Paris, 2010 // Toronto, 2006 // Toronto, 2008 // title: Colette – Claudine and Annie (1903)
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Tags: love
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.
Tags: france
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.
Tags: amsterdam
This weekend Toronto unwillingly hosted the G20. Although I have been physically in Amsterdam since Saturday, I have not left Toronto, glued to Twitter and the Internet reading obsessively about everything that is happening from all sides. Reasearching what the G20 actually does(n’t) do, and the history of it all, trying to figure out how easily meaningful discourse about the Summit gets obscured by hysteria from both sides. My write up on being a spectator from abroad is slowly coming to fruition. I need to take a few days to digest my interaction with the Summit almost exclusively online.
I am living with Rico, who runs IChione, and his family for the summer in their attic in Amstelveen. It is strange to have a peer that also has a 14 year old daughter. It is an interesting negotiation for me as a student but also an adult. At 23, Rico was on his way to be an ordained monk but then his daughter was conceived and he realized his way into it could not occur because he’d have to leave them both behind.
Here are some of what I saw yesterday in my new neighbourhood playing around with my UV lens. Flickr.
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MUSIC: Also, a few days ago one of my favorite music people in the world, Loops Haunt, posted a mix called Strange Fruit Vol 1. It has many wonderful old love songs on it. You should download it and have him be in your life too. OK? OH! And I just found out that he’s playing StekkerFest in Utrecht on August 14! I am there! Maybe this special person I know can come too? For his biiiiiirthday?
This is Not What I want to Be Doing.
I peek into the world of the Other. I have made considerable measures to open up the containers, both my own and the one of the Other. I am desperate for the Other to not only notice but want to open up my holes more, make consequences of the holes. It’s easy to peer through the holes, even touch the stuff inside, imagine how it could feel like belonging to me. I am always imagining the Other as more than I am. I am constantly in relation to the Other. I have created a self-appointed war in which I don’t know how to compete in at all and my enemy refuses to be the enemy. It’s effortless for me to start with, “I am not…” when asking myself what I am. The Other seems so assured and willing. I suffer from myopia.
This is Not What I want to Be Doing.
Being insecure paralyzes your body. The Other doesn’t ask for my reassurance but I give it, and with that, faulty expectations arise in me. I need to go inside myself first. Not to figure out what I want to do with my life as some sort of psychological cliched breakthrough, but if I am constantly teetering, I need to figure out how to go through and risk it.
I am not productive with my energy, AT ALL. Most of my days are spent imagining, procrastinating, aimlessly sitting around my apartment until a moment comes and it’s almost always at that time I have to go to class, or go to meeting or sleep. I can’t just wait around for moments of magic, disillusioned that the Other has somehow harnessed these magical moments into the makeup of their container. Struggle. Struggle.
Why am I always reaching out for the Other? What is the Other constitute of that I am lacking? My container is swollen and ruptured (maybe? or is the rupture not happened yet… at that moment will I have no choice but to take that unknown risk for the future?). Ok. Maybe the container doesn’t break all at once, but little scissions occur all around. Yes, there are many holes. I have made the holes in myself and the Other. When did I start doing this though? I don’t remember.
What do I want to be doing?
I am tired of the constant “I” and my struggle with solipsism yet inability to escape it.
i found this photo of me from 2004. i used to spend hours talking about ‘doing’ with j, the man that took this photo.
Tags: identity
My parents made me “supervise” my seventeen year old brother in the suburbs last weekend. I made him and his two friends watch two hours of Millionaire Matchmaker, and they all fell in love with Patti. They also let me take some photos of them hanging out.
Tags: photos
from the ferry back to Toronto // may 2010 // more here
“And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing. ”
- Haruki Murakami
Tags: photography, quotes