We have been in Spetses, Greece for one week. It is good.
Why not just declare your own nation? →
In 1980, artist Lars Vilks began construction of two sculptures, Nimis (Latin for “too much”, a structure made of 75 tonnes of driftwood) and Arx (Latin for “fortress”, a structure made of stone), in the Kullaberg nature reserve in north-west Skåne, Sweden. The location of the sculptures is difficult to reach, and as a consequence they were not discovered for two years, at which point the local council decided that the sculptures should be removed. They declared the sculptures to be houses, the building of which was forbidden on the nature reserve………
Me and Michael have a conversation.
S: “I have to stop eating nuts. I just eat ‘em all. All day. I have to stop. If I were a squirrel, I’d be such a fat squirrel. I’d do great in the winter though. I’d be all, ‘Lalalah.’ While you other squirrels ran around begging for nuts.”
M: “I’d be a skinny squirrel. I’d be…”
S: “You would do terribly in the winter. You’d be sooooo hungry!”
M: “I would. I would. But I’d be fast.”
S: “You would sneak around and steal nuts.”
M: “I would. I would be like, ‘I’m soooooo hungry.’ I’ll just take one.”
S: “We’d catch you and feed you to the dogs.”
Antique Boy Fight
I’m writing this on the roof patio of a blessedly deserted Southpark cafe, right across the street from our apartment on Kumbaraci street in Istanbul. We are here for two more weeks and I have the lethargy that precedes change. I can’t seem to do any arty stuff so fuck it. White wine and journaling it is.
For conversational and planning convenience Michael and I give funny nicknames to places we like. So far we have ‘Meat Alley’ (our favorite), ‘The Mexican Place’,’Tulip Alley’, ‘The Tea House’, ‘The Devil Place’, ‘Absinthe Alley’, ‘Bar Alley’…you get the idea. When I see it in writing, I guess our names are less than stellar on the creative scale…..functional, if a little anemic. This comes up later.
Anyway, a few days ago, I was looking for this vintage sunglass place we happened past one day on a ‘we’re totally fucking lost’ “walk”. It was closed when we went by the first time. But I had this fantasy that everything in the store would be really stupid cheap and I would collect all these kick-ass vintage Italian and French shades for pennies on the dollar.
So, the desire to find it again finally wins out over incessant Facebooking and I leave the house alone, determined not to return without locating this oasis of cheap hip. Well, after winding through dirty back-allies for around 40 minutes I finally find it. As I round the corner and see the sign, I also see some 19 year old bronze goddess in an olive dress, jeans vest, and badass shades leaning against the wall under the sign. She is flowing, wild-brunette indifference, patient and still, drinking the sun. I gather she is waiting outside ‘Sunglass Heaven’ for her embarrassingly large and sweaty family to try on every pair of shades in the store. She cocks her pristine head at me through superior eye-wear— such a listless cool- totally unaffected. Skin cancer is not in the forefront of her mind. It’s always on mine…….I morph from a hip-ish 30 year old in jeans shirt, bake-lite leopard bangle, and skinny black jeans to ADULT ACNE in about 10 seconds. So after an awkward pause outside the store I decide it’s not worth the wait and escape this totally unwelcome reality check. I casually take off down the street like, “This is just how I was going little miss Lolita. What?!” So down some unknown back alley I go, comforted by the wad of cash in my pocket and the comparative lack of familial baggage.
Much to my delight, this alley was the soon-to-be-dubbed ‘ANTIQUE ALLEY’. Not fancy antique stores, no, this was my kind of antiques. JUNK STORES! Filled the hilt with broken legged chairs, complete sets of peeling Encyclopedia Britannicas, crumbling floral cross-stichings, dusty glass top cases crowed with buttons, coins, costume jewelry, and random knick knacks…the works! I don’t completely lose it though. We are already charged with shedding 50% of our luggage weight before boarding another airplane. So I keep my excitement in check. I will not be going home with that mysterious brass looking-glass or antique microscope set. Sigh.
I enter the first store on the row with mild trepidation. It’s one room, about 10 feet in diameter, without any visible electric lights on, dusty old furniture and BINGO!- an old glass case with tiny things inside. From the doorway, in the center of the room, I see three older Turkish men on short little stools sitting around a low table of lined note pads and smoldering ash trays- calculators out. I infer from the orderly scrawl on the notebooks, their concentration, and utter disregard of my presence that they are ‘doing the books’. With paper and pens. The books. Seriously. So after about a minute of staring, the one facing the door begrudgingly acknowledges me standing there. I wave my hand at the dusty glass case, “Can I open the door?” He gives me a slight nod and sighs. I spend about 15 minutes examining each thing. There are old captain’s wing pins, little tin boxes, mysterious coins with arabic script…..ahh. I’m in heaven. I finally select two coin pendants and two little silver looking Saint Mary pins and stare at the men until one looks at me. I ask, “How much for all of these?” He grunts as he stands and comes over to me. “This one is 75, it’s bronze, this one is 60- bronze, 10 and 10.” I’m horrified. My treasures disappear- replaced by a rude awareness that I am not in a vintage fantasy situation. This is much more than I expected. They are dusty for Christ’s sake. Abandoned. No one wants them but me. I squinch my mouth as he tells me the prices and settle on the Mozart necklace and two tiny Mary pins. More than I wanted to spend, but I felt compelled after rudely interrupting them to buy something. He tells me the total but I’m so flustered that I short change him $10 and toss the stuff in my purse pocket to walk out. He calls after me and puts his hand out. Instantly aware of my mistake, I want to say, “Shit! I’m sorry! I can’t do math under pressure!” but instead I turn red and hand him a bill. With relief I hop up the stairs and head to the next place. The three stores following are all versions of that first one.
So now, wised up, I’m simply window shopping(stalking) outside an amazing antique jewelry store filled with magical treasures I can’t afford. Hand carved coral earrings on 14 karat gold hooks, ancient cloisonne pendants, delicate glass perfume bottles on chains, ruby earrings, little hand-carved brass birds nestled on little brass boxes…It’s completely masochistic.
Traffic is picking up behind me and somewhat defeated, I think about going home. But just then I hear some kids run behind me kinda yellin’. I don’t think much of it until a movement out of the corner of my eye makes me turn my head just in time to see this little 10 year old scrawn pick up a wooden chair by one leg and raise it over his head to smash another little 10 year old in the head. Lucky for the intended recipient, the Raiser almost knocks a beefy passerby in the face. The Beefer yells at the kid, grabs the chair out of his hand, and shakes it in the his face before he gruffly puts it down. With an indignant arm sweep and some insults Beefy keeps on down the street. Undeterred ,the itty-bitty Aggressor, followed (mysteriously) by his intended victim and a random dog, darts across the street to a food stand and….I’m not kidding here….rips, RIPS a plank from the vendor’s porch/deck thing. Rips it right off the deck. He pauses there for just a moment holding the old 2x4 aloft and then swings it Casey at the Bat style right into the other kids left arm. With a dull thwack, the board breaks but doesn’t fall apart. To my amazement and confusion, the Recipient just stands there. Nothing? Nothing. Does nothing. Doesn’t run away? Just stands there. They are staring at each other with death threats. My need to stop this fight intensifies. This weirdo dog is freaking out and I can’t tell who it’s defending, but it is barking like crazy. Instinctively I know that I have no right to interfere but I’m really afraid of what’s happening. I’m an American woman. I don’t belong here and have no authority over these little rubbery kids. At this point the five or so adult male onlookers finallyexchange knowing glances and a near-by used purse vendor steps up and grabs the Aggressor by the arm while he yells at the other kid- who turns and runs off.
I immediately find a “margarita” , put treasures out of my head and go home. It was a great day.
Young Manhattanite: Dear White Power Milk pt. 6 →
Some emails we’ve received over at WPmilk@gmail.com
— — — — — — — — —
“Dear White Power Milk”
can you, while purifying the milk, say words while you garlge the milk, so perhaps the words get placed in the milk. Just may be, when I open the package of milk, i might hear that word, or feel it…
Journal entry from July, 2005
“A couple of days ago we had a freind visiting from Nacogdoches. We were all hanging around in the dining room before he had to go home. I was listening to him talk and my eyes drifted across to the bookshelf, and settled on James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code, a book my dad had given me for high school graduation. I had never read the book, but I knew what it was about. I felt the need, not desire, but need to pick the book up and look at it. I was casually flipping through the pages and reading passages out loud. Afterwords it just wound up on the desk again. I didn’t think about the book again.
I had a dream yesterday morning, well more of a nightmare. In the dream I was sleeping in my house-in my bed and I woke up to see a small boy in silhouette standing in the door frame. I heard him whispering the word “Camus”, over and over. I yelled for Michael, “There’s someone in the house! There’s someone in the house!”, but Michael wasn’t home. In my dream him saying Camus, Camus was just the scariest thing in the world to say to someone. I was terrified. I woke up right after the dream and was like, what the hell was that about? I got up and didn’t think about the dream again.
Yesterday afternoon I came home from dropping some family photos off to be developed, and I had the nagging sensation that the day was going to be wasted. I didn’t feel like going to the studio. Blah blah blah. Anyway when I got home I saw the book sitting on the desk and thought what the hell and settled in to read it for real. I got to about the 30th page and there the author references Heidegger and Camus, the philosophers. My heart nearly skipped a beat. I have never had a concious thought about Camus, ever. I have never read Camus anywhere. I couldn’t have told you that he was a french existentialist writer who champions art as sublimation. I started to cry from fear. What if I have to pay attention to this or I suck? How can I not diminish this to fit into my understanding of the world? How can I? I felt a cosmic connection to something else, something that was guiding me, because it thought maybe I could hear it now.
A more subtle version of my first dream last night. I dreamed I was in art school, and I was going back to my studio to get my money to buy this little boy some redneck food for Christmas because that’s what he wanted. As I was going to my studio my professor, old and annoyed with me for my laziness, was telling me what project I would have to do now just to pass his class becasue I hadn’t even written my paper on “The Plague”.
I feel as though I am charged with the duty to read an assload of Camus now.”
A journal entry from July, 2005
“Here I am wanting to tell a story. As I sit blankly, staring into the screen of a laptop that is not mine, in an apartment I do not pay for, I am wondering where did my imagination go? This wondering takes me back to a specific memory, the conjuring of which does not logically answer the question but, none the less is what comes.
My father, 40ish, my brother, 14, and I, 8, are driving over a set of old railroad tracks in the family’s 1980 Chevy astrovan, affectionately named “Willy” after Disney’s horrible movie about a whale of the same name. The van was so full of farm and construction related detritus, that the carpet actually sprung to life with growing grass and several dozen baby praying mantis. We lived on a country road in rural Alabama about 15 minutes outside of a small, KKK infested town named Roanoke.
So anyway back to my memory. We are driving over a set of railroad tracks in the afternoon heat of a sadistic Southern July. Dad was explaining to me that when John hits me or calls me fat it is only because he cannot hurt my father. It’s just transferrance of aggression. John calls me stupid because he feels stupid, and he calls me a whiny, fat, brat because he feels like a whiny, fat, brat. Projection. My father had hurt my brother, and my brother abused the only thing he could, which was me. This is my father. Calmly explaining to his eight year old daughter the mysteries of human emotional motivations. Calmly explaining to me on a sweaty summer afternoon in Alabama, that he was to blame for both our pain. Calmly robbing me of the right to be angry. Opening my eyes to the fact that he would not protect me from my brother because he was guilty, not sorry. It was not about me, it was about my father. He was saying this in front of my brother, who was silently seething with hatred for both of us in Willy’s back seat. There were times I was afraid my brother would do permanent damage to me, or more likely kill my father. Which he almost did at 19. All of this is what comes to mind when I wonder where my imagination has gone. It has been suffocated by the weight of what has become more real. What I can see, and perhaps what I believe to be the total insignificane of human life.
I did not have a bad childhood. It was wonderful compared to most. But what I did have, I thought, was a very keen understanding of emotional motivations. All seen through the distortion of the super negative. It is hard to grow up with a father a narcissitic as they come and an angry, critical mother. Narcissism in a parent is a strange thing. I have not begun to understand it. But enough about my parents, I have grown to accept that I chose them to be born to, and not the other way around. Freedom from the idea of logical conclusion is hard work, but I am fighting the good fight to get away from one and one is two, stupid!”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Another song I wrote for the one square mile, Barrow Alaska
You seriously need to check this stuff out. My great friends are amazing film makers and really know how to capture the feel of a place.
-r
I had a dream that a cobra I had been keeping in a cardboard box had gotten inside my head-curled around my brain-because I had forgotten to seal the top of my skull? It was so terrifying. I kept wondering if it had already bitten my brain and my thoughts were not real anymore. I can’t even comfortably look at pictures of cobras now.
Last night was one of the clearest nights we have had yet. This is the view from our little patio.
