July 2004 Archives

"It is a bit of a problem," I explained to a friend who among other superpowers has the ability to really listen... "the problem is that I do not remember what I have told and what I have not told. It is really very strange. I have written so much over the past few years that I really do not remember which one of the stories I have already told and which one I kept to myself because I wanted to tell it when there was the right time to tell it." "It does not really matter," was the answer, "a story retold is always a new story. Jut imagine that each one of your entries is your first one. You are a different person than the one who wrote the other things anyway. You should not worry too much..." Hmm. Indeed. Why are so so incredibly obsessed with the "original", the "one and only"... it must have something to do with the industrial ability to multiply objects as if there were no laws of physics. And with the web... well the web allows to just copy and paste information in speedy and effortless ways... hmm... or maybe the need to have original content is just a really silly idea of mine... maybe this is all wrong. The most popular web destination are the ones that provide commentary on stuff others talk about... It is all about pointing the finger at something and saying something that has enough edge to split the opinion into supporters and those who do not agree... and popularity is polarized... This really works best with masses. Masses of clickers. Did anybody ever point out that if computers knew how to think they would probably find us to be rather dull devices that need some of the slowest interfaces, like antiquated keyboards and that really dumb pointer... A story told several times become a new story... a drawing drawn several times is always a new drawing... even photographs... the medium that is built around the very idea of reproduction... even photographs of the one and same object could potentially be a thing that develops... yes... it does. Maybe my not remembering what I have written is a bit of a problem though... it feels a bit tough to even remember how this entry here started... Or did I just point it out? I will try to close my eyes... for a little while. What an exciting non activity that is... and always very different and new... isn't it? ...

so glad to be able to upload images again. So it was the server after all... so glad... : )

The rotten tomato (or is it tommatoe?) tasted so incredibly horrible that I found myself looking at little pieces of it swirling down the watery path of no return just seconds after it had suicide bombed itself in my mouth. There were more pieces of it, this time much smaller, in the sink, then eventually none, it was just the taste of water mixed with a foul something on my tongue. There were still two little tomatoes in my hand, and I decided that maybe they also had not been created to end up as a part of me, …and so I buried them. I filled up one of my many little green flower pots with some soil, pushed the little red guys next to each other into the soft and fluffy bonsai garden and poured a little bit of water onto them. The plant had managed to make me do all this, by just being tasty most of the time, but in the end very perishable and one time incredibly disgusting. I had been tricked by a tomato plant into helping it propagate. I have been bullied by a nightshade plant… I am a plant doormat. But maybe not. Let’s see what comes out of that tomato experiment. There seem to be many experiments in my silly little garden… The lime tree is doing really well. Or at least I think it is a lime plant. She is too small to bear any kind of fruit or even flowers, but when I rub one of her insanely green leaves, it feels as if I were touching soft skin. Or maybe a hand that just managed to soak in just the right amount of hand cream. I touch the leaves and they make my fingertips smell like limes. This is miracle enough for me. I am thrilled. The plants have been doing really well recently. Even the little zombie of a Christmas tree, the last little guy available at the corner Korean deli on the evening of December 24th of 2003 is still alive. Yes, the core of the little bugger might be brown and look a bit on the dead side, yes, taking off the wet soaked plastic bow from its top removed some vital parts of the upper portions of the tree, but, even after all these months… the little guy has really amazingly bright green little branch tips. The whole plant looks like a slow motion firework. And yes, touching it really hurts. How did we get here? Oh, that rotten tomato… I really wish rotten eggs could be planted in a pot and they would turn into trees from which chickens would fall off, once they were ripe for eating or new egg production. Or imagine a cemetery that would over time turn into a forest packed with people trees, which we would visit from time to time to harvest little kids that would strangely resemble our grandmothers or grandfathers, or that guy that thought he had some unspeakable superpowers… or maybe that’s what that stem cell research is all about?… Though then we should probably not think of a forest or garden, but start with places that feel more like Gramercy Park… Oh boy, I am really bad with staying on track with my little fragments, am I not? Oh yes… rotten tomatoes? Or just love apples?

friends... this site will be moving servers. I am not quite sure what this really means, but I hope you can still read this and will be forgiving if certain things act up in some unpredictable ways... please be patient. All will be good... hopefully....

The air has the quality of translucent cotton, spread thin between the buildings, suspended, floating. The pigeons on the corner were flocking like sheep just moments ago, until it was time for humans to take their place on the sidewalk. Now the birds are lazily playing flight on the iron grill of an ever working air conditioner on the roof of the bank across Broadway. We are all expecting rain today.

Somebody related to charlie brown's teacher reminded all of those waiting for the uptown local train to report any suspicious objects or persons to ghuaghuaawa waghawawa. What was a suspicious object, the huge black trash bag left behind on the platform?, the month old cell phone on the tracks? And what kind of person? A terrorist with a camera? Or tourists with two cameras? Better watch out... they flash. I had just managed to open the little bag containing some incredibly potent vitamine C. It was a gift. I was supposed to mix it with water and drink... The thing had some really strange graphics on it and it was called something witty like "emergen-C"... 1000% of vitamine C... the 500% of some vitamine B complex came for free, it seemed... (or emergen-B would just not have made as much sense.) Oh, and I did not bring any water. Hmm, though I am three quarters of water, does that count? I remembered eating these orange flavored powders in Poland. I did not even know then that one should dissolve them outside of the body. I remember using a glas of water for the first time, more as a science project than anything. And I remember the resulting taste being a horrible disappointment... Orange or lemon or whatever vitamine powder was supposed to be dissolved on the tongue. And there was even a good technique for that... so I poured a tiny hill of the potent yellow powder onto the palm of my hand, looked at the little clumps, the differences in color... (which ones were the vitamine C?)... and i just threw that little mountain into my mouth. It was a bit like looking up into the sky and being amazed about something really incredible and at the same time throwing that surprise thing into the open mouth. It was a good and familiar sensation. The taste was a tiny bit too strong, at first, the powder clearly turned into some sort of magic substance... the vitamines returned to the hydrated reality with a fizz phoenix-B... no still not a good name for this. I was able to repeat the careful pouring of the powder and throwing it into my mouth several times. I still had a little bit left, when the train arrived. And this was when I got into the last car and this was when the best seats available were right across from this giant of a man. He was really big. He was almost enormous, maybe 8 feet tall? or 10, or 12? Funny thing how memory sometimes works. He could have been in his 20's perhaps. Though the expression in his face appeared to be maybe twelve or thirteen thousand years old. He might have been wearing nikes, his giant jeans and some layers of white t-shirts and also some sort of a hat, but boy, this was no ordinary man. Did he even have eyebrows? He had some sort of sculpted area around his eyes... Oh, and his eyes... he clearly was a hungry hunter. It felt that if a chicken happened to run across the subway car, he would have jumped up to simply bite of its head. Silly of me to sit across such a man, holding on to my little, almost empty, emergen-C... but I did. I tried to see if there was any movement on the other side of the aisle. Was this body of a man moving? Was it moving towards me? Was I maybe dressed up as a chicken? Things looked okay and relatively peaceful. He sat there, observing, something. Did he see some sort of prey none of us could see? His head was sunk, deep in that giant hill of his shoulders. His forearms rested on an almost inflated looking lap. My feeling for this guy was probably simply amplified, because I had just poured some 800% of the daily dosage of vitamine C into my body minutes prior to entering the train... And so I simply made one last little mountain, on my right hand, looked at it again, and in one move that other kids would use to throw in a bunch of m&m's I moved my hand towards my mouth quickly, and almost closed my eyes and... there was that powder hitting the inside of my mouth, turning into another tingling sensation and there it was, maybe just a few millimeters from my face, just swinging by, making a bit of a chilling wind, in an incredible speed, a giant foot in a nike sneaker. All I saw was the bottom of a blue sole. White swoosh... Size 18?... I was not sure quite sure what, but he just did it... the man clearly was a superb example of a killer kicker. In the split second it took me to move my hand towards my mouth, he managed to not only balance his entire giant body in some unpredicted way, he also threw a serious kick towards my face. A giant kick. A killer. And I think the reason why he happened to miss me was because that throwing of the vitamine powder made me move my head and body back... I did not say anything. I simply got up slowly... walked away... It was not until I sat down where all the other people were sitting that I realized that there was a considerable distance between the giant man and everybody else. I must have been distracted when I entered the car to not notice that... Did he even have eyebrows?... not that it really matters... ...

It took several attempts. It was not very easy. It failed every single time. I was probably simply too young too young to write the next great Polish novel. Just imagine I had finished one of the manuscripts. An eight year old writer of great adventure literature. Oh, I felt as if my life experience was perfectly sufficient to fill page after page with incredibly dangerous adventures of my newly invented friends. I was ready to nearly drown them, to nearly burn them, to almost kill them, just to let them emerge happier, smarter, more amazing on the other side of the stack of paper I was about to fill. Oh, and animals would play a great role too. And they would speak, of course, as animals do anyway. I had read enough Jules Verne and Henryk Sienkiewicz and Alfred Szklarski. Even managed to read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though only the Lost World, as I was not at all interested in his detective stories. Oh, and one should mix these experiences of imagined adventures with those of the Trolls and other creatures of the Moomin valley... and ready was the full blown inspiration to write, write, write... well, maybe watch some television, record a little song (i could never figure out how to end them, so they would just go on for what felt like hours,) maybe throw things out of the window... (nothing dangerous, I promise.) So, yes, I never really managed to write that great new adventure novel. Though I really tried... and I really, really wanted Monika Rosca to play the main part, as I really thought she did a fantastic job playing Nel in one of the favorite movies of my childhood... And it seems almost impossible to find any images of the original 1973 "W pustyni i w puszczy"... Enough for now... this post is turning into something really too strange... And everyone had childhood ambitions and incredibly hopeless crushes... I just can imagine that America keeps slightly better records of these things online... hmm...

A little winged friend is jumping through the leaves right next to me on the north side of Bryant Park. Cars are behind me, loud talking men in front of me. Subways below me, trees above me. There are teeth in my mouth and they are cleaner now than they have been for months. I am still a bit confused, but right now I am the person that is built around the teeth in a mouth that is shut in a head that knows it is late, in a body that is very hungry, sitting on a little folding chair in a park, more than surrounded by darting little birds, in midtown on the island of manhattan in this big city... and so on... Will need to rush now... but I am not really leaving anyway... (There are about seven birds sitting around me now. Do I look like a baked good?... Okay... we are up to 12... hmm... hmm... CHIRP!)

The cab was one of those with no partition. The cabs without partition scare me by now. Could the driver just reach into a pocket, grab a knife and stab me with a kitchen knife while using the other hand to maneuver his yellow vehicle through the canyons of manhattan? A with partition could not do that. A cabby without a partition could. Oh and the partition is also a nice place for stickers and marker tags. Not that I ever stick or tag, but it is nice to discover that there are forms of creative life out there... and daring. So the cab had the map of Manhattan stuck to the ceiling, or "Himmel" (sky and heaven and ceiling in a car are one and the same word in German... and I wonder why...) What does that mean when the map is attached to the ceiling... how does that work? The intelligence test in this involves too many layers for me. Oh, and the music was blasting out of the speakers. And the music sounded very suspiciously like The 7th Symphony by Shostakovich... named after another city no longer named after a man who most likely died of syphilis... On the dashboard of the car was tucked in the picture of another genius who died of unknown causes at the age of 35, ... WAM (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart...) "What is the name of the piece you are playing?" I asked the cabbie to start a conversation about death and music and driving a cab without a partition. "It is Strauss, and I don't know the name of this piece. It is something... something about his life!" The music really did not sound anything like Strauss... and so I tried to ask again. "It sounds a bit dark, doesn't it?" "Yeah, it really depends how Strauss sees his life, I guess?" And then he began to sing and whistle... and for the first few minutes I assumed that he was whistling in joy and anticipation of the music to come. But not a single one of the melody fragments he uttered had anything to do with the amazing music I was enjoying... What added to the whole confusion was the cabbies driving style. He changed lanes almost as if we and the other cars were dancing, the avenue our shining, moving ballroom, the metal skins of our cars glittery gowns reflecting the electrified candlelight of the big city... "So I hear you are from Vienna?" The dental hygienist asked me out of nowhere this morning... "Oh ho, hy heh hroh hohhangh... guh i highegh ih herhaghy hor horghyh heygh." "Oh, where in Germany?" she asked. Layers upon layers upon layers upon layers...

All my eyes seem to have seen in the last 48 hours or so are the insides of my eyelids and this screen. And the screen is the clear winner in this one. In a room with pulled shades, with the air conditioning on, drinking some cold water now and then and listening to either some random music or just the humming of the fans, I have been pulling together little bits and pieces of past time spent in front of this and other screens... And all this is done, so I can spent even more hours looking at screens... Amazing things we do to be able to afford the doctors and lawyers of the last few years of our lives. Unbelievable really... How was your weekend?...

Barely got the bus on that friday night when not a single taxi cab seemed available on 8th avenue. I could have walked to the subway and waited, but the bus was just there, ready to go, and so was I. On the very last seats was a couple, maybe in their 50's speaking the clacking and knocking dialect that might have originated among African bushmen. They were large people, both of them. I know too little about the origins of any language that might contain these distinctive sounds to make any further assumptions here. On the other side of the bus, across from me, on the seats that are usually folded up when a wheelchair is brought in, were two kids and what I assumed must have been their mothers. The boy looked like maybe 13, he was a bit on the heavy side (okay, very much so,) he was wearing a black adidas trainings suit that looked as if he had worn it for a few very long days (and nights). A seat away from him, and closer to the two women, was a girl. She looked maybe a bit younger than him, she was all skin and bones, her face appeared to be carved out of very light wood and then rolled through some material that gave her that very temporary but very acne-ish look. I tried to imagine what she might look like without all the little additional detail in her face and what I saw was a very gentle, serious, maybe a bit afraid person with blue eyes, a medium sized nose and barely any lips. Her ears had each several odd earrings pierced through them. It was good to see that she managed to be a bit of a rebell. I saw that she was incredibly thin, so much so that I could not even see what she was wearing, as her body was completely obstructed by a gigantic Duane Reade plastic bag. (DR is a pharmacy chain in New York.) The girl and the boy where whispering to each other, rolling their eyes from time to time. They were probably talking about the two women, who looked like sisters, or a lesbian couple of mothers. One of the women asked the girl for some water and the giant DR bag actually also contained a started bottle of dassani. The women were talking. One of them was now holding on to her new dassani water and the other one was somehow using a straw to sip on what must have been her yoghurt. Both women were maybe blond maybe in their mid thirties... "Look at all the trash!, did you see all that trash there?" The woman with the water pointed out to the girl. We were just going around columbus circle and the touristy four was clearly having their last exciting ride of a packed exciting day. The boy did not even react anymore. "Look, look, all the yellow cabs!" I wondered why this would have been something she would find so exciting this late at night while sitting on the bus. The driver announced the upcoming stop. It sounded like "hyghy hyt hmytt..." "WHAT?" That was the first thing we all heard from the yoghurt sipping lady. The kids were embarrassed. The boy was the only one who answered.. "mom, shh..." "I did not hear what he said, what the hell did he say?" She shouted. "The next stop will be 66th street." I made the mistake to answer, of course. Eight tired touristy eyes looked at me as if I were their dinner. "The next stop will be 66th street.", I repeated. Talking worked with wild animals... maybe tourists could be calmed this way too? The entire bus was now staring at me. The bushmen-sounding people in the back seat went quiet, the man who looked like the illustration of a writer looked at me, somebody in one of the front seats cared enough to turn around and see who I was. Somewhere all the way in the front of the bus was a mirror reflecting the two very angry eyes of a busdriver. It was as if I were the sole creator of these four visitors, as if I had been the ventriloquist who made the yoghurt lady scream. "WE ARE FROM O HI YO." the water lady spelled out the name of her state for me as if I were a little monkey. "In O Hi Yo we have grass," her fingers made a movement that was supposed to show me what she meant with this exotic word, "and gar-dens." No hand movement here. "You guys have none of this here." I was not sure how this was in any way related to what just had happened but clearly the four were now expecting a fun and witty answer. "Well, we have that here too. I promise." (Okay, that was really lame.) They stared. "If you have time, you should take the A train to 190th street and take a walk towards the cloisters." I really surprised myself how I dared to suggest something so unexpected and incredibly complicated to these people. The writer guy from the front of the bus looked at me as if I had just sent these four gentle souls into certain death in a piranha pond. "A CLOister?" Something was not quite right with the yoghurt lady. "Yes, Rockefeller build this cloister in trenton Park, in the north part of Manhattan. It looks as if it were a real medieval structure, but it is not... it is really a nice and quiet place with gardens... It is a satellite of the Metropolitan... mu..se...hmm..." It was as if I could see all of my words flying out of my mouth and straight over their heads and then bursting into little pieces on the bus window behind them. The writer guy hated me so very much right now. "Like a medieval FAIR? That is so cool. We have one of those in our town and it is SOO COOL. It is like knights and horses and..." That yoghurt that lady was having was some very quickly spinning stuff... "Are you from New York?" The lady with the water bottle reacted to the part of my description she managed to remember. I told her that I was not born here, but that I had lived here for a while now. (I did not want to use the term "New Yorker" at this point of the embarrassment as I did not want the writer guy to throw something else at me, beyond his continuos lethal stare.) "have you ever been to Ohio?" (She said it as if Ohio were the other 99% of the country.) I lied that I had never been there, but that I was not even sure, as I had crossed the country more than once. (Which was not a lie.) "That sounds like an adventure. We are here for adventure. And we want to show the kids New York. We are going to show them Liberty tomorrow." The waterlady liked the sound of the word adventure. She made it sound as if the word were a description of itself. "Do you have kids?" The yoghurt lady tore off the lid of her yoghurt cup, pulled out a giant bottle of Bud and refilled the little plastic container that then immediately went back to looking like an innocent little health drink with a straw. I did not even get to answer... she continued. "Kids steal the BEST YEARS out of yer life. They just STEAL the best years. And it doesn't even matter if they are yours or not. Even when you just adopt them. Even then. Kids just really mess it all up." (She used a different word for mess.) The kids had obviously heard this one before, and clearly more than once. "We came here to show the kids something. We both have been here before once. That was in 1998. Back then we were just like two dumb girls on the town. We had a lot of fun. So now we are back. My son is 15 and her daughter is gonne turn 13 on Saturday..." "Tomorrow..." whispered the girl from behind the bag, staring at the floor. "I'm telling you. Kids just take out the fun of it all. They tear out the best years of yer life." I was supposed to answer now. I was supposed to lift my imaginary glass, and shout something back as a toast. It felt as if the floor were littered with carnage. The bus felt like a deep pit filled with some smelly psycho carnage. "Well, haven't we all been children at some point in out lives?" (I really wasn't able to give any better answer..." "Next stoh heghenhy nigh hthreet." Said the bus driver. "Next stop seventy night street," I said to the kids. I found out that the Ohio-four were returning to their hotel on 94th street. I offered them to just leave the bus with me and not worry so much about missing their stop. The boy mentioned something about "many" and "streets"... I saw all the beautiful places that usually made the ride home so pleasant, pass by in the window behind him, unnoticed. The writer, in his black suit and white shirt, left the bus on 86th street. He adjusted his large black glasses and looked at me as if he wanted to let me know that he was far from finished with me. I made sure not to miss "our" stop on 93rd street, a block away from the Ohian's hotel. The kids managed to convince their mothers that it was okay to leave the bus with me, as I would probably not really mug them. The more sober mother was holding on to a piece of paper:"96th street, 96th Street..." It was clearly a set of instructions given by a hotel clerk who wanted to make things as simple as possible for himself. It took a few seconds until they realized that they were in fact where they were supposed to be... and so they thanked God... well, the sober mother did, rather loudly. I waved to the kids. "How do you?... " I did not finish this one... "Enjoy New York!, Enjoy your stay. And Happy Birthday." I said... The girls face now looked like a carved apology for the moments on the bus. I passed the shoe shine guy walking back to his station. He was out of character and so he ignored my greeting. The one legged lady in the pink nike suit was still trying to get some money into her cup. The Cuban Chinese place behind her was closed for the night. The lobsters in the tank had to wait yet another day for their death. A conservative looking guy in a yarmulke stepped into the elevator with me and asked me to press the button for his floor. He was clearly breaking several rules of his very openly displayed religion by doing so. And so he became the first one of my Jewish neighbors I ever asked if he felt that his request was "legal." (I did not want to use "kosher"; I am just a goy, not his rabbi.) "It is legal enough for me," he said, "besides, it's been an awfully long day." I pressed the button, making a little light bulb go on behind the number nine. Once I had stepped out of the elevator, I could see him, out of the corner of my eye, pressing that button, again and again and again... It had been a rather long ride home, for sure.

3: "Wow, look, the sky is so incredibly blue." 1: "I think it is because of that very reflective building over there, see how the sky creates a contrast with the reflection in the glass?" They both look at the moving clouds. The sky looks so blue, it does not even look like sky. 2: (coming from across the building.) "Is somebody jumping? Who is jumping?" 4: "Nobody is jumping. We are just really impressed by the incredibly blue sky." 2: "Oh, that's because the air is so dry. It is very rare that the air is so dry on a summer afternoon in new york... So nobody is jumping, heh?" (out) 3: "The sky is so blue." 1: "It is the wind, the wind is so incredibly strong. It blows away the dust particles and so the air is so clear over the city." 3: "Isn't it amazing how we tend to admire the reasons?... it is very odd how our minds work. We are somehow programmed to find explanations to anything and everything. How interesting that we are destined to make connections, assumptions, conclusions, explanations... I sometimes do not want to think about any explanations." 1: "I still think it is the building. And you are being silly. If we only admired stuff without trying to explain it, we would probably not even be human. And there would definitely be no progress." 3: "I guess..." and across the street, a woman on her cellphone, stood in the window and complained about the dirt in her room. And just a few floors down, maybe on the 6th floor of that hotel that lost some bricks during the winter storms earlier this year, there was an older lady, her back against the glass, her shirt's design perfectly created for just this moment in time. The climax of its existence. Down in the belly of the skyscraper, a man broke up with his girlfriend over the phone, while urinating in the wide stall, not really set up for any of his actions. Several tourist kids bought fake kate spade bags from the man who used to be the fatest runner in his village as a kid, but not after his leg was slashed in an argument with a drunk soldier, who happened to be a kid as well. A bare arm of a lover pulled down the shades, one by one. ConEd workers pulled out a cable from under the asphalt of 50th street, the driver of the truck talked on his walkie-talkie phone to somebody on the other coast. Right next to them, the old toothless woman begged for money or cigarettes. And today she was not alone... No time was wasted here. Not even by those who thought they tried. And above it all. The brilliantly blue sky. (Well, behind the brilliantly white clouds, of course.)

sometimes the skeleton of a drawing is so confusingly strange that it is especially fun to sink the eyes into. Remember the Bruklynn guy? (Click on that "remix" link under the drawing...) Yeah, like that. Whenever I get to draw in Illustrator, it is great to take a look at the skeleton of things, after the drawing is done... Some of the drawings look just somehow interesting... or something... ....

I don�t even know how many times I called the box office to make sure there would be tickets available for tonight's event. Should I just have made the assumption that if none of the people I would like to join me for the lecture could make it, then not many people in the city in general would be able to make it tonight? Seriously, nobody I asked had time to join me. I almost felt, as if I were trying to convince my friends, one by one, to watch my bloodthirsty dog. And it was not even a secret what I was being let go alone for. There were the �meetings�, the rope jumping class, one guy even cancelled on me because he really wanted to finish a conversation he had about a closed envelope in the lobby of the agency. How very sad. It was not until I was in the cab, stuck in traffic going uptown on eight Avenue that I realized that I should have called a completely different set of friends. But it was too late, and I do not have a cell phone... oh well... And I actually somehow imagined that they would have also have heard of the Elliott Erwitt lecture at the Guggenheim. And so I expected to see them there, it would be a small miracle, but they would be there. So many picture takers and posters went to the Photobloggers event at the Apple Store� so at least somebody should make it to the Guggenheim� when I entered the very tastefully decorated room under the Museum, there were maybe thirty or so people waiting for the event. I could have sworn that one of the most prominent online couples was right there in the center� until the little man spoke� and turned out to be a woman. The intimate setting felt perfect for a very friendly conversation. The cream colored chairs were as friendly as the color of the carpet. The circles of the Frank Lloyd Wright design extended all the way to here. Even a shark fin shaped window with nothing but mild light behind it felt perfectly in place. (That strange plastic watch hanging by a rubber band did not...) The little photograph projected onto the screen in front of us was of a little boy in a sailor uniform, underneath it the name: �Elliott Erwitt�. Jennifer Blessing read a short and very well focused introduction, pointing to Erwitt's travels, his connection to Edward Steichen, Robert Capa, Robert Frank... some minor announcements, some volume adjustments and the evening could begin. Elliott Erwitt took the stage. He was clearly not the youngest person in the room, but he was very relaxed, he had brought with him a disarming smile and a very friendly and warm voice. He explained how the picture of the boy in the sailor suit was the most recent flattering photograph of himself he could find. He thanked the audience for showing up� this made me laugh. The lecture was not really a lecture. It was a rather relaxed conversation, a very organically selected slideshow of Erwitt's "hobby" work. The photographer operated his powerbook with true grace, and we went from image to image, from story to story, from sequence of images to sequence of images� there were the occasional background anecdote, sometimes just the image� waiting for the slow audience to find the not really hidden funny point� The laughter would sometimes arrive ten seconds after the slide was turned on... proving to me the slowness of even focussed aperception. Elliott Erwitt appeared as warm and human in person as the world he presented slide after slide. It felt like a great confirmation of that Schoppenhauer statement that we do not really enjoy the world; we enjoy ourselves in it. And so what we saw, image after image, after image, were little pieces of Elliott Erwitt, sometimes taking shape as on screen stars of the 50�s sometimes turning into little dogs, or even people in a nudist colony. No, he was not all these people, but he was the one that turned them from an uninterrupted steam of moments in their lives, into these iconic frames, uncropped, often taken without any knowledge of those in the frame� these were his moments, his people now� and looking at them was as much fun as listening to him telling us about them. And some images were never taken. And the images we saw were taken as part of his hobby. Many were taken between assignments. Many were taken on the way to his studio. It was as if he were showing us drawings he had made on the train and we all imagined that this was his actual work... he smiled when he said that he made his living with photographs that were not shown tonight. Good and inspiring experience, I really wanted to just walk up to the man and thank him� I didn't do that though... There was a line at the end of the lecture, of course. People with their books ready for the signatures, some with just the program, just to have something, anything to get signed� I did not get a signature, or even a handshake... and yet I took with me some of the fun and good advice� Barking at dogs can actually make better pictures. (It got me a good bite in my shin when I tried it as a child.) One should not necessarily refrain from taking a picture because somebody says so. Many interesting pictures were not supposed to be taken. Sometimes it is a good idea to cough while pressing the shutter� sometimes it is not a good idea at all. It is sometimes more difficult to shoot at home� People who sue for being depicted in a particular picture, sometimes are not in it at all. Driving is dangerous for a photographer� It is a really good idea to keep the stuff for years and to keep the copyright� Oh, and Black and White is here to stay� as long as there are those who like to shoot in Black and White� I walked home across the park. There was a bicycle race, the joggers were as unique and as sweaty as usual� The sun had already set, and so the skyline of Midtown was just beginning to become darker and to be punctured by more and more little lights turned by those who had to work overtime. And the park smelled like a freshly watered plant as well. It was all good then and there. I am really glad I went� Oh and I also remember why I was so panicked about getting, or not getting the tickets. It is a barely related story, of course. This one time when I missed a lecture here at the Guggenheim because I found out about it too damn late, was when I was led here by a person with a slightly instable personality� that was years and years ago. Us not getting tickets to the event felt like losing a child in a fire: and I was made the one who had had the water, I was the one who had failed to use it... I was the one responsible for the death of the child... (The only child� the last child to be ever born in this universe...) Those were really cruel times... Going to this nice little lecture under the Guggenheim alone this evening was probably a reward, given to me by the universe. It was remuneration for several hours of horrible, horrible suffering somewhere in 1998� I do feel much better now� Wuff� . (Sorry� just had to do that�) : ) Oh and Elliott Erwitt has a Website... and it is called... Elliott Erwitt dot com and it also is very nice to pay a visit to... really... (p.s. choose "Latin" as your language...) ; )

Maybe twenty or so police cars drove up 8th avenue. And somebody in the street just said "they are going to screw in a light bulb." The rain is not too heavy. The night is not too dark. My face must have looked grim enough for the guy on the corner not to ask me for money but just to wish me a good evening. The window open, the street is half here on the bed with me. the tires make a sound as if they were pulling off a band aid of the asphalt. It is a good time to just call it a day. I will now turn off the lights and imagine what it would be like if I did not know that it is a bus outside or a train, or even that it is raining. What if each one of the sounds were a completely new a very first time event. Will I be able to imagine unshapely gigantic machines? Will the soundtrack call for animals? Maybe there will be some major tectonic movement? Enough for now. Sleep. (as a name. not as a command.)

"Your love of gardening will take on new meaning in your life." Who writes these fortune cookies? This might have been the best one yet. What incredible coincidence that I got to open this one... especially since I have recently been discovering that some of my drawings really are like... growing entities. Their "creation" works from the ground up, not from an overarching, predetermined composition... I mean there are healthy constrains, of course; the drawing is not very likely to end up on my hand or the table, the tiny elements in the drawings are certainly part of my program. But I do not compose most of them. They just grow out of very simple rules; sometimes even less than that. A little piece of information manages to convince me to finally be put onto paper. It mutates into something that actually makes it to paper. Then this piece of information, now outside of me, becomes a word in a dialogue I end up having with the piece. The system needs a lot of steady energy to end up as something that looks like a finished piece to me... but actually... is there a plan?... There are no sketches... And the thoughts are often just slowly counted numbers. One, three, five, seven, three, five... eleven?... and different times and speeds... short, short, loooong... and long and back and long... Our brains are pleased with systems, patterns, programs. Our brains are most pleased with harmonies that are patterns, predictable, recognizable... some easily, some not so... happiness itself often appears nothing more than a riddle that finds its desired solution... happiness rarely comes as a surprise... maybe?... is happiness the answer to a harmonious hope? A pattern? ... but between every two patterns there is an infinite number of the other. Not less bad, just unpredicted, somehow, in some ways... there are universes of non-patterns, or growing things that are overlapping textures of often multidimensional patterns... Ripples in thought and time and yes, space... And it all happens one little tiny mutation at a time... or at a place, or at an idea... And it is a bit like gardening, because we all are gardeners, aren't we? Trying to control what would otherwise be just a wild flow of the universe through us. We are groomed and grooming. We bonsai-train the world around us and ourselves in the world. We turn ourselves it into something we can comprehend and even harvest... I am not sure why, but today feels as if the growth had reached some bizarre critical mass. It feels as if I were standing in an imaginary garden and it is just the beginning of things, the very early morning of a giant push out of the imaginary soil... But it feels as if it is going to make much more sense now... And so that message in the fortune cookie is a good firefly on a warm evening... and it is one of the rare things that makes me smile today. It could also be some strange fluke of a thought that lost its right path and is simply passing through my head....

That spoon of royal jelly in the morning should be a habit, not the last straw when the refrigerator contains nothing else but packets of ketchup, water, some shady looking dressings and, well... that several year old royal jelly jar. My royal jelly looks like ear wax in a plastic jar. It flakes and melts onto the little spoon and really tastes delicious. It probably tastes delicious because it is really time to eat something now. Anything. Whatever happened to those edible packing peanuts? I won a camera. It is a little DV Sony and it is maybe 5 years old. I did not get a tape for it yet, but I was able to zoom around with the zoom button and also to snap some silly candid pictures onto that memory stick thing. I really do not know what I am going to do with this thing. I turned on the night vision function and I looked nothing like Paris Hilton anyway. Good thing. I am a bit afraid of moving pictures. I know very well how to hide things in stills. But movies? Movies are tougher. And they are somehow not as solid, and they eat up sound and such things... I am not sure I am ready. But still... winners should not complain... (Except maybe about some missing cables.) Oh and royal jelly is good. And playing around with Alias sketch leads to rather bizarre returns to scary cuteness... . Please forgive... ; )

Waited on the corner for the seconds to happen and they did, one by one they did, just as promised, they were subtracted from the day one by one, just like that. And nobody noticed. There they went, there they went. The sun spun out of the sky and behind the buildings. And the two women that were very deep in their conversation about "her". Were still in a conversation about "her" (who was a "total bitch", apparently), as they were buying the hair product. The woman with the blonded hair could barely hold on to the conditioner bottle, as she was trying to balance it in one hand, as her other hand was very much wrapped around a giant (venti) cup of coffee. And the security guy stared at the heavy kid looking at spiderman action figures. The security guy was dressed nicely in nylon and crisp colors and with his joystick he remotely controlled the camera over the kid's head. There was one spiderman action figure, then, the other one was apparently not good enough... another one. "You are in charge here." A little man just wanted to become friends with the security guy. "Well, not really in charge..." said the security guy, meaning... "Yes, I am, and I am going to show you how I can use this joystick to spy on kids that might steal action figures." I felt sorry for the security guy. He was powerful and yet he had not been given a chair. I also wondered if I could outrun him. Or what would I do to outrun him? What could I possibly take and run from the pharmacy? Maybe a vibrating razor? That would be exciting. The Vibrating razor might be one of the more exciting inventions of our time. I think the vibrating beer would be nice too. Or the vibrating pants. Well, the vibrating razor can turn anything into a vibrating device. I have not bought one yet. My cashier had serious problems with his back. He made it crack several times while I was looking for the right amount of cash to pay. Oh, and the woman at starbucks maybe made my day by testing the cream dispensers on her hand. They did not work properly. She really made a sweet white mess... Tripple espresso con panna... the brew tastes so horrible, it should probably be just served on the rocks. And I remember the night when the chief copywriter took me down to the fancy bar of the ritz carlton in Atlanta and made me drink some really old drink that had spent most of my life in an oak barrel. And the seconds just keep leaving the day. And I am back in front of this screen, and there is paper in front of me, And there will soon be a pen in my hand. And it will be okay. The day is a good one. And the evening is good too. The cloud on the weather widget looks nothing like the sky outside. I was sent a mail today that was an insult from the first word to the last. But I also received several mails that were just beautiful and kind. And so each second counts. (and why are they even called seconds?... why not "firsts", or "lasts"?)...

It is barely nine and there is a giant weight attached to the inside of my head and so I will just let it rest in a few minutes, just put my head onto a pillow and stare at the bands of light trying to catch each other on the ceiling. They amplify each other, then not... no they always do. The day was spent in a cool room, with the shades drawn, working on "smarter", "better", "faster" things... tiny little things. important. It was for the first time yesterday that I discovered other bluetooth users on the train. It was really silly. They looked so sad (i think pathetic is the word... or is it lost?), holding on to their little devices, poking at them with their little thin pens, after having given them really silly names (which I don't remember). I wanted to send them both pictures... maybe some pelicans?, some pictures of the outside? Or how about the inside of the train... freaky? I then decided against it... we had reached my stop anyway... and yet... would this had been considered toothing? When will somebody enter a subway train car and play a little song on their handheld device and tell us all that he is without work and homeless and hungry... and then give us his email address, so we can paypal him some cash, right there, right then. And many will. I got lost in the train station yesterday. It is a big station. I had taken this particular exit out of the train for the first time... It took minutes and I was somehow... lost. It was not that alarming being lost; not the kind of lost that would make me cry and call my mom (remember what it was like? when we were... three?). It was a strange surprised walk to places I had never seen before... everything was new and unexplored, but clearly only to me. The floor had the same indentations left by millions of feet, the dirt in the corners was ancient and there were even some tiles here and there, the remnants of the original, much more beautiful old station... it is not anything very surprising really. This is New York after all. I can not have seen all the corners of this city... but still. So I just followed the masses. The masses know where to go. (They all go boldly to Lemming Avenue.) Soon pieces of wall, the floor, the ceiling looked very familiar. Soon there was the street, packed with even larger masses. Then there was a red light. I knew where I was. So now we had to stop. I had a standing place in the front row. A man, maybe in his 60's stepped in front of us waiting for the light to change and he did not even introduce himself, he went right to the meat of his 2 minute speech, freshly recited for a very patient two minute audience. "God sent his son, to die for our sins..." He was just inches away from my face. I could see the embroidered hebrew on his silky scarf. (Jews for Jesus?) I could see the wrinkles in his face and they whispered, that this, my friends, was not a happy man. I just stepped forward, I stepped right into him and through him. I used him as a private gate. It did not hurt. It just happened... easy... Well, I did not really do that, but this is what it felt like, when I just stepped forward, as if he were not there at all. He dodged me, this must have happened to him before, did not stop speaking at all, or even slow down, but at least his voice was not directed at me anymore, and so it sounded like a silly memory... charlie brown's teacher was speaking now... not a born again madman. And then the morning unfolded further, nicely, slowly... I wonder how many times per day I am lost. And I wonder how many times per day I am found. And what does it really mean to be lost or found and can the one exist without the other? I guess it can... This little site here is found by some, several hundred times a day... and maybe some are lost... is reading this text for the first time equal being lost or is it more like finding ... what?... Maybe there is a much stronger connection between the two.. the lost and the found... If we are finding ourselves in a new place and we want to be there... then the place is found... and if we find ourselves in the same place, yet without any intention and without a clear way back or forward... and we do not really want to be there... then we are lost?... But the place can be the same? It is just the set of expectations that changes?... We are never lost or ever found we just think we are?... Hmm... I really don't know now... How did I get to this point in this post? I think I am going to hide the day behind my eyelids now. I will dive into the darkness of my simple dreams... and I can only hope that I will be back tomorrow... to just take a good look out of the window... and leave the house and to find myself in a day that I have never seen before. And it is going to be another incredible discovery... Good night.

A very fragile looking jogger with a white plastic bag attached to her left arm just crossed 96th street. She passed by a woman in an aqua colored sari. Both of them moved in a synchronized trott, echoing the long distance clapping of the red hands of the street light. Clap, clap, clap, has replaced the don't walk, don't walk, don't walk. On the island between the landes on broadway, a couple is watching the thin traffic going downtown. I can only see their backs from here, but just the movements of their heads and upper bodies tell so much about their unhappiness... He scans the surroundings now and then, then moves his body-weight over to her and kisses her, on neck, or mouth, or shoulder, or whatever she lets him kiss between the long pulls from her decoratively held cigarette. She now even moved the little white stick to her right hand, to the side where he sits. A few inches of a tabacco stuffed impenetrable barrier for him. The bird like minimal ticks of her large head are a real contrast to his fluid, drunk moves of white shirt and neck. Another man who shares the bench with them just asked the woman for a cigarette, I guess. The "boyfriend" replied, she just pointed the smoking stick at both and turned her head away as if in disgust. A very tiny old woman in a completely pink outfit spent the last five minutes or so pulling herself up the stairs of the 96th street subway station. Her movements looked even older than her, and it was as if she listened to their transmission from a very far away place. Slow is a word too short to describe this incredibly difficult timing of her motion. Two men in matching uniforms marked the concrete pavement of the north west corner with a bright green hose and are now turning it into a shiny, reflective, wet plane. It is time to begin my day as well... though I feel very much reminded of a Franz Kafka quote, which makes me actually want to stay and listen to the subtle vibrations of the explosion unfolding in front of me in relaxed slow motion. "It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet." Or something like that... Good morning....

The little guy watched me for a really good while. And when I came too close, he just let out a really loud chirp and hid his entire body in a crack of a large boulder. I think it was a chipmunk. Tiny guy, with two darker stripes. He watched me out of his stone safety for several minutes. It was a bit surprising to me to see a glimpse of a deer just several hudred yards or so from the George Washington Bridge. I walked closer and closer, whispering promises that I had neither gun nor bow. Suddenly a very loud sound that could have been the break of a large truck went off right next to me. I had not noticed that there was not only one deer there, but apparently two, of maybe the same age. I had come to close to the one I did not even see and he warned the one I saw. Both quickly disappeared in the green of the park. But I waited a little, and eventually their curiosity was stronger than their fear. The guy to the right was the more courageous one, the one to the left was really afraid of me. We kept a good distance. I think the animals were comfortable in my presence. They continued their meal... This lady fed on plants not far from the entrance of the park. She was larger than the two males I had seen before. She was as obviously interested in me as they were. She posed so very well... so calmly... Oh, and then there was this little guy. He let me take pictures of him from a distance of about two to three yards. He watched me and ate and watched me a little more... He was a brave and healthy looking rabbit buddy... I promised all of my models that I would be back with some more professional equipment. They seemed to be quite okay with that.

Broadway looks so very empty this morning. There are even parking spaces available on the freshly rain washed "great white way". We are further uptown, where tourists usually arrive in loud speaking red double decker busses and it is the day after the day of the happily exploding sky and other joyful celebrations. It is monday and it is a workday, but seemingly only for those who do not get wear the very white collars, those that do not even have blue stamps on them. And so the rush to the subway reminds me a bit of the mornings of my childhood in Poland. Groups of men with their eyes glowing from behind what looked like overly dense black mascara, would be returning from the nightshift at the mine. By the time I would be outside, those from the early shift would have already left, quietly, with their freshly prepared sandwiches wrapped into cheap wax paper. They would not only sacrifice the day, just as the nightshift had just sacrifice the night, but sacrifice it in a milder version of hell, tearing out black rocks straight from the soil, thousands of feet below the earth's surface. The people I see going for the subway stop might not be on their way to an underground pit, but their outfits and even the tempo with which they move their variety of bodies somehow makes me know that they did not just wake up in one of the penthouses around here. Or maybe some did. Maybe I am getting it all wrong. Maybe it is just the chirping of sparrows through the thickly gray air mixed with the distant sound of train-wheels on some far and invisible railroad tracks that trigger the memories. I think I will just get out of the house now, and I will walk uptown. Maybe this will somehow clean at least parts of my forehead, which is still glued together to one cushion of sleepy semi-thought. Hello fifth of July.

Happy fourth of July, dear American friends. Today might be a good day to take a good look at This Interesting Document and I think it might be important to read past the first paragraphs. Those who get a little deeper into the text will discover some really exciting stuff, I promise. I wanted to upload some pictures of some flags and other things that would go well with this day today. Unfortunately the backbone of my site here is a bit broken and it looks like I will not be able to upload images for a little while. I do not want to write too much about it, as it is really bad form to go on and on about the guts of one's website... but hey, maybe today is a good day to announce that I am also one of the founding members of something somehow semi historic... Yes, my friends, there this this thing called VC200 and when you look at this page and scroll down to Number 71... yeah... Proof that I paypalled $200... And because the service is for life... I will probably transfer this site over to the other server in the next ten years or so... When I finally was upset enough yesterday to backup all of the text from this portion of the site, and then I opened the site in Word, just to see if I could maybe print the thing and maybe hang it on the wall... the word document, containing all the comments as well, for all fairness, was about 2900 pages strong. I thought that was pretty insane. Those who (for some unexplainable reason) like to return to this site, probably know that a large portion of these pages is completely original content, as I do not have the brainpower to sound really smart and sarcastic about such important things like that Google policies, or iChat bugs or what Flash should have been and yet never will be. I tend to be distracted by silly stuff, like the setting sun, or falling in love with a view. But for thousands of pages? My feeling is that I will never ever get to read this thing again. Much too big of a book. Oh, did I mention that the export did not include a single picture? So again, happy fourth of July, dear American friends. The rest of the world have a happy Sunday. I would like to say so much more right now, but I think I will just take my time... Okay, even if the functionality to upload pictures with a thumbnail is broken, here are some photographs... This guy must be one of the workers at the Chinese restaurant here on 96th street. He is a smoker, and he is also apparently a ballpoint-pen tattoo artist. I really like that flower he is drawing on his forearm. Isn't it beautiful? I wish I had more pictures of this guy. I don't. One thing one might forget very easily it that Streetlights do not only provide, well, light in the evenings, but also a tiny piece of shade during the day. This is not really the theme of the image here, but still an interesting thing to consider. This Lamppost was my very own solar eclipse. Not the best and greatest one. But here I am posting an image of it. Oh, and then there is this picture of the flag, which somehow works in connection with both of the above pictures, I think, somehow, in some ways. Again, have a happy holiday. Don't injure yourself celebrating.

My neck is burning. It will probably turn red as soon as I arrive home, I will be an Upper Westside Redneck. I could be there in 20 minutes. I will probably stay here a little longer, It feels pleasant to keep myself in the shade of this Linden tree. Not only does its bark look like camouflage. The shade from its leaves turns everything around it into camouflage colors as well. It is such a pleasant thought to find myself in the visual microclimate of a living thing. Trees are wild and living, determined, ambitious, focused, brilliant, brainless, but only because they are strong enough and alive enough to not have to escape from predators. I guess if we were all trees, none of us needed a brain really… and we would just create microenvironments and be kind enough to offer those lower, brain driven creatures shelter and food and… well, camouflage. The West Side highway is just a few feet from here. I can hear it almost too well. A police car just drove by. I just imagined two policemen in a speeding limousine, one of them playing with the siren settings. Two intelligent, guided players on their shortest path to preventing somebody from not playing by the rules. A boy is throwing water bombs high in the air, to make them burst on the concrete of the playground. The little water filled balloons look like those old pineapple hand grenades. They are green and have areas of slightly thicker rubber, they are a cute and soft version of those metal studs made to fly through the air propelled by the explosive charge, designed to inflict injuries. Were the boy throwing real grenades, we would all be hit by pieces of steel. The entire family is laughing. Were these real, they would all be bleeding. His two small brothers are incredibly impressed by his amazing skill to throw the balloons high enough in the air so they actually come down with enough speed to burst. The smallest of the boys tries to somehow achieve a similar level of coolness by throwing his bubble gun into the air. The plastic toy hits the ground again and again and I am expecting it to lose some parts. It does not. The little boy finds one of the balloons that failed to burst and he throws it in the air around me... even this toy fails to break when thrown by him. Maybe there is some sort of secret knowledge involved here? Could this boy have the super power of not being able to destroy anything he touches? I imagine him as an older, very unsuccessful superhero. Trying to escape all the things he fails to break. Not far from here, to my right, between the highway, and me two teenagers on swings move back and forth like the pendulums of a biological clock. They move in a synchronized rhythm, seeing each other for seconds at a time, I can only see the girl’s face. I can see how serious she becomes when looking at the boy. I can see how her face is embraced by a smile when she moves beyond the moment of visibility… She is wearing a black top, one that she must have bought some time ago and a long, flowing, light, green dress. The guy is wearing a slacker hat. His t-shirt bulges at his belly, his pants seem several sizes too big. A white shirt is wrapped around his waist and it makes me think he might be one of the more proper Jewish boys of the neighborhood. His face comes with its own camouflage. He might be older than I think. The girl has had enough of the swinging. She slowly gets off the seat and walks towards the water rushing out of the four corners of the center of this concrete covered playground. Her friend follows her quietly... They both stare at a little girl riding her tricycle around the water-sprinklers in nothing but her diaper. It looks as if her older siblings had brought her here. One of her older brothers is using her for his water-gun target practice. She seems to love it more than he does. It looks like shooting at her is just part of this boring afternoon for him. The swings, from which the couple just walked away are now completely refilled with kids. I remember that first time when I found out how to make the swing work. I then also remember the stitched together chin of my cousin, at my grandfather’s funeral. I was told that she had found a way to swing all around the top pole… I imagined her moments of weightlessness. It took me a while to file this story into the drawer of untruths invented by my mother to keep me from making some dangerous mistakes. Some of the scenarios sounded scarier than others. I am sure she would have told me to never speak to a strange looking stranger sitting all by himself by the chess tables of the playground in riverside park. Yes, he would probably be typing on some intriguing looking device, but this whole setup would be just there to lure me in, his car, left with the engine on would be parked just behind the trees. Some security ladies, two of them, in a electric car, are looking at me suspiciously. I am actually glad they at least pretend to care. (The time they spent alone in that "for park employees only" bathroom makes me think they might care more about other things. Make up? I'll keep walking. The chess-table is made out of really cheap concrete, now weathered and old; the little sharp edged stones are cutting into my arms, leaving strange patterns. Yes, they do look oddly familiar in the context of a playground. The teenage couple is still there, though they are done observing the play of the kids in the water. The girl just fixed her glasses. She then fixed her bra in a very awkward way. She moves so much slower than he does. She reached out into the water of the sprinklers and with her wet hand strokes the lower layers of her hair, her neck. He walks ahead... The sun just moved behind a cloud for a few moments. We are all in a patch of a much larger camouflage. I will keep going now… I will be home in probably twenty minutes. My “typewriter” is turned back into a pocket-storyteller and I walk on, more trees, more paths, more patches of shade and direct sunlight… Like very, very, very brief days and nights… Oh, and my neck is not burning anymore. I will probably be just fine. Just had to stop for a moment and look around. Maybe not even that. Should I have just played chess? And lost against myself?..

Uploading of pictures is broken. Maybe it would be interesting is certain other functionality were broken too. In more general terms even. Maybe if I tied the hands behind my back and holding only a pen in my mouth and if I wrote letters this way, maybe this would be a very focussed and slow activity. And things would take forever, and there would be a lot of pain involved and the results would be filled with struggle and yet with attention as well. It might be just the very wrong way to assume that whatever is instant and fast and easy is a good thing. Maybe the things that take forever and are dangerous and can not be achieved by oneself or only by oneself under extraordinary struggle, maybe these things are the true valuables of our lives. Maybe most of the other stuff a bit of a supersized version of brain-nutrient deprived, bloated hull of what pretends to be good for us? I have to think of those works lacquer, which I like to visit now and then, at the Metropolitan Museum... elaborate objects, created with a very poisonous material, an unforgiving material, so very slowly, so packed with intense labour. Is this part of what we admire about them? I sometimes wonder how whatever I am doing here, the visible and the invisible things, would translate, if we used struggle as a factor, to one of those lacquer buddhas at the galleries... would the years spent touching keys of a keyboard and the thousands of times a shutter was pressed, and the miles and miles of lines drawn by pens and brushes... would they result to something? Would they result to something if I had not been given all these amplifiers of our age, like the pens and cameras and computers?... What is the worth of what we are doing here and will the worth of it be ever perceivable to anybody?... And I do not mean monetary worth, because this one is the most deceptive of them all... Maybe the way I am thinking about this is too simple again. Maybe a different angle would be better... For example, if I draw a little circle with one of the drawing tools I have here... the result will be instant... but what if I were without the computer... what if I used some other, simpler tool... what if I did not use a tool at all. No tool. Not even the tool of knowledge of what a circle is? ... Maybe this goes to far... So I can not upload pictures right now... (actually the error message is one that tells me that I can not create thumbnails for images..majick is broken? What might be the problem here?)... So maybe it would be a good exercise to write more for now... maybe even there, to reduce the vocabulary, then maybe try to write only in one tense, from the perspective of one particular person... Maybe this ability to do things quickly is a bit of an illusion... Hmm... what was it I was trying to say?... Or was I trying at all?