There was an 8.9 quake in Japan, the largest in 140-something years. My girlfriend sent me some e-mails saying she is fine, and I called her, but now I can't connect to her at all. All the phonelines are busy and she is not responding to e-mail, they are probably not getting through. None of the trains in Tokyo are running so she, like many people, is crossing the whole city on foot.
Looking for breaking news on the quake, I checked out the internet.
I found a video of the tsunami on youtube.
The highest rated comment is this:
"Whales and dolphins 1 - Japan 0 , sort of evens things up a bit in the great scheme of things." from user 'zblmgtube'
Yup. Human lives vs. Dolphin lives, and the 'great scheme of things'.
Can we get an Imam's opinion up in here? Did we get this quake because Japanese women weren't following Sharia law? Or was it truly the vengeance of dolphin ghosts. I personally blame gay marriage!
Thanks Zblmgtube!
3.11.2011
3.05.2011
BIRTHDAY
On the last page of the Heart Sutra (Heart of the Perfection of Transcendent Wisdom, Harper Collins, 1942, PG. 66), the Buddha, teaching on Vulture Peak, advises us to "Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse."
As any product of public education and public television I considered myself a Buddhist for most of my young life.
I write to you, friends, strangers, ghosts, to tell you that I find myself, today, incapable of following the Historical Buddha's advice. As of the end of this month, my birthday, I will no longer be capable of "d(ying) young." In the eyes of the law my extended youth ends in a matter of weeks.
Equally problematic: A freak genetic condition of my heel-cords plus corrective surgery rendered me incapable of "liv(ing) fast" since my elementary school days. Unless the word "fast" means immoral or promiscuous, still I can only account for a one year period in-between girlfriends in a city where the trains stop running but the bars stay open. When I wasn't at home staring into the space in and around the refrigerator I was being bullied into a taxi by the last creature left in the bar. And that's not "liv(ing)".
As for a "good looking corpse", I can honestly admit that as I age I grow more and more good looking. That is if I can fight back the skin diseases, lines, and other waiting humiliations. But will my corpse look good? I have no idea. And it is too late, at least, to leave a young looking corpse. At best, I wish someday to leave a confusing looking corpse. One that could dupe thieves into stealing my bones, mistaking them for something else. (See pg. 128, The Brihad A'Ranyaka Upanishad, Random House, 1978)
Because analysts have been telling me since 2007 that "China is the future", I thought very seriously about "living fast, dying old, and leav(ing) a Chinese-looking corpse." And though China may be the future, I thought about the Chinese past, and dreamed my corpse buried amongst armies of terracotta soldiers and enough paper money and paper facsimiles of human souls, to not only pay my way past Yama and the other kings of the dead, but to secure all of my descendants, grandchildren great and small, soul security into any possible future, Chinese or otherwise.
But these Chinese tomb dreams were interrupted by the deregulated realities of the Chinese present. Due to illegal corner cutting and the cutthroat nature of profit, the terracotta soldiers, funerary monies, and paper souls will no doubt be made from used condoms, petroleum, human factory misery, and human hair. (I doubt the kings of the underworld will accept counterfeit souls and money). And the tomb might collapse because of shoddy workmanship, using landfill cardboard instead of cement.
I would like to keep my corpse out of a future where you are either a slave in a funeral paper factory or a dead man in an opulent tomb made of spray-painted gold garbage.
Then how do I plan for the future?
As any product of public education and public television I considered myself a Buddhist for most of my young life.
I write to you, friends, strangers, ghosts, to tell you that I find myself, today, incapable of following the Historical Buddha's advice. As of the end of this month, my birthday, I will no longer be capable of "d(ying) young." In the eyes of the law my extended youth ends in a matter of weeks.
Equally problematic: A freak genetic condition of my heel-cords plus corrective surgery rendered me incapable of "liv(ing) fast" since my elementary school days. Unless the word "fast" means immoral or promiscuous, still I can only account for a one year period in-between girlfriends in a city where the trains stop running but the bars stay open. When I wasn't at home staring into the space in and around the refrigerator I was being bullied into a taxi by the last creature left in the bar. And that's not "liv(ing)".
As for a "good looking corpse", I can honestly admit that as I age I grow more and more good looking. That is if I can fight back the skin diseases, lines, and other waiting humiliations. But will my corpse look good? I have no idea. And it is too late, at least, to leave a young looking corpse. At best, I wish someday to leave a confusing looking corpse. One that could dupe thieves into stealing my bones, mistaking them for something else. (See pg. 128, The Brihad A'Ranyaka Upanishad, Random House, 1978)
Because analysts have been telling me since 2007 that "China is the future", I thought very seriously about "living fast, dying old, and leav(ing) a Chinese-looking corpse." And though China may be the future, I thought about the Chinese past, and dreamed my corpse buried amongst armies of terracotta soldiers and enough paper money and paper facsimiles of human souls, to not only pay my way past Yama and the other kings of the dead, but to secure all of my descendants, grandchildren great and small, soul security into any possible future, Chinese or otherwise.
But these Chinese tomb dreams were interrupted by the deregulated realities of the Chinese present. Due to illegal corner cutting and the cutthroat nature of profit, the terracotta soldiers, funerary monies, and paper souls will no doubt be made from used condoms, petroleum, human factory misery, and human hair. (I doubt the kings of the underworld will accept counterfeit souls and money). And the tomb might collapse because of shoddy workmanship, using landfill cardboard instead of cement.
I would like to keep my corpse out of a future where you are either a slave in a funeral paper factory or a dead man in an opulent tomb made of spray-painted gold garbage.
Then how do I plan for the future?
2.27.2011
2.21.2011
2.12.2011
YAH!
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum January Opening from Paper Fortress on Vimeo.
My sister in law is featured in this show.
And my dad, my brother, my cousins, and some others are shown.
UMBRELLAS 2
AND A is selling the umbrellas I designed, again, in different colors.
My name is nowhere on the page. And they never sent me samples.
Well.
My name is nowhere on the page. And they never sent me samples.
Well.
2.06.2011
WALLACE SHAWN
Our capacity to fantasize about other people and to believe our own fantasies makes it possible for us to enjoy this valuable art form, theater. But unfortunately it’s a capacity which has brought incalculable harm and suffering to human beings.
It’s well known what grief and even danger can result when we make use of this capacity in our romantic lives and eagerly ascribe to a potential partner benevolent characteristics which are based on our hopes and not on truth.
And one can hardly begin to describe the anguish caused by our habit of using our fantasizing capacity in the opposite direction, that is, using it to ascribe negative characteristics to people who, for one reason or another, we’d like to think less of. Sometimes we do this in regard to large groups of people, none of whom we’ve met. But we can even apply our remarkable capacity in relation to individuals or groups whom we know rather well, sometimes simply to make ourselves feel better about things that we happen to have done to them or are planning to do.
You couldn’t exactly say, for example, that Thomas Jefferson had no familiarity with dark-skinned people. His problem was that he couldn’t figure out how to live the life he in fact was living unless he owned these people as slaves. And as it would have been unbearable to him to see himself as so heartless, unjust, and cruel as to keep in bondage people who were just like himself, he ignored the evidence that was in front of his eyes and clung to the fantasy that people from Africa were not his equals.
Well, one could write an entire political history of the human race by simply recounting the exhausting cycle of fantasies which different groups have believed at different times about different other groups. Of course these fantasies were absurd in every case.
After a while one does grasp the pattern. Africans, Jews, Mexicans, same-sex lovers, women. Hmm, after a certain period of time somebody says: well, actually, they’re not that different from anybody else, they have the same capacities, I don’t like all of them, some of them are geniuses, etc. etc. The revelations are always in the same direction. We learn about one group or another the thing that actors quickly learn in relation to themselves when they become actors: people are more than they seem to be.
...
It’s this year’s fantasies that present a difficulty.
Are we more brilliant than Thomas Jefferson? Hmm — probably not. So there’s our situation: it’s delightfully easy to see through illusions held by people far away or by members of one’s own group a century ago or a decade ago or a year ago. But this doesn’t seem to help us to see through the illusions which, at any given moment, happen to be shared by the people who surround us, our friends, our family, the people we trust.
Wallace Shawn: Why I Call Myself a Socialist: Is the World Really a Stage?
Read the whole thing it is good.
1.27.2011
SEARCH: OVER
I just found the best/worst blog ever.
Shut in Japanese man awkwardly inserts doll into james bond scenes...
You are welcome.
1.26.2011
WELL, OF COURSE...(?)
NOT WORK SAFE/ET SAFE
Can't figure out if this is the official video or not. Apparently this is taken from an existing German porno movie.
Well...?
Can't figure out if this is the official video or not. Apparently this is taken from an existing German porno movie.
Well...?
1.24.2011
UBU IQBAL
A wrong concept misleads the understanding; a wrong deed degrades the whole man, and may eventually demolish the structure of the human ego. We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.
1.21.2011
VIDEOS MADE BY A MAN FRANK SENT TO ME BY MY FRIEND FRANK (NO RELATION)
Gwinnett County Parks by Frank
Thanks Frank for making these videos, and thank you Frank for sending them to me.
Johnathan, your assignment is now to send me a video made by a man named Johnathan who isn't you.
Thanks Frank for making these videos, and thank you Frank for sending them to me.
Johnathan, your assignment is now to send me a video made by a man named Johnathan who isn't you.
1.15.2011
MICHAEL, MICHAEL, MICHAEL PT. 3
"Me vampire, me play joke, me possibly feed you maggots"
-Donald Sutherland to his son, 1946
1.11.2011
A PARTIAL LIST OF THOSE WHO ARE FOLLOWING YOU (FIELD REPORT, FILE F20A6-21)
International Jewelry, AKA "The Want-Makers"
This is not a typo, nor is it some rehash of a false racist conspiracy theory.
International Jewelry is a multinational firm with holdings and agents in almost every nation. They are responsible for the sales of objects which have no worth or function other than beauty. Their goods sparkle and shine in, on, and around beautiful people. These goods elevate beautiful and non-beautiful people alike into the world above, into the sacred precincts of glamor.
It is the work of the agents of International Jewelry to advertise these objects and the depictions of the glamorous people who own them. This advertising fuels the economy of the world and dictates to us our desires.
The agents of International Jewelry follow you in the daytime to gauge your response to the wants they tell you have. These agents chart just how much time you will spend on working towards acquisition of the items which will buy you admission into the sacred precincts of the beautiful. The price they put on these items pushes you one zero at a time farther away from being able to afford your way into the higher realm.
At night, when you are asleep, is when the agents of International Jewelry do their real work. They stand over your bed, and shine a high-powered flashlight into a beautiful multi-faceted gem, making its prism lights dance on your closed eyelids and the softer parts of your skull.
Through a process developed in the 13th century, and still not adequately explained by modern science, this light enters into your mind. It does not necessarily effect your dreams as you sleep but the sparkling light stays in your mind and alights on different psychological areas in your waking hours.
The glittering light fills you with a self worth, a gleam, which tells you that you are entitled to beautiful things. Despite the defenses of your heart which tell you that you do not want things merely to have them, the light attacks you on two levels.
The first level shows you the world that you could enter if you could afford your way in. This is a world of golden rooms hidden somewhere deep behind the gray walls of cities and the miserable crossroads of small towns. These golden rooms are filled with beautiful people of many professions, but above all, their professions are to be beautiful by experiencing, appreciating, and understanding beauty. The furniture, the clothing, the settings and table-settings, everything shines. And by extension so do these beautiful people. On this first level you are a new edition to this world, and the beautiful people come to celebrate you. You are invited to fly in private planes and dine on things almost too beautiful to eat. There are beautiful women crossing and uncrossing their legs who are calling you by your full name. There are beautiful men with arms and chests which look like they were carved from stone offering to buy you a drink. There are banners hanging overhead and custom made cakes with your name written all over them. You can make love to piles of beautiful strangers on ancient rugs and animal hides while priceless artifacts and works of art watch.
Even better is the time when you bother to cross back from the beautiful world into our gray world. You can find your family, childhood friends, and tormentors stuck between the machinery of this gray world, and they will not recognize you for your beauty. When the recognition of who you are and how you have changed washes over them, they will shatter. In the light that emanates from you they will be further fixed to their worthless shadows which hold them in their gray world.
The second level in which the glittering light attacks you appeals to your better nature. This is not your physical desires or your vanity but your actual want to be a better person. If you truly had the money and the abilities which beauty and the golden world would afford you, then you would not only be a better person, but you could help the people you love and make the world a better place.
You could travel the world and bring about social change for the better. You could make and fund art. You could provide for the people you love and raise a family.
The agents of International Jewelry gauge these feelings inside of you and set prices accordingly.
A Bird, A Dog, and A Cat
These three animals follow you, one at a time. Their schedule rotates depending on the month and the day of the week. They keep their distance.
The Specter of Sickness
Emaciated and sexless, its palsied hands outstretched from under its shroud, it walks like an amputee with all of its limbs intact. It leaves a thin layer of grime in its wake. On its person are a series of photographs in diptych. On one side of the hinge is a smiling person and on the other the same person hooked up to a machine.
The chambers of its heart are a glowing antiseptic white.
Glory In a Crowd of Glories
Glory is an angel in flowing robes. She is bathed in light and she holds in her right hand a long golden trumpet. She holds her left hand in front of her as she walks on tenuous steps, her eyes shut tight. (Tucked into her robes, somewhere, is a photograph of her dead sister Victory.)
When, if ever, she finds you everything will change. She will blow on her trumpet. Everything you have ever done will be re-contextualized. Every mistake you have made in the long chain of mistakes leading to the present day will now be seen as necessary steps. You will be successful and all criticism you have ever suffered will fall off of you like dead skin. Every promise you have made under duress in this shitty world will be broken, they will no longer have to be honored.
Here's the trouble. Glory herself walks deep in a crowd of identical and false glories. There are hundreds of angels. Each has the same beautiful robes, wings, and trumpet. But these other angels have ulterior motives. Some would talk you into self-actualization and dietary cults. Some represent chauvinist and ultra-nationalist groups. Some represent the international miracle-drug snake-oil concerns. Some are advocates of deep tissue massage and orientalist muscle stretching cadres. One or two work for a family neighborhood product placement pyramid swap scheme. A growing number are recruiters for the armed forces. A few represent apocalyptic meditation cults and sell portable gongs shaped like natural and man-made disasters. More than five are paid agents of the Specter of History.
Your Biggest Fans, AKA The Mother and Father of a Better You:
A man and a woman. Individually they had loved you from afar. When they were younger they were timid, and their slavish love for you made you even more unapproachable. Perhaps at one time one of them approached you and declared this love. And maybe you spurned them. Maybe they never bothered to declare their love. As they watched you and fell deeper in love your distance only grew in their eyes, and through simple arithmetic, the space they would have to cross to reach you only widened, you can substitute any ancient Greek hero and amphibian combination to explain this.
So the man and woman met each other at the edge of an uncrossable abyss of love. The two of them on one side, and you a distant figure on the other. It is doubtless that you were unaware of their existence and their love.
When they first met, they bonded over conversations about you. They traded surveillance equipment and stories about you. They grew closer by comparing telescopes and telephoto lenses which held you in their sights. They both shared their scrapbooks full of your minor victories which were magnified in their love. They competed with each other in exaggerated stories in which they pretended to have a close personal relationship with you.
And at night they made love. The man and the woman made love, each imagining the other was you. They devised strange sexual positions and called out your name at the moment of climax.
Then they moved in together. At first they devoted all of their time and resources to following you, sharing surveillance and recording equipment.
But their need to follow you diminished. Their love for each other grew into the comfortable rhythm between the sounds of a home. The smells of cooking, the sounds of the plumbing and heating, the quiet moments of the man and the woman at a table holding hands and reading the newspaper. The love they shared, they both believed, was born from their love for you. And in these quiet moments, in every touch and glance, they thought of you.
But this love had prematurely aged them. The man and the woman were slower, quieter, in some way sated. They no longer follow you and film you from across a street. They go about their lives quietly. And before they kiss goodnight they speak about you, and when they are asleep they dream of you.
Who you are to them is further abstracted. Because they no longer need to see and follow you, because their love for each other is hopelessly tangled in their idea of you, who you are to them is magnified and beautiful.
Through this a better you has been born.
A Better You
This is you but better. This is definitely you, but a successful version of you, an effective you. This is you but free of any doubt, weakness, sadness, etcetera. This version of you was born yesterday, so this you has none of the accumulated defeats and pains of an average lifetime. This you has not yet had hopes and feelings blunted on the ugly data of life experience, and never will. This you has perfect posture and a correct style of walking, to avoid pitfalls and shrug off any airborne detritus.
This you has a city in its mind, a home in its heart, and a song its throat.
The city in your better version's mind is bright. All of the doors and windows are open, all over the city. The rooms, restaurants, and stores which would normally be closed are open, and inside strangers wait with open arms. The city is large enough that one could walk its streets forever and always find new neighborhoods. Everything is painted in exciting colors. There are parks and trains full of expectant strangers, waiting to love this better version of you. When night falls, the streets are illuminated with warm light coming down from apartments and rooms where strangers wait by the window to invite the better version of you up for nonstop sexual intercourse and interesting conversations about art.
The home that waits in the heart of this better you is a warm place in winter. It is furnished with old and gently worn things. Inside someone waits long into the night to welcome the better version of you home after a long journey. There is something cooking on a stove.
The song that issues from the throat of the better version of you is about the four seasons and it is not very well written. Maybe you could call it sincere. I don't know, I'm not a fan.
The better version of you follows you at a distance and picks up things you dropped, and takes advantage of opportunities you missed. The better version of you seems to be unaware of you, but follows your footsteps exactly.
The Old Man with a Television Set in a Wheelbarrow
Who is he? He seems to call all women "Louise". From the unadulterated stream of nonsense that comes out of his mouth anyone can see that he has gone senile. He wears a soiled old jumpsuit like a mechanic. He's pretty strong to be carrying that television around all of the time, it's gotta be at least a 32 inch. And the TV is somehow always on despite the fact that it isn't plugged in. The cord drags along the ground and is frayed from being stepped on. At night he cuts a pretty terrifying figure, walking through the dark, his face illuminated in the blue light.
Shadows That Resemble Your Mother and Father:
They do in fact look like your mother and father. But they are shadows, and their edges are tattered. They hover close to you and blend in with the other shadows.
Why do they follow you? Maybe because they love you. I'm not sure, your relationship with your parents seemed pretty complicated and I never wanted to get involved.
Maybe their presence makes you feel guilty, but above all else their presence is embarrassing. Looking deep into their shadowy forms you can see the ranks of generations. These are the deeply-nested and recursive tiers of ancestors who begat and begat until your parents and then you were begat. This long parade of ancestors staring back at you is an unbroken line to the "Old Country"(AKA the World of the Dead). And you can see them as they were, slaves covered in manure crushed under boot-heels, Holy men, idealists settling down to squabble in cramped kitchens, explorers, sufferers of madness and other venereal disease, heroes in burning cities, and so on in that fashion. Staring too long only invites the attention of The Specter of History.
The Specter of History and His Retinue: The Sphinx, The Fact, The Advocate, and The Scarecrow
The Sphinx leads the retinue and is leashed to the left hand of the Specter of History. It is not a proper sphinx, but a small lapdog with a man's face. The Sphinx has the disgusting nakedness of a shaved animal. It has the jowly face of a politician with the glasses to match. Its incessant yapping and snapping of its little teeth clears crowds from the retinue's path.
The Specter of History (previously known as "The Bloody Specter of History") has a long coat and a serene smile. The light of the concealed weapons and photographs which line the inside of his overcoat is reflected in his metal teeth. He has a hat which appears to be military but has no insignia. Embroidered into it are the laurels of a poet. His clothing is impeccably clean except for his boots which are covered in mud and ash. His left hand holds the Sphinx's leash and his right is thrust into his pocket, where the clinking of coins and medals can be heard. He has the face of a young man lined and cracked with age. His eyes are cloudy.
The Fact and The Advocate follow the Specter closely. The Fact resembles the Specter almost identically except that he wears the cheap suit of a professor and carries a valise. The fact is usually silent and only whispers to The Advocate when he is handing him graphs from his valise. The Fact's face betrays no emotion.
The Advocate resembles The Fact almost exactly except that he is balding, sweating, and he wears a cheaper suit. The Advocate publishes a newspaper, "The Advocate", which he named after himself. He carries the small hand-crank press and inks everywhere with him. The newspaper is filled with data and graphs The Fact supplies for him. The first few sections of the newspaper are dense and full of information. Because the information is expressed only in impenetrable jargon it is usually skipped. Most readers skip to the editorial and the pro ed pages both written by The Advocate. The Advocate advocates that knowledge is power, and that knowledge is engendered by facts and clean data. Therefore The Advocate sides with and advocates for power in all discussions. The Advocate is a student of history and through his editorial arguments changed The Bloody Specter of History's name to The Specter of History. On the back page of The Advocate's newspaper is the comics section. Here incorrigible tykes, tsking housewives, talking animals, and long forgotten stereotypes live out their lives frozen for centuries, sanitary and unchanged. Only the most fleeting reference to the days current events places their suspended bufoonery in our time period.
The Scarecrow follows up the rear. He is a tattered thing on a wooden pole which hops along. On his pole he is nothing but a twisted torso, two arms, a head, and a hat. He is weather-beaten and aged. The storm of years have stripped him of color and features. Yet his gray hide seems to be stuffed with something weighty, something meaty. He has the appearance of a broken and lost idol. A totem to some forgotten fear. One of his eyes is a button. The other is missing. His long arms terminate in tattered rags. His hat is only recognizable as such because it is placed on his head. As he hops a fob watch on a rusted chain swings from a rent in his chest which had probably once been a pocket. The watch's face is cracked and there is no minute hand.
END OF REPORT.
THE FOLLOWING ENTITIES WERE INTENTIONALLY LEFT OFF THE LIST FOR SECURITY REASONS:
The King of Birds, Manimal, The Artworks Gang, Handshakes, Dream Architecture, Childhood Toy, Actual Dead Man, The Friendship Bracelet Weaver, The Surgeon, Dr. Policeman, and Laundry.
With love,
No. 80
Primidi, 21 Nivôse CCXIX
Not proofread, sorry.
This is not a typo, nor is it some rehash of a false racist conspiracy theory.
International Jewelry is a multinational firm with holdings and agents in almost every nation. They are responsible for the sales of objects which have no worth or function other than beauty. Their goods sparkle and shine in, on, and around beautiful people. These goods elevate beautiful and non-beautiful people alike into the world above, into the sacred precincts of glamor.
It is the work of the agents of International Jewelry to advertise these objects and the depictions of the glamorous people who own them. This advertising fuels the economy of the world and dictates to us our desires.
The agents of International Jewelry follow you in the daytime to gauge your response to the wants they tell you have. These agents chart just how much time you will spend on working towards acquisition of the items which will buy you admission into the sacred precincts of the beautiful. The price they put on these items pushes you one zero at a time farther away from being able to afford your way into the higher realm.
At night, when you are asleep, is when the agents of International Jewelry do their real work. They stand over your bed, and shine a high-powered flashlight into a beautiful multi-faceted gem, making its prism lights dance on your closed eyelids and the softer parts of your skull.
Through a process developed in the 13th century, and still not adequately explained by modern science, this light enters into your mind. It does not necessarily effect your dreams as you sleep but the sparkling light stays in your mind and alights on different psychological areas in your waking hours.
The glittering light fills you with a self worth, a gleam, which tells you that you are entitled to beautiful things. Despite the defenses of your heart which tell you that you do not want things merely to have them, the light attacks you on two levels.
The first level shows you the world that you could enter if you could afford your way in. This is a world of golden rooms hidden somewhere deep behind the gray walls of cities and the miserable crossroads of small towns. These golden rooms are filled with beautiful people of many professions, but above all, their professions are to be beautiful by experiencing, appreciating, and understanding beauty. The furniture, the clothing, the settings and table-settings, everything shines. And by extension so do these beautiful people. On this first level you are a new edition to this world, and the beautiful people come to celebrate you. You are invited to fly in private planes and dine on things almost too beautiful to eat. There are beautiful women crossing and uncrossing their legs who are calling you by your full name. There are beautiful men with arms and chests which look like they were carved from stone offering to buy you a drink. There are banners hanging overhead and custom made cakes with your name written all over them. You can make love to piles of beautiful strangers on ancient rugs and animal hides while priceless artifacts and works of art watch.
Even better is the time when you bother to cross back from the beautiful world into our gray world. You can find your family, childhood friends, and tormentors stuck between the machinery of this gray world, and they will not recognize you for your beauty. When the recognition of who you are and how you have changed washes over them, they will shatter. In the light that emanates from you they will be further fixed to their worthless shadows which hold them in their gray world.
The second level in which the glittering light attacks you appeals to your better nature. This is not your physical desires or your vanity but your actual want to be a better person. If you truly had the money and the abilities which beauty and the golden world would afford you, then you would not only be a better person, but you could help the people you love and make the world a better place.
You could travel the world and bring about social change for the better. You could make and fund art. You could provide for the people you love and raise a family.
The agents of International Jewelry gauge these feelings inside of you and set prices accordingly.
A Bird, A Dog, and A Cat
These three animals follow you, one at a time. Their schedule rotates depending on the month and the day of the week. They keep their distance.
The Specter of Sickness
Emaciated and sexless, its palsied hands outstretched from under its shroud, it walks like an amputee with all of its limbs intact. It leaves a thin layer of grime in its wake. On its person are a series of photographs in diptych. On one side of the hinge is a smiling person and on the other the same person hooked up to a machine.
The chambers of its heart are a glowing antiseptic white.
Glory In a Crowd of Glories
Glory is an angel in flowing robes. She is bathed in light and she holds in her right hand a long golden trumpet. She holds her left hand in front of her as she walks on tenuous steps, her eyes shut tight. (Tucked into her robes, somewhere, is a photograph of her dead sister Victory.)
When, if ever, she finds you everything will change. She will blow on her trumpet. Everything you have ever done will be re-contextualized. Every mistake you have made in the long chain of mistakes leading to the present day will now be seen as necessary steps. You will be successful and all criticism you have ever suffered will fall off of you like dead skin. Every promise you have made under duress in this shitty world will be broken, they will no longer have to be honored.
Here's the trouble. Glory herself walks deep in a crowd of identical and false glories. There are hundreds of angels. Each has the same beautiful robes, wings, and trumpet. But these other angels have ulterior motives. Some would talk you into self-actualization and dietary cults. Some represent chauvinist and ultra-nationalist groups. Some represent the international miracle-drug snake-oil concerns. Some are advocates of deep tissue massage and orientalist muscle stretching cadres. One or two work for a family neighborhood product placement pyramid swap scheme. A growing number are recruiters for the armed forces. A few represent apocalyptic meditation cults and sell portable gongs shaped like natural and man-made disasters. More than five are paid agents of the Specter of History.
Your Biggest Fans, AKA The Mother and Father of a Better You:
A man and a woman. Individually they had loved you from afar. When they were younger they were timid, and their slavish love for you made you even more unapproachable. Perhaps at one time one of them approached you and declared this love. And maybe you spurned them. Maybe they never bothered to declare their love. As they watched you and fell deeper in love your distance only grew in their eyes, and through simple arithmetic, the space they would have to cross to reach you only widened, you can substitute any ancient Greek hero and amphibian combination to explain this.
So the man and woman met each other at the edge of an uncrossable abyss of love. The two of them on one side, and you a distant figure on the other. It is doubtless that you were unaware of their existence and their love.
When they first met, they bonded over conversations about you. They traded surveillance equipment and stories about you. They grew closer by comparing telescopes and telephoto lenses which held you in their sights. They both shared their scrapbooks full of your minor victories which were magnified in their love. They competed with each other in exaggerated stories in which they pretended to have a close personal relationship with you.
And at night they made love. The man and the woman made love, each imagining the other was you. They devised strange sexual positions and called out your name at the moment of climax.
Then they moved in together. At first they devoted all of their time and resources to following you, sharing surveillance and recording equipment.
But their need to follow you diminished. Their love for each other grew into the comfortable rhythm between the sounds of a home. The smells of cooking, the sounds of the plumbing and heating, the quiet moments of the man and the woman at a table holding hands and reading the newspaper. The love they shared, they both believed, was born from their love for you. And in these quiet moments, in every touch and glance, they thought of you.
But this love had prematurely aged them. The man and the woman were slower, quieter, in some way sated. They no longer follow you and film you from across a street. They go about their lives quietly. And before they kiss goodnight they speak about you, and when they are asleep they dream of you.
Who you are to them is further abstracted. Because they no longer need to see and follow you, because their love for each other is hopelessly tangled in their idea of you, who you are to them is magnified and beautiful.
Through this a better you has been born.
A Better You
This is you but better. This is definitely you, but a successful version of you, an effective you. This is you but free of any doubt, weakness, sadness, etcetera. This version of you was born yesterday, so this you has none of the accumulated defeats and pains of an average lifetime. This you has not yet had hopes and feelings blunted on the ugly data of life experience, and never will. This you has perfect posture and a correct style of walking, to avoid pitfalls and shrug off any airborne detritus.
This you has a city in its mind, a home in its heart, and a song its throat.
The city in your better version's mind is bright. All of the doors and windows are open, all over the city. The rooms, restaurants, and stores which would normally be closed are open, and inside strangers wait with open arms. The city is large enough that one could walk its streets forever and always find new neighborhoods. Everything is painted in exciting colors. There are parks and trains full of expectant strangers, waiting to love this better version of you. When night falls, the streets are illuminated with warm light coming down from apartments and rooms where strangers wait by the window to invite the better version of you up for nonstop sexual intercourse and interesting conversations about art.
The home that waits in the heart of this better you is a warm place in winter. It is furnished with old and gently worn things. Inside someone waits long into the night to welcome the better version of you home after a long journey. There is something cooking on a stove.
The song that issues from the throat of the better version of you is about the four seasons and it is not very well written. Maybe you could call it sincere. I don't know, I'm not a fan.
The better version of you follows you at a distance and picks up things you dropped, and takes advantage of opportunities you missed. The better version of you seems to be unaware of you, but follows your footsteps exactly.
The Old Man with a Television Set in a Wheelbarrow
Who is he? He seems to call all women "Louise". From the unadulterated stream of nonsense that comes out of his mouth anyone can see that he has gone senile. He wears a soiled old jumpsuit like a mechanic. He's pretty strong to be carrying that television around all of the time, it's gotta be at least a 32 inch. And the TV is somehow always on despite the fact that it isn't plugged in. The cord drags along the ground and is frayed from being stepped on. At night he cuts a pretty terrifying figure, walking through the dark, his face illuminated in the blue light.
Shadows That Resemble Your Mother and Father:
They do in fact look like your mother and father. But they are shadows, and their edges are tattered. They hover close to you and blend in with the other shadows.
Why do they follow you? Maybe because they love you. I'm not sure, your relationship with your parents seemed pretty complicated and I never wanted to get involved.
Maybe their presence makes you feel guilty, but above all else their presence is embarrassing. Looking deep into their shadowy forms you can see the ranks of generations. These are the deeply-nested and recursive tiers of ancestors who begat and begat until your parents and then you were begat. This long parade of ancestors staring back at you is an unbroken line to the "Old Country"(AKA the World of the Dead). And you can see them as they were, slaves covered in manure crushed under boot-heels, Holy men, idealists settling down to squabble in cramped kitchens, explorers, sufferers of madness and other venereal disease, heroes in burning cities, and so on in that fashion. Staring too long only invites the attention of The Specter of History.
The Specter of History and His Retinue: The Sphinx, The Fact, The Advocate, and The Scarecrow
The Sphinx leads the retinue and is leashed to the left hand of the Specter of History. It is not a proper sphinx, but a small lapdog with a man's face. The Sphinx has the disgusting nakedness of a shaved animal. It has the jowly face of a politician with the glasses to match. Its incessant yapping and snapping of its little teeth clears crowds from the retinue's path.
The Specter of History (previously known as "The Bloody Specter of History") has a long coat and a serene smile. The light of the concealed weapons and photographs which line the inside of his overcoat is reflected in his metal teeth. He has a hat which appears to be military but has no insignia. Embroidered into it are the laurels of a poet. His clothing is impeccably clean except for his boots which are covered in mud and ash. His left hand holds the Sphinx's leash and his right is thrust into his pocket, where the clinking of coins and medals can be heard. He has the face of a young man lined and cracked with age. His eyes are cloudy.
The Fact and The Advocate follow the Specter closely. The Fact resembles the Specter almost identically except that he wears the cheap suit of a professor and carries a valise. The fact is usually silent and only whispers to The Advocate when he is handing him graphs from his valise. The Fact's face betrays no emotion.
The Advocate resembles The Fact almost exactly except that he is balding, sweating, and he wears a cheaper suit. The Advocate publishes a newspaper, "The Advocate", which he named after himself. He carries the small hand-crank press and inks everywhere with him. The newspaper is filled with data and graphs The Fact supplies for him. The first few sections of the newspaper are dense and full of information. Because the information is expressed only in impenetrable jargon it is usually skipped. Most readers skip to the editorial and the pro ed pages both written by The Advocate. The Advocate advocates that knowledge is power, and that knowledge is engendered by facts and clean data. Therefore The Advocate sides with and advocates for power in all discussions. The Advocate is a student of history and through his editorial arguments changed The Bloody Specter of History's name to The Specter of History. On the back page of The Advocate's newspaper is the comics section. Here incorrigible tykes, tsking housewives, talking animals, and long forgotten stereotypes live out their lives frozen for centuries, sanitary and unchanged. Only the most fleeting reference to the days current events places their suspended bufoonery in our time period.
The Scarecrow follows up the rear. He is a tattered thing on a wooden pole which hops along. On his pole he is nothing but a twisted torso, two arms, a head, and a hat. He is weather-beaten and aged. The storm of years have stripped him of color and features. Yet his gray hide seems to be stuffed with something weighty, something meaty. He has the appearance of a broken and lost idol. A totem to some forgotten fear. One of his eyes is a button. The other is missing. His long arms terminate in tattered rags. His hat is only recognizable as such because it is placed on his head. As he hops a fob watch on a rusted chain swings from a rent in his chest which had probably once been a pocket. The watch's face is cracked and there is no minute hand.
END OF REPORT.
THE FOLLOWING ENTITIES WERE INTENTIONALLY LEFT OFF THE LIST FOR SECURITY REASONS:
The King of Birds, Manimal, The Artworks Gang, Handshakes, Dream Architecture, Childhood Toy, Actual Dead Man, The Friendship Bracelet Weaver, The Surgeon, Dr. Policeman, and Laundry.
With love,
No. 80
Primidi, 21 Nivôse CCXIX
Not proofread, sorry.
1.07.2011
WEEEEEIRD
Submitted for your confusion,
Warning, softcore pornography:
So this is a video of a young girl crawling around while someone films up her skirt.
What is she crawling around on? A concrete slide structure in Shibuya's Miyashita park. (Which was purchased by Nike, and is causing controversy, because it will be renamed NIKE park.)
In summer 2006, H.Kurata and myself painted the mural on that slide, A mural of then Yokozuna and grand champion Asashoryu, before he was forced into retirement (in dishonor). You can see our painting in between the shots of the girl's legs and butt. And here I was thinking that our mural was going to disappear after NIKE had leveled the homeless shanty town and turned Miyashita into soccer fields and basketball courts. (If they have not already.) But here it is, preserved for posterity. And I mean posterior-ity.
WEIRD!
Big thanks to America's Own "Mister N" for "accidentally" "finding" this video.
Now Internet, I want to ask,
Can I be famous already?
Warning, softcore pornography:
So this is a video of a young girl crawling around while someone films up her skirt.
What is she crawling around on? A concrete slide structure in Shibuya's Miyashita park. (Which was purchased by Nike, and is causing controversy, because it will be renamed NIKE park.)
In summer 2006, H.Kurata and myself painted the mural on that slide, A mural of then Yokozuna and grand champion Asashoryu, before he was forced into retirement (in dishonor). You can see our painting in between the shots of the girl's legs and butt. And here I was thinking that our mural was going to disappear after NIKE had leveled the homeless shanty town and turned Miyashita into soccer fields and basketball courts. (If they have not already.) But here it is, preserved for posterity. And I mean posterior-ity.
WEIRD!
Big thanks to America's Own "Mister N" for "accidentally" "finding" this video.
Now Internet, I want to ask,
Can I be famous already?
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