day-to-day

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my plane back to nowhere.

August 30, 2010 in day-to-day | 1 comment

“I am stuffing your mouth
with your promises
and watching you vomit them
out upon my face.”

Anne Sexton wrote that. I’ve blogggged it before. It’s one of the most perfect pieces of words brought together I have ever read so here it is again & again. Amsterdam and its constant downpours are almost over, a few more days until I have to go back to Toronto, and then I fly home (??), fly back to my city where I have no place to live, no potential roommates and the second year of my MA to start/finish. I have no home in Toronto, just memories. Where am I going? Maybe having no place to go opens me up to go anywhere, to have the potential for everything.

The shot of the tree was in France and the plane is from when I visited Shiphol. Now I am here in Jordaan in the centre of Amsterdam. Everything can change in the split of a second, just like that. Words can shatter whole worlds, whole conceptions of knowledge, of what is and what isn’t. Words can do it all but they canot solely repair the damage they are able to do. No, much more than that needs to happen.

Maybe the sun will come out again before I go? Do you know I don’t want to go back, I don’t miss anything in Toronto anymore. I want to stay here, everything makes sense here, my life makes sense here. I am alone a lot and sometimes with some people that maybe will be my friends, they are sweet to me. I have a suitcase, ok I brought two of them, my camera, my Wacom and my laptop. People move across oceans for so many reasons, I have already moved, why do I have to return?  Amsterdam has been so good to me, has nourished me, frustrated me, nearly killed me, but has taught me to give to it too. I love you Amsterdam, I love all you have done for me this summer.

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Hipstamatic France

August 13, 2010 in day-to-day, photography | 2 comments

Because life looks better through a preset?

The last day of Ile de Ré the sun almost burned my eyes out.

Here is Elodie and some of the other passengers I took a rideshare with. They were a contemplative bunch. I tried to engage in a discussion by speaking broken French. I had to be very loud because of the highway winds circling around the back window. I don’t think they even heard me.

This is what I see when I walk out the door in Val d’Or, where I have been most of my Paris trip staring at my laptop and working on my Project Proposal. 

My leg is not really bruised, and I would never smoke so many cigarettes at once, but you can’t argue with a preset.

Outside Monceau Park. The day I realized I can drink almost an entire bottle of wine and not get drunk (anymore).

Have to compete with the precious Parisian girls you know.

My friend’s family owns a Moroccan restaurant, so he took me there and made me fish tagine and it was like a VIP service for me. I pretended I was a celebrity who could only go out at off-hour times not to get mauled by her needy fans. Except he made me other food at the restaurant and the tagine at his mom’s house. Obviously they use a gas stove in the resto!

magdalena dramatica.

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Shitty Shit Shit + The Pompidou

August 9, 2010 in day-to-day | No comments

Pompidou, August 2010

All my photos are turning out really shit lately. I have no idea what’s wrong with my eyesight. Not to say my photography is so great to begin with but I was feeling more self-assured in finding a bit of voice, a bit of perspective and I was able to work through my ideas and materialize them more than before. WTF? Have any of you gone through this? I think it’s the stresses of needing to churn out my MA Project Proposal by the end of this week, totally obliterating any exciting time I could be spending in Paris and making me miss the first week project of my Digital Methods Advanced Class in Amsterdam.

Why am I always so slow and scattered at everything I do? Why can’t I have faith in my decisions?

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Below is a photo of me posing with Marina Ambramovic at the Pompidou last week. When I walked into her room of three sculptures I started shaking and bouncing around and had to be calmed down. Being able to be part of Marina Abramovic’s energy made me crazy! I love her! She changed my life.

The Pompidou has this ridiculously amazing exhibition on right now - elles, featuring women artists. It’s not tokenistic and doesn’t feel overly pushy, like here are some women artists and what they did, rather it’s more of a weaved narrative able to work through art history without just projecting ‘giants‘. At first I was excited to be surrounded by women’s art but I’ve also been re-thinking a lot about the category ‘woman’ (because of the focus of my Project) and what the boundaries of gender even are (and should we be reinforcing any boundaries at all?), and I wonder if the Pompidou thought of it too. How do you not reinforce problematic gender boundaries by focusing on gender? Maybe this is where Donna Haraway’s ‘situated knowledges’ fits in. Fitting in Cixous’ écriture féminine also makes sense, but I’m struggling with her work much more than Kristeva’s. Kristeva shakes up your whole idea of Being, and Cixous seems a bit like a French bell hooks to me, which as much as I appreciate its influence, doesn’t really work within my thinking. BAH!

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Bicyclette Obsession

July 20, 2010 in Inspirations, day-to-day | 1 comment

Hi hi! Yesterday after seeing this emotional performance at STEIM (the studio for electro-instrumental music), I rode a fixie around this crazy makeshift track at Mediamatic, set up for Sur Place, and exhibition of old and new and fancy fixies and self-portraits of people after brutal bike accidents. It was so exhilarating that after I walked out I was totally in love with everything, feeding my exponentially growing cycling (+Amsterdam!) obsession. Then after smoking, drinking and almost crashing a bbq in Vondelpark I rode home dancing on my own bike to Bullion and the Love Joys.

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Schiphol Airport (+I’m Feeling It)

July 18, 2010 in day-to-day, photography | No comments

Last week my friend Wassim and I were talking about how badass it would be to ride your bike to the airport and go fly somewhere. So, today I biked 20km to Schiphol airport through the giant Amsterdamse Bas (the forest). I didn’t board the plane though, I carry too many shoes to fit in a backpack. Instead, I stopped by the road where many people were sitting on blankets and on cars with binoculars and fancy telephoto lenses. Parents with their children were also running around, maybe showing them another family member flying away. I remember when I was young in the 90′s flying was very expensive and rare for the average person, so every time one of us would fly out the others would hang out of the car by the airport and watch as the LOT plane took off for Warsaw. We stopped doing that years ago, probably because the rarity of flying ended and now I see the inside of airports all the time.

I biked around some more. I started feeling really good, really right, right then. I mean, there’s been so much outpouring that Amsterdam and I don’t get along for the last three weeks and here I was, feeling “in my element.” I started taking photos of the parking lot. It was only after I was shooting for a while that I realized the comfort and ‘rightness’ I felt was because I allowed myself to become intimate with Amsterdam. I wrote about my desire for intimacy with architecture and physical spaces for a GPS video I did last year, suivez-moi. Perhaps this sounds totally cliche, and I guess it could be, but it makes so much sense to me, to take Amsterdam with my body, literally. I guess to be in love you have to be intimate in some way yea?

Yesterday I read all of Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted.

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Going Out Girl

July 17, 2010 in day-to-day | 3 comments

Hello. Last night I went out to see Headhunter play at OT301 by myself because I have no friends here and I’m not really sure I am able to/want to make any? I guess I’d like to make a friend or two to do things with and talk to. We could go to the dumpster site that acts like a beach and looks nothing like the website, or maybe discuss why Mount Kimbie is worth the expensive train ride to Brussels. I’ve met a few people that I get on with OK but I don’t want to compromise my time if I’m just hanging out with them because there are no other people more suitable, you know? We’d sit at the edge of the pond in Vondelpark, watching the fountain, drinking 1.99 1L bottles of Albert Heijn wine and have many awkward silences in which we’d both be unsure whether this is ever going to work. Then maybe we’d rely on a common ground: discussing our feelings towards Amsterdam and the tourists, but not in a memorable way at all, in a way that would leave us empty and sad and we’d both know we’ll never keep in touch, even though they’d say “Look me up if you’re ever in my city,” or maybe it wouldn’t even get to that. However PS. I’d love to spend more time with Brittney. //

These are the photos I took to remember what I looked like before heading out in case something happened to me. I got what I wanted: to practice my footwork and be among a large mass of non-stop dancers. What I didn’t want: non-stop comments from guys about my dancing, about me being out alone, about me being an ‘American.’ //

OT301 is an organized squat near Vondelpark that sells cheap wine (2 euro) and is a venue to many music and art shows. It also houses a restaurant, De Peper, selling vegan and organic 2-course meals for 6 to 10 euro. Like most squat restos in Amsterdam, you have to call earlier in the afternoon to book a reservation for that night. This makes me want to start a cheap kitchen initiative in Toronto because I don’t know of one, do you?

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Amsterdam & I don’t get along + Boxcutter

July 5, 2010 in Inspirations, day-to-day, music | 3 comments

I am unable to pry Amsterdam open. There is a thick wall, a thick concrete wall that stands between us. I am not good with unmalleable material. I am a soft sponge - penetrable. Sometimes trying is pointless when you are unable to try in a meaningful way. Or do you just keep going? Amsterdam is raw and humid and harsh. I can thrive and relate to raw and sharp, but not when the rawness is dull and cold. Some of the people in my program are in love with Amsterdam and all it has to offer. I am glad. I do not feel this. I want to smell and touch Amsterdam but it’s not letting me. Why won’t it let me? I can get along with every city I go to, why now, why here? There is an energy, a really pushy energy that tourists exude on it, making its residents impatient, making the city impatient but unable to say no.

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MUSIC ::: Did you know Barry Lynn, also known as Boxcutter, also known to me as one of the most phenomenal musical artists of all time has a Soundcloud and he puts new unreleased music on there for us to listen to? When I listen to Boxcutter all of the cells that make up my existence re-articulate their existence and open up to the infinite possibilites. This all sounds cliche because it is how I always describe him, because his musical output’s great vastness permeates me that much.

I was in J’s music room in 216. It was early 2006. It was really bright outside. I was sitting in his lap on his gray oversized office chair that always swung back a bit too much and I was sure we’d both die this way. He played “Mossy” and I fell to the floor on his rug, closing in on my face with both hands the way I do when I hear music that overtakes me. I started crying and demanding the song be put on lifetime repeat. It was one of those moments that everything changed, that I heard something so new and so exciting that it made me want to keep being alive so I wouldn’t miss moments like these. I have those moments. They are rare, but they occur and when they do all of pessimistic insecure me seems implausible.

Mossy is one of the songs on Oneiric, Boxcutter’s first album on Planet Mu. When I hear oneiric in my head, I remember Mary Anne Hobbes talking about it when he did an exclusive session for the Breezeblock, and I managed to get myself in on the shout out as “Miss Riot” because that’s my handle on DOA from many many years ago. It mattered to be part of that moment so much then.

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Now I am here, in the moment. I’ve been spending hours every day in front of Resolume with my Korg midi controller imagining with my own hands how all my favorite music looks like.

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