Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: berlin, breaching the vortex, columbia, cortex, dead time, dispatchwork, dubai, eminent domain, flipper, gentrification, ghost of petrodollar bubble past, hardcore, jan vormann, occupation, open the gate, punk, the future
The picture above is from the Berlin that I won’t be revisiting in June – I think it’s from the alleyway/courtyard leading to Central Kino? Couldn’t agree/hope for more perhaps – capitalism is pretty much ‘civilised cannibalism’ anyways. Ditto with ecocide – I have issues with the “Earth-my-mother” vibe – but it seems that hyperconsumption and death-by fossil fuels looks a bit cannibalistic? And sorcery – I don’t remember where from but Paul Bohannon has opined that “men attain power by consuming the substance of others”. (For a desktop sticky note tells me so – I sense my life would implode slightly if the program ever crumbles). I’ve been thinking a lot about magic/sorcery and links to power and art lately following a recent final (and via Zerzan’s ‘Case Against Art’ – hopefully not the beginning of an awkward green-team foray) – more on this later perhaps. Also from Berlin though, this time to patch up the gaps of the past (not that the vortex hasn’t been breached already) is this lego brick project I’m really digging:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dubai, karama, anthropology, brownbook, headspace, summer, future gutter status, uae, ghost of petrodollar bubble past, dead time, evan collisson, estrangement, expat anxiety, deira, skateboarding
Dubai again and a strange affection for a city that I guess is my home, little as it does want me here. Jobs here seem impossible at first hunt, perhaps I should look to skip and dip on standby tickets for the next two months? I will definitely be in Cairo (and not Berlin) for a fortnight sandwiched in June, and Kashmir/Mumbai for the first 2-3 weeks of July. Hopefully finding an affordable (!) sublet in NYC for August and couchsurfing for the last dredges of July til I can inshallah move in. My life is currently packed into six boxes in the radio station – I fascinatingly had five last year and four the year before. I suspect the number could go down though as I have scores of books to disperse (like theory, like cats) into the atmosphere, and several boxes lined with wake-up-an-hour-before-kickout-time dump and run panic. [you can't go home again..]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, cotton candy, dallas/fort worth, dead time, esther watson, garbage, iceland, par and weace, texas, the future, ufos
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Esther Pearl Watson’s work is pretty and makes me happy, or rather, momentarily peaceful which is maybe the same thing. And makes me want to write in shorter, crayola friendly sentences. She could be a list of words for an aesthetic that’s a little out of reach, maybe because it’s in her remembered Texas past. Or maybe because it’s hovering in soft pink in the sky, like an extraterrestrial version of the chewing gum sculptures. I am not very good at short sentences. But reimagine your standard chalky woodcuts and bikes and whole worlds and roofs and probably gnarled trees with cactuslike flowers (bright and bloomy not prickly, that is), or maybe cannibalistic orchids and hearts and fists and revolutionary love and rage and etc. (There’s something a bit off about that though. Maybe it’s the overly exotic flowers or the absence of lined faced dignity (I think we are post and not humanity here though, because it still holds rusting industrial corsets?) |
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anarchist bookfair, anthropology, ☭☭☭, cat party, catastrophe, dead time, dissemination, dubai, expat crisis, future gutter status, headspace, listen trotskyist, new school, situationism, summer
“I sometimes think I envy those people who know where they belong;
writers who have a language and a history that is granted them with no catches, no hooks. Theirs for the taking. Along with a nation of willing accomplices, compatriots who see their own fate and that of their nation’s history and literary tradition reflected in the mirror the writer’s labour. It is all so neatly sewn up. Of course, I enjoy no such privilege. I belong to that nomad tribe, the great unwashed, those people born in the joins between continental shelves, in the unclaimed interstices between time zones, strung across latitudes. A tribe of no fixed locus, the homeless, the stateless. I have two passports and quite a variety of other documents to identify me, all of which tell the world where I have been, but not who I am, nor where I am going to…
A petrodollar summer?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: fashion, headspace, future gutter status, film, rags, 1990s, as if, rage against the machine, rnc 2008, dead time
The last few weeks have been kind of strange, kind of characterised by a weird pre-apocalyptic silence (that has nothing to do with election hyperventilation). Sleeping every three days, and when I do sleep, missing whole days. I have been semi-repulsed by fashion over the last near-year or so yet I find my self drawn to it and everything visually embodiable lately. And maybe mostly, the 1990s and the films, and fashion that went with it (and I suspect there’s so so much I’m missing).
Things I remember like plaids around the waist and docs and small-print florals and dungarees and neon sneakers and dark lipstick on coffee cups (I’m becoming my mother) and really really wanting to be a riot grrrl. And things I don’t like the ubersleek gorgeously clean minimalism of the early side of the decade. Of course it’s retrospective nostalgia, but didn’t things seem mad fun? Like this Amy Grant video (the hat!), and remembered slushies, astroturf, pink bougainvillea and little-kid fashion shows in somebody’s Jumeirah back garden. I really miss Dubai right now, or at least its more-is-more excesses, maybe it’s the same thing.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, dead time, future gutter status, hasisi park, headspace, south korea, tss
What if you wake up to find that dictionaries have been revised
And the revolution is only a thought in what you think is your head?
There’s something faintly comforting about these Hasisi Park photos, like the exoticising/legitimising fluid motion of putting cumin or cardamom milk in your tea instead. I don’t care to much some of h(ir?) work, which mines the same extra-grainy scummy hpster aesthetic that I love to hate to love. These I do like though; perhaps I need more flowers and porcelain dolls in my life (maybe Fran has this last part covered?).
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Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: arabic, dead time, future gutter status, headspace, larkin, summer
I am unsure of who this man is or what it is that he’s doing. This does however characterise my current relationship with the Arabic language rather accurately. Today I was told that I sound like an ambulance siren (a quieter, more mumbly version) when distressed. I’m not sure how I feel about this? [I would like to learn to whine/wail to the theme tune from M*A*S*H when I grow up please]
But I’m reminded of a goldilocks level of bitterness – Philip Larkin poem:
As tired as a sleeping man by jinnwoo
Work meant I ended up seeing Chris Han and Custo Barcelona, more on this later. A weird headspace means I’m listening to a lot of Nirvana, Sonic Youth. I haven’t been following very much lately, I suppose someone will tell me about this season too. Hyper hyphenating and labelling makes things convenient though. I told Hong Kong CG I like technoflorals at Balenciaga and bowties (only the clip-on kid though).
Filed under: art, dubai, rhymes | Tags: dead time, florals, headspace, here, phillip larkin
Maybe it’s the season of riotous florals and prints and colourbursts? But in the aftermath of two days without sleep and the washed out post-rain night buzz I’m starting to perhaps prefer the gorgeousness of experimental Canadian photographer Laflaneuse’s scapes instead. Boots with candy laces instead of Miuccia’s toadstool heels, please.
usine II by laflaneuse (cc) | maintenant c’est toujours by laflaneuse (cc)
I’m reminded of the last stanza of Phillip Larkin’s poem Here
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
