I finally found a full version of McLaren’s Negatives online. WATCH HERE. A ten minute intimate documentary about his life and work by Canadian film-maker Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre from 2006. The editing and composting was done by Kara Blake! Blake and Saint-Pierre co-produced The Delian Mode, an experimental documentary about the legendary Delia Derbyshire (I’ve emailed the website twice about getting a copy to watch but no one replied to me! I need to watch it so badly).
I hated Alphaville for its blatant cinematic masturbation but then I started to love it. I want my whole life to look like that.
Transcribing and translating French poetry to work the/my language.
This is where my inspiration lies right now although it’s hard to keep standing with the heavy clouds and rain following me from Amsterdam to Paris to Amsterdam again. I don’t know how long I can take this.
Last night I sent off my first pilot interview questions to my lovely friend Vaccine, who also happens to be one of my favorite artists. She is thrilled to participate in my project.
I want to re-try some things. This is it. Waiting never works out.
View from the balcony in St.Cloud where I stayed at my friend’s house in Paris. It looked like this almost every morning for weeks.
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.
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.
This is a picture I took of the famous poem I stumbled upon earlier this year that made me fall in love with Yoko Ono, and in turn it gave me the words to fall in love with you.
Penestin, France, July 2009
After I sat on a cliff watching the Atlantic Ocean it rained. It was my first time. I cried because it hurt and opened me. I had to bike back to my caravan with heavy clothes. I was climbing the rain.
+
Touch
My hands
open the curtains of your being
clothe you in a further nudity
uncover the bodies of your body
My hands
invent another body for your body
This is Dalida. She is a goddess, but really an Egyptian-born French singer. Three of her lovers committed suicide after being with her. I took her photo from all angles, especially to showcase her hair. It reminds me of mine. It reminds me of the story of Samson and his locks. I am pretending to be between them right now. Saul Williams in a poem, This Type of Love says: “…I want a love that makes me want to cut off all my hair. Well maybe not all of the hair, maybe like I’d cut the split ends and trim the mustache but it would still be a symbol of how strong my love is for her.” Yes! I say this so much as an extension of my love! I am so fervent about my long hair. It’s everywhere. Playtime!
President Roslin, who is dying of cancer sits with a dying woman, Emily, who is at the last stages of her own terminal cancer in the hospital quarters.
“Those are the gods you believe in? Capricious? Vindictive?”
“They are not to be taken literally. They are metaphors.”
“I don’t need metaphors, I need answers.”
I believe in metaphor, thus I believe in God. I don’t need answers or reassurance, because they’re in me already.
I don’t think I was ever truly an atheist. The anagram of my name spells A Mad Angel.
I want to explore what it means to be me (how cliché is that?), what it means to be allowed to experience everything. Sitting in front of my laptop playing Solitaire isn’t getting me anywhere, but it’s what I do. I’m stressed out. Solitaire. Finished a part of an application. Solitaire. Being told what to do at work while someone else makes the decisions isn’t working me out. It’s wearing me out. Being in the same city since I was a preteen isn’t conducive to risk. But I’ve never been a risk taker, so what do I do? I have these projects lining up in front of me, but I cower. I take them on, on, on but not with all of me. Never with all of me. Where is the exploration in a desk? I don’t want to be no armchair archeologist. I think I’m starting to grow old because I think about my mortality in a different way. In a way that things are changing, moving so fast that all I have time to do is go through the motions. Sometimes I feel because J is such a dreamer, I have to be the one to induce practicality in our lives. He is the one living out his dreams as an artist. I can’t let myself.
This song is from my favorite downtempo house album of all time, A View from the Heights. My ex introduced me to them. I don’t even recall how and when. I wish I remember the story of how he came across them. I found a copy of the album in some small shop on a corner in downtown Paris. I also bought Cassius’ 1999 and Feeling for You for 5 euros each. This was 2002 and the euro was just taking over, all the prices were still in franks too. This lovely blonde woman worked there. She kept talking to me and I pretended to know more French than I truly did. She found it pleasant that such a young girl was backpacking and still had the will to buy vinyl to carry around so she gave me some French house record. I felt so cool. I didn’t feel so cool when I was sweating buckets in June carrying heaps of records from the different cities I visited, but at that age, the struggle feels less. Always.
Einstein said:“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, then what are we to think of an empty desk?”
There he is sitting at his desk, just like I do, but with my back way more twisted. There are papers everywhere surrounding him and his genius. I am not cluttered, but merely complex and thorough.
These images of Albert Einstein’s desk in his office at Princeton were published by Life magazine in 1955, just months before his death.They can contemplate a blackboard full of equations, a pile of old magazines and even his own pipe momentarily abandoned on one of the notebooks.
