a slightly more guttural ‘h’ than expected, a sea of darkness, bumping your head on the bathroom wall in the middle of the night, “oh, a cockroach,” the wrong remark, twice, the bump, still there, right forehead, just below the hair line, unable to just holiday, and the slight unease of a continually heated toilet seat, never making the effort to inquire about actually turning it off, and the house, more than you ever imagined, the fifth roll, and dad making a clichéd remark about young people needing to bump their heads, you sit there on the pale lilac carpet leaning against the spotless white wall, legs bent to the side, right side, left side of body against wall, jeans a bit uncomfortably tight in this position, holding the telephone to your right ear, listening to your sister cry on the other end, “don’t tell mum i’m crying.” how do you do it, drawing, a straight line first, the bottom half, then a curvy upper part with a squirt hole, “a big fish”, dad recalls yesterday today, the time there and not here, so they get there early, i get there late, ice cream served in hot baked bread, sweet in the mouth, a bitter after-taste, what were those lights, you still wonder, floating candles on a quaint little stream, but then seen from the airplane window a thousand miles away, impossible, “don’t tell mum i’m crying.” (picture edited from one of LonelyBob on flickr, may change when own film is developed)
i’m 23 and it’s 14 and i want those days back
i’m too familiar with the street layout of bda*. singapore garden, green town, shanghai salon, it’s a villa, dear villa, dear townhouse. i watch them grow, and get old. it was a life-changing thing i discovered this gem four years ago, years ago when there was the river, the fountain, the tennis court, the kites, the dogs, the roller skaters. it was the most beautiful afternoon with the sunset, the grass, the villas. i keep coming back searching for another moment. i keep bringing more people back and keep asking them are you disappointed. i’m now, and i’m obessed why a place designed to be developing would reach today when the word developing is too far to reach, when, i have to admit the dream to live here and drive one fifth of the fifth ring road everyday to work is actually not so alluring. *bda: beijing economic technological development area
korea lies between china and japan.
waiting: after his parents picked up the miso;
shaved ice, korean mochi, pineapple, red bean, ice cream, green tea powder
after arrival: the soup of a tired octopus stew,
after eaten, can be stir-fried with oil and white rice to make a tasty fried rice.
anticipation for breakfast of rice and kimchi results instead in 3 mochi sesame pastries, 2 mini croissants, 4 orange slices, grapes, carton of milk, peach yogurt.
everything separately packaged and arranged in wicker basket.
it will be possible to eat a different meal everyday for one month.
kimchi, tsukemono, green chiles dipped with miso gochu jang, pa jun, seafood udon,
bulgogi stew (soup of which becomes stock for flour-y udon), steamed kimchi dumplings, neng myon with soup, neng myon without soup.
counterweight: view from the 2nd rung from the bottom [herbal brew: smells like chinese medicine. chase shortly thereafter with soju.]
waste not words: she entered, ‘waste not, chinese artist’ [whole chicken stuffed with rice and stewed for many hours with ginseng and chinese herbs]
not-yet-expired activity
[readings for Best Before; this is what we’re up to; arnhem, boston and beijing in new york, August-October 2006]
“The separation between a thing and its environment cannot be absolutely definite and clear-cut; there is a passage by insensible gradations from the one to the other; the close solidarity which binds all the objects of the material universe, the perpetuality of their reciprocal actions and reactions, is sufficient to prove that they have not the precise limits which we attribute to them. Our perception outlines, so to speak, the form of their nucleus; it terminates them at the point where our possible action upon them ceases, where, consequently, they cease to interest our needs. Such is the primary and the most apparent operation of the perceiving mind: it marks out divisions in the continuity of the extended, simply following the suggestions of our requirements and the needs of practical life.” —from Matter and Memory, Bergson
“We ought to think of the historical world according to this model. Why ask if history is made by men or by things, since it is obvious that human initiatives do not annul the weight of things, and the ‘force of things’ always acts through men? It is just this failure of analysis, when it tries to bring everything down to one level, which reveals history’s true milieu. There is no ‘last analysis,’ because there is a flesh of history in which (as in our own body) everything counts and has a bearing — the infrastructure, our idea of it, and above all the perpetual exchanges between the two in which the weight of things becomes a sign as well, thoughts become forces, and the balance of the two becomes events. It is asked, ‘Where is history made? Who makes it? What is this movement which traces out and leaves behind the figures of the wake?’ It is of the same order as the movement of Thought and Speech, and, in short, of the perceptible world’s explosion within us. Everywhere there are meanings, dimensions, and forms in excess of what each ’consciousness‘ could have produced, and yet it is men who speak and think and see. We are in the field of history as we are in the field of language or existence.”These transformations of private into public, of events into meditations, of thought into spoken words and spoken words into thought, this echo coming from everywhere makes it such that in speaking to others we also speak to ourselves, and speak of what exists. This swarming of words behind words, thoughts behind thoughts–this universal substitution is also a kind of stability.” —from Signs, Merleau-Ponty
“Take, for example, a small drawer, which the carpenter has made for the convenience of some housefold. With the passage of time, the actual form of this drawer is surpassed by time itself and, after the decades and centuries have elapsed, it is as though time had become solidified and had assumed that form. A given small space, which was at first occupied by the object, is now occupied by solidified time. It has, in fact, become the incarnation of a certain form of spirit. —from Kinkakuji, Mishima
Posted by secretary | reply »pluto is no longer a planet
but pluto is still pluto.
怕上火喝王老吉
computer music
1. make an appointment with your friend; ask her to bring her computer.
2. when she comes over, sit on either side of the bed from one another, both on the floor. both of your computers can be placed on the bed.3. open your laptops. now you don’t see one another’s faces.4. use your favorite voice messenging service, and call one another. do not use headphones. turn the volume to maximum, then back down again. then back up again.5. improvise.
Posted by secretary | reply »
|
.
|
rss 2.0 | feedburner | del.icio.us |
|
.
|
this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. |
|
.
|
site by orange 程康 and ourwork.is. |
|
.
|
best viewed with your character encoding set to unicode utf-8. |
