his prothesis, which gave it the look of a borrowed item. He did not say a word... He just shook his dirty paper cup.
I thought about giving him something and then I did not... next time?
Another useless thought?
There were two homeless guys on 86th and Broadway. One of them managed to get a spot in a building niche. The other man was just right there, his shirt off, on his back, his eyes closed, his mouth open. He looked like the "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb" 1521-2 by Hans Holbein... What did I do?...
Nothing...
Do thoughts really count? Life certainly rewards actions... But thoughts alone?...
Did it matter at all that I was in all these places and that I saw all this?
I did not change a thing? I have not helped in any one of the situations. I was just a somehow useless "neutral" observer... Not very happy about it...
Not very happy...

"What, you saw something here, I mean, somebody else? Not quite me, you mean, there used to be somebody else in my spot? You're kidding, right? I am the first and only one and as unique as it gets. Seriously, no?"

He was a very visual artist, thinking about it.
His glass was always almost full.
He loved to treat his ideas like a loved expansive family overseas.
He spoke about them in the nicest of ways, or not at all.
He was a very visual artist, that's for sure. He had exquisite taste. Highest standards. Definitely. Always. Yes.
He was a writer too. A pretty darn good one on top of that.
And still young...
Where were we?

Also at night, of course.

My index fingers are currently pointing at two websites that are made by the same people and really look it. I am not saying that any of this is bad work (Some is actually quite excellent, it really is). It is just making me smile. (A good smile...)
Take a look at workinprogress (good, eh?) and now take a look at selfservicemagazine... (clearly related, aren't they?)
While we're at link jumping, take a look at the following site:ade hauser lacour kommunikationsgestaltung gmbh... (The toy on the homepage is cute, isn't it?) (Make sure you turn off any Pop-Up killers, as this site is just in love with Pop-Ups.) (Why, oh why?)(Why?)(pop)(up)(pop)
("alle fenster schliessen" means "close all windows with one mighty click")
Links discovered at Vier5... who knew?

"When I will be gone, I will miss you, perhaps" she said.
They were sitting on plastic chairs on the roof of an empty old industrial building and looked towards the horizon, towards Paris. It did not glow as much as it did in the postcards. It was a milder glow. A sleepy one. It was too late at night for tourists. Too late for the lights designed to attract them to stay on. The sun would soon return and make this past few hours into their first "white night".
She smoked her second cigarette. He stared at the sky.
"you will miss me 'perhaps' ?", he said, adjusting the pitch of the last word to resemble her softer, more feminine diction. "How snobbish of you to say something like that. Maybe, perhaps?" He looked at her, or rather at her back, as she had turned away and seemed to be more interested in the nearby buildings. "Will you base your decision on what I will do in the next 24 hours? Or what will happen to you once you get back to Japan?"
"How long have you been here?"
"Soon longer than anywhere else."
"See, that's why."

It was all very loud and very clear. All at the same time. All with the same intensity. There was a spectrum of though, of course, but overall, her conscious was an uninterrupted stream of very well digested knowledge. Every hour on the hour, her imagination came down to a single magnetic point. Then the world exploded into thousands of voices.
She knew so much more than she would ever be able to share with anyone, ever. Though the sharing part was also only possible when it happened without any delay. She was able to say what she thought, right away, instantly... never ever what she remembered. She just did not remember.
Or she did, just not well enough...
Sharing was her specialty though. She was really good at focusing on a tiny sliver of her vast spectrum of thought. When asked for the right story, her monologues could be anything from simple spoken words to laughter of children to grand interpretations of beautiful compositions as performed by the worlds best orchestras under the direction of the most renowned conductors. Like that. Perfectly sung by her large and very well calibrated speaker (She made it all sound a little richer than it actually was). Not interrupted by any of the other things going on in the world.
She loved to come along on country trips. Friends would gather around her on a blanket in the grass and she would sing and tell them stories until her batteries made her feel heavy and tired and sleepy.
She would then often awake early the next morning, with weather on her mind. Then there were more important events. Urgent traffic data. Markets.
The days were often spent with playing Satie or Chopin to the cats. Evenings could be filled with excitement and summaries of the day.
Much of the fun ended once the television arrived. The dumb and graphic television, all about pictures, pictures, pictures. It took over as if it were an altar for some universal religion of dumb. It could also be extended with memory modules of various sorts. Canned superficial dream simulations.
The stereo also boasted with its ability to speak with two voices at once. And it also remembered stuff... (Except it rarely had anything new to say... and if it was new, then it was actually pretty old...)
Then came the computer, then the iPod. Over, out, too much...
The accident sealed it all. The fall was so unexpected, so violent. The floor would not have been so bad, had there been any carpet on it. And it was actually the water bottle that had been left by the table that broke the glass. Now the scale for frequencies was not protected. It was completely exposed. Touched again for the first time since the factory. How embarrassing.

She ended up whispering up to the minute stories to the old typewriter and the burned out super8 projector in the darkest depths of the closet. (Unable to change the station, she somehow came off as a bit narrow minded and not overly bright...)
It took years before they took her out again. It was a summer afternoon. Just like the ones she liked best when spent by the river.
She found herself on moldy blankets, with a little price tag attached to her antenna...
She wondered if she would ever be able to share anything with anyone again, or if she would just be crushed into pieces and become part of a landfill.
After several hours in the sun she was touched by a pair of hands. They were not as strong as the ones that used to carry her around. They were incredibly investigative and careful. A very careful fingertip touched her dials, then the exposed frequency scale... the hands paused... one hand turned her dial and the other gently followed the movement of the frequency marker.
Never before had she been touched in such a meaningful way...
Something told her, that this would be the most loving and meaningful relationship of her life.

a white space it is. If I did not know that there is a New Jersey across the river, if I did not know that Manhattan is resting firmly on solid ground, I could probably assume that we are on an airship today, floating in a milky white sky.
It is raining again. As it has been and as it will be...
Indeed...

Through the rain, through the dust, through the night, through the boom, through the recessions, through the presidencies, through the wars, through the strange moments in life, lives. Centuries.
He made sure to balance each step well. He made sure to do the right thing at the right time. Remain in best company at all times.
Paris was more important than ever.
He was really late for work again.

"So you will be only posting these little stories to your drawings?", Todd is back from Vancouver and we can again talk in person sometimes, not via ichatAV with me pacing around the room, shouting at my powerbook and him somewhere relaxed looking at the ocean.
Things have been a bit much in the last few weeks. All I end up at the end of the day is a square of virtual paper in a very moody Adobe Illustrator, a wacom tablet of the old sort and a thus slightly shaky virtual pen.
Last night the software and I stared at each other for a pretty long time, until I decided to walk over to my bookshelves again and to make another one of those crosswordpuzzled drawings. There was just nothing I could think of, no story of my own. Many of my friends must think I am avoiding them, or that I am going crazy. I ask for lunch plans and then have to cancel, ask for some time to relax and then am too stressed to keep my promise. Not a good thing... At least I know that it is temporary.
When I looked through some of the old emails and paper diary entries, there seems to be a pattern. I tend to go through phases of incredibly dense work, followed by phases of good and calm observation and learning. I guess it is a bit like swimming upstream, perhaps? And I will just need to keep swimming... Just try not to die somewhere upstream, or be eaten by bears...
So will I be posting anything beyond drawings and stories? Oh, absolutely. For my own sanity I will... or is there anybody actually reading this here?

She was the second daughter of a glowing single mother. She was the brightest of them all, or so she appeared to some.
Her days were long, her years were short. She was beautiful, immortal perhaps. Turning slowly, against the odds.
She was aware of her unstoppable transformation. She was the definition of what many wanted to be. Even an incomplete image of her was still an incredibly beautiful idea.
Tonight she softly rested her eyes on the city of Basel.
In the back room, behind a green curtain, Hans was thinking about a hollow bone. Or so she thought...

It must be the combination of humidity and airconditioned air. All of the parkett tiles on the floor make every step like walking on egg shells. Crackly, crackly, crack. The flowers on the table are still alive, despite of their water being a bit foggy. The wild garden by my window has new light green tips, telling me that somebody grew again, or that everybody grew.
I do not feel as if I grew or kept myself alive very well.
Yes, the water in my vase of the day appears to be foggy. again...

They laughed at him when he rejected the acting job for Winged Migration. He did not laugh when they were shot off the sky, one by one, just so the director could get a good picture.
Now, with all his friends gone he could finally test his wingless flight technique. No stupid flapping, no sounds, none of that cute bird-like stuff.
Pure will power, determination, focus.
This would bring him down south easily.
To make things even better for himself and his new friends, he decided to bring along this perfect little nest box he found on a street corner. It was already filled with a pretty advanced library of amateur writing and a gallery full of nice works on paper.
There was also this pretty cool eagle sticker on the side. Certainly to keep of the squirrels and other wet-nosed folks with furry paws.

the train, the night train, the chain of bright lights, the rushing through landscapes, the speed, the speed, the urgency, the rush, the heavy heavy rain, the mountain side, the tunnel, the distance, the distance, the distance, the headlights reflected in the silver stripes of the tracks, the rush, the rush, the rush, the speed, the speed, the speed...

A conversation. A bottle of bordeaux St Julien. An invigorating little snack. A whisper. A hand protecting the words from their reflection in the blur filled black window. A soothing rocking motion. An accidental brush of fingers. A very red red wine. A private space. Attention. Affection. Amorous tension. And then...

the rain, the rain, the rushing, the wind, the night, the steel on steel, the tunnel, the bridge, the valley, the light, the blur, the hundreds of wheels, the sparks from the wires, the high voltage electricity, the rush, the rush, the...

All of the above...

Woke up in the middle of the morning to see if the orange juice is still in the carton.
Now there is less of it.
I wonder if the dreams I left are there waiting for me, though it probably is up to the me who made me wake up to check on that juice anyway.

People are rushing to the subway station. I can hear the arrival of a train. Two busses just crossed the same intersection a few minutes of each other. Making my mind connect them... Two dots, two minutes apart...

I need to go back to bed. now.

Wherever he turned there was this light. Always in his face, dead on. A round, glowing, slowly throbbing globe. Always there, like a humming sound that does not want to go away, like a mosquito bite in a place that can not be reached by hands, like a grain of finest sand inside of one's left eye.
Everybody had a shadow. He did not. Just this light. This constant light.
He was tired of it. He did not want it. He wanted to run towards it and smash it into pieces. He wanted to throw something heavy at it.
But he could not. He felt too weak to even try. He waited for it to either go away or to explain to him why it was there. Nothing.

Blinded, tired, sad and weak, he stumbled towards it, like a moth in a world where air had been replaced by honey.
Was he Curious, Brave?, Mature?, probably none of the three, yet...
Not for years...
He stopped.
From now on every even tiny step began to make sense. It all began to make sense. Everything and all of it...
Very slowly, very, very, very slowly he remembered.
He smiled even more, he laughed, staring at it all with his almost fogotten eye.
His field of vision was expanding again. Far beyond anything he could have dreamt of. Slowly but surely. Unstoppable, soft, kind, inspiring expansion.

The possibilities were endless. Would s/he remain a simple tiny organism, keep imagination at bay, be a little center of a tiny one cell universe? Could s/he decide to split up a little more? Maybe become the idea of genetic information? Think beyond the rim of the thinking glass, imagine herself as life in general, turn this planet upside down, try to conquer all places, from the depth of the oceans to the peaks of mountain ranges, then farther, farther towards the sky, become the idea that takes over the entire universe.
Wh knows, maybe one day there would be books, objects made by printing with burned organic matter on sheets of filtered organic matter, books, in which some wise wo/man would write about her, describe her as the one who was the beginning of all life. Would they give her credit for it?...
Would they realize that they were created and actually ever renewed after her image?... Hmm... She did not dare to go that far...
For now s/he was a one cell organism aching to split into a day and a night.

Friend:"I just looked at what I sent to the publisher last year and it does not feel quite as good as it felt when I wrote it."
Witold:"Wonderful. This simply means that you are moving ahead. Your judgement is growing, you are able to refine your perception. Imagine it were the other way round. You would read some of your older material and it would be much better than your current writing. Now that would be depressing..."

I realized that many of my observations are scattered across many books and sketchbooks on shelves here in New York and in Germany. Some pretty nice pieces are on harddrives somewhere under furniture, some of the material is in the old Apple Mail format that died with System7.
The depressing part is that some fragments of it are much better than what I am writing now, at least as ideas, or at least it feels this way for me. Either way, a slightly depressing discovery. Regressing is not something I wanted to start now. I know that my brain is not the fresh information sponge it was when I was 22, but boy...
What I will try to do now is to add some of the older entries, some of the stuff that was written before there was a world wide web.
Much of the old material is in German, but I will just make it English, at least as much as possible. My handwriting is really so bad at times that I will probably never find out what the past me wanted to say...
Now back to the archives... oh, and I will try to keep things clean. The younger me was, obviously more fascinated by daring expressions of sex and rocks and rolls... To read that stuff, one will still need to get hold of my paper records...
Keeping this point of view under layers of coded images... (Or did you really think I was talking about flowers and animals here?)

A mysterious, intelligent commentator on this site, left a link to otogai.com as a reply to one of the earlier posts... The link is a really fascinating one of course, though I would again really like to understand more (any) Japanese.
The very first link in the link section of Otogai threw me into the arms of another mysterious man Han Hoogerbrugge and his insanely beautiful little site entitled NAILS (which apparently stands for "News, Archives, Info, Links and Stills"). The site appears to be a collection of little autobiographical yet quite stunningly bizarre flash animations... Brilliant. (There are some older ones.)
Wow...

Made a dusty pile out of pillow shaped coal pills today. Cracked open a nascar branded white plastic bottle and added some of that odorless lighter fluid to my crude creation... Opened one of those little paper pockets with cardboard matches. Did not quite follow instructions, flipped over the cover, grabbed the head of one of the matches and pulled it out as if it were already hot and burning between my fingers. There, a soft whispered sound, a little flame, ready to go, ready to spread. Just a little magic touch of the flame and the coal sculpture and *wooopieee* larger flames jumped up for their wicked dance.
How could I ever forget how I loved to play with fire. I am a fire sign, after all. I would spend evenings playing with a single candle. I was a fire child. A single, fire loving boy, in an apartment with a sleeping father, a mother who was not there to watch me, as she had to teach a class of other probably also fire loving kids.
Imagine little me, all alone in an apartment with a gas powered stove, four open burners and a plastic melting oven. I had the matches, I had the "zimne ognie" (what is the name of these magnesium powder covered sticks that are called "cold fires" in Polish, but are anything but cold, are actaully able to burn holes into things, are actually able to melt into bizarre shapes when just brought together, those things that burn like little hand held suns on their far too short wire rods that get so hot one would want to just throw them at the carpet?)
I used to burn and melt and toast things almost daily. Once I discovered that it was possible to make nearly invisible yet quite destructive flames by burning mail polish remover drenched magazine cutouts, I spent entire afternoons watching landscapes and objects and sometimes just random photos with some strange looking politicians turn into incredibly light, incredibly black, incredibly brittle leaf like objects.
I was concerned about safety, of course. I would burn things only in the bathtub. The shower head was always ready to fight an out of control inferno.
Some more dangerous experiments involving combustive mixtures of chemicals took place in the safety of the always flushable toilet.
I was also the child that enjoyed a casual black snowfall in the kitchen, when a plastic cup turned into probably quite cancer causing airborn fallout.
I guess it was good to get all this out of my system before I was five or so. This way I did not try to blow things up once some more potent flamable objects became the rave with my friends in school. (I only heard some scary stories of some kids blowing off their limbs if they were lucky...)
I also remained quite cool when years later my otherwise peacefully organ playing friend Stefan would set up elaborate chain explosions, destroying entire armies of plastic soldiers in his little playhouse in his parents' backyard in Groß Auheim.
It was pretty much as if I had forgotten that I am a real fire sign until today.
I saw myself waving a paperplate at a pile of red glowing choals as if I were a desparate bird trying to take off with one far too short little wing.
I made the flames come back several times. Sparks drew little messages into the air. I watched the black coals go from black to red to almost white.
Oh, such simple pleasure, such deep satisfaction.
I will need to buy some really good candles. Maybe it could be the right time to take up a welding class?
I smell like a smoked ham right now. Happy, satisfied...
Do you like flames?

Things were pretty cool throughout the winter months. The spring was not so hot either. It was in the summer, when everybody was sweaty and sticky and hot when they fed him the coals and the grease and the meat. With his mouth wide open he would wait for them to put things in his mouth to let him taste them. He was the official taster, with his wicked burning breath.
Even after everybody was gone, he would digest the white ashes, drenched with burned proteine...
Oh what a life it was, oh what a life it was indeed.

The ground by the walk way was completely covered with their tiny moving bodies. An area maybe the size of my hand was just a pulsating mass of ants. I wonder what they were doing there. I thought that maybe the colony was on the move. Or maybe they were working as a cooling mechanism for their sun exposed location?
A few yeards further, on the same path, a little earth worm, ready to give up. I have not touched one of those since I was probably 8. It barely moved. It was so overheated, on this hopeless concrete walkway. Once I placed it in the shade of the much cooler grass, it began to be more active again...
I am obviously not in the city today. (and this computer does not have a spellchecker, so please be kind...

It was really difficult to get out of bed in the morning. It felt as if I were twice my silly weight. Then the shower, the water, it did not want to play with me. I had to hug the wall in order to get wet.
Forgot the power supply at home. Bought a delicious, very spongy Chocolatechip-Banana Muffin (yeah baby!).
Saw a lady in the subway who had such horrible water in her legs, that it looked as if her ankles were bags with water stuck into much too small shoes.
Food fell out of my chopsticks at lunch time.
At the table not very far, a whole vase filled with flowers and water fell to the floor.
I was expecting that it would rain today.
It is pouring.
I think it is a day with increased gravity...

She worked in the Romanian Postal Service (Posta Romana) back in the 60's. She was a good little postal truck that would go from mailbox to mailbos in the streets of Bucharest. It was 1971 or so that she even made it onto a 2Lei Stamp. She looked fast and reliable and was much more important than her driver, who was sent to the background, while she enjoyed the limelight.
After the revolution she was retired and sent to a place somewhere in Hungary. She was not used to carry letters anymore, only little farm animals, chickens a goat, some geese.
How much she wished somebody had written her a letter. This was not very likely to happen any time soon. Well, actually... you never know...

It was a family from out of town. Two oddly shaped men, a beautiful mother with a sleeping child in a carriage and a very annoyed daughter. They looked very lost and i could not resist to ask them if I could help them in any way.
The younger man asked me if I knew of any pizza places in the area and because we were on the corner of 49th and 7th, I told him about the closest pizza place just one block away. I leaned back against my wall. He thanked me, returned to talk to the others. I then heard him say:
"This man just told me that there is a fantastic pizza place just a block from here."
Fantastic pizza place? I never said that. In fact, the one I pointed out was not even the one I was thinking of.
Imagine I had told the man (the true story) that the pizza place was inside of what was supposed to be the first theme restaurant by David Copperfield* ... Hmm... New York is such a fun packed place...