April 2006 Archives

The work is comprised of nine panels, each with varying size, but all in elements of three. Each work has a sub-concept, deriving from the placement of the work--in terms of horizontal and lateral views, relations between the sizes, and the direction of the 'droplets.'

The joy of the 'droplet,' which sends the water it impacts into circles, the beauty of each expanding and growing more diminutive thereby. The three-dimensional aspect in the expansion of the water upwards--struggling to defy gravity, but conquered. Droplets contain the potential energy of the universe, hydrogen and oxygen, but are in themselves a most insubstantial substance.

Micro-encapsulation, controlled release, and the literal interpretation in blots from Rohrschach (pipe-chess) give rhetorical colour to the wordless concept.

The vibrancy of this place takes my breath. It has an African hugeness to it, and a European control. The people have taken a route that America would have benefitted from, in that they are all mixed up racially; it is an amazing rainbow of people and a singular fusion of African and European culture that has enriched the gestalt populace to an extent that America, with its impoverished and segregated culture, can never hope to even understand the loss of. Saudade is the operative word for Brazilian people, and to be Brazilian is not a matter of bloodline, but rather, of blood;how potent is its essence pumping in your veins? Does the beat make you quiver?

The cities horrify me, they are huge in a way that makes New York feel very small. The grinding poverty and brilliant wealth come together to create a strain on the people who live at either end. I visited areas in the Northeast that were simply poor--even the 'wealthy' were poor by American standards. With this in mind, I felt no insecurity--people were kind and happy with the fact of their life. I don't mean to suggest that people who live on almost nothing are content, but there was an undeniable suggestion in the air that living was its own reward, and that happiness had less to do with the accoutrements appertaining thereunto.

Have I ever mentioned how much freedom subterranean trains have brought me? These urban solutions allow people from any point of view to get from one place to another in reasonable comfort and speed. Generally one can get from someplace one is to someplace one wants to be, cheaply. The mark of a great city is the ability of a person to get from one place to another without overdue hassle.

My nine favorite places (that I have been) based on this standard:

1. Munich
2. London
3. Paris
4. New York City
5. Berlin
6. Lyon
7. Barcelona
8. Chicago
9. Vienna

Nine places rumored to have great subways that I haven't ridden (that I'd like to):

1. Moscow
2. Tokio
3. Buenos Aires
4. Madrid
5. Mexico City
6. Seoul
7. Osaka
8. Lisbon
9. Brussels

I have reached an age where looking back on my life means many things. I recognize a stage where looking back isn't always the same as remembering, since there is now so much to remember that I don't always recall, or if I do, my recollections can be incomplete, or inaccurate.

As the title would suggest, though entirely coincidentally, there is a large breach in the mountainous terrain of my experience. It is no clean hyperbole that describes my adventures as a being, human. My life has been a series of ups and downs, some high and low, others barely perceived.

From 1988 through 1992 (with interruptions between) I lived in a small Bavarian town. Southern Germany is an interesting mixture of Alpine insanity (exacerbated by the presence of remaindered windstorms that blow off the Sahara and become trapped in vales and dales of the Alps) and German rationality. The rationality of Germans taken as a group is so fierce that it borders on irrationality, as I tend to find extremes of the psyche circular in their diagnosis and symptoms.

Being 17 in a prosy German town is an interesting thing. The safety of the streets was legendary. I say was. Back then I could leave my bicycle unchained anywhere and come back to it, one could walk anywhere at any time without the slightest care. By the time 1990 came along, with the inrush of Eastern Europeans, this all changed. Vandalism and robbery occurred with exponential frequency, and people became suspicious and hateful (relative to my prior experience).

Traffic always was a serious issue in Garmisch-Partenkirchen--nominally populated by around 30,000 people, Garmisch-Partenkirchen (or Garmisch) grew to around 300,000 on any given snowy day. I am not exaggerating. This crowd would send the atmosphere to a frenetic pace, with cappucino joints hopping and shopping popping with bustling Omas and Opas selling their boiled wool underwear and other fun-filled crafts. For someone as suggestible as myself, it was a great opportunity to people watch, and to drive like a madman through the pedestrianised zone on my bike. Mind you the Füßgängerzone was a new contrivance, where earlier the paved cowpath simply split into two obverse one-way "streets."

The changes in Garmisch were pretty amazing when you consider that on my arrival it was essentially a cow-town (not in the stockyards sense, but in the pastures and shepherds sense) with a ski-slope and a couple of hotels. By the time I left there were condo developments, and discos, and high-speed rail connexions. I recall riding from town for five minutes or so and being in the fields, with towers of manure and flowers everywhere--the kind of green that makes you expect to see some swiss-miss jump up from the flowers and being then seventeen, in my mind she'd have a lusty look in her eye and a picnic blanket open nearby...

I would ride the trails into the mountains...Garmisch is enclosed on two sides by mountain ranges, each designated as a national park. I'd ride until my butt ached, and I'd inevitably find myself in some surprising hamlet under the granite mountains with names like Hammersau, Grainau, and Murnau. I think the "Au" refers to a field or some such thing. Basically it is a pastoral existence for a young man, if perhaps a bit lonely and not a great place for someone with my particular bents of mind. That's why it came as such a great pleasure to learn that my schooling (or what was left of it) was to be done in Munich--a great metropole about 101km to the North, and boasting all the sins and suasions of the mind and flesh that a young man could possibly dream of (and many as yet then undreamt of).

This treatment is not of Munich, though. Munich is an amazing and marvelous city, and still holds my heart in thrall, but Garmisch-Partenkirchen is the town of my teen ages, the healthy and vigorous "ort" of my orientation and the benchmark of happy times to follow, by which so many fall short (inexplicably short to those who don't have the perception of experience). I suppose I've just touched on something defensive in myself--I am a bit raw that people think I am negative. And people do...I have been at odds with people who can't understand the vehemence of my observations, and I feel sorry that they are drwan into my subliminal melancholy, for they haven't seen the godly land of the Loisach valley, with its fairytale villages, its green fields...they haven't experienced the pleasure of ruined castles found suddenly while biking through the unspoiled pine forests. For my compatriots its a life of highway rest-stops, strip malls, of Americana gone wild, of sins of the flesh and mortification of the mind carried to conditions that would have a satanic figure blushing and exclaiming "why didn't I think of that?"

There are so many memories flooding in on me, how do I share them? How do I keep from being judgemental when I feel judged unfairly? My test comes at the price of having known something delicious, but personal.

Poverty is a problem. It must be solved by the impoverished. Top-down assistance is assistance, but that word never meant 'solution.' Rather than welfare, if wealthier nations want to obviate the problem, they must work to creating opportunities. Poverty is not evil, nor is it the fault of the wealthy; blame is incorrect, victimology is misleading, and quick-fixes are quick but not necessarily fixes, except maybe in the sense that a dose of heroin is a fix.

There is a certain pleasure in mediocrity, knowing that I don't have to fight to prove my worth at the 'top' of some imaginary hierarchy. Are we goats, that we must vie for some useless position at the pinnacle of whatever object we might see?

And how then can I deny that I too have looked and seen a lofty point, and wished to be the one sitting there; for the acclaim and desire of those beneath me. Is this some validation of my person, some means of alleviating the insecurity of having been born just a man? What awful concepts will the will of society create--each growing less worthwhile as society furthers its degradation and assumption?

Superheroes and Heroes

And we need superheroes, since we abdicated the viable man--no commoner may save the world we have devised.

Shame on us, thinking that simple men couldn't create, and that simple men cannot preserve--yet what must be preserved is a thing already senescent, being no longer in the process of creation--necessarily dying.

What of these young idealists who stand around our bank fortress with sheets full of propaganda--Will they change something, do they believe they will change something, what purpose do they have--is it presumption that makes them think they will have an effect on the suffering of others?

Sterility

Or something odd, something a bit different, something exotic. Stimulated by alternatives--I seek to reinvent myself through association with something new (association can mean intercourse, can't it?)

Are you an elitist bureaucrat? Have you allowed your lifestyle, here with slickness and wealth, to influence the way you envision the poverty-stricken? As if in being so, their condition is a result of their existence. A choice perhaps, just as your own choices led to your success? And how that success makes for a model of behaviour? One which sees you working in tandem with the like-minded to establish patterns of behaviour--parameters, as it were, that are boundaries to the poverty-stricken, keeping them from attaining betterment?

Is it better to be bourgeois and strive for the bourgeoiseeing of the plebes and proles? Or is it better to allow the division of humanity to exist in its current state and allow people to graduate between the levels, rather than redefining the levels themselves, or solidifying the position of someone in their level, a freeze of immobility economically through bureaucratic intervention?

Denial

The favour of the bureaucrats, why desire it? And the ridicule of people, for their proclivity to denial? In denying the obvious, people are not creating a new reality, but denying the reality of this one. This one--is it mine?

How strangely I feel, sitting now in this bungalow, on the edge of an impoverished city--fingering my WorldBank ID.

I guess it is my own fault, having expectations that simply don't match with reality. But isn't that what expectations are, or at least possibly can be? Not only do I seem to choose a form of happiness that depends on the surreal, but I would guess that I am inhibited by chronology as well.

You see, I am desirous of lifestyles that have no modern equivalent, and very likely never were real at all. My expectations, at least in terms of living life, have no basis in observed lifestyles. At the very least this is an American conundrum, but I suspect it is a 21st century dilemma as well, or alternatively.

Coffee is the most difficult meal of the day, and my expectations around its service and quality prevent me from enjoying either service or quality on any given day. I wish for some peaceful introspective moment, and I get a beer delivery truck across the street, whose driver insists not on placing the kegs on the ground, but throwing them onto the ground, with a loud recurrent clang. He's parked in the middle of the street, and traffic is at pains to get by. Yes, the bar that he's servicing needs its alcohol to function as a business entity, purveying all things inebriated. I feel put upon however that their needs have imposed themselves on my needs at this decidedly un-bar hour.

There's the poorly dressed businessman, his clothes the shabbiest of Joseph Bank's off-price line. He's wearing a headset and talking to some prospective lover/client. He's talking loudly and openly, sharing with me. I am held hostage to his spiel, and he abates not at all to order his own coffee, which I guess to be more a stimulant than a pacifier.

There's the student of medicine, likely biking over from Stanford, he's at such pains to satisfy any curiosity as to his sexual persuasion, that he is leering at a pregnant woman. Two elderly matrons are not safe from his randy protestations. He opens his mouth to speak--and a purse falls out.

A man that I had heated words with about his smoking habits is suddenly escorted firmly from the cafe. He notices me and grimaces in a most superior way. I can almost respect the power that such an egotistical face must require to be maintained under these circumstances.

And my coffee, served to me from a thermos and heated using the milk steamer...is cold.

at the millionth branching
of some tree evergrowing...never green

aquiver, full of arrows...cupid
tried to kill me with his only weapon

what grass will welcome me...falling
freely, accepting gravity

my life is not for you
anyway, what would you?

The fogs have flown in, at first racing to snag themselves on the Bank of America tower, then thickening--no longer seeming to race, but no less velocitous.

I've lent my weight to the press of bourgeoisie in this dumpy ghetto-equeness. Sitting in a stained cafe with wireless connectivity...a man walks by wearing short overalls with white hose and an orange plaid blouse. He's an albino, but that is the last aspect which I notice. The clothes have accomplished something significant.

Another man walks by. His hair is red like deep fire. He's pretty, and has interrupted my daydream. Suddenly my reverie is dinged by the makeup, the moods, the fat, the fakery...