December 2005 Archives

there were very many people in the stores today. i bought elements for s fantasy polish sylvester dinner. there will be kapusta and such. i think i still have champagne somewhere in the refrigerator. it is from last year. if it completely sucks, one will be still able to drink some other beverages, i think. the birds discovered that the feeder actually contains food (something the squirrels had figured out in 10 minutes mammals-dinosaurs 1:0). Now they will only have to learn (from that one very good one) how to actually land on the feeder. Right now it looks like a bunch of boys talking about kissing a girl. Everybody knows how to do it, but nobody does it. No, wait, one of them does it. The others are not impressed. The one who actually knows what is going on simply does not say a word (a piep)... hmm... when i was cleaning out the winter flowers out of my living room vase, i noticed that some of the sticks actually started to grow little green branches (miracle alarm) and so i put these candidates and some more sticks into some special water glass. i wanted to use that rooting hormone i had bought a few months ago, but it looked like it actually also can be used to take out entire city blocks (stuff appears to be poisonous, but they don't tell you until you actually read the small print.) grr... So the sticks will have to grow the old fashioned way. In less than an hour there will be 2006 in Europe. I better take a nap now... (i have a very good new place for that,) so I am ready for the calls from my family. They will be shouting. I have to get ready. Oh, dear. : )

So, after a few phone calls on November 7th I was convinced that I should get the Goetz sofa. After one more phone call with Highbrowfurniture.com I was actually getting it. The price that was offered to me over the phone was just much too good not to be accepted. And so the order was placed for a Walnut and Black Leather Goetz Sofa to be created for me. Just like that. Those highbrow folks even gave me free white glove delivery. I mean they are really nice like that. The Sofa was shipped from Herman Miller on the 18th of December I think. And I received a phone call from the Wright Brothers' white glove delivery service on December 28th. The delivery would take place as soon as I wanted. So i got the sofa for the 29th. 9am. Oh, somebody had left a comment on this blog, suggesting that I should have the sofa delivered without legs, which would make it easier to get through my door. Well, it turns out that the legs are actually pretty important pieces of the sofa, because of the shell if the goetz sofa being exposed the way it is, removing the legs would just make the veneer more vulnerable. Herman Miller would actually only deliver a sofa without legs if not only I but some other people signed some document... Hmm... they are serious like that. I got the sofa with legs. Good thing I did. Okay, so on the 29th, a van with three men and the sofa arrived, they were three very friendly men who struggled quite a bit to get the pice of furniture up my 52 steps to the apartment. The door was indeed a bit of a show slow downer, but with the right turn, the sofa arrived in the room and it was placed where is still stands now, as it is the heaviest piece of sofa I have seen. The delivery guys were soon gone and I was left here with finally my Goetz sofa, the sofa which I wanted to buy about a year ago, but which I did not dare to buy for various reasons, and which I in the end ended up buying. What can I say. The sofa is much better than I had imagined. It is also much better than I had remembered. Mark Goetz created an incredibly smart piece of furniture here. He managed to put the piece straight into the Herman Miller tradition and yet he also managed to add some very interesting elements that make the sofa really exceptional. It is a very hefty piece of furniture, and yet it looks really pretty light weight. It is incredibly clean and very elegant and yet it is going to age into a very relaxed inside with a restrained outside (how excellent.) There are no superfluous parts, as far as I can say. In some other sofas I have looked at there are zippers and hooks and some other strange mechanisms to hold the cushions in place. None of these things exist here. There is the outer shell. (It smells like walnut wood, btw.) And then there are the six cushions. That's it. I can take out all the cushions and use them as casual seats around the room and the shell remains a beautiful object, a little soft on the inside, upholstered very cleanly with a dark grey fabric. It works very well as a play area for casual memory games. Or maybe some time spent building castles out of those Eames cards. The cushions are so well crafted, their zippers hiding in especially prepared pockets, it is a joy to put them anywhere in the room. The three seat cushions are about seven inches thick. Inside of them there are layers of foam with very varying levels of softness. The sofa has no springs. The very top layer in the cushions is incredibly soft. The additional layers give enough support for the sofa to feel rather upright. The seat position is at about 17 inches, the seat depth is something like 21 inches. This is, at first, not a sofa into which one sinks into. We all know though, that foam does change its personality over time, and so I am expecting the sofa to be more and more and more comfortable, as I take care of it over the years. The sofa feels like it is really built to last. There are no parts that could start being annoying over the years. The shape is so compatible with other Herman Miller products that I am sure it is going to look just fine (or actually much finer) in several decades time. Am I happy with the purchase? Oh, more than that, I think. This is a really good piece of furniture. This is the good stuff... I think I am going to take a nap now. Oh, and I originally wanted to post many pictures of the sofa, but then I realized that they would be very much pictures of my apartment as well. On a site that does not have an "about me" section... maybe not. And no, nobody is paying me to advertise the sofa or Herman Miller or Mark Goetz and his work. I am just really happy I finally got the sofa I actually wanted. And I did not even expect the positive surprises. (I mean, did Mark Goetz koncept the shell as a play table?) Hmm... okay, I will post one picture. It is from the underside of the sofa. There is a sticker with the signature of the designer, as well as one with the serial number of the sofa as well as the product code. GS100 means Goetz Sofa. OU means Walnut. 258 258 probably means black Herman Miller leather. That's at least what I got here. Oh, and there is also the manufacturing date: 12/13/2005 (that's not so long ago) and the initials of somebody at HM and the serial number... 9398652? maybe?... hmm... will need to take a second look. Yeah. I love it.

Had to climb onto the roof today. It was just very briefly. It does not count as climbing onto the roof. I had with me several feet of steel wire. I attached two ends at strategically very well chosen points. I cut the wire a bit longer than needed, then threw it over the edge. Once back on the fire escape, I attached the ends in a way that created just the right amount of tention. The wires had to cross at a point that would be about two feet away from the glass of the window. This is where I created a special knot. I attached the bird feeder to this particular spot. Three squirrels were staring at me from the roof as I was adjusting the position of the feeder. One squirrel looked up from the fire escape stairs. As I was working on my wired piece, more and more birds gathered on the near by branches. I was being watched by several species. I made a steel wire suspension that will keep away humans too. It looks clearly like a non verbal sign: "This is the home of a psycho-steel-wire-murderer. Stay away, or he is going to turn you into bird food or something worse than that." Oh, and: "Rhaaaaaarrrrggghhhh!" The suspension looks insane. It is version 0.3. I am afraid the wire I selected might eventually begin to rust and need to be replaced. I kept some of the excess wire attached, just in case a further drop in temperature makes the tension on the whole system too strong. (It is a hellava system...) I will probably think about a more elegant solution soon. For now..., for now the feeder is in a place that can not be reached by an intelligent squirrel. At least not by one that would like to live for more than a few more minutes. (=intelligent squirrel = squirrel.) It is amazing how I chose to withdraw food form a mammal, in order to make it available to little airborne dinosaur-like creatures. It does feel a little odd, i somehow crossed that species line perhaps. Maybe if the squirrels had a better variety in their plumage, maybe if they sang beautiful and complex songs. (I think they do both.) Okay, the squirrels still get (got) their food. There was a lot of it available for everyone today. It just was, really. The bird feeder instructions had suggested that once a feeder is positioned it might take something like three weeks for the birds to actually figure it out what was now available to them. Because we are in Bruaklyn, New Yoak, there were birds on my window and fire escape and on the feeder itself about three minutes after I crawled back into my living space. Okay, they were sparrows of various origin, some Juncos. Slate and Dark eyed and what not. These are a bit like flying squirrels, aren't they? Ah, maybe all this does not really matter... Can I say just it again? "Rhhoooooaaarrrggghhhhhhh!" yeah, that felt , hmm, okay. (Can you see him say "thank you, psycho bird feeder man"?)

had to cut off that bird feeder. little squirrel managed to eat about three inches of bird-food. that's a lot, even for a furry non-bird. I will now seriously have to try to somehow outsmart the squirrels. (=mission impossible?) a chain of christmas lights is illuminating my living room (two more chains are still artfully packed into their little boxes, awaiting their deployment into the post holiday nights. Some more stamps were delivered today. Some of them were not even actual stamps. They were the memories of stamps. Transformed into objects enclosed in air tight blisters. I like the word blister. It is so close to blizzard, except completely still. Squirrels are so wickedly smart.

What looked very cute yesterday became a bit spooky today. There was not one cute squirrel on my fire escape but three cute squirrel and the "squirrel proof" bird feeder was everything but that. The famous black squirrel came to visit and really dug for food in all possible and impossible places. Yesterday's squirrel was there too, looking for more. The smallest of the three figured out a way to ride the bird feeder upside down, and to simply pull out as much bird food with its small paw as it happened to want at this particular moment. I felt a bit violated. It felt as if I had thrown off the environmental balance of Park Slope, I felt like a real idiot, outsmarted by three (admittedly smart) rodents with bushy tails. I will now need to find a better way to hang up that other bird feeder. Am I going to put it at the end of a pole which I am then going to rub in with butter? I am not sure yet. The animals today were really rather self confident. I think I am not throwing off anything here. I am just supporting the long supported. One of my favorite entries on "Only Blog Knows Brooklyn actually tells the story of what I think is exactly the black squirrel pictured below. Yes, I gave food to a local animal celebrity. p.s. as I am posting this, the small squirrel is emptying out my bird feeder. About an inch of seeds is gone now. The little buddy uses the landing sticks as handles. It looks cute, but I will have to find some sort of solution for this.

So here I was by the window, blowing my bird whistle, trying to attract the birds on the branches just outside my window to that new feeling place I had hung outside yesterday. Things do not work quite as quickly, of course. I felt as if we had some sort of dialogue going for a little while, but then, then I managed to blow my whistle a bit louder than the bird managed to sing and so they flew away, upset, maybe just really scared. Who knows. (Maybe they just saw that I looked rather crazy.) I stepped outside to see how I could possibly hang up that new super feeder I got for Christmas. It is the color of my first car, I love it, the only problem is that I will have to hang it up in a way so it does not blow out the living room window even if some freakish storm decides to visit brooklyn. Or if a squirrel really wants to prove to me that she is much smarter than dumb humans imagine, well, for that we also need to be prepared. The horizon blue feeder and I. There were three squirrels fighting for territory on one of the trees in the backyard. Their cries sounded almost like baby cries, just a bit more freakish, maybe like a mix of baby and crazy bird? I looked at the possibilites for my feeder attachment. I can either get a special suspension that will attach it to the wall, or i could use the roof... I looked up, leaning out, stepping onto my fire escape... and there is was, a short "hey there"... okay it was a bit of a squeak maybe... a squirrel wanted to help me hang up anything in any way related to squirrel food. I almost stepped on that buddy. Well, not really. we were a good foot or so apart. I crawled back inside and went to get the camera. In the meantime, buddy found some seeds and things in my herb box. (Not that kind of herb, silly.) I had left some seeds there, maybe some other leftovers. (Just dropping seeds into soil makes for a good experimental garden, believe me.) I eventually closed the window. Buddy was really incredibly close. The reflection in the eye is actually my living room window. I can almost see myself in there. We were maybe 10 inches from each other. I was too nervous to get a real camera. I would not have been able to share these pictures anyway, I guess. Hmm, maybe next time. I have a very strong feeling there is going to be a next time. : )

Hmm, This article in the New York Times which I found by reading this post on the Gothamist reminded me of the very short and shy encounter I had with Rapunzel, the Sumatran Rhino in the Bronx Zoo a few years ago. It felt like she was an amazing animal, so incredibly sad and shy and gentle. It was incredible how clear it was to me that she was more than aware of her surroundings and the visitors and somehow the entire situation. No matter if she actually was or not, (to anthropologize an animal comes very close to saying that we were all created by an old man not so long ago, these days...), but it was an incredible encounter. Hmm, I guess we sometimes forget how much intelligence is inside of other species. Some of them just manage to let us know better. Ah, I am not sure what I am talking about. It is early and late and very confusing right this minute. And maybe this is perfectly okay this way. Help the Sumatran Rhinos.

"so did you write about a squirrel today?" "I would not write about a squirrel really, it would be more as if the squirrel wrote about me." It took one and a half hours to get into the city this morning. the streets were not half bad, there was room enough for many cars with four passengers in them. many people were just walking across the bridge. many with bicycles. It took about three hours to get back to Brooklyn this evening. It was a really great ride. This is a really large city when you think about it. It is even bigger if you don't. a package with photography books arrived today. i can not say what they were because some of them are not for me. the better ones are not for me. i am giving away strange things this season. what did i do before there was itunes? did i let design seduce me in record stores? now i am being seduced by 30 second snippets and glances of memories of songs i used to listen to on a walkman some years ago. okay, maybe more than a decade now. audioscrobble all the way. so what about the squirrel? It had nothing to write about today.

there were tiny salt crystals on the dark red surface of the thin slices of slowly drying westphalian ham, arranged in arcs, as if they were the rings on an ancient cut down tree trunk. they were actually the marks left by the blade that cut through the tissue which now began to have the familiar taste of freshly sucked blood, that blood at the stage just before it turns from cooled off lumps to blood rocks. No matter how much work and time and chemistry went into covering up the taste of killed animal, it was all still there. Clearly a very powerful drug for any hunter, gatherer, or anything in between. On a brighter note, I exposed the tiniest of plants to that sliver of bright sunlight that traveled over the bedroom floor. I also finally setup a more grownup wireless network. One that uses a mother-ship and a baby express. I gave both very unimaginative names. As I was cleaning up things I noticed that somebody called heather had been using my network. That Japanese gentleman who was connected to my iTunes library the other day also is unknown to me. I have the best blue blanket in the world. It makes me so perfectly warm I want to write a thank you letter to the little blue goats who gave their softest for it. And then there is a tiny little pig in my life as well now. It can turn its head, it wants to eat money and once it is full, we will convert the content of its belly into a new package of insanely thinly sliced westphalian ham. I will be vegetarian again. For now I will go and lick some stamps.

Let's just hope nobody gets hurt. Let's just hope there will be no injuries. There was no such thing as telecommuting last time the city was hit by a Subway shutdown. Now I can write this here (whatever "this here" is) and publish it worldwide without having to walk anywhere, take any transportation, even be attached to any physical cable that would connect me to anything. Today is going to be a test for those who are able to telecommute. And most hurt will be those who rely on the very affordable trains to get to work and who's work really requires their physical presence. Many of them are not the best paid people in this city, I think? Were this Poland 1981, the entire country would probably shut down to show solidarity with the WTU workers. We would probably be in the 3rd week of strikes now, with electricity down and water only available for a few. Hmm, but Poland 1981 was a very different place. (And Poland 1981 was the place we fled.) It is too early in the morning to write a coherent post. I hope nobody gets hurt. I hope good things come from this. Somehow. (And I think some will.)

what would jesus do? he would be upstairs for three years already and working feverishly with a team of ghost writers on his latest book. Or something like that.

It is just so incredibly fascinating to listen in on other people's conversations. They are such various kinds of conversations too. It is so tempting, so tempting to eat slowly at lunch and to follow that fascinating stuff. The tables are much closer to each other here in New York and when one picks the right restaurant, at the right time, the exchanges at the neighboring table can be quite entertaining. I recently learned that the semiconductor market was about to rise by about 20%. Then at another table, somebody was discussing that big announcement being finalized, about that very important new development for Lehman Brothers. One girlfriend was happy for another, as she had finally found the right man who managed to fullfil her various sexual desires. There were many, now all fulfilled. His wife liked that stuff as much. Things were going really well there, especially when all three of them were in the same bed, or so she felt. At a different table, a daughter recently asked her father if it was okay for fish to swim motionlessly on the surface of the water. An assistant in a different restaurant complained to her girlfriend that her boss was really strict about a gift policy and required all gifts from a vendor to be returned. Needless to say, our storyteller managed to eat all the chocolate and bypass the policy. One of the best conversations was that one recently in a midtown restaurant, there were two men, their accents somehow foreign, their knowledge of literature really beyond anything I will ever achieve. The lunch was a friendly testing of the waters. The gentleman with the French accent ended up paying. I though that the man with the other accent was the person out of town, but he mentioned NYU several times. Now that's certainly here. But he might have travelled. The conversation had started innocently enough. It was about books and articles and papers. Names were exchanged like soft strokes on cheeks between lovers. This man liked this name, the other one admired the third. The conversation felt a bit like a dance, a slow one, the bodies not moving. They were talking about books and soon they were talking about those who write them. There was a man who had written a great novel in the 30's and has since only given lectures on time as river and life as a clearly temporary dream. Then there was that Brazilian writer who was very interesting, who's wife however was a really serious piece of work. The story started with the couple coming over from Rio on a first class flight, and staying in an NYU apartment overlooking Washington Square Park. They must have arrived on a Friday, as the wife called our man with the unknown accent on Sunday at midnight, requesting a cleaning service for her husband's underwear. He had only brought two pairs of briefs, now both were soiled, he did not want to leave the apartment and she certainly was not going to wash his things. A maid had to be hired to wash this man's underwear. On a Sunday. Perhaps. The stories went further and further. The man with the unknown accent apparently must have been quite attractive when younger, as this one pianist had performed an entire concerto in Carnegie Hall, staring at him only. A very interesting picture somehow. Oh, the special times. Then the conversation turned to the baron. Intellectuals, so continued the conversation, hated to meet other people, as social gatherings were more than a waste of time, they were seen as hurtful to the fragile creative process. Enter the baron. He knew that the only way to attract the best people was not to actually organize anything, but to simply have an open house. And so the great minds would just some over to watch the news together, very casually, while he, dressed up in various robes or dresses, would treat them as if they were his naughty, naughty little pets. He knew all about them. He was powerful and eccentric. His wife was a great collector of photographs. Oh, and he was so very brutal to his lovers. He was a bit of a sadist really. Something the man with the unknown accent seemed to actually enjoy. He did not like that the baron tossed one of his boy toys aside, once he had found out that the young man had aids. The tossing happened too late, so it seemed. The baron eventually died of the disease. Oh, but the time spent with him early on in Bruxelles was oh so enjoyable. The man with the perhaps French accent seemed to agree. The time spent with the Baron in Bruxelles was indeed wonderful. And so the two men discovered, right at the table next to me, that they had had relationships to the same influential Baron Phillippe in Bruxelles. Both seemed to have had a wonderful time. His anorexic daughter was also an interesting character, both men agreed. She had been sent to a boot camp in the States, where she would be forced to eat, more than that, they stuffed her like a goose. Upon her return to Bruxelles, she organized a great party for all of her friends. Shortly after the party, apparently a good bye party, she committed suicide. Oh, yes, a party, the conversation then continued, there was one coming up, a New Yorker party. It looked like only one of the gentlemen was invited, even though he had written maybe ten or so pieces for the magazine. The man with the French accent went on to tell what he seemed to feel was a very impressive story of his boss having to gather 26 million dollars for their institution every year. This hunt for money somehow turned him into a very particular kind of a machine. Having to ask for more than 70 thousand dollars every day of the year somehow must have a very particular influence on a man. The cheque was picked up by the man who's boss needed to rise large amounts of money and who had met the baron through his family as a young and innocent boy. The other gentleman was very thankful. He was a writer, certainly, at least this was what he managed to imply. Had I known more about the field entered by the two characters, I could perhaps follow the literary trails of their conversation. I have not only no good knowledge of international literature but also a pathetic memory for names. And so I was left with a small forest of images. The forces, the dirt, the strange hidden experiences of people long dead. I saw the pianist look from the stage, I saw the wife of the writer talk about the soiled underwear, the daughter force-fed somewhere in a block cabin in upstate new york. There was the wife of the baron, her photography collection. There was their living room the walls covered in large images resembling a forest. The baron making dirty jokes about his wife in her absence. The jokes being trapped in French (which I do not understand.) There was the writer, whom both of the men were thinking of as a pathetic figure, who spent the rest of his life talking about life as a dream, and time as a river... and maybe this cliche was a bit of a key to their conversation and my being there. I was no more to them than a dead dog by their river. To me they were two strange birds, discussing the life of dolphins. They might have seen some, somewhere, but what did they really know about the depths of the depths of the sea? Oh, and it is morally inexcusable to listen in on other people's conversations. Unless I do it. Then it is legal and noble and good. Had I not listened, we would have all missed a somehow important pieces of nameless arrangements of stories about people we do not know. Stuff like that is what saves lives, I hear. For years now. Tomorrow we will talk about the beauty and importance of stealing.

The pepper in my window looks like a lantern left on from a holiday that has yet to be invented. The lime tree will probably start its own religion, as it has been dead several times and back among the living, so far–more often than the other way around. The Jade mother tree is currently hibernating, while the three children are growing like weeds, just behind that grey curtain I hung up to finally get rid of the kitchen. (At least visually.) That other plant I had once salvaged from the office when it was just six limp leaves is now an angry territorial explorer, sinking its air roots into any piece of soil it can find. Oh, and then there is that dry pot with a bunch of seeds in it. Let's see who is going to win here. Now that was just what is going on on the inside. The outside is just worse then that, and the squirrels have not been visiting perhaps because they do not like some of the herbs growing there. Nothing illegal or dangerous, just the regular kitchen variety, now under a blanket of ice that used to be snow. Ready to be plain old water again. There are some microscopic plants living off that orange spot in my office. I will probably need to get up on a chair and lick the ceiling. I will probably need to lick it softly, so the whole led paint cover does not fall on my face. Maybe there should be no licking at all. Office or not. My face actually almost fell off today, as the wind was getting under my skin somewhere between first street and union, sometime on the way to the train. I only realized that I was doing something incredibly illegal as I stood by the car door, with my coffee in one hand and a muffin in the other. Aren't beverages now prohibited on the subway? Or was it food? Or was it just switching cars while the train ain't in the station? It pretty much looks like my gardens are out of hand and the weather has turned for the worse and some of the new underground rules are not quite clear (yet). But as far as happiness levels go. Now is the time to light the candles. Beautiful season we have here. Languagebeginswhereitends. Rockin'

I was given a little gift at lunch today. It was at the restaurant where I tend to finish all my meals. It was a little book about sushi. So very nice. It came in a little envelope with a bow on it. I was told that it was a gift for me because I was special. I felt most wonderful receiving it. I carried it in front of me for a while, as if it were a magical object looking for objects just like it. It pulled me into a church. It was the same church who's bells (the Glockenspiel) recently played "There's no business like show business." I am not kidding. It is the St. Malachy church, the one for actors who work on Broadway and so it does make sense. But what does this really imply when the bells of a church play this song? I do not know a short answer to this. I will now step out into the snow again. It is time again to spend about an hour underground. Life is so incredibly beautiful. It could not be that way if it lasted forever. Or maybe it actually does. Yes, it does. The signs of the bigger picture certainly point to that.

When you stare into darkness, it does stare back into you and when you walk through a field of flowers, not only do you enter the field, but the field will enter you, in some way, somehow, it will and it is going to change something about you. This poor man on the train today could not hold himself together too well, and so the smell of urin was spread around the car, pushed out by something new coming out of him. and he happened to sit right under a "12 year" whisky ad which featured a beautiful photograph of a glass half filled with that beautiful stuff, slightly yellowish from the oak barrels it had rested in for longer than some of the people on the train have been alive. and the line read something like "may your workweek be as smooth" and next to it was the same glass, with the same yellowish substance and there were ice cubes in this one, they were perfect ice cubes, like the one peter saville would have picked for a new order cover, and a tiny script underneath suggested that one should enjoy quality in moderation. I switched cars. The new and legal way. I left through the door and I re-entered through the door. In the station. While the train was in the station. Stopped. Relative speed zero miles per hour. it is very cold today. well, it is not really cold. it is just colder than one likes it when walking down the avenue towards a train or when one has to walk crosstown to get to another building, far away from home. Other than that, it is just perfect. It is as cool as it should be. And we are waiting for the snow to come and make the air so freshly crisply clean again. Make the air like what it must feel like for a sardine to breathe while rushing towards that other sardine and escaping from the sardine behind it, somewhere around the cooler waters of the ocean. And when the giant wave comes, the sardines breathing fresh water barely notice it, no matter how destructive it might become once it hits that unprepared shore. walking through the field of flowers, together with the other sardines who enjoy quality in moderation, one does not feel the change as much. And staring into darkness together is still very much messing up the sardine brains, even if it really does not feel too bad. Even on a cold cold day.

Annie Leibovitz was talking to someone in front of the building yesterday. She looked like a very wise human being, transported here from a very special age, a different age, one where most people spoke about ideas. Not other people. I hear Yoko did not want to drop her pants for Annie, and so only John did, and so on. We know that picture. John drops pants for everyone in and outside of the picture. Imagine all the people did that. Well, a part of the population, I mean. Does this make sense? I have seen many angry drivers in the streets around here recently. And there have been near misses in person to person encounters on the sidewalk as well. Somebody nearly hit my temple with their cane yesterday. A bag was pushed into my face. Track work on the B line would need a bit of an overhaul. I made a small animal sound when leaving the house today. There is a cat-dog roaming around as if we had not stated the species count loudly enough last time. Evolution? Intelligent design at work? What makes us think that progress has magically stopped once we realized that we have ourselves to talk about? Isn't yellowstone still a giant magma bubble? Aren't we in the process of being part of something that will turn the microbes we live for into something much greater anyway? And I somehow do not understand some museums and their illusion to be less ephemeral than a very well refrigerated mountain side or a swamp, or a dried out corner of a man made cave. If I had one person to fire today. It would be myself. I will now take my pen again and start creating some cat-dog-like creatures. I am apparently even less good at doing anything else. Though then again, there might be some thinking needed to define what "good" is. But that, seriously, is a much bigger question than most of the other questions. It is right up there with the one if it even makes sense to ask questions. Maybe not dropping your pants for Annie, can be that little thing that saves your life. Yoko could say that, no? I mean really.

there is snow on the ground here. the frozen water kind. things are beautifully quiet. i looked into the belly of my camera on the train and it felt as if the pictures had been taken in a completely different world. and they had been. my memories are still somehow scattered and i will need to spend some time in a very simple room to gather some of them so they can be turned into something even i can read. one thing that made me worry a bit at art basel miami beach was the exuberance and the hunger of the visiting crowd. some of the work available for sale was really bad. some of the work available for sale was a clear rip off of good ideas which have been had in a different place by other people. contemporaries, some not very old. that was the scary part. really. if it was enough to say "and he worked with a real architect" or "he went to a real military basis to do this" to let somebody run to get some cash... ("I don't actually care how you get the money. i am sure there is an atm somewhere near here, people have been coming back to me with cash for the last few days.") well, maybe we should be a bit concerned there... a tiny bit. well... if a bubble is about to burst... (which according to some sources is not supposed to happen for a year or so... While others just notice that there is some serious demand...) well, if the bubble is about to burst... then things will be a little sad for some... while others will probably not be very hurt... Let's just hope that those who will not get very hurt are going to be the ones who worked hard for whatever they have achieved. Or is that some outrageous thinking on my side? It probably is. (Still remembering that:"Honey, we just made three million dollars..." snippet of a conversation... which might have very well continued in "and so you are a loser and i am going home with jack." You never know, right? well, I certainly don't.)

The main event was probably as big and as intense as expected. Maybe about as much. What turned out to be truly exhausting were the other, additional events surrounding art basel miami beach. scope was a bit of an art pushing location. some of the visitors were somehow driven by factors not even good for the artists represented here. some of the gallerists were a bit near a fine line one would not like to cross when dealing with art. Some of the art finally was also in the proximity of some lines... (And I will explain later) AQUA, a show just a few blocks away and across collins avenue turned out to be a really excellent place to discover some quite good new work and some quite good new artists, as well some freshly created work by some o the old favorites. If one arrived in Miami Beach tomorrow and wanted to see something good, I would definitely recommend a look at the Aqua Hotel and the nice selection of galleries there. It was the greatest pleasant surprise of the ABMB2005 festivities... Oh, and what was that idea with the containers? (Too tired to write anything more now. )

completely burned out now somehow. so much to see. will perhaps need to get some of those heavy brown glasses. venus looks so beautiful in the superbly clear sky. the wind is calmer than calm. thank you.

Maybe it would be a good challenge to write about a giant event without the mentioning of any names. I could maybe not even saywha the event was about or where it was? This could perhaps be a good challenge. It is very easy to describe an event that so heavily depends on personal brands by just dropping names. One could just drop names and then the names attached to the names and then the names of tose attached to these. This would create a nice list, one could fill the name buckets with the right knowledge about the names, one could use a search engine to look for pictures, stories, all that.
Imagine a large iterior, the ceiling painted in a dark bueish grey, the floor covered with a relatively shiny concrete floor. Pour in the idea of carboard walls. Some of them arranged in open, some arranged in closed shapes. The light has a buzzing quality to it. There are objects everywhere. They are various objects. They are very admired objects. They are objects that are admired because they are told to have experienced love. Some of them might have experienced love. Some experienced more love than others. The love some of them experienced seems to have been some better kind of love than the one experienced by others. I
f the amount of attention stored in the objects distributed in the large room were able to create differences in air pressure, there would certainly be a windy corner here and there. Some of the objects were here for the first time. Some of the objects have been around the block many times. Some of the objects were large and heavy. Some were so light and fragile, one had to ask how these things could have possibly have made it here. And what would happen to them afterwards? H
mm, now imagine that the large room would not only contain this strange light, the odd walls and the very various kind of curious objects. T
here would also be a very large group of people in the same room. And they would look at the light and the walls and the objects and they would have different thoughts and the th

One of the things one should not write about is about the tools one uses to write. Is this one of the golden rules of blogging? B
ut the tools are fascinating sometimes. I am writing this on a very small device, and the keyboard I am using is not attached to anything. The small device has no hard drive, it has no real spell checker (at least not in this blogging software) and the keyboard decides to capitalize certain letters now and then, just for fun. M
Y screen is to tiny, I can pretty much see only one sentence at a time, and so the experience is a rather intimate one. ANd the writing is probably very odd. I will laugh about all this here, once I return to the larger tools. RIght now the feeling is of a secret transmission to a very close friend, someone trapped inside of a tiny box, somewhere on a very far away island. M
Aybe I will take a picture of the setup later. MAybe not. (That random capitalization is getting on my nerves.)... I
t is getting a little late. I ThInK It Is TiMe To JuSt TuRn ThIs LiTtLe BuDdY OfF. : )

and no, I do not know who and how is controlling whom here. And it is on paper and it is not large and it is ink and soot and silver paint and many other paints, hidden... and ball point pen... and the drawing frustrated me for several days... until i realized that both were equally important... hmm... okay...