October 2003 Archives

So what is it you write about on that site?...
Nothing, really, I am just trying to somehow write down some of the slightly finer observations, you know. I mean if you look at anything, an idea, a person, a thing... and then a second idea, or person, or thing and you just put one and the second next to each other, then there will be an unlimited amount of shades between the two. Even if they appear identical at first. There is an unlimited amount of numbers between 1 and 2, and now imagine we could be talking about infinitely more complex entities than just numbers... hmm...
But it all does not really exist... I don't know... it is a bit like seeing without looking... perhaps?... gosh now i sound as if I wanted to say something important...
But at some point it just becomes really not relevant, I mean it can be boring, no? And you arte not really comparing apples with apples... who would want to read that?
Well, it really depends... I really like the thought of listening to the ticking of my watch and knowing that even though each one of the ticks sounds as if it were identical to the one before that and the one after, there is no such thing as a repeating tick. They are divided by time and space (as we are traveling through space faster than a bullet, right?) and with every tick, the watch also moves farther away from the moment it ticked for the first time and closer to the moment when it will do so for the last time... everything is different, at every point in time. It is my mind that defines that this unique event can be grouped with the other unique events and just called "ticking of my wrist watch.."
Well, maybe it is not a good example... I don't know...
So what about photographs, aren't they frozen moments, things that are frozen and bound not to change?...
Hmm, photographs are not really frozen moments, are they? Photographs are, as much as many other images, surfaces that contain information that was probably gathered over time, with some sort of device... they become frozen moments once the user pours the idea of them being frozen moments back into them. It takes an intelligent mind that knows at least a thousand words to put that thousand words into a picture... and then we still just have a thousand words... no sentences... no grammar... and the grammar changes with the users... I sometimes imagine how certain pictures which we now accept as contemporaries must have looked to those who were closer to the time of their creation... imagine... just pick any image in any museum... but now it is all before photographs, right?... hmm... very different... (very different?)
I have no idea what you are talking about
What were we talking about?...

On certain days, there would be such fog outside of our window that it almost appeared as if somebody had painted the glass white. There was nothing out there, not a thing, just this shapeless whiteness. I would stare at it for what appeared to be hours, trying to make anything out, anything. We lived on the 8th floor, far above the tree line, of the young trees planted in the freshly made dirt around our buildings. It would sometimes take more than an hour indeed for the fog to settle, branches would eventually emerge from the whiteness, then the faint shapes of flat looking crowns of trees, some transformer box here, a street lamt there, then headlights, then cars.

There were other days on which I would lock myself in a seemingly perfectly dark room, ... and then wait for the first shapes to emerge. It would sometimes take more than 10 minutes for me to be able to see the bathtub, or the photographic equipment of my father's darkroom. The darker the room, the longer the period of pure anticipation. Did I really see something, was I just imagining it? I knew that I could exit this voluntary blindness at any time, by just opening the door, just stepping back out into the light.
I think it was only once, in the mountains, at our weekend house, in Koszarawa Cicha, in Poland, where the light never became enough for me to see anything... I stared at where I knew there was a ceiling, I looked over towards the walls... and there was nothing. It was a complete darkness, one that did not seem to be out there, but inside of me, not in front of my eyes, more behind my eyes. I tried to reach into it, but it felt like nothing... I think I was pretty scared.
I remember waking up before everybody else in the house on the following morning, into a complete darkness again, I waited patiently, it took a really long time...
In the place where the window shutters had been closed, red ovals eventually appeared, they then turned somehow less bloody, and they slowly became the branch circles in the wood of the window shutters... My brain used this tiny amount of light to somehow reassemble the room for me, I began to see the inside of the house again... I was able to find the door.

I am not sure if I looked straight at the sun on this particular day, but I know I used to, sometimes. A blue and green disk would appear in front of the glowing star, A shaking blueish disk, obviously my eye trying to not go completely blind.
The blue disk would then stay with me for quite some time, the after image of the sun, one that only I could see and that I could then follow, as it was jumping, seemingly randomly wherever I was about to look.
If I managed to relax enough, the burned in blue circle would just slowly sink to the ground, like a deflated ghost friend who became tired of jumping around the apartment... as soon as I became aware of this observation however, he was ready to jump around again, of course...

I am not sure why a rainy morning like the one today would make me think of some of my childhood's eye-games...
The rain has been pushed forcefully against the window for some time now, if I step close enough to the glass, I can see the world exploded by thousands of little water lenses. A bit like the slow glass photographs by Naoya Hatakeyama...
Time to leave the house again. Just a few more minutes left here...

At the end of my money I smelled the dust on the brown linoleum in my living room next to the two red chairs which I had found in the street just a few months after moving in. I somehow wished that the metal shelves, filled with books and toys and probably just trash, could cave in on me, just burry me, just make sure i was killed. quickly... by Astro Boy, or Goethe.
I played with the tears on the floor, little salty drops that turned into trails of dirt under my fingers. I made crosses, triangles, no circles...
I ate Matzo bread and onions, since they were the cheapest thing I could find, I froze juices diluted with water, to make a taste last longer. I so wished I maybe had a dog, or some pet that could maybe just eat the bills from my mailbox, and then maybe me, once the shelves caved in, buried me, smashed my stupid skull in, at last.
A friend came to visit, we had been paired up to work on a big project together, a few months prior, it was supposed to be a big one, I had spent the thousands in anticipation of the great success. We failed so miserably like never before and never since. The company paid me a symbolic dollar to just make sure I do not say they did not pay me for the weeks and weeks my partner and I failed at visualizing our really lame ideas.
So here we were again, in my living room, my tears wiped, the matzoh on a plate, the empty kitchen closed, we on the chairs, far away from the window, staring at each other silently.
I took her in my arms and carried her light body into the other room, the one that was just bare with two found tatami mats on the floor, no futon, really cold. Oh, there were hundreds and hundreds of small photographs, near the ceiling, but that's a completely different story.... She looked so incredibly fragile, barely there...
We stared at each other with a most desperate completely silent intensity. I think we might have kissed, though we probably have not. Or did we maybe touch each other's bellies? No we did not.

Then she just left. I do not even remember how quickly or really when and how. Oh, I remember her probing her thin limbs into the sleeves of a flimsy worn out t-shirt... Her translucent skin less and less visible under layers and layers and layers of fabric.

She later, much later, told me that she had been pregnant on that day when we met, in my pathetic apartment of unpaid bills and rent.
She had lost the baby shortly after.

It was as if somebody had been listening to my pleas to bring death quickly into my apartment, and the reaper came to visit, rushed through the rooms, found us staring at each other, on the mats, on the cold linoleum floor... and then he killed, and he killed the weakest one he could possibly find...

Dear God, why are you making me think of this right now?

As the sunbeams illuminate a strip in the façade of the building across Broadway, I can see glimpses of families in the morning. A father trying hard to read his paper, his little son fighting for his attention, and yet distracted by the little girl, jumping around like mad, closer to the television set on which they tend to play video games for hours at a time.
Just one flight above them, a mother, dressed in only a thin white nightgown, is holding on to a large white cup. The woman is barely visible behind the little plastic pumpkins and books and stickers in various colors and shapes that adorn her living room and kitchen windows. Are her two boys still asleep? Maybe they are not even in town, she appears very relaxed...
I wonder if these families ever meet. I certainly do not know my neighbors from downstairs or upstairs. It is quite possible that to the families on the other side of Broadway I am as grouped in a theme as they are for me. It is quite possible that there is somebody above me or below me, who now also hides their hands behind the screen of a laptop. Somebody who peeks out of the morning shadow cast by this building, somebody who is rarely there to enjoy the evening sun when it nourishes the plants in our windows.
It would be fascinating to be able to observe events and people and thoughts without a set point of view. It would be so most incredible to be everywhere at the same time, without the choice of the floor or direction or even time of day...
As long as one is trapped in the physical world and as long as one is contained in a certain point of space and time, one can only imagine such a state...
and it is not easy, because our thinking is based on being somewhere, at some point in time... (perhaps?, I do not know enough.)
Or maybe the imagination of such a state is reward enough... hmm...

I really did not want to complain about one more thing after coming back from Europe. The things I wrote here were all quite depressing, and so I did not want to make things even worse.
It was about the trees. Remember the acacia trees, the four heros of planthood, the seeds that were turning into mighty trees right there in the little green plastic pot? They were all murdered. Killed. Just dead.
Little animals were crawling all over the dried and twisted plants when I returned after about 7 days. It was a picture of ingenuity and misery. The plants were dead, but the little animals (and we are talking microscopic little leaf cows here,) built a sort of silk cocoon around the top branches of the tree. I would usually let nature make me a sweater here, but I was so upset about the death of the plants, the trees, that I did not want the white animals to spread any further, build anything else, explore further architectonic constructions (though they were really close to making a model of the München Olympia Stadion. I chopped off all the trees (with a pair of scissors,) and rushed them to the room of no return. Once they were down the garbage shoot, I realized that maybe I should have at least tried to save them. I mean they were really strong and hardy plants. Almost a yard in height, the strongest of them all could have probably been brought back to this side of Peter's gate with some serious chemicals, or something... was this a true DDT moment? Was this when one should use napalm or radon indoors?
I looked at the pathetic pot with the four thinner than pencils tree-stumps... how sad. Oh, and even the monitor plant, or whatever the name of the salad could have been that always showed me when the trees needed water... even the monitor plant was now just a bunch of dried and crumbled leaves.
I also cut these off and watered the almost empty pot.
Then I discovered that Patty potato... was also... dead... : (
It is seed season these days and so I was really hoping to find some new Acacia seeds, maybe plant them one tree per pot, this time, just to make it all less stressful for the little guys. Should I perhaps try to grow an oak?...

The monitor plant returned after about a week. Its leaves were a little lighter than version 1.0, but still clever enough to grow towards the light. There are 7 of them now (leaves that is), I keep watering the guy. We are seeing something I would certainly call the "miracle of life".

Just yesterday was the day of the even more stunning discovery. Right next to the stump of the tallest of the little trees, maybe a few millimeter from it, just close enough to make me think it might be the same little plant... there is ... a new acacia tree. I really could barely contain myself here. It snuck right by the monitor plant, and now measures about 6 inches or so. The two protective leaves have opened and what I can see from here is a slightly light, but healthy looking acacia tree...
I can also see 17 jade plants, two new avocado trees, the larger one about a yard high, btw, and a bunch of other green life... smiling, no laughing at me here.
I look at my thumbs and they are certainly anything but green... I have the feeling that I have always underestimated life...
Two more avocado pits are floating in their plastic cups... I will post pictures... just need a little sun... : ) tomorrow...

What happened to the extra hour? Where did it go? It is late again, my body seems to trust my watch more than itself. How odd, how odd. Did you go to work and hour early today? Did you notice the extra hour in any way?...
So strange, so strange...

There is a pet store just two blocks or so away from here, the basement filled with a little zoo. I love to visit their basement... as I did today...
A parrot at the entrance to the basement keept saying "hello" in the voices of several very friendly old ladies. Some mini crickets trapped in the terrarium with three really cute looking little lizards, committed suicide in a petri dish filled with water. A turtle was just teasing itself with the idea that it could possibly overcome the 4 inch wooden barrier of its sand filled box and walk towards the darkness of the relatively hot room.
The are aquariums everywhere, large salt water tanks with pretty neurotic fish. Had nemo landed in one of these mini-worlds, his story would have probably been a memoir containing thousands of pages. Quite obviously lot happens in these tanks, their inhabitants being healthy, active, insane fish.
One of the animals that especially caught my attention, was this yellowish parrot fish. He was a pretty crazy guy with one really dangerous looking, white, beak-like tooth. (A bit as if the fish were a parrot in a fish costume.) The animal kept pacing inside of the tank. I managed to catch just a few glimpses of the tail-fin here, maybe a swoosh of color here. What a wild child... (He was probably scared... I hope he will find a larger home soon...)

They are all over Central Park. Plaques with names of loved ones who passed away, who used to sit on these benches, those who used to pass by underneath these trees. One could imagine ghosts coming back to these places late at night, when the park is that scary place where living humans should not sit around.
Not all of these metal plates deal with loss and with loved ones who passed on to the other kind of Central Park.
My favorite inscription in the Park does not even celebrate a human being. In a really good spot, right behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, right near Cleopatra's Needle... one can find the following plaque:

In celebration of the extraordinary life of
Lord Randall the Bulldog
and all other canine companions
who pass this way

It is as if he really wanted to fall over. He tried, he wanted to just roll forward, at least his body wanted to... but it was oddly impossible. Not sure what really the perception of this person is in this particular moment, but this notion of almost falling over, almost rolling forward, this almost toppling over is one of the signs of a heroin high. At least to the outside world... this looks like a seriously tragic moment... not sure what was going on in the head of this man, across the street from the Cooper Union this evening... for him it was certainly not the night of the panther... hmm... such a sad image really...

Well, I really do not know much about the Hajj, just little bits and pieces... what I know is very humbling and very important, feels like an extremely important experience for anyone involved. I had no idea that the event takes place only once a year, I did not know about most of the symbolism. It is all really amazing, amazing...
Have you participated in the Hajj? Are you going to go? Do you know anybody who has?

As I was crossing 6th street, one of those active beggars was starting a better and better optimized conversation with anybody who would or would not want to listen.

Beggar (to a man whom he seemed to know): "Hello, good evening Sir, I am your favorite Bum!"
British looking guy (walking briskly):Yes, you certainly are.
Beggar: No, I'm not.

Well, I could not resist, I had to go see the "Night of the Panther" down in SoHo, on Prince and Greene, at the Apple Store. I thought that I would maybe just walk in, get some sort of t-shirt or something. I never got in. There was a line outside of the store, all the way around the corner, half way to Houston street. Impressive. A couple and an older man from Poland were discussing what they should do with this line. "Za chlebem" (they are lined up for bread) I said... And the lady laughed. She was old enough to remember.
These people here were lined up to either get Panther, of which there was enough, certainly, everywhere, or maybe to get 10% off anything in the store after the purchase of panther. Wow... that's crazy talk...
I did not get in. I walked away from this.
Maybe next year... or in several years... three years... that will make it os 10.6... hmm... "Montecore"?...

will need to get some lunch before the sunwind hits the planet, before the thoughts will change and the ideas will turn into little circles, donuts, capilar tunnels, aware of their galactic insignificance...
i will then crawl back into the skyscraper and hope that the rays can not penetrate layers and layers of steel...
and they will not care, they will just blast through all my cells and not even see me... the 3/4 water man...

It came in a little envelope, no cage, no box, no leash... just a little, brown, bubbled envelope from Apple. Inside, four disks, a cute brochure, some legal magic spells in various languages of this our planet, some special advice to those who think they know how to bring up a kitten...
A black, shiny kitten... divided into three parts, reunited in the process of "installation"... I renamed my HardDrive "The Cage" until I had the little Panther kitten under control... and now it has me under control... Windows are flying all over the place. Expose is taking over my world. Things just went wild inside of my PowerBook, wild, my friends... The time is now being spoken to me, there are sounds in the mail application, tiny colorful bubbles with names are attached to things all over the place... wooow...
This is truly fantastic. A system should be simple enough to just be workable in seconds (panther appears to be just that,) it should be smart enough to get out of the way when not asked to perform any stunts (we are working on this, but boy, it is a fun exercise,) and it should be powerful enough so that it makes me believe that there is intelligent life out there somewhere in California... (and boy, it surely knows how to show that...)
So, am I happy with the new Panther in my Harddrive?... Yeah...
Do I totally get it?... Not yet.
Do I love the fact that I do not quite get it yet?... Absolutely...

As long as this animal does not grab me by the nec and carry me off stage, just because I made some silly mistake during installation... we will most likely be very happy...
How do I tell Expose to take it a little more easy on me here?...

Some of the readers seem like the look of this blog. Some do not only like the look of it but also go so far to email me to tell me about it. (Which is always nice, of course.) It would be wrong to try to take credit for something I have not really coded, so I have to admit, again, that I might have somehow had an idea as to how the page should look, but honestly, I could not code my way out of a little brown bag (even with a yellow arrow spray-painted inside, believe me,) and so what you think looks like my work here is put together by hand, in London, by Tom. He is the one who coded the random image on top of this page, and he is the one who made some subtle changes to his older design yesterday... The stylesheet looks different now, we are still tweaking some of the colors and font sizes and things.
You will notice that I decided to drop this world map I used to have here on the page, as it was only really good in kicking people off the face of its New-Zealand-less world. Tom and I are now talking about an "about me page", a feature of the site which the shy me has kept under wraps for several years now... oh, and if I am really nice, we might actually get a little gallery section going, a place where it will be finally possible to exchange some of those seemingly unlimited edition portraits of dead american presidents into something created to increase in value. (Those donation badges on the right hand side of the page are just fakes, and very temporary...)
But until this all happens, Tom and I would like to see this page through your eyes. So please either link to a screenshot of this very page in the comment box, or if you feel more shy about your possibly exposed links, you can still email me...
So here again, credit where credit is due: Tom Flemming is the man behind the H, the T, the M and even the L of this page. Some code snippets were provided by Blogrolling, Chris DiClerico, and a mysterious visitor.
(If you contributed and I have not mentioned you here, let me know.)

My parents went to Mallorca for two weeks, or was it three weeks? It is a bit difficult to keep up wit their European style vacations. Both of my parents get 6 weeks of free time each year. My mother even gets a little more. She works so incredibly much.
My parents sent me two postcards from Mallorca. My mother has the handwriting of an elementary school teacher, she used to be one, first to 8th grade... well ,that is beyond elementary, of course. My father writes like a little printshop. He used to design things, now he builds things, he always had this iso italic handwriting....
The first postcard was written my my mother only...

Dear Son,
We visited the house of Frederic Chopin, here in Mallorca. It is all incredibly impressive. Most impressive about this place are the letters he wrote to his parents. His handwriting reminds me of yours. It felt almost as if I were looking at letters from you to us.

"Dear Parents", this is how Frederic Chopin would begin his letters to his parents. There were many, many letters here that started with these words "Dear Parents"...

Dear Parents,
the weather here is really horrible. I do not think you should come visit me this next month. Yes mother, I know that the diet here is not quite as good as your incredible recipes. Yes, my piano play is improving, dad, though I will probably never be as good as your old friend Jasio... please send my regards to my good old piano room, I hear you converted it into storage...

She did have an interesting profile. He was trying so hard to impress her. He obviously had brought her to this place, he was the one making all the special comments about his incredibly deep knowledge of Japan. He was supposedly really good in sounding like a Japanese person speaking English. When in Japan, he was asked by one of his Japanese friends to speak to an American friend of his friend over the phone. He had chosen to pretend to speak his special American-Japanese English. The person on the other end of the phone did not want to believe he was American, so he claimed proudly. I did not want to believe I was seeing this man say such dumb things to this woman, whom he clearly was trying to impress.
He continued with observations like the following: "when the Japanese say "Hi", they not always mean 'yes', they sometimes just mean "yes I hear you, but I am not agreeing with you..." (yes?... I was not aware this was a country specific behaviour... well, for him it appeared to be this way at least...)
I felt a little sorry for her. She was maybe 36, he was probably 45. She somehow hinted that she was an actress, the topics somehow revolved around the business. She spoke about this really great "script doctor", she knew. He would always be called in to heal scripts, add those brilliant lines. "How do you like them apples." he interrupted her with an example of a well doctored line. He laughed...
I really felt a little sorry for her, at least till the moment when she pulled out a Chase Manhattan Bank cheque, to show him that she got paid less and less the more often they have "Law and Order" reruns... oh, so she was indeed an actress, one that might have played some role in a television show?... They began talking about various accents. Well, he tried to speak with a South African accent.
I had my own little conversations with the waiter. He told me about "that business friend" (I am still not sure whom he meant, to be quite honest, since he was extremely discreet about any details of "my friends" companions), whom I had brought for lunch a few days ago. Apparently he showed up twice since, and ordered whatever I happened to order (yes, in my absence). I did not quite want to believe it. "Yes, he asked me to have whatever you had last time you were here, Witold san." This felt a bit bizzarre.
As I was leaving, the entire staff of the restaurant came out to say good bye. I really like going there, I like to not even have to place an order anymore, they somehow know what I should eat on any given day. It really is good...
As I was leaving, I caught the glimpse of a stare coming from the table with the actress and the guy who had been working so intensively to impress her... They were trying so hard to put me into one of their little boxes filled with names movie scenes and television snippets... they had this look on their faces as if they both had seen me before... they wanted me to just do something, anything that would allow them to place me into some compartment containing those they knew and respected. They had to know me, how else could anybody explain such commotion upon my leaving the restaurant?...
I just smiled...
yes?... hi?

There are layers upon layers of paper on the shelves next to me. vast landscapes of thought, photographed, turned into linear, slowly developing lines of written and printed language, drawings, charts, page numbers. All pressed so tightly against each other, waiting for the moment of liberation. They are worthless unless looked at, they are worthless unless decoded, the layers of black and cyan and magenta and yellow ink, covering various areas on both sides of pages. Advertisements calling out to buy products no longer available, offers no longer valid, points of view burned into pages, published, now preserved, frozen.
There are very peculiar combinations of information on that bookshelf next to me. Wayne Thiebaud's Paintings press tightly against some observations made by Laura Hoptman, pressing against Gursky's photographs, against William Eggleston, against Helen Levitt. Thiebaud painted uptown, downtown, really, Levitt went Crosstown. Gerhard Richter painted for forty years, the back of the book quite abstract, next to him, Tufte, Envisioning information, then Andy Warhol's brilliant drawings from the 50's, next to the twilight of Crewdson's photography pushing against Georgia O'Keeffe's portraits taken by Alfred Stieglitz, resting on Struth 1977 2002, next to Ansel Adams at 100... next to the wall... below all this some Bulgakov, some Bachman, Rilke, E.T.A. Hoffman, J.Pawlik... Goethe on Gingko, Murakami, more Rilke, more Goethe, Heinz Edelmann, Sagmeister, Paul Johnson, Thoreau... gosh... this is quite a wild bunch, right here, right now... I should probably not even spend my time looking at this screen here, but grab these pages again, when there is daylight, and just read a little more again, not using any electricity anymore... just mine the words and little dots that make pictures, and just dive and swim... not surf...
But I will probably close this universal book here again in a few minutes, turn off the light, stare at the stripes projected onto the ceiling by the cars driving by on broadway. They will move like pages of a book, they will wander like the links on some schematic view of a site... they will remind me of the nights when I was in my room and when I had not the slightest clue that any one of the books next to me or in front of me ever existed or would ever exist...
And I will probably try to just slow down to this particular private pace, and then watch the hours and hours of stories concocted by my own brain from what I fed it all of today...
Hmm... so many stories waiting, everywhere, everywhere... always.

the world slowly melted into something that became just one single thought. A large thought, one that can not be simply expressed by language or drawing, or song or any communication tool available to us...
The world simply turned into one single thought. It was that easy. And it was only possible because there was no need for an explanation, no need for reason or outcome or anything like that.
or were there two thoughts?... were there maybe three? Three that somehow felt like one?... Hmm... just the idea of being able to grasp these thoughts and counting them seems absurd... even calling them thoughts, or ideas, seems absurd... I will thus not even say anything about those non translatable and uncountable ideas, thoughts, whatnot... hmm... but if they can not be counted and can not be summarized, captured, grasped anyway... hmm...
could it be that this hypothesis is completely true then?... except that maybe melting is not the right expression here... and describing any process as slow or fast certainly also involves some sort of comparison not really needed here...
hmm.... yes. I think the answer is ... yes...
(I guess.)

The lamps cast interesting shadows on walls and ceiling. The sounds of Broadway could almost be mistaken for the beating of waves against a high, rough ocean coast. The air has cooled down substantially. I am sitting in a chair far away from the slightly open window and I can feel how the cool air is spilling into the apartment. My head is too warm, my lap is hot from the powerbook... even my right foot is warmer than the left one, the one actually resting on the carpet.
I am holding on to this Sunday. I know what will have to get done tomorrow, it will be a manageable amount of work... I know where I will have lunch tomorrow, I will finally return the camera with which I shot that Selfportrait with Sockdog...
My mind feels like a pendulum right now, swinging from the past, quickly bypassing the present, into the future, just to return in the same rush, pass the present and to return to the past... I should have gone to sleep more than an hour ago, calm down this silly movement, try to let thoughts rest in the present, real time. But maybe this is what some part of me is afraid of?...
Could this be what makes living easier sometimes, for some of us?... Do we like to somehow imagine worlds ahead of us, and dwell on those behind us in order to just somehow sneak by the things we should be really doing now?...
Sleep, sleep is what I need right this minute... and no more writing for me today. Not even some short little posts. Good night. : )

Last week knocked me out quite well. So little sleep, so much work... so many worries... Today I just closed my eyes on the sofa, next to my powerbook reading a book to me and next thing I knew it is four hours later, the book seemed to have closed itself...
Not many emails have been coming onto my mailbox lately, maybe because I have not replied to so many... why would anybody write me if I do not reply?
The mail application filters out junk and spam, so I checked up on that folder just to find an old email from a bank, reminding me in a typically edgeless tone that my statement was now available online... (a week or so ago...)
I managed to log myself into the secure area where they were hiding the statement from me, just as I had requested, originally with the intention to maybe save another tree...
I was expecting a positive balance on the card... yet what I found looked more like a bloody crime scene. I had obviously assumed that the account was in good standing for a while, had not paid and now there was a huge number there, and many little red numbers. The tone of voice here was not quite as edgeless, more of a sharp one, like broken glass... finance charges, increases of rates, all the things seem to have happened at the same time... so weird.
I felt a bit like the man in this British commercial I saw just this past friday.
The first scene is the face of a calm man in greenish light, asleep, the voiceover is calm: "This man, will die in his sleep tonight. He is warm, comfortable, surrounded by his loved ones." (Does not sound too bad, does it?)... then the camera zooms away and we see that the man is indeed surrounded by his family and warm and comfortable, but only because he is in a speeding car on a highway. The greenish light was coming from the car's instruments...
Okay, it was not quite as bad... but it was still very odd to "wake up" to something of a slightly negative surprise...
Oh and one more odd observation. The chapter of the book was almost finished when I woke up. Not completely finished though... so I must have woken up and turned off the reading. I returned to the point in the book which I remembered from the moment before I fell asleep... Now what was read to me appeared completely new, as if I were hearing it for the first time... only now and then, every 15 minutes or so, was a sentence that was completely familiar, absolutely clear and just somehow seemed to make sense in the context now created by the minutes and minutes I must have missed because I was asleep.
I know I am jumping around here, but I recently read about a study in which overly tired men in Germany were tested in a driving simulator. They were observed as they fell asleep for just a second or two. The dangerous "second sleep"... The men would then be asked how long they perceived to be asleep. Some were not sure if they had been asleep at all. One of the men thought that he had fallen asleep for about two seconds, had been asleep at the simulator wheel for a full 45 minutes... Now imagine he had been the pilot of, let's say, the Staten Island Ferry...
Today's experiences somehow reminded me that I sometimes ask myself how awake I am when I am convinced that I am awake. There are some days, some weeks, some years even that appear to have taken place as a chain of small, aware events, connected by whole passages of sleepwalked life...
How much of what I have written here is actually based on anything that I can truly say that I fully experienced?... Hmm... the warmth of the powerbook on my lap is telling me that I am awake... the smooth keys under my fingertips are suggesting the same... but... hmm... now I lost the thought... ; )

The view from the offices of Mixed Greens on the west side of Manhattan is a pretty spectacular one. There is enough distance to landmarks to make them appear not too overwhelmingly large, the side view of the city is a very interesting one... the windows in their office wrap around and so one can also look uptown, see the river... I think even the George Washington Bridge?, perhaps?
I remember that when I came to New York for the first time, I somehow expected the city to be all skyscrapers, neatly packed boxes, one next to the other, Manhattan, so I imagined, was all offices. (And police cars and cabs, of course.)
I really had no real clue...
It was much later that I found out that the geological makeup of Manhattan also is reflected in the height of the buildings here. Apparently bedrock comes closer to the surface in midtown, then dives under layers of sediments south of 30th street prehaps, just to resurface in lower Manhattan. This is why there are actually clusters of high-risers on the island... the rules go beyond the rules of money... they are the rules of the soil makeup...
Hmm, looking at the image below this is not very clear now, is it?...
The area to the left of the dividing window frame is above 25th street, the Empire State Building is on 34th and 5th... The right side of the photograph is the distant Madison Square Park, with the old Metropolitan life tower, made to look like the campanile at St. Mark's Square in Venice... It must have been interesting to see it at a time when it was the tallest building in the city, and also the tallest building in the world, I think... It looks now as if the city were its turtle neck sweater which it pulled almost over its head. It is still the tallest in its neighborhood, and if it were able to see, and its eyesight had really worsened over the years, it could imagine that it still is the tallest building in the city and in the world... a silly thought... (but can you imagine?)

I remember driving in that rented car up the west end highway. She had been upset with me right from the moment I made a little fun of us being the only people at avis rental car and still not getting any service. she was upset with me most of the time, it seemed. well, there were moments in which she laughed... smiled, maybe... her incredibly white teeth would then appear to be a light at the end of the otherwise dark and hurtful tunnel.
"my mother likes to call me her little bird", she said...
and this is when I saw her smile and realized that her teeth were porcelain inlays, cracked, like an old glazed tea cup. I was doomed. I had been doomed from the moment I thought that this was going to be the best time ever.
I never stood a chance.
At least this was the moment when I realized that this was all an illusion. This was all the wrong movie I had accidentally stepped into... it would now be the time to somehow get myself out of the fron row and to find that door with the exit sign over it... this would not be easy... but it had to be done, if I did not want to end up in an asylum... and it looked as if I had a ticket in my pocket already...
"A bird?" I asked... not really wanting to hear any answers...

When some of us recently looked at the new accessories for the iPod, somebody had the idea to use the iTrip thing (this transmitter that somehow is able to hijack FM frequencies to take over the IP system of a subway train to blast some of that... well, what could we possibly blast?... Some music...
Imagine that? It would be like audio graffiti like having the full train as a blaster... yeah...
We then decided that the Subway trains in New York are most likely to use a wired system... oh and if I can not decide what to blast now... what would I blast if I actually could?... (Though I have been listening to the Strokes a lot recently... oh well...
So tonight... somebody actually managed to hijack the sound system on my train home... now that was pretty exciting... and what did they blast?...
Their transmission was not very long... it was obviously two individuals... the first one just said: "Everybody on this train is gay!" (he had a rather freshly rented manly voice) the other person asked a question: "wanna lick my ba**s?" hmm... Sounds like a clear proof that having the power to do something does not really mean that one has the ability to do that thing right...
Hmm, and that was just on a train... imagine somebody took over an entire country... just a thought...
(the conductor warned that he would take the train out of service... and yet he did not... oh well...)

Please don't hate me for just posting a quote here, but I like it and do not want to forget this one...

Basically I don't call this work made with colors watercolors or whatever. First of all I call everything drawings. Whatever oil paint or mordant. I despise chalk, but charcoal I tend to like more, or graphite. Chalk doesn't suit me. So basically everything is drawings.

Joseph Beuys, 1970
(From "Joseph Beuys, Early Watercolors", Schirmer's Visual Library, page 7.)

I really like how this little snippet out of a conversation or a talk has been blown up into this "quote", and how the translation makes this thing even more bizzare...

If the jacket had been a little larger, if the time were a bit more abundant, if the skill were a bit more there, he would have certainly just sailed away, for miles and miles. effortless. right through that open window...
his eyes focused on that legendary horizon, the place where the sky meets the earth, not the water-towers, the roofs, the man made mountains with cut out holes for light. Oh, there would be a sun, up there, high above the milky soupy clouds...
being outside is a luxury onto itself. he had spent the last days and days in rooms, staring at windows he could move around, and open and close, but never really reach into. there was a mouse under his hand, but birds? birds were just visitors frozen in photographs, memories.
if the jacket had been a little larger and if the time were a little more abundant and not already completely spent and rented out and sold... then he would probably just take off...
next time...
please let there be a next time...

The catalogue section of the site now contains "Mona Lisa Visitors 2003", a new series of 23 photographs shot in 15 second intervals in front of Leonardo DaVinci's "Mona Lisa" at the Louvre in Paris this September.

Tomorrow, watch PBS tomorrow... Chris just reminded me about the upcoming PBS airing (or is it called cabling or dishing these days?) of Worst Possible Illusion the Anne-Marie Russell (and Paige West?) movie with and about the Brazilian artist, sculptor, photographer, illusionist... Vik Muniz.
Chris and I have seen the movie when it was shown one single time at the Walter Reade Theater more than a year ago. (No, Chris is not my boyfriend.) This was also the first time that I saw Vik Muniz speak (as far as I remember, he is the narrator of the movie.) I was most relieved to see that this artist who's work I have loved and admired since I first saw his solo exhibition at the ICP a while back, turned out to be a pretty normal and sane guy. I mean he could have been an insane, self centered machine, eaten by years and years of OCD... it was good to see that he appears to be able to keep a good distance to his work, he seems to have fun doing what he is doing, this is all good karma, this is exactly what art making should be like. Good, healing, brilliant. (Why do I have to think of Chuck Close just now... and his idea that painting can be like golf?)
I must have never written about Vik Muniz here, because it would be so much fun to write a real post, and to create some sort of layers of meaning, translations, twists and turns in language to describe the work. (Take a look at his work and you will see what I mean.)
But now there is no time for lengthy posts, the movie will air tomorrow, it is a really quite excellently made movie by Anne-Marie Russell, produced by the quite great and quite Mixed Greens...
You will like this movie, I promise. Vik Muniz is a truly amazing artist, who manages to step aside and smile at the process of creation of art itself.
The movie really helped me understand a lot about art and art making in general. If you would like to know a bit more about Vik Muniz and his work, before watching PBS tomorrow at 10pm or if you happen to not live in a place where there is PBS or a TV or... hmm ... visit Vik's new and truly improved site,
go to vikmuniz.net.
(Or you could also start out with this little flash site...
Can one tell how excited we all are here?...

Even though I worked in the building for years, I was never allowed into some rooms. I could have probably asked, I would have probably been allowed to enter, maybe even to take pictures. (Though I would have taken the wrong ones anyway, for sure.)
Yesterday was different, it was better. I could hide in a crowd of hundreds maybe, snooping around the Masonic Temple on 23rd and 6th Avenue. It was one of the locations which New Yorkers were allowed to visit, thanks to OHNY.org.
It was fascinating to discover that the roof, on which I had locked myself out just a few years ago, was now almost open to the public, equipped with a protective railing, and yet surrounded by a slightly crippled view.
The sky was basically exactly the way it decided to be when the door locked shut on a drizzly afternoon some four years ago or so. But that's a completely different story. (I might have even told it here, maybe even several times?)
One of my favorite rooms in the building was one on the 6th floor of the building, a very beautiful meeting room, narrow, lined with antique book-cases, Mahogany paneling, an incredibly ornate ceiling, and with a much larger than life statue of George Washington, in a material far too golden.
The ceiling in this room is decorated with symbols that look like straight from a book about South American pre Columbian cultures.
It was interesting to be allowed to enter the room and to see the reactions of visitors to the statue, the books in the (at first closed) book cases, the really unexpectedly ornate ceiling.
It was clear that the statue was of George Washington, but why under a South Americanesque sky?
The answer to this question was a real surprise, and so incredibly fitting as an anecdote for today: The team of experts who renovated the incredibly ornate and saturated rooms of the Masonic Temple in Manhattan had been brought in from Peru. When instructed to use "Old American Symbols" for the room with the large George Washington statue, they certainly did not think of "America" as in: "United States of America", they thought of the continent, the place that was here before even the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Niña arrived, bringing glass pearls, syphilis, liquor and... well, Christopher . This here used to be a home to people a long time before , long before Amerigo Vespucci, long before it became "America".
One has to thank the Masons that they did not have this stroke of brilliance on the side of the renovation team "corrected".
I shot a few pictures in the amazing interior on the 6th floor. I think my favorite image is the one below, and the more I look at it, the more it feels like the right one to look at today.
The couple across from me, on one of the leather sofas, in front of those Mahogany (?) paneled walls, their feet on a persian carpet with floral motivs, wearing Puma sneakers, levi's jeans (?), she sporting an italian knock-off(?) gucci bag, are staring at a ceiling that is populated with pre columbian symbols. The ethnicity of the couple places them somehow here, they are obviously the children of generations of various streams of people who came to America long before and also after the arrival of . I do not want to make too many assumptions about the origin of their genes...
Though they both do look like the future of this continent, don't they?

The salvation army store down 96th, near west end avenue is a small place, and somehow beautiful too. Parked outside, from Monday through Saturday is a large truck, two workers stuffing its back as tightly as only possible, flinging the bags with clothing towards the transparent ceiling, building a soft mountain of worn out love. The truck does not have to go far, I think, there is this main Salvation army building on 46th Street, a huge operation, this is where the clothes are washed, some starched and equipped with various colors of tags, to be sold back for amounts between $2 and maybe $7... (This is the place where I sometimes get my most sophisticated of shirts, those with most elaborately constructed collars and mother of pearl buttons so thick that they barely fit through the hand sewn button holes... not all the stuff is of this quality, but some actually is... )
The store here is much smaller. One does not just walk into it, one barely fits through the entrance, as there are large boxes with clothing and some very oddly constructed office on one side and this wide glass island for the sales person on the other. The feeling of going in there is a bit of a crawling back into a warm place, like one that we normally have to leave for good.
There are shelves with books, and glasses and small home appliances on the ground floor, smelling of acid and dust and tape recorder oil. Much of what is sold in this tiny portion of the store seems to have been born in places that supply companies with objects designed to extend their gigantic international brands. One finds drinking glasses celebrating some walk for some cure, sponsored by somebody who's name has been inflated and then boiled down to be just massively designed initials. Some of the books are brittle, vertical piles of dry brown paper, filled with words which have not been seen by a human eye for years. Some titles are intriguing though, of course, some of the books do not stay here for long, this section of the store tends to be packed with those looking for "love and lust" and "power of politics" not the free catalogues and instruction manuals that linger rather embarrassed in piles bending the shelves in the corners of this literary labyrinth.
Above the book area is the clothing paradise, a half floor, a gallery, a location with a view. One has to walk up stairs, another passage way, this one decorated with bleached out posters of sunsets, puppies, kittens and some other quite incredible art related objects made by the human kind. The upstairs can't help but smell like oily flakes of old shed skin, like cut fingernails, like the inside of a forgotten laundry hamper. All of the clothing here is clean and beautifully organized, it just appears that the fabric of some pieces does not want to let go of the memories of some of its probably long gone owners. Some of the clothing really looks and feels like somebody's skin. Some pieces feel like something that was not only picked out with a very focused love (and be it self-love) but then witnessed love and passion, and views and sights and locations we will probably never even know of. Some of the jackets must have been to weddings, some to funerals, some were not allowed to the last one, were later discovered by those left behind, thrown into bags, thrown onto the back of that truck outside, taken to 46th street... and then...
It is one thing to look at this clothing and to imagine its future, but it can definitely be a very inspiring activity to browse through the layers of fabric and to imagine its past. Some shirts are so worn out that they will never find another owner, or who would like to have their neck surrounded by a large yellow stain left behind by what must have been slowly sucked in sweat? Is the tiny brown speck on the back of this Christian Dior shirt really blood that does not want to go away because it knows some secret nobody cares about anymore? Why is only one french cuff on this quite interesting multicolored shirt worn out so badly as if it had spent its life polishing a heavily ticking watch?... and where is this watch now, to present the other part of the story?
Some shirts have initials stitched onto their cuffs, some still have their emergency buttons. Some shirts have nothing but their collar stapled ticket, in some bright color, at this point meaning "buy me at half price."
The clothing floor also has its "unwanted and never used" area, of course, here we find mostly t-shirts promoting some bizzarre places and events, designed by either incredibly frustrated designers or those who were trying to find the cutting edge in some completely, hideously wrong places.

I did not go upstairs yesterday, only to the third area of the store, the very back, the living room, the machine room, the gathering of large objects. This is where sofas meet cabinets meet tables meet computers.
The manager moved one shy macintosh LC to the side, so I could spread out what used to be my most trusted equipment for years. I came here twice the load was really major, Macintosh desktops tend to have a metal gut and CTR monitors are built to stand their ground as well. I managed to organize all the equipment into two computer scenarios as complete as I could only imagine. I really imagined. I hoped that there would be a glowing moment, right when the person who connects all the cables finds out that the intentions here were good, that the equipment was not thrown out but prepared and adjusted, massaged so it can run like a well trained athlete for another ten years or so.
I bought a laser printer in the GoodWill store on 79th street once and had exactly this experience. Not only was the laser writer select in an incredibly good shape, somebody had actually equipped it with a new toner cartridge, one that I never even got to change, because of its quite spectacular capacity. It was amazing to see that the salvation army store can be a bit like the anti eBay, where features of equipment are hidden, not searchable, an encapsulated surprise. There was no paypal here, no pretty doctored pictures, no blinking ads for Spam Killer. This was real people, not traffic, a mix as diverse as on the subway, not on the server, looking for real things, not clicking on underlined blue links.
As much as the clothing on the upper floor was able to reveal some and hide some of its stories, so did the computer equipment here. The mouse pointers on these machines have been to places, have moved tons of pixels, have touched OK and SEND and OPEN so many times... the l, the o, the v and the e keys have been pressed on these keyboards in full intent, from the heart, so many times. The mouse buttons had a smooth surface in some places, stroked softly between the millions of clicks, and drags and clicks...
An older lady looked at the machines as if they were the one single answer to hundreds of her years of silent questions. She wanted to "learn all this". She wanted to "know if she will be able to". She wanted to know if the equipment was "good". She then wanted to know if she would be able to "record DVDs", and I had to say that she would not be able to do just that... but that CDs would record just fine. This was the moment when another lady walked by, not even looking at us through her heavy glasses. Her statement was dry, shared in a very monotonous voice: this was all old stuff and that there are new computers at CompUSA. Hmm... oh well... : )
An older gentleman, of whom I at first thought as one of the people employed at the store kept asking me if the machines were those "Macintosh" computers. And yes, they were, even after the fifth time he asked.
He then told me that he was "not yet experienced enough to work on a Macintosh", that he was looking for a "PC for now"... I did not really know what to say to that...
I wonder if the macs found their new owners yesterday. Maybe I can walk by the store on Monday, if its open, maybe connect all the cables, maybe set up the systems, turn them on... Maybe I will just find out that somebody only bought the power cables, that it was all they needed, for now...
I will then go upstairs and find little stains on shirts, or browse through the brittle yellow pages of an old romance novel, looking for a good sentence to make me smile... and there certainly will be many that will...

Frank B. was a true artist friend of mine when I was 15 or so. He lived in the basement of his mother's house, he had two rooms, the bedroom had a pile of clothes in it from which he would just pull out random pieces of clothing, in the dark, every morning, he always looked the way I thought a real artist should look like. Including wrinkled everything.
His idea of painting an E and a Y between the B and the U and the U and the S of all BUS lanes in the city, (making them Beuys lanes), sounded like just the perfect project. (I still think it is a pretty brilliant little idea.)
One other little thing I remember him telling me was the thing about glass. He claimed that glass did not quite have a cristaline structure like, let's say, a sheet of metal. The molecules in glass were frozen in an organization that resembled something closer to a liquid. He claimed that if measured with the appropriate devices, one could see that large sheets of glass, like those in department store windows, for example, were thinner on top and a tiny bit thicker on the bottom. Glass was like a really, really slow liquid. Really slow, dripping its way down in every single window frame, giving in to its own weight.
Hmm...

a clear plastic bag just floated by the window, as if New York were an under water city, the cabs its yellow lobsters. I almost swam out to play with it... well, I did not really, I knew that I am not the best air diver... not these days at least..
This past week passed in such a blur, such a quick succession of kicks and puffs and other punches... at times the feeling was as if I were running against the current of a large herd of buffalo. I would return to my desk after just a few minutes and there would be many, many messages, friendly voices pulling at my skirt in all the possible directions. (No, I do not wear skirts, it is just somehow a more fitting picture than somebody pulling at my pants, don't you think?)
And so Saturday is here, it arrived with the heavy thwomp of the weekend edition of the New York Times at the door, it arrived with five phonecalls from my father, telling me about his new fascination with this thing called os X... and that the neighbor died... after saying good bye to his wife, hugging her... he knew... oh and that my mother keeps telling him that I left the house much to early... (My father likes to create potpourris of messages, to make the sad not too sad and the happy not too goofy... he is a libra...)
A good morning... though I brought work home, I will look at it after breakfast. Now is the time to just go through the piles of things that need to be sorted and given to others who need them more now. (The gigantic DaVinci book now actually has its own place, for example.)
I received another first day cover from Britain. It is the one to celebrate the birthday of the British Museum... on the back is a very nice quote by Russel Lynes a Cultural Critic who lived through most of the 20th century (1910-1991).
He said:“There is a distinction to be drawn between true collectors and accumulators. Collectors are discriminating, accumulators act at random”
Hmm... i sometimes feel like a collector of everything... I am very discriminating, just have broad interests...
Hmm, shall we raise some funds and get just the best items from this upcoming event?
My head is abviously still spinning...

the slices of cheese have turned into little yellow bowls with brittle, almost transparent edges, holding little pearls of what looks like dew. the tumbleweed shaped meat on the limp and wet leaves of lettuce has finally received the permission to officially decay.
Variations of sugarwater are trapped in colorful containers.
White forks, embrace transparent knifes.
The paper Solo® cups are proud of their Meridian™ design...
Only some have been kissed, some are still waiting, nested, in separate towers.

Looking at this metal surface with a texture of wood printed on it... my teeth are talking louder to me than any other part of my body.
The head just performed an unexpected stunt. Invisible to a possible outside observer, it just jumped, a tiny, joyful jump...

The Strokes, are playing tracks from their new album on BBC1... Blur is next with some live performance. Zane Lowe is asking questions... all live, earlier this week, in New York and in London...
New York City, wait, this is where I am, right now, this second... living on a mainly foreign diet of prefabricated, prepared, as well as a few sometimes self constructed observations...

Maybe this would be the perfect time to stare into a half filled little glass?... : )
Ice cubes?, or rather an olive?, a mint leaf?
Don't get me wrong... this is all a happy place... (and I will certainly laugh when I read this in a little while... though I have my doubts that I ever will...)
: )

The signs were large and inviting and cinematic and they even spoke plain English. Twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty. It was a bit as if it were the earliest morning, as if there were a light morning fog downtown, below Wallstreet. An older gentleman tapped the building with his white cane... it can be surprisingly quiet in these canyonesque streets...
Marble everywhere... the old elevator shafts were now fitted with contemporary cabs, but the old buttons still sat in their cast iron flowers between the doors.
The 18th floor was tranquil. There was a wall of orange behind the lady at the front desk. Such a good sign. Orange is always a good sign... The orange sofa... a vertical lake, made out of water bottle... they were blue, of course...
What a good place... (And the people I met... friendly kindness...)

it has been very difficult for me in the last few weeks really to create any refined expression or experience a finer perception. what used to be an expansive palette of emotions and observations, more than i could ever write down, for sure, has been replaced by a yes/no switchboard, a rough and faulty circuit board with one lightbulb which appears to be in either an "on" or an "off" state. (Though it seems to like the "off".)
Believe me, I am trying to break out of this very unpleasant state which might have someht9ing to do with the amount of work I have to juggle these days...

I just listened to the ticking of my watch, tried to force myself to realize that no two ticks of any instrument are the same, that there is actually a physical distance between each tick of my watch, as we are all spinning, not only around the axis of the planet but around the sun, and with the sun even... faster than bullets, really in constant motion, constant change...
Just a few seconds after this glimmer of a thought came to my mind, the alarm of the watch went off, very loudly, of course, even louder into my ear, somehow reminding me of my recently very rough and simplistic perception of things...
I really hope to get back on track very soon.
It is my profession to observe and to create subtleties... I currently feel slightly powerless...
This might also be one of the reasons why I have not replied to your email, btw... (if you wrote one...) I might have replied actually, but then decided against sending barely anything more than a "yes" or "no"...

If I were a tiger and I were shown that the stories about the hard work on stage were not just some scary fairy tales but painful reality, my bleached fur suddenly exposed to bright and hot limelight, hundreds of people making silly clapping noises to top this all....
If I were a tiger and somebody hit me over the head, with a microphone, or anything, I would probably grab them by that arm, or like a kitten, by the neck, and I would carry them back into a darker place, where we could talk about this little incident in private. I would not use my claws, I would not really hurt anyone, I would let go when I would be nicely asked to... be it with a fire extinguisher or what not.

If I were a tiger, and I were fed chicken every day, and if I had to share a tiny Manhattan apartment with a suspiciously quiet reptile roommate... I would probably shred the furniture and try to get my attention in some other way... (Call for help?, Bite something?, go to the bathroom a lot?)

If I were a tiger and I lived in the bronx... I would pretend that I am a friendly guy who is scared of new toys and who loves to carry around a tire...

But I am not a tiger, of course... what am I?...

the colors outside appear as if they were reflected in a highly polished brass instrument. All blues and greens have been replaced by warm browns and golds. The air looks as if it could not only carry birds and clouds and little objects riding the wind, but even me, if I jumped out, right now, my arms spread, my eyes closed. (I will probably go back to sleep to imagine just that.)

There is a link to this site from WORKBOOKstock this morning. This might be the right time to write at least a tiny bit about the quite incredible cooperation between WORKBOOKstock and me here. Ophelia Chong, the creative director at WORKBOOKstock selected 6 creatives from around the country and gave them completely free hand to convey the message of
find: inspiration
The creatives she selected are: Anne Burdick, Adam Larson of Shrine Design, Justin Fines of Demo™, Superhappybunny, Joshua Davis of PrayStation, and ... me. (Can you imagine how honored I feel to be included in this lineup?)
All of the creatives were given complete freedom in their work. A true dream assignment.
I was given the opportunity to design the print ad campaign for this year.
Look for the next ad in the Design Annual of Communication Arts to see how far we were able to expand the idea of "finding inspiration".
The ads are a translation of inspiring findings into the visual language of photography and drawing. I used photographs from the WORKBOOKstock collection and extended their meaning by adding sometimes quite unexpected drawings. Many of the ads speak about choices. Many focus more specifically on paths into the creative process itself.
The ads are coded messages which can inspire the users to not only decode them, but to also follow a similar thinking process in their work with words and images.
This is how much I am going to write for now... just a quick note, (also in case you arrived here from the WORKBOOKstock site.)