November 2003 Archives

Sorry for making it such a surprise (though it is all the rave these days), but I am going to leave the city now and spend next week in Miami, to participate in the fun of Art Basel, Miami Beach.
I will definitely not stop writing and drawing, but I might quite possibly pause the posting here for a week.
All the very best.
-witold

a tiny one, not a large one, not square, not red, just the name is supposed to be a hint for all of those who wonder why there is a frosted window with the kreml in the front, next to that door, that strange looking door...
and the water will be of the tiny kind as well... the little water, you know...

---update---
yes i've survived. the turkey was caught with a dynamite stick, there was just one bottle of tiny water... the music was abysmal...
glad to take an aspirin now... just preventive... you know...

Her new office was gigantic. It was so huge that some of the walls had to be covered with thick, textured foam, to somehow crush the sound-waves, to somehow prevent the echo from reaching cathedralesque proportions. The room looked a bit like a place of worship indeed, but did it really have to have the acoustics like one as well? Preferably not.
She liked it when her voice could be heard clearly by anybody who entered through the giant iron doors, hundreds of them daily, sometimes many more. Some were warned. Some were required to take a specific route over the tiles on the floor resembling an emotional map of the world, not one of those simplistic ones put together by primitives who would just apply rulers to coasts. Or to their thrones.
Her freshly arranged desk was uncluttered, stylish. There was a large display, some input devices, some paper... ink.
She had about 21 little ink bottles, some red, some blue, lined up in front of her, ready to be fired, thrown with deadly precision, at anyone, anyone who's sum of character flaws was too dangerous for the fragile world...
the not so dangerous ones, she could simply ignore... their petitions piling, collecting reddish dust in front of her office doors.
Though her office was miles above the vast and old city, a dove would sometimes find her window and just simply sit and stare amazed (I know, a staring dive is a truly rare sight). Pigeons would get the ink.
Once the bottle would hit the bird, they would both travel like a blueish pile of bricks, hitting the ground minutes later, turning the entire city into a shaking, swaying ship at sea.
Such earthquakes would occur every two weeks perhaps...
But one really does not know too much about any further detail... we might need to travel there, to find out ourselves... April?

It was much colder now. The wind was very strong and somehow unpredictable. They were really glad to have finally found a shelter. Staying together, closely, they were waiting for that last jump. The final mission. Soon they would be traveling, under watchful eyes, carried on silver wings, by thousands of horses. Some would probably find their destination on the other side of the country, some were destined to go all the way, much further than one could ever imagine. Protecting, holding on. All over night. All over night...
Soon, soon...

As just recently mentioned here the incredible little red-leaved plant is not only back from the dead and surviving, it is blooming!
Take a look:

The activity log showed that somebody used the Google translator to read the entries on this page. For some odd reason, the "wow" title of this entry came out as "Wimmern" which means... "whimper, moan, whine" which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what I am actually saying here. Is this how wars get started? How do generation long conflicts start anyway? Could it be through blunders in translation?... and I do not only mean words...

this entry is just here to bookmark the day. what started with missed trains and spilled coffee, bloomed into a pandemonium of international thought and some really great ideas. It is raining in New York... but what about all the other places that happened to somehow subtly touch this screen today?...)... wow........ (thank you sooo much.)
When I wrote here first, it was a bit too late to use my brain, tinkered with with two screwdrivers and some quite interesting little snacks at a place that selected an anvil as their logo.
Now it is the morning after, the time when I should be able to somehow put together the puzzle of the positive little pieces that fell on me yesterday, I am barely able to do that... and so I will just rush forward and just write the next entry, about the terrific, stunning new day...
(For Google translators: Happy, happy, smiling face.)

the hair is okay... it is everywhere. it is on the floor, it is in the cracks of the table, on the seat, in liquids, on that towel in the drawer. it sticks to all utensils in the hands of the barber. He still does the best job of them all. He is a good one. He works quickly, quietly. And he also listened to my request to be honest with my hair. I know I am losing it. I am not going to hide it by him letting a strand longer and putting it into some strange spin. I am not that kind of guy.
I sometimes would not say anything, just go home and cut it off. Just like that.
Cut.
My hair used to be long. I had it cut shorter in Toronto, after we knew that we would go home to a different New York.
"You look like a real person." Chris said when he first saw me...
The hair then got only shorter...
It is not really about the hair, now is it?... or is it?...
the weekend was a fiasco... this week will be a fantastic one...
I have to promise this to myself, or I will go insane.
Each piece of hair does contain the complete genetic information, does it?

Just a few more days and the acquisition of the competition would be completed, the pr campaign praising this "merger of equals" was in full swing. Everybody was on the same page, they would soon let him take things, to a new level, he would just have some time to relax, see the kids again, Karen, they would all take it easy for a while.
Turkey day was coming up, so they better deliver that new furniture, and they better not mess up the marbling, or whatever they call that, on the wood this time. But who knows, maybe they would, just like they did two times before. It just did not look right. How did he care if wood was a natural resource. "More natural than human resources?, because human resources is what i have to deal with, and they are more complicated than your stupid magahony wood, and you can still whip them into shape, to show the right things in the right places." Yes, he was a perfectionist, exactly what some just hated about him and also what his shareholders and his family really loved about him.
The kids had perfect grades, grew up in a perfect environment, with the perfect tutors, all his perfect plan.
And yes, he ate right, and did the right things perfectly. He worked out in a perfect way, he was in better shape then when he entered the business. Karen loved it about him, she even called him her "mr. perfect every time". He always got her into the right place, on time, guaranteed. Yes, perfect delivery baby...

This would be a rock solid Thanksgiving, all the way.

On his entry into his learjet he hit his head for the first time. It was as if there was something attached to him... he checked in the mirror, right away. Nothing.
It was obviously time for a bigger machine, with a much bigger fuselage...

there are layers upon layers upon layers of brilliant surfaces around me, left right and on this silver table. photographs and drawings and books (some prints). little three dimensional objects, created by many very different people are also here with me in this room. (hello.)
i will move them around a bit today and maybe move myself out of here as well. the sun is out there, offering some good old free radiation.
all good today, all good today, all good...

oh, and I woke up in Berlin, and it was a truly good experience. now it is time for coffee and a sandwich and some orange juice...
feels a tiny bit like the future. and i like that...

Some objects appeared just slightly out of focus at first. Some had a strangely used look, even though they were really new, certainly new, just bought, or even in the store. It was not until people began looking slightly unusual when she began to avoid the street, the outside of her apartment, the outside of her room. But even this became a bit of a difficult task more and more, as even closed doors began to thin, the wallpapers began to disappear, the floor softly turned into a skeleton of wooden beams. It did not take long and she was looking onto her downstairs neighbour's soup, onto the broken bones of the old lady upstairs, the trees appeared to be calling her, though she knew that they were on the street... She tried closing her eyes, but her eyelids were now completely transparent, there was no rest for her, it all was there at once. And it was brighter and just brighter and brighter. The world was stripped of more and more of its surface, her vision seemed to penetrate entire buildings, people turned into walking voices, there was no day or night.
It was not as if she wanted to wake up from what others would maybe consider a nightmare, she just craved to fall asleep, to rest her eyes, to not see any light. ...
One certainly might have suggested an operation. Amputations usually work wonders with out of control limbs... but eyes?...
It appeared as if her options were to go insane in a completely transparent universe, suspended, attached through gravity and all other laws of physics to an invisible planet... or just to dive into complete darkness and to select her own focus, view thoughts as a kind of illuminating force, selective perhaps?...
She knew that if she chose blindness, her visual memories would soon cease to exist, she would be giving up all of her visual world... but what was it worth now anyway? She was being flooded with light shining at her through what now appeared to be a giant ball of glass...
She cried, on her invisible bed for days... or at least what she was told were days... and nights.
She tried to somehow look down, through the planet, through its core, she imagined that she could see the magma flows, the volcanoes, the bottoms of the oceans...
The thought of being able to see all these was somehow calming at least...
She also began to fall in love with something that appeared to be a tiny floating point of sorts, some very slowly moving little something, a bit of what might have been some flaw in her otherwise perfectly light flooded universe.
She observed the little dot for hours at a time, until it became her true obsession to track it down, to see where it might be when she decided to look again. She did this for days and weeks and slowly the point turned into more of a human shape, a man perhaps, probably even her age? Yes, yes, he was... she could now clearly and more clearly see him. He was just slowly progressing into her direction. He clearly also obeyed the laws of physics, he clearly also had to avoid invisible objects, had to follow some invisible streets, sometimes driving in invisible cars.
She did not say a word. She knew that he was heading in her direction, she knew that they would very soon meet and more...
She watched him walk, she watched him sleep, suspended in their bright and transparent universe... she was madly in love with him of corse. He was the only thing in this world she had. She knew his every move, she knew the expressions on his far away face, she knew more than he probably knew about his outer self, when he finally stepped through that invisible door, into her invisible room... she welcomed him with widely open arms. he was the one who was here to save her. he was the one whom she now would hear speak, who probably held the key to the mysterious explanation of her hopeless and overwhelming situation.
"I am very sorry," he said softly, looking straight at her from the left side of her bed, moving closer now, she could see his face up close, his mouth, his eyes, he was the one she learned to love. He was the one, he was the only, only one, she closed her eyes, they kissed... "I am very sorry," he continued, "I do not know how this could have possibly happened."
The lights went off.
She shrank to what felt like a little object. It took her a while to realize that the darkness was caused by her again functioning eyelids. She opened them, in great anticipation. She had been liberated? Had they both been liberated?, Brought back into the visible, the normal world?...
The room around her was dark. The clock hands pointed to some time around 3:30...
The open door to her room moved slightly, as if somebody pressed their body against it on the way out...
She heard the house door slam... some steps on the gravel... then it was back to the night. Just darkness, the ticking of the clock now illustrated by an object. The walls of her room back in place, even the wallpaper, all seemingly grey, because seen at night... She kept her eyes open for a while, hoping to regain her incredibly selective vision... but all she soon saw was the inside of her long deserved normal dream.

I admire the incredible photography of Eliot Shepard at slower.net. I think it is a beautiful project, the images are little masterpieces and having more than a thousand of them on one well designed site makes the experience even better.
I visit often, I leave amazed, to the point that I would feel silly leaving any comments... What happened just minutes ago let my jaw drop for another reason. Please click on the following image:

and now do not close the pop up window and take a look at a recent image on Slower.net.
Who would have thought that there would ever be such a coincidence of time and space... Eliot Shepard was obviously in the same room, at probably the same time, I might have actually noticed him, as we take pictures with the same camera...
Are these two, obviously related photographs a good illustration of Villem Flusser's theorems of us humans being mere operators of more and more intelligent machines?... Did not Eliot and I take the image, but did our cameras take them?...
I actually think that our photographs are very different. He managed to capture the situation better, I was really trying to emphasize the reflection...
(His composition is better...)
When did we take the pictures? How did we get there?...

oh, and the best effect is achieved when my photograph is on the left hand side... then the wall becomes a backdrop that continues through both of out photographs. Stunning.

it must have been a whole pack of police cars and a bunch of fire trucks, all rushing down broadway at 4:30 am...
I have been staring out the windows since...
and now the sun will slowly turn this perforated dark mandscape into a spectacle of golden light... any minute now... the sky is already this brilliant navy blue, some of the buildings are turning from ebony to mahogany to bronze to gold... slowly... very slowly... or at least it appears this way seen my human senses... my scratched and greasy lens of perception.
I guess being alive means being chained to a cell called point of view?

ate a bunch of blades just now, no not real ones, just some spicy wicked stuff that wants to burn through my chin, as quickly as possible... it will not, I as I am going to knock out that taste with some countermeasures on a beverage front, quiet over there taste buds, keep quiet.
the last few days have been tearing at me like a badly placed piercing, or a matthew barney rubber band.
a friend convinced me on sunday to write more in one of the older languages i know... and i did and it turned into a fiasco. it turned into a bitter onslaught of words, missing verbs, misguided adjectives.
i managed to be hated by more than before, for all the good old reasons.
I am not a real aggressive tough guy. i tend to ask questions, not know any real cool answers, I am more of a listener, really...
and when I give advice... it is often mißunderstood, taken as an insult...
how did I ever manage to be successful in my job...
and at least this has been working out, I finally accepted that I have to decorate my office, somehow, why not with some of the elements from my old pre september 11th place.
So what was it with the moon this week, that made some kind people incredibly overreact to my tiny remarks... I felt as if I had been exploding dynamite sticks, I thought were candles...
oh, and i have been staring at the screen for quite a while now, hoping a part of me would just finally write something here, or have the courage to post the incredibly bad drawings I somehow scribbled onto this beautiful lcd screen.
if you got this far in this entry and there is a smile on your face because you are enjoying a tiny bit of confusion, God bless you, my friend, because you are in the right place.

Victor Ivanovich Shapliapin liked to take long strolls along the banks of the river. He could be very easily spottet doing just that every afternoon. It was not very hard to recognize him, as he was quite an unusual individual, with many ideas hidden under his winter hat. Some of his contemporaries suggested that some of his inventions might be of incredible use for the military, others, more worried, were very afraid they could possibly fall into the hands of terrorists. The thing with Shapliapin was though, that nobody really knew what he did, how he did it, or even why he would never do anything about it.
All that was visible to the public were his long walks with his hat suspended in the air just a few centimeters ahead of Victor Ivanovich's nose, floating, somehow attached to him, and yet clearly separated from his slowly moving body.
Shapliapin rarely spoke a word with others, he did not seem to care too much about the papers and the other ways of spreading news...
He apparently wrote many letters to some distant friends and relatives. And even though those were all intercepted and checked for any dangerous information, they did not seem to contain anything, not just a trace of any unusual thought.
Some brave citizens asked why such an individual were not imprisoned or at least called in for some serious questioning. There was a really obvious threat to all of them, a ticking time bomb... but for some reason, no order to arrest Shapliapin ever made it into the right hands, or maybe the address was somehow mixed up, leading to slightly scandalous raids on the apartments of his neighbors. Yes, there were some injuries, some apparently accidental deaths.
So years later, Shapliapin still made his rounds, the hat floating softly in front of him, his look quite focused on something nobody else seemed to see.
It was on that afternoon in December that somebody finally had the courage to point their rifle from a distance and to liberate the city of this really dangerous man... the rest is of course history, but it is not history we shall care about here, and not now.

It was a family of machines. Bright, smart, filled with great ideas to chew on. And they would never ever let them go. The ideas were in good heads. Protected well, for all to see, for no one to touch, or lick, or taste.
They were very smart machines. Just not great givers.

Thank you for your inspiration, Wayne Thiebaud.

The wheel was good. It gave him a good push, even after he stopped moving for the day. He would just close his eyes, his many eyes, and the wheel would keep turning, making him wake up in a completely different place, at a completely different time for sure. He would then open his eyes one by one by one... slowly, very, very slowly.
His view of things was quite overwhelming at times... There was so much for him to take in, so little time to do that, such richness, so little curiosity to actually think about it.
And so he would react to things, flee from things, jump at things. He would never really interpret anything he saw. He would just wind up his wheel, close his eyes... and let himself be pushed... further, and further away...
happily...

she laughed, she was not worried at all. she had been mistaken as the protector of thinking organs, and yet she was a secret carrier of ideas herself. with brains sliced and preserved in jars hidden in basements of various museums, she was a laughing witness, she was the one that carried more information, for now... she was the one that would stay longer, survive somehow....
she imagined how interesting it would be if she were the actual thinking device. if she were not protecting or protected but exposed, used to bumps and scratches and serious hits and alterations. what if she had the power to heal herself even more than the brain could... and yet she would be much more dense, would collect ideas better, she would see much more...
oh well...

he was a self made king. he had worked really hard to kill the ones who were in his way. he had worked his way up to the top of it all. he had to paint his own hermelin to get there, and he had to grow his own crown...
still he could not get rid of the feeling that there had been too many odd individuals on his path to his personal victory to actually stay where he was...
he was certain to die, as soon as he dropped one of the royal insignia... the knife of his most trusted friend or even brother was waiting to be used...
oh, bloody knife...

really want to hold on to things, old documents, strange notes to myself about the urgency of projects long finished. Paper with information, the kind that has already been turned into knowledge. Many times. Not today. Today was an attempt to somehow make the apartment forget a little more. Bags of old brochures and papers and things went to the room of "no return". They will probably soon come back as the paper that hits the door early in the morning...
maybe?
do all rooms have this kind of memory?...

What are you taking a picture of, heh, heh?... She really wanted to know... no she did not really want to know, she just wanted to say something that would put me on the defensive side in front of her other teenage friends. And she never made it in to the frame... the R train was going at full speed, it was shaking like crazy when I decided to do what I used to do as a boy on the couch... imagine that the ceiling was the floor. Turn a room into a place with hanging furniture. Now I was turning the subway car into a sardine can filled with human bats.
If only somebody turned off gravity, could we possibly fit more humans into a subway car?...

Just recently found this little card on the subway platform here. It is a collection of answers to some questions we do not know. It is a really nice little card, as it helps to imagine a person thinking about these answers, somebody else asking questions... it is a very oddly recorded side of a conversation. Now the mind of the one who finds the note desperately wants to complete the dialogue, make it whole again... it is a nice one...
Try it...

Dear reader, it is quite possible that I wrote about this before, but it is always nice to point it out again. Anything that you type into the search field on the right hand side, ends up in a log file. I check the log file now and then, just to see if anybody might be looking for something. Some users arrive here from search engines and look straight for little kittens, or roosters or combination of both. Some try to speak to the search field in plain English, and look for pictures of little kittens, roosters, or various combinations of both. Some take the call to action quite seriously and look for themselves. ("me" appeared several times in the last few days... I do not really know who you are, my dear. Please look for your full name, address, phone number. You might want to check if I posted your Credit Card number by typing... no that's a bad joke, don't.)
I also do not know:
2003.11.10 22:51:30
Search: query for 'where did thomas adams live'

2003.11.10 22:52:19
Search: query for 'where did thomas adams live'

I will however try to answer the following question(s).

2003.11.13 17:45:57
Search: query for 'how long will it take to go around the world'
2003.11.13 17:46:33
Search: query for 'how long will it take to go around the world'
2003.11.13 17:49:17
Search: query for 'what is the sound to go around the world'
2003.11.13 17:53:32
Search: query for 'to travel the speed of sound , how long will it take to go around the world'
(It took our seeker seven minutes and thirty five seconds to ask this interesting set of questions...)
Well, what is the sound to go around the world?... And how long will it take for it to get around the world?... I thought I could find a really simple answer to that... just divide 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 kilometers) by the speed of sound (which is 340.29 m / s)... but then I realized that there is so much more that needs to be considered... Take a look at all the factors I almost forgot.... So even though the simplistic answer would be that the time needed at sea level around the equator would be ... almost 33 hours... (no way, really, this long?) and that the time it would take for the same sound to travel just a little deeper, in water, would be about 8 hours, (The speed of sound in water is about 1500 m/s!)... these answers must be wrong...
If the same sound had to travel around the world outside of the atmosphere... then it would take it exactly 24 hours... because sound does not travel in a vacuum... (imagine how loud the sun would be...) so the sound would just wait in one place for the earth to turn... the sound would travel by not moving... hmm...
But wait, does this mean that we should calculate earth rotation with the other equations as well?... I am clearly confused, can not solve a simple mathematical problem... and I guess I will just need to go to somebody's blog and type into the search field:
"How long would it take an object, moving at the speed of sound, to travel around the world, and what would happen if the object were actually a sound, an informed shockwave, and it traveled through environments of different media with different density, maybe even with different temperature?...
Hmm... we all have these really powerful calculating machines in front of us... I wonder how long it might take to get some real answers... (Or are we asking a really silly question?)

The second she was born, she was told that she was the most precious, most wonderful new member of the family. Everybody laughed and smiled and waved hello. She was very happy and focused, sharp, intelligent. More intelligent than anybody else in the family, actually. She knew when to pay attention to certain detail, knew what to see, and how to see it.
And they just loved her, they all just loved to show her around. She got to see the entire apartment, she got to see the garden, the street. All the friends got together to see her. All happily waving, excited.
Then came the trips. The trips were probably the best. She was shown all of the interesting sights. She looked at them, understood them quite well, translated their ideas, remembered them.
Happy people in places all around the world. Locations. Days nights. Happy people, dressed, almost naked, beyond naked, moving, standing still, funny, unusual, more funny. She got to see it all.
She saw the arrival of the new babies, all celebrations, the holidays, she saw strange parties out in the suburbs, involving people dressed in black, lowering a box into a hole in the grass.
She got to see many people, one person, no people at all.
She then got to see items, things, whatever was around the house, on a white table cloth: toys, computers, jewelry, books (not many of those), watches, even furniture...
she eventually grew a little tired of these things... she began to lose focus, to blank out from time to time, to even fall asleep...
One day she found herself on that white table, being put into different angles... she heard some clicking, at first... then she was turned around... and she saw something that looked almost like the reflections of herself she had seen in the mirror... except there was a different name stamped on her reflection...
she was not the one taking the picture... she was the one being taken the picture of... the face that she only knew as a smiling one, was now oddly hiding behind that newer her... then came the flash, more powerful than hers... she was then shipped away...

Once she arrived in a completely different place, with completely different language spoken by her new, very different looking owners, her life began again... a completely new life... one that somehow involved things that did not look like humans or things or anything at all... she was afraid at first,... she assumed that she now completely lost focus, that she soon would be just discarded of... but eventually, she realized that she had finally entered camera heaven... that suddenly all the things she had been very ashamed off, the blurry images, the missed shots, the overexposed blobs... these were the things that were really loved about her... she was so ecstatic about it, that she eventually began to shoot on her own, secretly... happily... most beautifully...
how wonderful...
(and this is how she recorded this one thing that happened on the porch in december... she did it all on her own...)

it is easy to be thrown off when things are subtle and tiny and gentle and soft. the bold, the loud, the agressive, the destructive appear to just grab attention, arrest it, keep it... for a while... maybe again, again, again...
the fastest way to become famous is to kill somebody famous. but is it the best way? is it at all important to claim any kind of fame?...
the slow and the subtle and the gentle may not be the best way to grab anybody by their throat and to show them what the way could be through here, out of here, or wherever...
but it might be the best way to get to hear the little sounds, the slight changes in color, the ghosts that make up the magic that is transformed into what the screamers then might claim to own...
and yet they never really do...
i think i like the slow and magnificent growth process more than a jerky explosion of anything...
it can be all quite calm, as long as we assume that the others could carry a big stick, no?...
oh, and never stop to listen, never stop to learn...
i think we will be fine... ; )

Here some tiny bits of what was is left of a post after i decided to shorten it and to link as little as possible...

It is difficult to not have noticed that there has been some quite radical change in the design surrounding some of the main Adobe applications. MetaDesign (and I guess it happened in the San Francisco Office?) has completely revamped some of the most familiar icons on the desktops of creative professionals around the world.
Gone is the Photoshop Eye, it is now a little parrot feather. Image Ready is now represented by a set of two yellowish and orange feathers. GoLive, is not a hand (of God?) holding a metallic sphere somewhere in space, but a star shaped window into a galaxy, far far away (okay, it is a star). The InDesign butterfly has a more graphic and more dynamic look and...
Venus is dead?
Adobe Illustrator has a new face, and the new face is not a face at all.

It is now a pink flower.
Clearly, Adobe has worked really hard to teach us over the years that there is a connection between "Illustrator" and Botticelli's Venus. Venus has been around since the beginning of Illustrator and up to version 10 one could take a peek at what the original startup screen of this first Post Script editor looked like. (by holding down the option key when selecting "About Illustrator" from the pulldown menue...)
The face of the Illustrator Venus was sent through more and more transformations and makeovers until it arrived at its somehow final transformation, in Illustrator 10. Venus looked a little tired by now, what would be the next transformation that would have to happen to her, in order to show that she is now even more up to date, that it was worth it buying the new version of the software?...
What happened, is the transformation of Venus, the Goddess of love and beauty into her own symbol, a rose. (Except that no rose was used in the icon, only in the outlines of the startup screen.) The flower used in the upper right corner of the startup screen is a yellow five petal shape... I will not write too much about all the symbols here, as we might want to keep at least something "under the rose"... hmm...
This made me smile... It is a bit of an internal joke...

for several months or so there was an empty, pathetic, clay pot on the floor next to the window. I had been given a little plant with oddly red leaves and i managed to just kill it. It was dead, there was no doubt about it, the soil was separating from the rim of the empty flower pot. And it was not a good looking pot either... more of a dirty brownish thing, with calcium crawling over the rim. Hmm...
Not sure what made me pour water into the pot every friday (the plant "rain" day,) and I also do not remember when the first reddish leaves started coming back. It was really nothing short of a miracle for me. We went from plant to death to plant, and this little creature was far from giving up...
It now has about twenty leaves, is about twelve inches in diameter and today, for the first time, it opened a tiny little flower. The flower looks very much like a tiny hanging iris. I dare not to touch it, as it seems to be connected to the plant by nothing more than a hair thin stem.
Will try to take a picture tomorrow... fascinating...

Looking at work of Students at the FIT it was good to see how there are certain heritage specific vocabularies in their visual language brought here by students, how these vocabularies survive in their thinking in their view of things. This energy of ideas from all around the world is what makes cities like New York so rich and interesting (among other things, of course)... and it is always a good experience to see this energy shine through all tiny cracks here and there... (even though it also screams sometimes, of course.). Some of the visual languages spoken were easier to understand, to listen to, than others. Just for me?... for others?...
It was also interesting to see how computers are now integrated into the design process, how it is easier to swing around several thousand dollars of a cursor in a software environment than it would probably be to move around the tip of a 50¢ pencil over the surface of found paper...
Hmm... ideas should probably still be born inside of heads or on pieces of paper, not on screens and inside of "creative suites"... hmm...
Also, how do these two points of view mix?... On one hand there is a very local and location specific view at things and on the other hand there is this technological filter which uses a bit of an "international technology style" interface... hmm...

a police helicopter has been making its rounds over 100th street, maybe 98th. the bright spotlight is pointed directly at a building on this side of broadway, so i can not see if there is any further police activity. just the sound of this loud machine observing the neighborhood at a low altitude does not feel quite right...
sometimes it would be nice to be in a more quiet place... (now)

it is 6:30 and i have yet to eat. this will happen now, after a day of pushing up a round boulder up a hill, just to find out at the end, that there were already several on the summit. who would have thought.
i am entering the phase of the day in which the dried out lips begin to hurt, the stomach becomes more demanding and the head just floats on top of the very weak body.
It is not as cold as before, there, outside, where I will go now... to hunt down something that will taste wonderful, no matter what it will be.
I still dislike speakerphones... too bad a certain portion of my work has to take place in a dialogue with them...
typing into this tiny text entry field feels so comforting now... (you can't see it, I can now...) hmm...

He was maybe not all brains, more like all cotton inside, okay an 80-20 blend, but only to make him less lumpy, well, so maybe he was not all brains, but the person who put him on the sofa, right in front of the television, facing the television, must have been not all brains either. he was curious at first, yes, and it was nice to watch some of the cute little shows for children, but then came this whole life unscripted thing, the trading of places, the knifes, the paint, the displacement of objects. "Where did my pillows go?" "Oh, we just replaced them with these modern ones."... what started with the promise of an educated life, was turning into the living nightmare... folks like him were just being murdered on all those annoying semi real-life shows. The queer eye super five pointed one of his brothers as design faux pas numero uno (they liked to mix european sounding expressions), trading spaces, horror, "clean sweep"-oh please no... "jimmy, you will not get to keep your ox-head pillow, or whatever this is"...
All of these horror shows flickered acros that little screen and were being repeated left and right...
Once tivo arrived, things got even worse... much worse to say the least... it somehow appeared as if tivo had some special cruel side to him... he would seemingly especially record sows in which little innocent pillows were injured at best, mostly simply killed... killed by people who were "doing this for the first time."...
Oh, how he wished he were at least able to close his button-eyes...

There was a delay in my posting of the 360x360 drawings. Some of my tools were gone, I could not write the little illustrative stories for many other reasons. I will go back to posting a drawing a day, these here actually will be moved back into September... (maybe I should have done it right away?...)

Elizabeth knew, this one was too good to be true. Such delicious crumbs right in the middle of St Luke's Mews?, right next to that good old postal pillar? no other birds? Nope, this was clearly a trap and a pretty obvious one as well... cats?
She could now simply wait here for the postman to pick up the mail at 6:30, right when good old Ms. Smith tends to walk by here with her little pug, the dog would start his extensive barking concerto, this was most likely to confuse the stupid cats and allow Elizabeth to go for the crumbs. The only question now was if it was worth investing the time now to wait for the crumbs here, (47 minutes), or if she should just fly over to Upper Gilmore's place, where there was always cake on Thursdays, yet one barely was able to see their own beak, because of the location being such a stupid pigeon hot spot. Yet she could quite possibly fly into Charlie and Billie and maybe even Phil, and they always had such a jolly good time, exchanging little ideas about most recent trends in nest architecture...
Clearly, the crumbs were not worth it... unless...

He had been attacked by a giant yellow round something, in the middle of the night, in the kitchen, out of nowhere, okay maybe not out of nowhere... still just imagine... The shape reminded him of his early video game days, but the skin was cold and waxy and hard. No pixels here. Just this big, really heavy, round, semi flat thing, rolling towards him, threatening, dangerous, unpredictable...
Okay, maybe it was just there, flat, but still a real threat, since it could have jumped up any second... a scary thought...
He had to use a knife to protect himself, preemptively. He slashed it, cut it, it was not easy, he almost injured himself in the process, yet he did it, he managed, he survived.
It could have been worse, it could have been much worse, of course.
It all turned out to be pretty yummy... and there was still plenty left for later.

(call it the big cheese)

It was a very clean job, a very clean procedure, no traces left, no sounds left, not even traces of memories left. Well the adrenalin was still there, the delicious, good, addictive adrenaline. It was worth it. Every single time. It was worth the wait, it was worth the time it was worth the struggle...
She now listened very closely to all the potential sounds around her. She would move on now. It was all done and good and really better than ever before.
And in just a few seconds, even she would be gone from here. Quietly.
She was certainly not the one making any noise. She was far too good for that.

Nobody would ever notice her. This little dot, that tiny little thing... She was, in fact, a small, yet growing, galaxy, expanding at a slightly slower pace than what the human mind might ever even care to see. She started in a garden, somewhere behind a little wooden house. Her colors glowing, yes, but muted, not overpowering, warm. It took her several days to expand to the size of what others might have considered a poppy seed... oh, a tiny one at best... really small... her gravity was not very good yet, she was only able to swallow a bee or two, then a squirrel, a cat... but there was really no rush... she wanted to take over here in a bit more than a few million years...

She was beautiful and she was incredibly gifted. Her days would be spent in a world filled with what we see and know and also much, much more. She saw the things and also the things between the things, and even those between them. She knew before and after and now, but also the benow and afnow and all the shades of time and space. Not only the real, the imagined one as well.
Most of her time was spent smiling at things and places and those things we do not even have words for.
In the evenings she would exhale, turn herself into a tiny person at first, then a small blue thing, then a tiny speckle of some sort, then a single, non-dimensional point in space and time.
In the mornings, long before what we call sunrise, she would awaken, as a super nova, ready to take in, collect, and to transform...
the things and the things between the things, the times and the times between the times, and even the ideas and the ideas between them...

Swimming was for losers. Anybody could just swim with the sharks or the dolphins or whatever school of fish just happened to be the hippest, coolest, most now, whatever. She really did not care. Her life was short, she had no intention to make some dumb alliances for survival. It was all about sightseeing, baby. Learning languages, ocean history, depth magic and sightseeing.
She had read somewhere that her species was supposed to be quite intelligent, but live only for about a year or so. That sounded quite frustrating at first. Just one year is not a lot when one takes into consideration the age of the entire planet. What could have also worried her beyond that was the fact that she was not really sure about her real age at the time of this grim discovery. For all she knew, she could have been eleven months already. What was she to do?, kill herself now, or maybe enjoy the last 30 days or so, or 60, or maybe 300?...
It was after her 7th summer or so when she started to ask herself why she was not yet as dead as predicted by all those who themselves were by now gone?... why did she not want to swim?, why was the the only one that really looked really like her?...
She was not quite sure about the reasons, and maybe the reasons were not really what she was looking for. She now somehow had the idea that it might be simply time to leave the ocean... (and I think she did just that...)

Where others saw blurry blobs of color, he was able to read serial numbers etched into the windows of the skyscraper. When others were scared to drive at night, he did not even turn on the lights, became invisible, drove at full speed by cops sleeping in their car, avoided little animals, crossing the road in the depths of the woods. He was maybe not the fastest runner, but he was gifted with the ability to see very clearly, from very, very far away. Even at night. Even with the lights off. And he was also able to remember things he saw. Really well, it was as if he had painted what he saw underneath his eyelids, instantly. He just needed to close his eyes and he could take a second, a third look, at the licence plate of that car a few blocks away, of the little boy, waving out of the airplane window, of the ant, struggling to carry something that looked like a giant grain of rice, downstairs, five floors below him.
He did not tell anybody about the things he saw or how he saw them. He just enjoyed and smiled and moved on. Some superpowers just were not worth it to be given away to this stupid low resolution television.

Really wanted to mention it earlier, yet there was never really a right moment, and now maybe is the wrong moment too, but it appears to me that for some reasons the Right socks are the better survivors, or maybe they are the ones who just want more stability, the ones who return to the drawer, who want to flock. Left by their Left socks, they are the Right socks, but yet they are left behind. (that does not sound right.) What I mean, I have half a drawer of paired up right socks can you believe that?
How do I know the difference between my Left and the Right socks? I like to wear so called Runner Socken, manufactured by a very excellent company from Germany, Falke. The thing about runner socks is that they are fitted for their particular foot and that they have not only the shape but also a little red letter on their noses. The right socks carry an R, the left ones an L.
I do not wash my socks myself, the friendly laundry place across broadway does an excellent job in my absence. It is quite fascinating to find new combinations of socks after each and every wash. It appears that the right socks are more now (the ratio is maybe 2:1 or something like that). They like to hang out together, they come back paired couples... how odd. Left socks like to go missing, they just disappear, they seem to wander off, they leave.
One special pair, that was a so called "walking" Socken pair, a slightly thicker kind of socks, actually never even made it into the wash. The Left sock left the Right sock before they even got to go down and around the block and into the laundry place. It is a truly odd little event and observation. They are obviously made for each other, there is no doubt about it. They are very different than all the other Left/Right socks, they never even get to go to the laundry place, where they could possibly get lost while having really close encounters with other socks or pants or who knows what... and still. The L sock leaves. The R sock possibly feels completely useless... sad and tired and really out of place.

Let's talk about what Germans call "Handschuhe", hand-shoes... the English word for that is... gloves...
When I was a boy, I used to lose my gloves at a higher rate than the Polish economy could possibly manufacture them. It was quite odd as well. How could one lose a glove or mitten. It was not like I had to take one off to sign some treaty or document of capitulation. One mitten would always get lost. I imagined it alone, somewhere, in the snow...
My parents eventually connected my mittens with a special, semi elastic string. The string was long enough to go right through one sleeve of my jacket, behind my back and through the other sleeve. Even if I took off one of the mittens, the other mitten would still hold on to it via a very primitive model of the internet. (Smart mitten, dumb network, remember? A telephone network would be a mitten with two strings.)
Maybe such a string could possibly be an idea for my socks, now that I am older, and can dress myself? I could attach my socks to a string that would go up one pant leg and down the other, connecting the Right one with the Left, making them a unity forever without them having to be attached by the hip.
Just a thought... and i wonder how comfortable or how silly this would feel. (Should I possibly patent it, would I like the friction?)

My problem with the Right walking-sock the one left behind is far from being solved, of course. I still somehow hope to find the left sock, lonely, somewhere in the wash. (Probably busy chatting with the other socks?)

Socks seem to really enjoy it being united by their necks, don't they? It is as if their union created a model for our multidimensional universe. And maybe it does? Could we be onto something here? The universe could be like two matching socks, connected with the perfect string.
(I bet this whole trackback thing does not work for me, so yes, I was reminded of the issue by a much better post by Shauny.)

managed to get through the times and to not keep any of it for later. a true achievement, as it usually takes me days, weeks, sometimes longer, to let go of some pieces of this printed matter. now do not imagine the apartment here as a paper mountain range, this is not the case, there just happen to be this little pile that does not go away and it is not really visible, unless one stands in a particular location in the living room.
There is a bit of a pressure inside of my skull this morning, a bit of a pathetic hangover, left from a pathetic evening spent mainly on opening and closing of some new applications.
Need to find ways to free that silly mind of mine a little more... (taptaptap...) it will not be easy, but it must be possible... : )

it was a bit of a disappointment this morning when I arrived at the last page of a book I had been reading for the last few days on the train. My thoughts were something like... she is touching the handle of that portfolio with such delicate attention, if the train were not so loud, we could certainly hear it purr. Clearly I was not paying attention to what I was reading. Not a good thing, as what I was reading was again one of the books in which every sentence is like a layer on top of the previous one and so on... so I have been looking at letters, playing with that highlighter in my pocket, but only the punctuation marks would resonate with the sounds of the train and find their little homes in the back of my head. Not very useful.
This is why I like looking at pictures, when on the train I guess. Here we have a thousand words, all completely disorganized, forming what appears to be a familiar impression. I tend to look for the flaws and hints left behind by those who made the images. Look at photographs and try to discover the human factor... It is interesting that writers do not get excited about their typewriters or word processors. Photographers on the other hand are not only divided into particular brands, they sometimes even sign their photographs with not their names but the name of the camera. Machine operators...
Looking at images on the subway and looking at the little flaws that make me hear the voice of the designer saying nobody will notice if I just clone the background here or what if I blur that hair here... but these people are not photographers, they are photoshoppers, editors...
No wonder I can not read on the train, or barely read anywhere else for that matter. I tend to fall into the little spaces opening up between the words, little loopholes in the Os and As... and the Ps as well...
Soon I will be listening to the songs hidden in the sentences of the people speaking to others (i already do that) then probably to the songs hiding in voices speaking to me...
and if all this progresses... I will probably somehow need to find a therapist, on who's sofa I will just take a nap, listening to the sounds hiding in the walls, my own breath, the breath of my sleeping therapist, on the chair near by...
It is sometimes the best thing in the world to pay attention to those things that do not really matter... but at times... now I forgot what I wanted to say...
; )

It is really amusing to me every time I realize that I am running like a little application, running a program, taking part in new religions, and really seeing it all as completely normal, especially since I am trying to be a little less fanatic about it than my... what does one call them these days?... peers, the other users?, friends, other people?... okay, other people.

I could claim that I know how to use certain machines, but in fact, these machines are telling me how to use them, and I better follow orders and smile while I do it. This is true starting with the snooze button on the alarm clock... okay, I never use this one. Or how about the interface of my shower? It is a funny one, a bit like those in motels across the country. there are only two speeds for water, one handle goes from cold to hot, dependent on the angle of the handle. Once this is figured out, I am the perfect user of the little interface. I let the water run into the tub first, put the handle in the 11 o'clock setting, put my hand in front of the shower head, so I do not get wet (how odd) then pull this little lever on top of the tub (is this the spelling for the device that keeps the water from raining onto my downstair neighbors?) and here we go... water march! Oh, and I could probably dim the lights, you know, pull down that little thing next to the door. I am pretty good at that... I don't.
The shaver lets me use it in a certain way, so does the toothpaste (prevent tooth decay, wait no, postpone tooth decay.)
Buttons are a good interface. I do buttons really well. Zippers too.
The morning TV... just a few minutes... email. Okay, email was actually first. Email is before I wake up. And email and computers are the ultimate holly mass. One has to click here, then there, connect to this, adjust this, then scroll here, put the cursor there, then here, over there, use other devices, the mouse, the keyboard, trackpad, the little button in the center. One needs to feed that thing, connect the power supply here, there, wait.
don't move.
be careful about the way you carry this thing around, better buy a padded little bag, thing, insert into the bad that you, i already have/s...
keys
elevator
subway
metrocard
train
office, id card, more doors, some want to be touched with a special magic card, some want to be actually penetrated with a carved piece of metal... turn, turn on the lights, turn on the computer, turn on the virtual email application, other interfaces, more information, rituals, rituals, rituals, rituals...
one sometimes is amazed as to how a person living in the 14th century could remember all the saints and angels and special creatures,
I get to worship, no I get to serve timex, apple, sharp, schlage, otis, bombardier, metro card, more apple, lotus notes... canon, oh... the new york times...
it just arrives, no, it hits the door, right before i wake up in front of the email... and the new york times is a demanding biest...
"look, I was put together by some people far smarter than you ever will be, they managed to not only write articles about things and places you can barely imagine, they even wrote it in a language which makes your mouth water, they illustrated their ingeniously put together articles with really brilliant photographs, had that stuff not only posted on the web but actually also printed on paper, many copies of it, and they managed to have this woman run, run as if she were running for her life, because she is, so this paper can hit your door before you go to the bathroom... so now READ!"... did i just switch the times from the first person to the third person?... i apologize. and so i read. i do read the times, parts of it, every morning. i read the photographs in it. oh, that is not called reading?... oh it is not?... wait for a little while, and the times will be a grand collection of photographs, mostly... some writing... captions, pull quotes... oh, it will never happen?...
oh, it really will... it already is happening... it will be like those little slideshows with the journalists telling stories... a little less than television, as it is so expensive to make, it will be a bit of a slideshow...
and why do i know that?... because all religions are extremely efficient this way... or when was the last time we really sacrificed a lamb...
what am I talking about... this is not the same thing...
oh, and I better press the amen button when I want to even log out...
or I can just cancel...
and then nothing will really change... and i will never crash, or go to heaven, or hell... just remain here... in the device purgatory... until i am done pressing buttons that say save... or preview... and I believe... enter, return... option...
ctrl (that could be hebrew... and what language is "fn" and "tab" and "esc"?)
hmm... I feel a bit confused... hope some of the bits and pieces made sense...

It was a bit cooler today. A very fine mist of water seemed to fall onto the city in incredible slowmotion. What would have been unbearable humidity in the summer months, now, cool, appeared like the exactly right thing to happen. It is fall, after all. The leaves are moving from the branches onto the grass, onto the pavement, onto the streets. Their colors are now so much more vibrant, surprising, shouting. The colors are as saturated as the bright colors used by humans to announce most special events.
I left the subway on 50th Street at around 9:30. There were masses of people in the street, rushing. We were in the center of midtown after all. This is the place where a high percentage of the thinking actually makes it to the presses, to the billboards, back onto the street, back into the heads of those who were here with me, and far far beyond...
There was a very fragile little object, right by the yellow strip painted onto the sidewalk to mark the entrance to a parking garage.
It was a wing of a bird, maybe a sparrow, ripped out at the socket, right there, with the leaves, itself like a leaf. So perfect... so frighteningly beautiful
I managed to not imagine the story of how it got there and what happened to the rest of the certainly small animal... I tried to imagine that whatever happened here was painless and quick and unexpected.
Now this wing felt like the most peaceful little piece of the city. And yet bold powerful... just arrived at the end of its story.
Just fallen... for now... it was that time of year...
Icarus was still high above us, probably, holding back his tears...

some invisible force has grabbed me by my lower spine and is holding me firmly, painfully. things become especially painful when I forget about my condition. Just the moment I relax there is a jolt of pain, a little immobilizer, a bit like this sadistic toy (Or this one.) except there is no remote, or at least not one I can see from here.
So I am sneaking around the office, near walls, like quasimodo, leaning forward and sideways, in a shy way, smiling... it does not always hurt.. ouch... now it does...
Last night when I wanted to turn in my sleep, I had to use my arms to throw my body around, as if it were a barrel filled with guts. (It sort of is.)
Btw. Can we please do something to make these sadistic dog collars illegal? Or can we at least have a mandatory belt for the dog owner, with at least tripple the discharge?, and I would not mind if the device were hidden out of sight...
We live in a very scary world.

p.s. no, I am not really complaining, just observing... oorgh

walk don't walk, drive don't drive, look, don't look. love don't love. she stared at the changing signs right there in front of her printed eye, both of them, as long as she was there on the outside, waiting for something to happen, something that could move her further, along, away, and yet she would never leave there, where she was staring down broadway, at all times, glowing at night, focused during the day. she was not really seeing these signals at all, her image was, something that appeared to be here was, something that was made to look like something that could probably be mistaken for her was.
she did not really think about that, at all, she did not really see broadway, or the lights or anything really, not even the lens anymore, not even the lens, the one that cast a reflection in her eye, the reflection, long gone, removed, replaced, by one that made her eye more inviting, or the image of her eye, the eye that saw but not the walk don't walk, just the move, don't move, the blink, don't blink, the smile, don't smile.
and there were four of her, layered, thinner than paper, right here, this second, and yet in thousands all over, and then not really...
she was asleep.

They will open the façade, they will expose the guts. Holes will be cut, marble will be thrown away, views will be created, adjustments will make her look like the others, more like the others? Does she need to look like the others? Really... can she be just left alone?
as mentioned before...
please... please... too late...

it is autumn again, it is november, it is the end of the warm season and yet it was warm enough today for me to go home, walk home that it, just like that, stopping in places, strange, familiar, taking pictures i have taken many times and some i was taking for the first time today. it was as if i had been in a deep water for a while and then the walk was a bit of an inhaling of the water, and being part of it, or was it? I did not take a picture of the Pizza sign looking exactly like the chase sign not far from it, making a photograph of the words "pizza chase" possible. I did not manage to take an image of the firefighters near lincoln center, or the girl who asked the firefighter if where she was sitting were a good spot.
I made some photographs of hands, faces, will like to combine them. I purchased fascinating moving pictures, stored on disks, little movies that just made my jaw drop and inspired me, and I just started watching them, just a few minutes ago.
And my spine hurt, and my body hurt, all day, but I had the light on and it was good.
And when you read genesis 1:26, you will notice that women and men were in fact created at the same time, even according to this ancient text. And I know you do not believe me, or do you?... Google it.
I also listened to this american life again, today, and it was as incredible as ever.
And I also found out more about the wall on that bridge, the one that happened to be at the 20th mile. There were images of it in the times this morning.
And then I heard about the wall again. And how faces were distorted, the body did not want to run anymore, how the brother beat P Diddy, but how he did not, how I would be too tall to run the distance, though the one telling me about it was 6'6" and i am barely 6'4'?, perhaps, or what does 189cm translate to?
Queens was supposedly the oddest, nobody cared about the thing in Harlem, the last 500meters were the worst, as were the last 700 meters, or the last three miles, or the last 6 miles actually. After three miles there were people calling their loved ones on their cellphones.
One should not run without music if one trained with music. ONe should run without music, just so one could hear the cheers. And yet the cheers did not seem to matter.
I ran for 26 yards today... and it was too much.
My best friend now has a daughter. She was born under a most wonderful star and she has my favorite names... perhaps...
i am starving and had no dinner... it is so late now that all i will be able to eat will be the moon, and it is just half there.
out in the streets the temperature now is 69F, or about 20C... perfect.
today was the summer we did not have.
i turned on the lights.
I am glad I did.

Early in the morning on 96th Street and Central Park West...

And about 5 minutes later, down on the subway plattform...

Why am I thinking that there will be a bazaar on November 15th? What does it really mean to live richly?...

November first is a day made for reflection. At least where I come from it was. It was the day on which the entire family would try to gather and discuss matters with those who had passed away...
Yesterday, far away from the graves of my ancestors, I just felt oddly guided by some invisible force wanting to just tell me what I should do a lot of and what should be simply left alone.
I woke up at three in the afternoon. My "breakfast" was a meal I managed to take in at around 5:30 or so (and it was also the only meal of the day). My favorite water was oddly enough on sale, and when I wanted to buy some Polish beer, the six-pack discharged its content, launched an explosion in front of my feet, five bottles smashed right in front of me onto the supermarket floor.
It was late, the workers at the supermarket could not care less about the confused me, telling them about the incident.
There would have been this really important party to attend to, but once I built the shoe phone for my costume...
I decided to light the candles...
It was all saints after all, not halloween...
The apartment could have been on fire after I woke up,
a few hours later,
curled up in the chair,
next to the last flickering flame.
It was a very odd and quiet day...
or rather evening...
I feel as if I had spent it under a large protective hand.

One of the grand achievements of consumer culture is the dissatisfied shopper, the one who gets really upset, the one who demands the money back, the one that gets her or his way, the one that walks away with a fixed new item, a brand new something. Or money back. Money back is also very popular among some. One complains long enough and back comes the money, the same money that was in the wallet before... it just returns. (In most cases it comes back sans the shipping and handling and the interest accumulated on the credit card and we do not even want to start about the hours or days or weeks spent on the actual process of complaining....)
I can't complain. I am not really good at it. I was not taught how to complain properly, I love to suffer, I guess, just wait and see and look for the solution... passively... actively, certainly (or I could pray, or wish, or hope.)

So when my new PowerBook arrived with one little pixel screaming at me with all its brightness, I went to some site where I found the manual for Apple technicians, found the story about dead pixels, found out that I would need to have at least three of those bright ones, or four of those dark ones in order to get an exchange... and so I did not say anything... I sometimes place the pointer of my mouse under the dead pixel, then it looks as if it had a green, glowing eye... we talk... it is sort of fun.
I read an article today about a new petition regarding an apparent flaw in the display of my PowerBook. I checked, I have it, indeed... I am not one of the 650 people who signed that thing so far, I see some white blotches, yes, but I am going to wait right now, not go crazy about something that really would not make me smarter or more handsome, or live longer if it were fixed. (Actually, worrying about this stuff, could quite possibly shave off a few days of my probably pretty short life.)
Complaining is a really nice new way of self expression. Some cranky "experts" just lustfully jumped on some of the new features of the new mac operating system, some write as if they were really, physically aroused when they can complain about some practices by companies like google. Others are truly, deeply upset that some fonts do not ship with some free software...
I am just really glad that I am alive tonight...
There must be a bit of a misunderstanding here, some of us believe that pointing out of issues is a great way to stimulate progress.
Large discussion groups emerge, hundreds of users enjoy the brilliant observation skills of the complainer.
Complaining feels a little anti productive to me... it does not appear to be a really creative process... and it is really not to be confused with constructive criticism which is actually something really good...
It is a bit like lamenting about a blown out candle, pointing out that it smells and does not illuminate the room, or that the room now disappeared, or that the moths have nowhere to fly...
Or one could just light the candle again... or just a match or something...
Silly, simplistic thought, perhaps?...
Is complaining the great power of the consumer?... Is the role of the complainer the same one that used to be one of the court jester, perhaps?...
I have this slight beginning of a feeling that complaining about things and their flaws is the direct response to what expectations are packed into the now more expensive toys we call products...
We tend to buy fantasies that surround a product, the actual item is then just a material representation of the expectation... anything that does not comply with the promise... is obviously a large disappointment... to the one who really believes the promises in the first place.
I guess I am still too much of the boy who was very amazed about the possibilities of a piece of paper, or a plastic cup, or plasticine. I did not grow up in a world that promised me that I would be able to draw like Leonardo if only on the right sheet of paper, or that the water would be the most delicious if drunk from this or that particular glass, or that the clay would turn into art in my hands, if only purchased in that bright and pretty special pack.
Most of my toys could probably be considered rubbish, or dangerous, or maybe both. I played with knifes, with caps of bottles, with dirt, with dirty snow... None of these items came with some predetermined world, stories, instructions, a sales pitch, which could annoy me, or just bore me... I had to turn the bottle cap into a racer on a track I drew into the dirt with my left shoe. That knife was not really dangerous because I knew that pointing it at myself could injure me badly, of course...
My job as a child was to "inform", to "transform" things, anything really, and to thus turn it into something that was as complex as my imagination.

I remember coming to the west and discovering that the packaging of toys was the best thing about them. The promises printed on the outside of the colorful boxes were really rarely kept... and they also were a but like panic flaps put onto a horse. Even lego was pretty disgusting in the west, the packaging contained pictures and predetermined outcomes of maybe three stories per package... this was all really disappointing...
So I can understand quite well, why anybody who was born into a world that tends to bombard us with legally backed up promisses would focus as much as possible at the disappointing flaws of things... It really is a bit of a creative process, a breaking beyond what the manufacturer wants us to see...

Though wouldn't it be really beautiful if we all somehow had that power to invent new things and ideas and just charge forward and explode into the world as a burst of completely new ways of looking at the silliest little things?...
(rather than believing dome marketing pitches, and then whining that the promises were not completely kept?)
How great would it be if we managed to just take the energy of the blessings we encounter by the million every day and just ride it into the next unscripted day?...
This is not very fashionable... sarcasm and irony are the king and queen of the contemporary thinker...
Hmm... how odd that this little entry could almost be read as a complaint...
; )

Btw. I am still amazed that this piece of software here checks my spelling on the fly no matter if I write in English, oder ob ich mal schnell was auf Deutsch schreibe, albo nawet po Polsku, (obwohl ich mir da nicht so sicher bin...)
Amazing... I find it all amazing...
I am stunned by the tiniest of things...
I can't complain... we are so darn lucky to have what we have. So darn lucky... and I sometimes have to pinch myself, because I must be dreaming...
this all goes far beyond my boyish imagination...