A few transparent shadows hushed by my office yesterday. They were not even shadows really, more like areas of changed focus, as if the air had the density of water, spontaneously, in the shape of some creature, maybe for a split second, here, there. It happened more than once... then again.
My heavy head feels as if it were attached to the body with just a few quick stitches.
Upon arrival at home last night, I fell onto the bed, face first, and woke up an hour or so later, just to fire up the PowerBook again and to play catchup with my overdue projects. (And they are good ones, and I love working on them.)
I closed the machine at around 2am... slightly numb...
This is a very temporary condition, I know... the seasons are changing, Septembers tend to be difficult? It is the jetlag?
All will be good.
September 2003 Archives
Why do some of us sometimes become upset that they have to wait for the flavor of the tea leaves to become part of the water that surrounds them?
Why is there this need for immediate results?
Such a behaviour must have something to do with the contemporary distance of origin and destination of things.
The tea and the water and even the clay of the cup did not start to exist a few seconds prior. Ordering a cup of tea did not create either one of them. (Though some economists would certainly argue that the need for them did.)
The tea leaves traveled far from a field from a seed from a tree from a seed for billions of years, touching, dancing, kissing the soil, the rain, the wind...
The water around the leaves traveled just as long... and so did the clay of the cup...
The heat that was used to bring the water to the right temperature was a sacrifice of resources to allow all the parts to meet in what we perceive as a perverse harmony.
When waiting for the tea to develop the right flavor, it is helpful to imagine that we are much more temporary than the water in and the clay of the cup.
And the flavor of the tea?... Where does it really come from?...
for days now, for days. it is something that goes far beyond the time difference... there is some sort of barrier he is carrying with him. something that keeps him from seeing the world as clearly as he used to. now conversations with friends sometimes just turn into odd collection of familiar sounds... some tastes are a bit like a dream. some views are not even registered... except for after, long after the fact.
he only hopes that this is not a permanent condition. the glue is missing between the words and it is not good. this can not be good... he has also not drawn for a really long while now... even though he managed to fill two sketchbooks in just three days... he somehow does not remember... does not remember. the connectors are gone... this is some sort of trick, isn't it?... what happened?...
two burning eyeballs are asking to go to sleep...
this is what should really happen now.
A pigeon just spent a longer time hugging the façade of the building across broadway. Or was it not even a building?, was it a cliff that happened to have glass covered openings behind which humans are still asleep?
What must this city feel like when the buildings are reduced to what they really are... accessible/unaccessible to birds, a landscape plastered with mountains that are wired or have spikes and make scary sounds next to corners on which somebody throws large amounts of bread to the ground.
If I were a bird in the city today, I would probably...
Another pigeon just flew a very wild circle between the buildings here. It was as if she flew this pattern, interrupted by jolts of acrobatics, for no other reason than joy...
Silly human interpretations...
The building here is relatively new. Some of the little design artefacts still remind of what was cool in the 80's. The oddly rough, pink, vertical window blinds are definitely one of the suspects, as is the very strange carpeting in the halls, green and plum... and did I ever mention the lush dark plum elevator doors... oh, and my apartment door is also vintage-pink... (on the outside only, of course.)
The large windows here make plants go nuts. The lightly built walls would be probably really a problem if my neighbors were more interested in activities that make any kind of sound...
Oh, the sounds... there was this chirping, romantic meadow sound in the bathroom for months now. The subtle whisper of some simulated brook added to the atmosphere of serenity... and made me be even more thankful for that airport card in my PowerBook and the dimmer I installed upon move-in...
Where there is a meadow and pinkish doors, there usually lurks some beast... and yes, there is one here, one of the elevators... It must have been incidentally placed on top of some sort of burial ground, because, oh boy, it is cursed, and scary and bad. I remember this one time when it claimed to bring me to the 8th floor... but instead opened its doors on 16... not after making some serious jumps and jolts... scary stuff to experience when inside of an elevator... the display showed 8 when the door opened... it then quickly corrected the number to be 16... a flaw in the matrix perhaps?
I think the entire building is tilting actually. Not only were all frames hung on the same odd angle when I came home last night, there was also this random roaring sound. It was pretty much exactly like the sound of an airplane toilet flushing... that "stand back, or I am gonna get'ya" kind of sound...
It was loud, random, annoying...
It is not less scary now that I know what it is... It is the elevator scraping the walls of its shaft... every time it goes down, it scrapes something between the 8th and the 7th floor...
I took the elevator this morning... first up... to the 16th floor, just to see what happens... and it sounded like dracula's coffin...
On the way down, between the 8th and the 7th... a scraping sound and then a really heavy vibration, as if we were entering the earth's atmosphere again...
This can't be good.
I know there was an earthquake in Japan yesterday, but why is the building here tilted now?
The other elevators were shut down yesterday, so now there is only the "cursed scraper" going up and down its dark and angled shaft.
It might be time to look for a place where there are no odd cracks in the walls and no ceiling that appears to be pushing down the wall paint... but only in some places...
I hear of miracles happening up the hudson river... anyone, anyone?
Or what about Amsterdam? At least there are those hooks outside on all the houses... hmm...
Parking in Amsterdam, at least in the street, in Jordan, where I stayed, was €2 an hour. And the parking meter was actually quite clever. With a little yellow button, I could select the parking modus first... regular parking €2/h, parking from 19:00-23:00 €6,- parking for the whole day... €26 (or something like that.) It was a bit of an annoying feature that the parking meter did not accept credit cards or bills, only Euro coins, but this was very easily fixable even for me... I simply bought some stamps at the next supermarket (in a machine...) and the change was enough for the first night. The next day, all of the accumulated change pretty much made up the amount necessary for the parking spot.
The owner of the bed and breakfast felt sorry that the pricing was so high... €2/hour... seriously... I told him that parking in New York can be in the $18 range in some places... hmm... as soon as the words left my mouth, this sounded like a really wrong price tag... $18/hour?... now that is pretty outrageous, isn't it?... how did I come up with that?... maybe it was the 18% tax on top of the parking charges?... Maybe what I thought of were some numbers I saw on the side of some 5th Avenue building?... I mean, I do not have a car here... how should I know?...
Oh, Paris,... a completely different system btw... there are these pre-paid cards... parking is also €2/hour... except one is only allowed to stay for 2 hours in some places and the cards one can buy start at €5... the system is basically built so there are cards left with stuff (cash) left on them... An old trick to collect crumbs or change from between the sofa pillows... works well for paris parking meters...
I had calculated that I would need about 12 hours of parking... this made me buy cards for €30 (they can be purchased from Tabac stores) I ended up parking in a spot that actually accepted the cards for a mere 2 hours... (longer, except the night is free...) and so I basically paid my €15 ($18?) per hour... here we go... Paris got me...
Oh, and why am I even writing this down here?... On my way to lunch today, there was a parking meter... I checked the price... $2/hour... cheaper than Amsterdam!... : )
The two gentlemen next to me at the Japanese restaurant had one of those discussions that would have probably much better worked via walkie talkie. Little bursts of misinformation were fired across the table. I tried so hard not to pay attention to things like: "Why will we build schools in Iraq, have you seen the schools in New York?" and "Aftica is next. I saw the document. Africa is next."
The older man seemed to be some sort of established personality. His opinions were the ones of somebody who has lived in the cocoon of yes-sayers for a long part of his life.
The younger man, who was probably in his 50, tried really as hard as he possibly could to impress his lunch date.
After having discussed how "the others do not understand American culture" and "they just envy us for what we are", as well as "it is our responsibility to protect and lead and educate," the conversation went towards a more digestable topic... personal fitness. The younger man spoke about the "torture blocks", the portion of his almost daily 3 mile run in which his body hurt him most. Then there was the "weights" and how "fitness opens new food possibilities."
(He had not eaten his rice, even though it would have been a "reward" for him being "especially good today" after having run for 5 Miles.)
As they were leaving, I remembered this Tom Sachs piece... hmm... probably the wrong shortcut, my mind decided to take there, looking at these two "established old boys", but it still made me want more tea.
I ordered the same combination of rolls as always... well, I did not even order them... the owner of the restaurant seems to really love that my favorite dish is such an ultra traditional combination.
"We are all your friends here," she said today. (What can one possibly reply to that!)
And I thought that one of the best ways to go through a healthy and complete life was maybe not even running the three or five miles, not the torture blocks, no educating others about what is the right way by... hmm... I don't even want to think it... and such... there are many other ways... many, many other ways...
But that's just silly thoughts at lunch time...
(I know that I am being incredibly naive... but I treat this condition as a precious luxury, not as a handicap...)
The air outside is like a fresh cold leaf of iceberg lettuce pulled out of a refrigerator.
Could I break it now?
Would there be droplets of cold water all over the room?
Good thing I left the window open. Maybe the cold autumn air will convince my lazy brain that it is time to store nuts for the winter and to come up with something more than this frustrating "I am so tired, what time is it?" mantra...
The idling truck outside and the passing cabs and squeaky breaks of busses are reminding me that I am back home, back in New York...
It is autumn, my favorite time of year...
I will now walk out and take a walk on the dark streets of New York... (Or maybe just across the street to that Police man's favorite Dunkin' Donut shop.)
A subway train is now entering the 96th street station...
Every time I try to outsmart my biological clock, it reminds me quite well that I am a very regular little human ant and that I time zones do not travel on the wings of airplanes. It is 2:26 right now (at least according to the watch here next to me), and my body is ready to go out and play in the morning sun (where are the birds?, where are the birds?). The planet will need a little while until it is turned into the position of the morning, and until then I will need to force my jumpy mind into sleeping mode. It will be like trying to stick a bag filled with honey collecting insects into a little box, using one hand behind my back. (Relatively impossible...)
It is an odd balance. On one hand, my mind is not quite ready yet, it is sleepy, it wants to relax a little more, find some rest, and yet on the other hand it wants to run, run, run...
The city is luckily very quiet on monday mornings at 2am... so maybe if I just imagine that it is not morning yet... oh, that would not be imagining...
Hmm... spin little planet, spin...
All of those blue-black drawings on paper on this site are made with one single pen. It is a very trusty, now about ten years old Mont Blanc Meisterstück. I had to service it once, that was after a rather unstable friend snatched it out of my hand and threw it on the floor, about nine years ago... maybe eight.
What happened this time was a very much self induced accident, one that really gave a nice tone to my entire trip to Europe...
I had not paid attention from which one of the ink bottles I filled my "Füller" and so what I thought was the nice blue-black anti-sediment ink I had bought in a little store in Kraków three years ago, turned out to be a rather lethal cocktail of various inks, some of them not water based... a really bad mixture, a killer infusion. I did not notice my grave mistake until I tried to make the next drawing while waiting for my plane to board, at JFK, in the evening, somewhere in the depths of terminal four.
The pen really tried to play along, but it was hopelessly clogged, dried, melted inside, perhaps. I ran to the bathroom and tried to somehow wash out my drawing instrument, over one of those motion activated sinks. How pathetic...
I even thought that I had achieved something when the water kept coming out clear. I really thought that all I now needed to do was to get some ink in Germany and that I could then maybe draw later...
It was not until I tried to refill my drawing instrument in a hotel, later last week that I noticed that the waterproof ink had dried inside of the sensitive capillaries. The pen was pulling in vacuum, it was not taking any ink anymore... it was clogged. And the ink did more damage. It dissolved the very fine rubber layer that used to keep the sensitive front area of the pen air tight. As I moved the front of the pen with a paper napkin, the instrument just came apart, it opened up, I gave up. Inside, in the little ink compartment, was a dark blue spongy thing, a nasty sediment. It is all broken now. I will need to use some other pens for a while. I will have to have my Meisterstück repaired. Probably in Hamburg again. This will take a while. I am sure.
Oh, and the graphic tablet, the one I used for drawing the 360x360 pieces. It is attached to my father's iMac right now. I wanted to inspire him to use Photoshop... hmm... completely forgot that I need this thing to actually make drawings and to do work... hmm... and this is just the beginning...
Home. The Dalai Lama is speaking in the Park now. I am sure his disarming laughter will make the massess of people I just saw, crossing Central Park in a cab from the airport incredibly happy.
It is okay that I have a headache, it is okay that my stomach is really upset with me and with itself and ultimately with the world which I presented to it by odd combinations of airplane food... it is all okay... I am finally home, it is noon, my body thinks it is 6PM... all good, all good... what will now have to follow, will be pages and pages of coded descriptions of micro events on this other old continent, spent without online access... and actually... no phone... can you imagine that?...
Imagine me in my old room in Germany. Books I loved as a child under books I hated as a teenager, between toys I did not think I ever had, between images of family and friends and many other unbelievable objects. What used to be my room is now turned into cave of memories...
There is an iMac here as well... except the internet connection really barely works... I hoped to be able to write more... but it took me hours to get any connection... My poor father... he thought it was something he did wrong... it is really the line here, I think...
So this is the mini entry. I will be travelling for this whole week. Expect my return and the return of posts here on this comming Sunday... (that is not too far away, now is it?...
(hope the connection will let me post this...)
A friend described his feeling about today in an interesting way.
"When you lose somebody very close to you in your family and the anniversary of their death comes back to remind you of the event, you carry this burden with you all day long. You take it with you when you get your coffee in the morning, when you ride the train, when you go to work, in the evening, you will reflect. There is this sadness inside of you, this memory of a very different reality, sealed inside of you. Nobody, except for you knows why you are sad, not many will pay attention. Unless, of course, you run into somebody who also had a relationship to the same loved one. If you meet on this anniversary, you will probably not even talk about what happened. You will not say anything in particular about it, not mention the living times, the moment of loss... it will be all there, in both of you, both of you will be aware that the other one knows... and whatever conversation happens on that day, will happen on the plattform of this knowledge. Yet it will be a shared, hidden awareness...
Today, everybody in the city shares this experience of loss. Everybody on the subway knows what happened, why everybody else appears today the way they do, everyone knows exactly where they were when it happened, they all have lost a bit of their world... today... we all know... and we just continue..."
It was interesting that he said it, because, of course, I knew exactly what he was talking about, just as he described it... and so we both continued to talk about something completely different...
I imagined the ghosts of all those who died on September 11th 2001 come back... maybe with the ghosts of those who died because of what happened since...
And I imagined that these spirits would probably somehow wish for exactly this kind of mourning. One that is not debilitating, one that does not stop the world every year, not one that uses the date as an excuse to destroy more lives.
Hmm...but that's a very different story...
People are pouring out of the 1/9 2/3 subway station on 96th street. Traffic has been completely diverted from this block. There is police everywhere. A man in a green protective suit just walked up broadway, alone, towards the branch of CitiBank on the north east corner of the intersection...
Let's hope all will be okay.
A journalist is just being escorted further away from the corner. It is almost quiet now... no cars, no people... just the far sounds of the city and many fire engines...
(update...) nothing really happened, of course... hmm...
The last few days felt a bit like a dash from deadline to deadline.
This will unfortunately continue until Friday.
On Friday I am going to go to Europe to visit my Parents... (and some old friends in shape of people and art and places.)
This is why the entries here have been a bit slow...
...
Scavenging for food is one of the normal activities of office humans. Some of the more important meetings involving more important people tend to include breakfast or lunch or other special snacks. One can either be part of such a meeting, be more daring and pretend to be part of such a meeting, or one can just wait for the large animals to complete their meal and then rush in and scavenge for whatever is left. Office workers pack sandwiches into paper cups and carry them secretly into their cubicles or offices or devour them right there, off the plates, sometimes mixing the wraps with the wilted salad, the cold coffee, the gluey pasta and sometimes almost transparent cheese.
Such free food is free of any calories or sugars, or saturated fats. Such found post meeting food also does not need to be refrigerated.
Kings used to employ professional tasters to see if their food was in any way poisoned. Food after meetings must be such tested food and thus completely save to eat. (Unless the meeting room is littered with bodies, of course.)
I recently saw two workers in a meeting room in the afternoon, eating roast beef and tuna sandwiches left over from a long early morning meeting. One of the workers boasted that he had survived several years in China and that even if the food we was eating now had obviously not been refrigerated for more than four hours, the Chinese bacteria in his so experienced stomach would easily kill all the germs that might have anything to do with the not refrigerated "meeting food". Hmm...
Am I immune to this irresistible call of preowned and certified meeting food? Certainly not. I have had my share of meeting pasta... had some cold black coffee (there was no milk or sugar left.)... some melted brie...(the crackers were almost crunchy.)
Today my catch was just a cup of mini-pretzels. Inside of the cup however was a real gem. We all know that pretzels do not grow on trees, of course, but what I found today, between the little fish and some low fat potato chips was a genuine, a real, a little... bonsai pretzel tree.
It is not very large, that little bonsai pretzel tree. I would say that it is about 7 centimeters, perhaps? It is a little flat, there is a short stem, some roots, and the crown already bears three genuine little mini pretzels. I carefully planted the tree in a large paper cup, and instead of soil I chose paper napkins. I will need to give it some silica, so it does not suck in moisture, with its sprinkled salt. For now it is in a good place covered with one of the transparent one way orange juice cups, for protection.
I know the little tree will never grow, no matter what I'll do with it, but it is truly a masterpiece created by some slightly flawed manufacturing process over at the meeting-pretzel plant. It was dark when I found the little tree, but I shot some mini portraits, hope you'll enjoy these...
1) A total view with coffee cup and cover.
2) Pretzel tree, close-up
Do you have a bonsai anything? (And please do not provide a link to that bonsai kitten site...)
It was in the afternoon and I was on my way to the 14th Street 2/3 train, when I heard the music coming from St. Francis Xavier Church. It was a good New York moment, I walked right into it. The beautiful space was attracting more and more visitors who appeared to be drawn in by the strange sounds of a rather synthetic sounding organ played by somebody in the front of the church. I found a spot somewhere near a large fan, the sound quality was not quite as good, but the air was at least moving. It was a sunny day and for some reason the church was rather warm inside.
I expected a concert, I thought I was holding the program. I began drawing little pieces and fragments of what surrounded me. The church is too really beautiful, the colors of the stonework feel muted, slightly yellowish. Looking at a large number of people positioned in this vessel of stone somehow made me feel warm and included. It was really a very odd feeling. It really was a good place somehow, this minute, right there, waiting for the concert?...
It is Sunday, of course, what I walked into was the afternoon mass, it was one that was about to include a confirmation.
As the ceremony began, the entire congregation rose and we were advised to introduce ourselves to those around us. "Hello, my name is Witold Riedel..." was my line to the very friendly looking gentleman in front of me. (The line did not quite work, he really thought my name was Vito... okay, it did not really matter...) Right next to me, we were divided by a little wooden separator, was a guy maybe in his early 20's, seemingly as surprised to introduce himself to me as I was.
Behind me was a rather eccentric couple. I might be wrong, but I remembered her being maybe in her 50's, with large hair, white... not quite sure. Her husband, lover, friend, looked like a toned down version of John Lasseter, sans the Hawaiian shirt... yet with...
a rather large parrot on his shoulder. Was I supposed to shake the parrot's hand? I wanted. "His name is Hector, the man said."
"Heeghar," whispered the parrot...
"Hello, my name is Witold Riedel." (guess who said that...)
With the parrot watching my back, "All are welcome" sung by all, had a very extended meaning.
I did not stay for the mass. I did not stay for the entire experience. I escaped after just a few minutes. I was not ready for an institutionalized conversation with God... through music? yes, through architecture? yes, through an encounter of a parrot?, certainly... orchestrated (beautifully and skillfully...) not quite...
Other little things that happened just a few minutes later, somehow made me believe that it was a really good thing that I had left that church.
They were all good things, but giving them away here would be no fun now, would it?...
Under my fingertips are the soft and familiar keys of the PowerBook keyboard. They are as smooth and soft as they can get after three years of extensive use. In front of me is the slightly messy surface of my PowerBook screen. Because of certain design issues, there are some soft keyboard imprints on the surface. It all makes the screen feel a bit more like a slightly less than perfect piece of paper. Not a sheet of paper, more a piece, really...
Underneath these familiar surfaces, around this familiar and so friendly user interface of Movable Type is a freshly furnished virtual space, furnished nicely by Apple... It is a fresh installation of os X... Jaguar, 10.2.6... nothing personal really... I have tried moving some of the sensitive data to a backup disk, folder by folder... just hoping the dead drive would not hit that corrupted sector again, flip out, drag the entire setup into a crash...
I was able to salvage some work files, some personal files... only to discover yesterday that some of them were randomly corrupted... this will be a longer walk home...
Data loss is fascinating, because it is so clean. The outer shell of things looks really the same. The data deprived environment is a pristine space, happy, ready to be used and furnished.
It is amusing how a few days ago I imagined what it would be like if digital interfaces had some of the qualities of real life objects... riiiight.... here... and then a bit later, I lamented about this unquenched urge to paint...
I will need a little time to readjust, please be patient... can we be?...
while I was asleep, the driver took me via Madison, not on the way, of course, or was I dreaming?...
It is nice to be able to drink wine and still come home safely...
good night...
Here is one of the recovered images, btw. It was 99 and then it was too strange, so I never posted it. It does not have a story either, it is a bit scary... now somehow fitting after such an exhausting day...
Now really going to sleep... Hmm... I wonder what story he could tell... it could be the story of lost data... or would it be the story of him being data... lost, found again... yes, this could be a very nice Kafkaesque angle for a story. Somebody whom life reduces to data... a degrading act, really... and yet he misses it. He misses being predictible, misses being moved around as if her really were nothing more than a number...
Hmm... we might be onto something here... though it is a story told... so often... so often...
so many entries, just to keep the time stamps... drive crashes randomly, even when I copy smaller folders. I am exhausted. This will be it for the day...
(I actually just almost fell asleep writing this... how odd.)
This feels like the 10th round of a box fight... or something else that I can not quite describe... good night... what wonders and miracles await us tomorrow?...
Hmm...
the drive just made the clacking sound again, the computer crashed, the drive does not want to show up anymore (again). We are back to square 1.5... except I am exhausted... this was a horrible day... and it is bound to continue...
I was too happy, too soon?...
Drive X gave me a comprehensive looking list of the good the bad and the ugly.
(That was about an hour ago.) Some of the discrepancies it found were somehow positive (there were more empty sectors on the disk), some were more alarming. (The number of files was not the one expected, as was the number of folders...) It asked me if I wanted to repair, warning me that there might be data loss involved... I wanted to repair... it did something... relatively quickly, compared to the about 4 hours it took to run the test...
The tests after the "repair" were all passed...
The drive is not making any unusual sounds, right now, I am treating it like an open raw egg...
It is currently attached to my new backup drive. I just copied over the master files for most of the drawings here, as well as the most important work for commercial clients... (designs they had already seen and liked, except for some minor changes... which would have been a minor part of a complete redo, had the recsue mission failed.)
We will now attempt a complete, raw, 1:1 backup of all data...
I will then worry about some pretty solution like Backup 2.0 by Apple...
but right now... things look much, much, much better than at any point earlier today.
Drive X was able to just perform the various tests easily. Only the catalogue structure of the drive seemed to be damaged. I turned on "surface test" and this is where Drive X crashed (I think.) My drive did not want to show up anymore at all.
I removed the drive from the Powerbook and put it into its own enclosure. (The drive is a 48Gig Travelstar, built 11.2001.
Tried to mount it as an external drive from my G3 tower. No luck. Tried LaCie tools (Silverlining) but it was not able to see the drive. Norton Utilities would just crash. (We are now in os9)... The drive would receive a call from Norton, but then prin down after a few seconds CLACK CLACK... (really loud knocking.)
After several restarts and various Norton attempts, the drive just mounted, for a few seconds, just to bring the entire system down.
After 2 hours of trying, Norton finally managed to find the drive. It discovered that the Catalogue Header was damaged. It repaired it.
In order to repair anything further, Norton needed the driver from the HD, it warned me that it would crash... and so it did.
Now with the drive at least being recognized by the system (=would you like to format?) I was able to go back to Drive X, which is now attempting to repair the catalogue of the drive. The message on the screen of my crippled PowerBook, which runs from the CD and does not contain a System bearing drive reads as follows: "Repairing the volume structures will recover the directory and repair problems with the volume"... Let's hope it will indeed happen...
3:55PM
-- update 5:30PM
"Repairing the volume structures will recover the directory and repair problems with the volume" Step 1,181,140 of 1,434,595... Task 5 of 6...
(Still hoping...)
I am currently at the apple store getting disk recovery software and a backup drive. My PowerBook broke down last night (drive made loud CLACKING sounds... and then everything froze.) I really hope that at least some of the vital data can be recovered. Sorry for sharing such sad news... at least for me...
All the other cats were just whatever they happened to be. Some were plain lions, some just stupidly striped tigers, there were Jaguars and Pumas and Panthers (not only those at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris.)
He, he was a very special species, he was beyond all that, beyond even, well you know. He was a bit of a chameleon of the cats, though he would never dare to combine these words in public. He liked to call himself the C-Cat... or Copycat, as some would say, he was the creme de la creme of looks, and smarts and oh... just name it and he certainly excelled at it... and did he not, adjustment was no problem, survival of the fittest?, he knew if anything, he would be the last cat standing, jumping, looking good. He, after all, was able to intelligently pick and choose, to grab a stripe here, to become inspired by a roar there. Some of the design solution found on cougar was much better than on a siamese cat, yet when it came to speed, he knew how to make himself look like a perfect Cheetah, going straight for the kill, cutting corners, picking the shortest sprint...
He was convinced that what he arrived at was the ultimate and the optimal perfection. Only thew best of the best, perfectly adjusted, optimized.
There was just one, just tiny, little drawback... being the very best, the fastest adapting one, the nimblest shifter of shape and color and thought, made him incredibly hmm, how did he sometimes try to call it...
Well, let's say his friends were never able to keep up. They were just slow and did not get his speed in spotting trends, and so they had to be just left behind.
So there were friends in his past, yes, many, very powerful, influential friends... like even the lion (from him he sampled the left paw)... and there were even more powerful friends in C-Cat's future... Hyena, his current buddy told him that...
Well, in the present, the present... here he did not have a real group. Right now... for now, just this second...
As for hunting... he was best at hunting trends anyway... and this winter, this winter was the winter of the Bears anyway... he would be a Copy-Bear this winter... he would own the snow, the hills, the mountains... He would be dressed up as a blackbear, be strong as a grizzly... he already saw himself rushing through the powdered snow...
At least this is what he thought, the really big bears did around December...
He was not quite sure for how long he had traveled. Something might have happened not so long ago that made him forget whatever might have been before that. Or was it a long time ago? Or... he was not quite sure where it all might have happened... if it happened at all.
All he knew right now was the fact that he was standing in front of... or was he?... well suddenly it was not quite so clear if he was really in front or right next to or maybe not at all in the picture...
oh, things used to be so much easier...
but maybe the intriguing part is this not very clear part of the things that appear completely cristal clear... hmm... this made him smile...
plexi?...
She adjusted the wet wings of her sleek black umbrella as if they were the masses of dark air flowing towards a tornado. She then used the attached massive strap to confine the folded, wet umbrella even more. Water was dripping from it even more now. The pouch which she pulled out of her pocket barely wanted to accept the incredibly drenched black object. It took several attempts... Once the umbrella looked like a black magic stick with a cord attached to one end, the elegant woman stuck it into the pocket of her coat. "Beats getting wet.", she said, seeing me looking at the place in the center of the car where she just performed her umbrella contortion maneuver.
"I hope you will give it some air later,..." I heard myself say. It was as if the umbrella were an animal she stuck into a paper bag without leaving any air holes. (Why did I reply that?... strange.)
"Later, once I get to the office. I am not a big fan of mold." She pulled out her cranberry and began browsing through her massive list of emails... the micro conversation was over for her...
I did not answer... I just stared at the door and thought that I really liked certain kinds of mold. Maybe not the kind she could have gotten with her wet umbrella, or the kind that will probably bring the Deutsche Bank building down, south of ground zero,... but I imagined touching a really velvety piece of camembert... then thought of the last time when I had to take penicillin...
And then I thought that it was the sometimes playful silliness of my mind that would prevent me from achieving access to that fast lane on which this obviously very "successful" woman was traveling... If she was "Human Being 2.0"... the faster, better, more effective kind, I was a bit of a beta test, still exploring and observing the twists and turns of the little threads that pulled my aging body through the stunningly complex detours of the labyrinth of life...
Not sure I have ever seen a lazy looking seagull before, but the one that just drifted by the window, slowly, barely moving her wings, taking a right on 96th street, then coming back, taking a left on 96th street.....
She looked very much like a lazy yet serious kind of seagull, cruising not higher than the 6th floor perhaps, between the buildings of Manhattan... looking for something very different than food... (I guess...)
Hmm... I think I remember meeting serious seagulls at Lake Tahoe, last year...
But that was earlier in the morning, by a lake, it was a group of them, and I spent some time with them being as considerate as I could be with my 50's clicking machine. Let me see if I can find one of the pictures... yes... here:
(And I am thinking more of the guy in the background, as he looked a bit surprised by something moving next to him in the water...)
You still there? The canvas almost gave up on the man who really wanted to paint. He wanted to paint. He wanted to work just the way he had about a decade earlier, passionately, obsessively, lovingly. He used to touch the canvas with such caring and loving attention. He used to pour his heart right onto the stretched fabric. They would spend nights together. The paint moist and glowing and soft, his eyes focused, not the brush all of him was her tool. There were fingers, there were splashes of pure saturated liquid, thrown at layers and layers of soft, lush color.
No more, not for a while now. He missed it so much, his longing was unbearable. She missed him too, her whole existence depended on those moments spent together, alone, one on one, privately, softly, sweetly.
She deserved to be the artwork he did not allow her to be, through his cruel absence. He wanted to be in the place only the two of them were able to create... Hopefully there would be layers of wet paint again, soon...
Even though I barely remember any of the little details that were so new to me and so strong when we escaped from Poland in 1981, I will never forget that one map. It was the map of Austria. We had crossed the border from Czechoslovakia and were on our way to Rome. We stopped at the very first highway gas station, just to look at what the West actually looked like. I mean there were all these legends about the incredible mountains of actually colorful products. The eleven year old me wanted to definitely find out if there were indeed as many Matchbox cars as hinted by the numbers on their little boxes. We looked at the map of Austria. It was all in German, all pretty colorful and all roads seemed to lead to this very interesting white blob. It was a hole in the map actually, rubbed through the paper by thousands of fingers that somehow wanted to touch their immediate future. The blob was called WIEN, Vienna and we were also heading towards it, though it was not our final destination, just a centre of gravity that was about to propel us onto our actual orbit... (which was not Rome.)
Whenever I see a map with a rubbed out place, and there is a lot of them around New York, especially on the subways, I have to think of Vienna.
Vienna, the place that looked to me like the largest pile of broken washing machines and burned out cars. It was a narrow road between two landcapes of 1981 style recycling... I guess we never actually drove into the city.
The outskirts of Vienna actually looked a little bit like that hole in the Autobahn map...
And why am I thinking of this little fragment right now? Is it because of the shiny greasy spot on the spacebar of my PowerBook?... maybe it is because of those three "Get Mail" envelopes, which might be the most often clicked little icon in any application on my mac. It is a bit like going to Vienna, except that it is the other way around, it is as if random voices were summoned onto my screen from so many various corners of the world...
The odd thing is that whenever I hit that little button with the pointer of the mouse... it does not rub off a bit, no pixels go missing, there is no hole in it... nothing.
I once got really upset at Jeffrey Shaw when he was giving a lecture about his then quite ground breaking virtual reality art installations.
I was maybe 20 or so and I got up in one of his lectures and burst out that his work was not really worth anything, because it did not allow the user to leave any marks, to leave anything behind, to comment to scratch in anything. He looked at me (and not only he looked at me) and did not understand how I could be so pumped with adrenaline about such a silly, unimportant thing...
Nobody leaves his marks on the Mona Lisa... those scratched marks on historic landmarks are a rather disturbing side effect of human interaction with art...
And yet, if there were no fingers pointing at Vienna, ever... if there were no eyes wanting to stare at the Mona Lisa (or, 1911, that space), if there were no massive amounts of humans streaming towards the places others make or build...
Would it make sense to make any of these at all?...
One of the second generation Jade plants received an "architectural" look today, as I removed about 30... counts... fifty!, fifty leaves of it. Does anybody know a recipe for Jade plant salad?, I am holding about a pound of bio matter here. Lush, large, juicy Jade leaves, some with a red rim.
I think I will give them water and see how many will make it into grown up plants. The one from which they were harvested used to be a little branch just about a year or so ago. It now stands 14 inches tall, has 7 large branches and more than 100 leaves.
I am looking for ways to make the stem of these plants a bit more tree like, more covered with bark, I hope that removing the "trunk leaves" will have the desired effect.
We shall see what will really happen.
The mother plant is now completely out of control. She must have some 500 leaves, perhaps, she is almost two feet high, and maybe three feet wide.
I will need to find a way to somehow groom her better or she will topple over kill herself with her eager growth. I was able to turn her branches into about 14 new plants... this is all getting out of hand. And then there were these saplings she herself started to plant. I just found a leaf with roots and even a stem put onto the branch of a close by leafy plant. The nutrients in the now limp leaf were almost exhausted, but it was clearly a baby we have here. (Now in water, soon in soil.)
I am actually glad I do not breed kittens... can you imagine?...
It rained again. It just never stopped. Last time he could remember it not raining must have been in China, years ago, a long, long time ago.
But New York? Rain, rain, rain and more rain. Well, snow, sometimes, then wind. The wind was worst, maybe. It would just go under his skin, try to flip him over, ridicule him, make him lose his job, lose his head, lose his life?...
He knew exactly where the umbrellas ended that were not able to keep their heads on their necks. He saw them littering the corners, pathetic little carcasses. And there were new ones coming into the city, hoping to make it through the season. Some were being given to people for $3... pathetic little weaklings... they were lucky if they survived a good drizzle.
New York was a really interesting place for an umbrella anyway. Some of the good restaurants offered resting places for umbrellas, little conversational areas. This is where the best stories were exchanged. One umbrella has once seen a holdup. This other large had a really secret story about his owner... (nobody knew if such things could really be true.) There was one beefy guy who claimed that his inside was printed with a happy, cloudy sky. No rain? Yeah right.
So this conversational part of the job was not so bad... the wind, the rain, the long, lonely drying sessions in the bathroom... they were less fun...
But what could be done about all this... after all, he was a professional, automatic, unique, holding tight.
