August 2008 Archives

with the air conditioning on it sounds as if I were somewhere over the ocean, flying towards a distant place.. perhaps..monday? first class. the bed is soft. the other passengers are not just asleep, their lights are off as well. we are expected to arrive in about seven hours or so. there is going to be a sunrise on our right, then breakfast will be served. hmm... we are actually in constant motion, all of us, in all possible ways. there is no standing still actually. ever. will close the device now. add a title. set the alarm. then perhaps arrive about 5 minutes ahead of schedule. expecting some good entertainment program. trusting the autopilot. cheers.

Different languages hit me in different body parts. When listening to Polish, the language arrives somewhere almost underneath my lungs, maybe a few centimeters below my heart. German kicks me straight in the back of my head. Wonderfully so. English is turning more and more into a diving experience. It is not that the language intrudes me, it is more like I touch my way into its universe. A bit like an almost completely dark room. And I know a bit where the table is, where the sofa is, where the... ouch... what did I just kick here? Some of the other languages I speak or like to listen to work in some other magical ways. Some more pleasant than others. And then there are the dialects. But I like diving these days. Language diving. And with the bubble of understanding shrinking around me, this whole experience is something that makes me smile (sometimes nervously...) now and then. Oh, and it is a bit like diving without my goggles on. But that's okay. At least I know that this is a very approximate experience. Oh, and why doesn't life have opening ceremonies and closing ceremonies and even a medal count (with a variety of interpretations?) It ain't the Olympics. No matter what some think.

so i switched to wind power about two years ago maybe? and it was incredibly easy (took about 15 minutes or so...) and it made me and the environment feel much better. now visitors to green section of yahoo have a chance to see a bit of my story (if the right ad is served.) I hope the ad makes at least one other person switch to wind power. If it is more than one person... even better. Oh, and yes, wind power does come with some higher cost to me, the consumer. In the worst case my electric bill pretty much doubled. It is not that the energy itself is so much more expensive, apparently, but the utility charges a good bit to "deliver" the electricity to me. now obviously the electrons that come out of my outlets are not coming straight from a wind turbine. con edison does not have a special guide that walks the electricity from somewhere in upstate new york all the way to the filaments in my light bulbs. still. there is some cost associated with whatever these guys do. which is okay. the slightly higher cost are making me slowly switch to more energy efficient ways of using electricity because of the way i feel about being directly associated with the generation of wind power. a bit like becoming vegetarian might one make like puppies more, maybe. so just for the psychological benefit's sake, it was very much worth switching.

the watermelons sold around here are of the kind that is much closer to what i used to eat as a child. closer than that other new stuff. or maybe they are not really similar at all. not sure if we had 16 pounders with dark skin back in the day. sugar babies? not sure what the really heavy ones are called. i got one at the bangladesh store right next to 2b-thai on beverly road. it was the last one. no price was listed. some special value was negotiated for me between the owners. the sweetest watermelon of the year. so far. next season i will need to reorganize my "garden" a bit. i am not going to grow large sweet objects, of course. maybe a school of tough spicy plants. or would that be a flock? a field? a few boxes perhaps. i can hear a dog barking in the very background of the background's background. there is a chicken living in a backyard a block away rom here. and yet i live on an avenue designed by olmsted and vaux. a good mix somehow. the now and the here tend to be good places to visit. sweet.

some of the walls at home look like parts of the guggenheim. sometimes before the restoration process. but there is a bit of the desert clay architecture feeling to some of the walls. that melted crust of years of thin layers of heavy metal white. saw the louise bourgeois show at the guggenheim yesterday. and it was beautiful work in a space that somehow had not been made for it. bourgeois' work sometimes needs to be locked into a dark environment, sometimes it needs space to be approached from all sides, explored in stillness. it needs time to whisper or shout. the guggenheim sometimes feels like a parking garage for art, packed with insane masses of people who are itching so badly to take pictures above the permitted level of first floor that i am surprised that few jump. and the light was awesome for that motorcycle show a few years ago. even the matthew barney show with some pieces that appeared to be semi translucent versions of frank lloyd wrights preferred materials somehow fit neatly onto the ramp. the louise bourgeois retrospective felt a bit drained of blood, washed, tilted, sanitized. maybe that's good. maybe this makes lb's work more accessible to all those who never had a chance to come across it... (though, who would that be?) one of the best rooms of the show was actually on the b level, behind the glass door of the education center. here a series of photographs and many of the passports of the artist were on display in a gently curved plexi glass vitrine. and a movie was looped on a hd television, playing for an audience of three to five, perched on tiny folded garden chairs. it was the movie that had been created for a 1983 retrospective, at the moma. it was the movie that maybe focussed too much on the mistress, too much on one particular conflict in lb's life?... yet here it was again... okay, we arrived at the guggenheim on a friday afternoon. fridays are the long evening days at the guggenheim, so the masses were more... massive. perhaps looking at the show was a bit like watching a movie after having read the book. maybe i should not voice an opinion until i get a little deeper than chapter three or so... the guggenheim was selling little pieces of the facade as jewelry. perhaps one day i will be able to melt the paint in my apartment into little soldiers. just like the ones i was not supposed to chew, as heavy and soft and sour as they were.

the insanely wired lemon tree is seemingly doing okay. it used to be a soft stick i turned into an arch using aluminum wire. the pot in which it is sitting is an old discarded wooden bowl, somewhere from south east asia. i drilled a hole into the bottom of it, planted the stick, bent it. it seems to be doing okay. it is not bonsai by any means, there is something beautiful about the little plant though. it has so many leaves now. i will need to remove the wire before the bark begins to embrace it. a tree in a wooden bowl shifting into a new shape somehow suggested by me when it used to be a little stick. after i grew it out of a lemon pit which i fished out of my salad. we have a very odd relationship. the little plant will probably outlive me if things go well. and in about 18 years or so, perhaps the little tree will make new lemons. so now what is going to survive? the tree? i? the idea of the tree? perhaps something else. certainly something else.