Summertime Clothes

Sweet summer night and I’m stripped to my sheets, it’s winter now and my furnace creaks. The clock seems busier and manic, racing me to some sort of finish. A voice from the clock says you’re not gonna get tired–my bed is a pool and the walls are on fire. Chills from my fingertips down your back make you shiver and me smile. I sit back and let us breathe. You can’t help but smile and I’m so relieved. Let’s slide to the street, I want to walk around with you. It doesn’t really matter, I’ll go where you feel. Hunt for the breeze, get a midnight meal. The breeze is now a chill and the leaves twirl, following us down the street. Walking around in our summertime clothes, nowhere to go while our bodies glow. You pull me, we walk in tangents attached at all times. Too much on my mind, that it spills outside…Our clothes might get soaked, but the buildings sleep.

Do not be deceived

Democratic National Convention–Denver

Taken with a Diana; black and white film crossprocessed as slide film

Always Do

I stand in stasis; hold my ground against the impending crash about my knees that I know the waves will bring. There are the beautifully simple days that make oh so much sense and fall together seamlessly. But nasty little cracks sometimes form, my anal retentiveness creeping through. My need for some semblance of control aches in my bones, itches for a fight.  I’m gonna make you, if you don’t love me. If you don’t love me, that don’t make it true.  Laughter is my subterfuge; I am crumbling inside; I am seething with terrifyingly desperate thoughts. But this is not me. Sweat in the sun, let it stick to my clothes. I do not wish to own you, grow into you, amass your thoughts for mine. I am conflicted in wanting you free and wanting you mine. Lay me down, get the splinters out. One by one, by the light of the moon. Make it soon…I’m begging you. It kills me trying backstep away from you. If I’m to make the same mistake every day, would you mend it?

Emulsion lifts

As a compulsive eBayer of old junk like skeleton keys, slides, cameras, foreign newspapers etc., I’ve been trying to assimilate my pile of ‘crap’ into a pile of ‘crafty crap.’

Using slides that I bought from an estate sale of an elderly couple’s world travels, I created Polaroid 669 (peel apart type) prints using a slide printer (that I also happened to eBay, hmmm…), where you can manipulate the brightness and color levels.

To create emulsion lifts (such as those below), you allow the prints to dry 24 hours before soaking them in [nearly] boiling water in a fancy contraption known as the casserole dish (praise Jesus and the Midwest for these). Once the emulsion–the thin membrane laying on top of the backing paper–begins to bubble, you transfer the whole print with tweezers in to another tray filled with cold water.

Now you can begin to manipulate the emulsion off the backing paper by gently pushing it with a finger or eraser, where it floats around in the cold water like a little photographic jellyfish. Sliding a piece of heavy, cold-pressed watercolor paper underneat the emulsion, you can tear, crease, or stretch the thin emulsion around on the paper.

Aaaand allow to dry!

Staring at the ceiling

She’s posting all the time but the boards are down. I’ve come to terms with the vague notion that I may be polluting the web ‘air-ways,’ but to set these thoughts down reassures my constant paranoia that my mind is becoming a sieve. It’s a burned out building. Perhaps we become far too wrapped up in our narcissism, but we are able to project images of ourselves and maybe even initiate a self-fulfilling prophesy. We look inward, we look outward, he’s spending all his time on his back, staring at the ceiling, but at least we scrutinize.

This blog may never be given out, but it’s comforting to know I put it here, I may remove it, I may simply hide it. Crayon past the line…crossword filled in with non-photo blue (so they’ll never find you). Until that moment of decision, I remain content to string bits of thoughts or memories or reminders up on these walls.

Tadao Ando

Haunted by the agonizing pervasiveness of ghastly barrack-like structures of beton brut and the expanses of strip mall pavement of my [embarrassingly] suburban upbringing, I am unceasingly moved by the delicateness and sensitivity captured by Tadao Ando’s designs.  I am strangely affected beyond the capabilities of painting and sculpture. While his concrete structures are inherently solid and massive, they are rendered powerless against the “shafts of sunlight [that] penetrate the stillness” (15 The Colours of Light) and rigidity of his in-situ cast concrete. Apertures through these massive concrete planes create a powerful dichotomy between corporeal and ethereal. In its silence–as in Zumthor’s “thinking architecture” as opposed to architecture that incessantly ‘talks’–lies its expressiveness. In its materiality–ambiguously “both organic and inorganic”–lies its power. Light delineates space rather than the concrete mass as it hits the sheen of the surface.  Caught in the dialogue between simplicity and complexity, Ando achieves an incomparible lyricism and transparency so rarely realized by concrete.

 

 

• I highly recommend  Tom Heneghan’s “Architecture and Ethics” and Peter Zumthor’s Thinking Architecture. Both beautifully explore conveying the human dimension of design through honesty of material.

Cease to begin

As I set down these notes on paper, I’m obsessed by the thought that I may be the last living being on Earth. To overlook an empty city of a civilization no longer in existance. I stand not to resist decimation, but to be swallowed by the soil; to be devoured by insects; to decay into muck. It’s a beautiful idea…to be returned to nothing. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

To be pulled backwards, forwards, and simultaneously fixed in the present is an unadulturated, incomparable tranquility that settles upon you as you hover mere feet over ancient ruins on the delicate glass and steel floor poised above.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative.

–Anais Nin

 

 

Is there anyone on the air? Is there anyone?