Macedonian Folk Embroidery
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SKETCHBOOKS

• Eric Rodenbeck
• Aureia Harvey
• Huck
• John Copeland
• Adam McCauley
• Corey Jackson
• Paul Antonson
• Kozyndan
• Mayte Bayon
• Wayne Jiang
• e*rock
• Jon Keegan
• Tom Wood
• Archives of American Art

If you know of any other good ones, let me know.
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First we went to Martha's for drinks at sunset. Then off to Neb's farewell backyard barbecue at David's, where Stewart invented this marvellous new drink: rum and coke and chunks of watermelon. Delicious. And we spent a lot of time looking through Corey's notebooks. You should too.
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He arrived Ben, but he leaves Neb. There are various Neb songs, Neb anthems, Neb ditties. And from Neb have been derived the following words:

• Nebulator
• Nebtastic
• Recombineb
• Nebulon

Please send me any additions, updates.
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Oddly enough, after posting about Harry Smith several times, I never ran a search on the guy. Demian rectifies this. There is a web site all about him, where you can read is fascinating biography and look at pictures of him with Allen Ginsberg (I find it annoying how Ginsberg is photographed with everyone. I also have a vague, unexamined grudge against him) and there is also a book, American Magus. Demian saw some of his early films and "recommend(s) especially 'early abstractions' - every frame is the result of a complex process involving gels with shapes cut out of them, bleach and various chemicals sprayed from an atomizer, tiny hand manipulated images cut from catalogs, etc."
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Thank you for your message, Dr. Freud. I have decoded your instructions and read that though there is peril, it is counterbalanced by marvels, and that in spite of the near accidents and a bumpiness, I should befriend the black and blue, and just enjoy the ride. However, my codesheet is without a reference to "roosters". Could you please send me the latest update?
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In a January 1998 issue of Artforum, a short article about the rerelease of Anthology of American Folk Music, -- a record that kept me mesmerized day and night for a full week --and its compiler, Harry Smith (that was one of my favorite designs for Salon) by David Frankel. Harry Smith was:

But mostly, he just organized things. "Some people are nature loves, some become export bankers," he said, "I am interested in getting series of objects of different sorts." Frankel says Smith could be considered a kind of oblique curator, or, better, working with materials already extant, organizing music in the manner of an artist, and quotes the quotes Smith printed in the booklet included with the Anthology:

A new Pierre Menard, germane to various essays and works by Benjamin and Duchamp and the latest conversation by Lawrence Lessig on copyright law and its suppression of creativity. Smith is part of my new interest in the "Life as work of art", artists working outside of the institutions of art -- mavericks, oddballs, geniuses -- not art brut or "outsider art" -- but artists working in vales of art-making of their own creation, in the interstices of the professional art world.
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From a 1997 issue of Bunnyhop magazine, in an interview with Katharine Dunn, the author of Geek Love (I've cut it up into paragraphs):

Sorry about that annoying window -- the comments are actually hosted offsite. Here's a link to a resizable comment window for the comments below on crime, bad neighborhoods, junkie intimidation tactics, etc. Interesting discussion! I'm reading it all now...
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Tonight I was frightened by three very tall and fantastically filthy junkies that cornered me in the alley by my studio pulling the old "we'll watch your car for you while you're gone" scam, with the vague suggestion that they would break into my car if I didn't give them money. I didn't give them money.

I almost laughed when one guy said, threateningly "you know that there's a lot of crime around here" -- on looking at these hoodlums, the first description to come to mind was certainly not "law-abiding" or "socially responsible" or "concerned citizens" -- if there were to be crimes committed within 500 feet of where we stood, they were going to be committed by them. I almost laughed, as I said, but I was too scared. I could barely see them, silhouetted in the bluing sky, what with all that grime on their faces and the vines of their lank and greasy hair, but the smell of them was just terrible. They stood so close I could smell them.

I went up to my studio, and thought that maybe I should give them money after all, since they frightened me so much; then they'd leave me alone. But I thought, you shouldn't give people money for threatening you. I was so freaked out by the possibility of encountering them again after the sun had set, just me and them alone in that dark alley, that I couldn't concentrate. I stayed for only 20 minutes and went out to the car in the ebbing light. I made sure I was talking to Stewart on my cell phone as I was walking down the alley so they wouldn't talk to me, and I could tell him if something bad happened. One of them loomed menacingly as I was getting into the car. I pretended not to see him, and drove away as fast as I could.
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I've been spending all my time down at the studio, hour after hour of putting tiny objects in order. I'm clearing out a space on the floor for a large installation. Neb, Corey and Stewart came by in the Roofless Salon, and we drove around looking for dinner. We finally found it at the BBQ joint on Broadway, Memphis Blues, where we ordered the Memphis Feast. They dropped me back at the studio where I worked until 2:30 AM. I'm headed out to the studio now and then later to Inter-mission. I'm writing an article about them for Readymade.

It occurs to me again and again that what everyone needs is to be master of their own time. I've been thinking about this since the other day when I posted about being on a "bad" schedule. Mercantile democracies have provided limitless time-consuming activities, starting with the 40-hr work week, a certain numbers of hours spent watching TV or going to the movies or otherwise being "entertained" -- I'm highly suspicious of the word "entertain" -- weekends for "recreation" (I'm also suspicious of the word "recreation") but not enough time in which to really do anything. Two weeks of vacation a year! At some companies that means 10 days -- two five-day work weeks. It's inhumane.

Rogerio wrote "Current plan: to deflate some things, make time less precious, devaluate stuff I value in excess – and then see what happens." and then later "Why would I want to make time less precious? Think of the intersting things you thought of doing (and did) when you were a child or a teenager - *hours* spent skateboarding, swimming, reading, writing letters, exploring your neighboorhood, your body, your lego. Now I don't have time for half of this - time became too precious. That's why."

I keep thinking about this.
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There's a story today in The New York Times about a tax revolt against a remote Washington county's libraries which made me feel vaguely nauseous. Without the public library in the town where I grew up, I think I would have died of loneliness, boredom and despair around age 11.
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After only one day of midnight straight-to-bedding and 8 am wakeuppery, I'm back again on the Draculan time table. I do try to coordinate with the rest of the world, but I'm coming to believe Time=Fascism. Unclock me now!
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I was much amused by the entry for Indian Hemp under the POISON section of Mrs. Grieve's Modern Herbal.

The "leathern" just kills me!

I've been looking up the various worts in the Herbal, dropwort, figwort, sneezewort, butterwort, birthwort, fleawort. According to one of the dictionary sites (I forget which) -wort as a suffix was often used in the names of herbs and plants that had medicinal uses, the first part of the word denoting the complaint against which it might be specially efficacious.
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Lemonade purification fast starts (again) today!
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Crap! From this new site Calamondin turned me on to, there appears to be a new William Gaddis book coming out, Agape Agape. I still haven't finished any of his other books, and they keep coming out, even after his death.
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Fascinating, this Verlan business:

My referrer logs lead me to the linguablog languagehat, which notes that Verlan's been around forever, and widely known.

Languagehat has all kinds of interesting tidbits, and appears to be relatively new (no archives?). Shares my dislike of William Safire. How old is Safire anyway? He must be in his 80s by now. (I'm not asking this in any kind of concerned way, I'm, uh, just curious.) I've also ordered, on her/his recommendation American Tongue and Cheek, by Jim Quinn.
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Fair-to-good day of writing so far. I am also doing a lemonade fast. I think not having eaten any food today has sharpened my sense of smell. Someone is cooking chicken, probably in their kitchen. Someone went by before with a fresh cup of coffee. And someone is barbecuing beef on their balcony!
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I thought it might be safe to go back to Burning Man -- I went in 1995 and 1996 (see comment #2) -- and I started asking around to see what was up, who was going. But I finally decided not to go. Like Eek said, there are a lot of people going way too far out of their way to be wacky. And when I take trips I am usually looking to change in some fundamental way, to invite chaos in -- to find myself, say, broke and sleeping alone, hugging my backpack, on top of an airport in Salvador with planes shearing down overhead -- and there don't seem to be many opportunities to do that there. It's a predictable sort of chaos. I'm feeling very been there done that about the whole thing, which I find to be a bit sad. But I think, better to take the $200 admission fee (!) and go spend a month living in, say, Manila, or Kuala Lumpur or Bombay -- though the flight's more expensive than flying to Reno by about $800, I could get to know some of my more distant relatives living in Manila, and traveling in the third world, especially alone, changes first world people in fundamental ways. It just does. (Unless you're, say, David Duke.)

And then there's adventures like the parking lot of Milwaukee Metal Fest, or camping out at Bang Your Head. Woohoo! There's a journey into the unknown! Step aside, Burning Men, and let the professionals through.
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The Vancouver Department of Tourism has been trying to keep this information out of the public's awareness, but I'm going to have to break the story: Vancouver sunsets are pale, diluted affairs, the color of a half-drunk glass of Kool-aid that's been standing in the sun for too long. They inspire no awe, no mulling on the brevity of life; all those couples drooping into one another on Sunset Beach are clearly acting from some script they read in a Hallmark card -- I don't believe for one second their amours are in any way augmented by the declining sun, who you can see punching a time clock on the way out, bored.

Another peeve: the dream girl being pimped on dictionary.com. More water than flavor, ice cubes melting in Diet Rite. She really needs to do something about those roots and that is there any spinach in my teeth? smile. Ew! Can we have a blood infusion over here please?
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So the other week, Eric and I are chatting away on IM having yet another one of our internationally famous repartee exchanges, all wisecracks and wisdom, when suddenly Eric busts out with this:

Yesterday down at the studio Faith and Carol and Richard and I are talking about yoga, and Faith was telling me about her class on Commercial, says, you have to study with Grant, he walks on water, he hung the moon, etc. etc. Then she says, "Everyone falls in love with their yoga teacher, it's just the way it is." and I say, "Yeah. I'm still getting over Joe." Joe was my teacher at the Iyengar Institute in San Francisco. And somehow I put together Roberto Rossellini and yoga and I thought, I'm ready to suffer again.

This morning I was up at 6:30, walking over to Melriches for some coffee. I decided the only way to kick this going to bed at 7 AM and getting up at 3 PM habit was to just stay up until the following day. I can't for the life of me fall asleep when I want to. All I can do is keep myself from falling asleep when I am desperate to. So I'm walking and I'm thinking about what Faith said, "Everyone falls in love with their yoga instructor." And it occurred to me that that's the only way it happens -- you have to fall a little bit in love with the people who are going to do some good in your life. You don't fall in love with someone who does nice things for you, or people who are trying to help you. People have done wonderful things for me, and I've said "Thanks" and never thought of them again. The way it works is, first you fall in love with them, and then they change you, move you, fix you, inspire you. You're in love with them, so they can! The things that come out of their mouths -- genius! brilliant! This is why you fall in love with your yoga instructor, or your shrink or your teacher. If sick people fell in love with their doctors, people would be jumping out of their wheelchairs, throwing their crutches away, reversing terminal cancer!

Then imagine you were Roberto Rossellini, and you could get all of those people in your life helping you out with your job! Holy mackerel, what then!
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From Sex and Class and Race by Terese Svoboda:

If you can dream and not make dreams your master.
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I just read Ursula LeGuin's palmary 1979 essay It was a dark and stormy night: or, Why are we huddling about the campfire?, recommended to me by Juliet when we were talking about framing narratives, and which I now, in turn, recommend to you. It's got Bulwer-Lytton, Aristotle, The Gododdin, survivors of the death camps and Virginia Woolf, and is a bit of a hoop-snake text. It's not online unfortunately. It's in her book Dancing at the Edge of the World, if you can get your hands on a copy.
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What a rabble-rouser! I just listened to Lawrence Lessig's latest well argued, entertaining and thoroughly persuasive presentation online and after being convinced of exactly how dire the current state of copyright law is -- immediately went and joined The Electronic Frontier Foundation. Lessig's refrain throughout the presentation bears repeating:

Rouse, ye rabble, rouse. That's the link again there folks.
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A foray into one of the less read sections of the paper, the Obituaries, yields the story of the Robinson family who in 1864 bought Niihau, the seventh largest of the Hawaiian islands, and kept it from tourists and development. It is the only one of the islands where Hawaiian is still spoken as an everyday language, and rare monk seals proliferate.

These worlds-within-worlds fascinate me. It's like finding a science fiction story being lived in the world, a land that time forgot. A Shangri-la, an alternate history.
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I haven't looked at these photos for a while. I never noticed I had such a pronounced filtrum before.
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Found on Jessamyn's sidebar, Wrote.org. Yesterday's news, today.

As well as The Museum of Unworkable Devices
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Having had so much success pulling off over 1000 words a day -- yesterday was 1600 or so -- 1000 words a day is the new regime. As always, this is a minimum.
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I hate fireworks. Loud, loud things. Exploding things. Vaguely militarisitic. Something about them suggests sports and stadiums, wars, television, bombing, Fleet Week, demonstrations of power. I hate fireworks.

So does Dos Pesos. He is very afraid right now. Grand finale, finally. Car alarms going off all over the place. Ugh. Over!
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Shittr! By my green candle, I've been reading Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry (in this nifty handwritten edition.) Trying to figure out what this exclamation "shittr" was all about, I found out that it was a translation from the misspelled "Merdre!" -- also translated as "Shite!" and "Pschitt!". Apparently quite shocking when it was first performed in 1896.

CrimethInc. I was so happy to receive my two books from CrimethInc today, in an envelope full of posters and stickers and zinelets and flyers. I stood outside and read the latest word from the publishers, claiming to purge all Traveler Kids from CrimethInc Membership. You have to dig around the site and read a bunch of the material to understand what it's all about. There are things here that are intriguing and stimulating even to the comfortable bourgeoisie, of which I consider myself a member. But in the essay, they say they're tired of preaching to the converted, that punk kids and ripoff artists are not who they're looking to challenge, but middle-aged bus crossing guards and people who are slaves to cheeseburger advertising.

Once you start examining all aspects of the transgressive, you find these whole worlds out there, options you didn't even know you had. Well, I guess I should say that I always knew I had these transhumanist, cyborg, anarcho-syndicalist, noospheric, punk, off-the-grid, communist, Sadean, militia, nomad, Rastafarian, vegan, telemarking, non-violent, NRA and Loompanics options, and even participated in some of them, but I haven't done all the reading. Or at least not for the past 10 years or so while I've been busy, you know, paying rent. Fascinating! Liberating! Once again, let me say for the record that I can't believe anyone is ever bored. There is no end to the variety of ways to be. And if you're bored, you can always change. (If you are wondering why "telemarking" is included in the list of life options, it's because once when I was skiing off the lift, my friend Bay, a telemarker, shouted as she hopped the cornice, "Free your heel and your ass will follow!")

Vineland. I'm deep into the only Pynchon novel I haven't read yet. So far, I think it's great. Who all's been saying it ain't so great? I want words with you.
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Exercise is the most boring thing in the world. My body has become more or less a vehicle for lugging my brain around. None of us really need bodies anymore, and they're so high-maintenance -- eating, sleeping, breathing, exercising. Exercise is this stupid, annoying thing that I have to do, that I hate, just to keep the vehicle running smoothly so it doesn't poop out on my brain. You know those people at the gym who sit on the reclining bicycles while reading a book? who can't go any faster because they might jiggle their book? who you're like "why bother"? who reward themselves with a gelato at Mondo Gelato after their "workout"? That's me.

I lucked out with a superfast metabolism, inherited from my rail-thin father, Pete "I'll have the Lumberjack Breakfast Special please" Fake. My mother actually makes him eat dinner before they go out to someone else's house for dinner, so he doesn't embarrass her by polishing off four cornish game hens and a fish.
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Paul links to a great essay about framing tales by Margaret Greer (coincidentally by my ex-boyfriend's mother, who is a brilliant scholar of Spanish Literature), Who's Telling This Story Anyhow?. The most interesting part for me came at the very end:

Looks like I will have to check out:

Brooks, Peter. 1985. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage Books.
Bruner, Jerome. 1991. "The Narrative Construction of Reality." Critical Inquiry 18: 1-21.
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I love the quote below. Having been reading so much about serial killers lately it makes perfect sense -- these guys who kill and dismember bodies so they can spend one night of perfect bliss lying in the pools of their victim's blood.

I finished American Psycho yesterday, which cast a pall over the day, a day already rainy and I already glum. Once again I feel... unwashed... after reading a book. The last time this happened was after reading My Idea of Fun by Will Self last year. American Psycho is neither the offal some people assert that it is, nor is it the work of art others have spent many words insisting. It's something in between, a competent dissection of the late 80s yuppie heart beating beneath the Ralph Lauren V-neck sweaters, a completely revolting exploration of woman-hating, materialism, and bloodlust, but by no means the towering work of Dostoevskyesque themes as has been occasionally claimed.

Do not take with food.
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I was just reading Gore's Editorial in the New York Times, and he pretty much goes through item by item the things that have enraged me about the Bush regime, the tax cut, the anti-environment policies, the non-disclosure of the Bush administration's involvement with Enron. Though there wasn't much on the various foreign policy fiascos of the past year and a half -- maybe not Gore's strong point? It very much appears from this editorial that Gore is going to be running next election.
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This Guardian review Kenzaburo Oe's novel Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age is going along quite nicely, talking about Blake, and the narrator's relationship with his disabled son, called "Eeyore" then launches into a few paragraphs on this tiresome subject:

And this a mere 4 sentences from the end of the review. I would have liked to see this reviewer take on the much more interesting and relevant question of the sensibility of the narrator, but what I mostly got were some surmises about the veracity of this version of Oe's life. It's fiction! F-I-C-T-I-O-N, it's made up, often using elements of the real, usually derived from the author's own experience and the experiences of the people around him or her. Big whoop if the suicidal bodybuilder referred to as "M" is almost certainly based on Mishima! Big whoop if the disabled son is almost certainly based on Hikari Oe! Big whoop if the "author" in the book is discrediting prior assertions in prior books, if Oe had wanted to give us facts, he'd have written an autobiography. The decision to write fiction is de facto giving oneself the license to tell untruths, half-truths and truths, essentially, to lie with impunity.

I get very annoyed with the how much "fact" is in this fiction question, bloodhound critics and readers alike sniffing out a divorce here, a disabled child there, an acrimonious relationship here and suspiciously familiar initials there and here and there, holding the biography up to the text to see how well they line up, and poor writers standing at the lectern feebly explaining that their own mother is really not at all like the monster portrayed in the novel, even though they both wear coral-colored lipstick.

More to the point is the narrator's relationship to the truth, i.e. in Pale Fire Is Kinbote obliquely confessing the murder of John Shade? Is Shade dissembling by penning Kinbote's lines? -- and not questions like Was Nabokov's relationship with his homosexual brother acrimonious? Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and other reclusive writers have done everyone a great service by keeping themselves completely out of the picture.

I was disappointed to see that the translator appended an explanation regarding the competencies of the real son of Kenzaburo Oe. Completely irrelevant, mere gossip -- unless it was part of the book written by Kenzaburo Oe known as Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age, which I don't think it was, as this reviewer called it "The translator's Afterword". Exasperating.

I could write volumes on this subject, but my opinions largely agree with various assertions that Nabokov makes in Strong Opinions, that Julian Barnes obliquely makes in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, that Mario Vargas overtly makes in his essay "The Truth of Lies" found in Making Waves as well as sundry assertions made in (gulp) Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia. They're argued more cogently than the midnight ramblings of this irritated Guardian book review reader.
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Thursday night was music at inter-mission, electric fiddle, percussive items, twiddling knobs, turntableage, midi files. Khan had made some wonderful light fixtures out of enormous origami cranes. Ben, Corey and I stayed until 4 looking at Steve's crazy drawings, admiring his collection of books, and making origami with Marianne and Julie. Today, Ken and Ashlyn's wedding on a perfect day overlooking the ocean. Next, Whistler. And holding steady at 500 words a day. I'm still awake at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night b/c I have 50 more words to go, and they're just not coming to me. 450, not good enough. Fifty. More. Please.
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dos pesos iz de kyoootist dawgie een dee hol dam werld!
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The Atrocity Exhibition. I read the edition with J. G. Ballard's notes in it -- a UK edition apparently not available in the States. This whole sexualization of car accidents -- what? I can understand how they are irresistibly compelling, that you can't look away from them and that they therefore have powers of attraction as strong as sexual situations, but huh? Penetration of the body by machinery, car crash as orgasm, wound as sexual orifice, it seems like an idea only a man could come up with. So invasive, destructive, repulsive! I have never had any interest in the supposed "dream" the car offers of speed, power and freedom. Prostheses, cyborg culture, Donna Haraway, the widespread use of contact lenses, pacemakers and hearing aids -- even Stelarc -- are more interesting investigations of technology penetrating the body.

That's the only part of it I had a problem with. He has a lot of very prescient parts about celebrity culture, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and the media cynosure of the Kennedy assassination. All good.

The notes were great. Without the notes in this edition, I don't know if I'd've understood a thing -- without the help of David Cronenberg and Scott Bukatman too. Yeah, it's astonishingly brilliant, but even less engaging than reading Burroughs, another writer whose willful refusal to accommodate the reader has frustrated me in the past, but not stopped me from reading volume after volume of his work. I persist nonetheless, wishing these guys'd toss us a line every now and then, like the notes in this edition. Thank you Mr. Ballard.
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And to accompany the syllabus below, the consumer culture bibliography.
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Some days writing is completely effortless. 500 words in less than a half an hour today, and I feel like I could write forever.
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