King Beast or “Baby arm”
Christmas greetings.
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.”
Deserted roof top cafe in Istanbul. Good.
[video]
Share this and keep this dick from Santorum-ming everything up.
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…
“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.”
“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!”
another little sketch….Untitled, Prague, January of 2011
Watercolor sketch From the East to the South
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.