Shine on sister!

Come on in, it’s cold outside!
I can see the revolution now!

Miyuki is vital to my experience. She is the perfect company for me—we don’t have to talk but we know or I assume we have lots to say, lots of time to figure what those things are. We eat together and wake and sleep together. And I like to pour her the coffee she makes. It is not terribly different from the way I functioned with my mom as a child or with any close friend, roommate, Anne, or other close person. In fact, I think that the main criteria for relationships is if the other person can make the coffee. If they make the coffee I am so very happy to serve it to them and to keep their cup full. I even like to clean the coffee pot after. I will make them a compost pile if they don’t have one and I will put the grounds in it. I will make breakfast to go with the coffee. But if I should go to the bathroom and my coffee gets cold while I am gone, I think it is necessary that they fill up my mug or make sure the coffee is still warm. And if we are in the midst of a conversation, maybe they will make some more. Once, when I was staying with Paul in Berkeley, I missed my plane due to this type of situation. We were sitting in his yard, and the super black coffee kept coming. We were talking about shoelaces and freedom or some such thing, but it could not be stopped by some silly need to return home on time. It was a plane well missed.
Today is already better than other days for several reasons. For one, when I went to bed I was filled with anxiety and it had a lot to do with things I left in NY. Things I left in the fire. But I meant to leave them there and not to let them simmer in my pockets. The woodburner keeps me warm, I don’t need friction in my head and heart.




So I have taken to this midnight yoga, and instead of the normal routine of moving around and trying to empty out my brains, I just spilled them all out on the floor and almost passed out from doing a headstand for as long as I could stand it. Then it was easy to go to sleep. But I woke up at 630 or so with a start. The bad feelings returned. Bad is the wrong adjective. Unsettled. I feel unsettled. That is because I am unsettled, physically, in my routine, my relationships, my thoughts, my stomach. It is what I asked for.
So back to today. It is better. A look outside, a cup of coffee. A shower, and Miyuki making more coffee for me to pour.
She is reading my copy of Invisible Cities because she makes cities out of paper with holes for light to come in. She made dinner last night and after we spent a few hours sitting with our tea and reading our Calvino.
Today is also better because there is a plan. We will walk the long walk to the center of town. We have been warned against this but we are both walkers. To the bone. And if I am not allowed to discover new things I might die. And no one would know. So to whoever might read this, if I die in Finland, it will be in the process of discovering new things, the opposite of how they want it-- in a warm dry room with lots of soft wood things to sit on and drink coffee out of. Also, if anyone is reading this. What are you doing?!
What I mean is:
1. Why are you wasting your precious, well earned or selected free moments?!
2. Do you feel like you are reading my diary? Is that terrible? Maybe I am not so interesting.
3. Why aren’t you writing me a letter? If I told you all this banal stupid nothing, don’t you feel like you must reciprocate? I am such a good listener and all I have is eyes and time. Eyes and time.

4. If you read this, I want to tell you that:
Jesus is cool jesus is scared
Baby you are the only car I drive.
Foolin around fooling myself
Baby you are the only car I drive.
Easy to touch easy to find
Baby you are the only car I drive.
Melts in the mouth
Melts in the hand
Baby you are the only car I drive.
Out of my skin, out of my life
Baby you are the only car I drive.

How shaving ruins time and space

"There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it.” The Time Machine, H.G. Wells

And my consciousness is in the toilet much of the day. Freedom to think whatever all the time is not so glamorous at first before it gets comfortable. My thoughts are quite limited:

To shave or not to shave. Maybe I should save that for tomorrow when I am calmer, my hair is longer, I will make a better decision about how to deal with this. It could turn out that I don't shave my legs for the two months I am in Finland. Who would know? Besides, I don't have time to do it right now. There are so many other things I thought I would be working on this morning. How silly of my to sit and debate this.
Actually, I think I should just go ahead and do it. The shower and the whole nine yards. But I AM NOT going to wash my hair. Absolutely not. I have not done anything to cause excess oil or dander that needs to be washed out so soon. I am living and breathing purity, who am I to waste precious water and soap and electricity (I can't NOT dry my hair when it is cold) when I practically AM purity itself. And who knows what my hair will look like if I wash it and dry it in such a dry climate. It could be hideous. And then I would have to wear a hat more often, maybe inside the building, in the studio, in the library, the kitchen... even though I am usually by myself or with Miyuki, looking at my own afro is way more than I can handle. So I will shower. I will shave. I will absolutely not wash my hair.
I am so glad I shaved my legs. And a shower, it is so soothing, so warm, and now I feel as though I officially started the day. It is important to have some sort of signal to self: the day starts... do dee dooh... NOW. It is now clear what has to happen. The day. The formless, flowing, timeless, spaceless, dark day of Haukivuori, Finland.

One thing I get very caught up in in every new place I venture to that has some sort of extreme climate is the effect that the weather has on time and space. I cannot say if time here is longer or shorter, as the days have gone by very quickly with very little sleep. I think the best part of the day is precisely between the hours of 11:30 pm and 2:30 am. It couldn't be any darker or more silent than it is right then.

Back to my spacetime problem- a walk to the gas station/coffee shop/bar (pictured earlier) that takes less than ten minutes to get to is considered a trip. Taking into account the prep time for the walk, I suppose that there is a time commitment that is longer than 10 minutes, but the distance feels physically longer than it would in NY. Because of the bodily discomfort you necessarily experience in travel, you can't help but notice more of your physical experience of walking, and all these details drag time out into noticeable milliseconds; but the noticing takes longer, and soon one milli is three or four. That is one part of the extension. This sort of thorough physical involvement in the experience also effects distance, as every step is a little dance with death. Your right pinky toe is going numb, your sock has a rupture under your heal and a little drip of water got in and is frozen on the bottom of your foot. Where will you step so not to trip on a branch, sink into a secret stream, slip on some ice? And that is assuming you are alone. Mix it up with some slow talking, english as a third language locals where conversation is forced, slow, and broken, and soon your auditory sense is also consumed by the extension of time and space. Further, look up and wonder why you can't see the stars, wonder about the few sounds that survive the silence, notice every detail of the one car you see in your one hour/ten minute walk or that you remember seeing on your other walk--(and why aren't there any cars driving tonight? Is it some sort of holiday?) and then try to understand that this is probably the equivalent of walking two long blocks down Fulton St. in Bed-Stuy. The space time interval between Saksala Artradius and the gas station described on wikipedia timespace article: "Certain types of worldlines are the shortest paths between any two events, with distance being defined in terms of spacetime intervals. The concept... may be thought of as "pure motion" in spacetime, that is, free from any external influences."

so in addition to walking extreme distances, my first few days schedule looks like this:
7:30 am wake up. read articles on computer saved from previous night (no wi-fi in room)
8:00 coffee, continue reading on couch.
9:30 check email in library (down the hall)
10 forest investigation, walking in the vinter vunderlund
11 breakfast with Miyuki (we rotate cooking meals every day)
12 wonder/wander/errands/ try try try or give up and read a story or play with cats, have ideas at the kitchen table, listen to music, fiddle, whittle, mcdiddle.
2pm yoga, meditate
3:30 eat a snack, hang out with Miyuki, read stories
4 nap
7 dinner with Miyuki
9 email, write, look up articles to read in am
11 walk outside, record sounds or take pictures
12 yoga
1am read stories, draw, map ideas
2/2:30 sleep

The idea that I can do anything at anytime is amazing and overwhelming. I crave a structure so that I can take mini vacations. Everything seems really distant, and because it is seemingly impossible to leave my residence, I don't even consider the outside world. So there is my timespace problem for today.

Another Flexible Personality

Today is maybe a little bit scary I that it is the beginning...

Geographical dispersal and global coordination, just-in-time production and containerized creativity kits, a generalized acceleration of adaptation, and a flight of barely accumulated capital into the lightning-fast international financial black hole: International Artists Beware. and take a break from your laptop before it takes away your imaginary 401k.

The Flexible Personality by Brian Holmes was what I read when I woke up.

'... it can be said that the networked organization gives back to the employee—or better, to the "prosumer"—the property of him- or herself that the traditional firm had sought to purchase as the commodity of labor power. Rather than coercive discipline, it is a new form of internalized vocation, a "calling" to creative self-fulfillment in and through each work project, that will now shape and direct the employee's behavior. The strict division between production and consumption tends to disappear, and alienation appears to be overcome, as individuals aspire to mix their labor with their leisure.[26] Even the firm begins to conceive of work qualitatively, as a sphere of creative activity, of self-realization. "Connectionist man"—or in my term, the "networker"—is delivered from direct surveillance and paralyzing alienation to become the manager of his or her own self-gratifying activity, as long as that activity translates at some point into valuable economic exchange, the sine qua non for remaining within the network.

Ahemm. Fear wells up in my throat when I read this. You and me and everyone we know are getting closer to perfection. My perfection exists in a seamless relationship between my ideals and my life, my career and my imagination, my magazine subscriptions and my groceries. I desire intimacy with my boss that is the same as with my best friend, and my paid activities are blurred by my equal devotion for my job as for my personal practices. And no one can tell me that my time spent learning how to bake naan or tracing pictures of Jay-Z doesn't add to my professional practice? I don't even see the bounds between my shower and my job, and I can't see why I am not paid for all of it since one probably wouldn't exist without the other.

I taught an 'action' art course recently where the idea of the performance of every day and the horizontal sacredness of all rituals was a prominent thread. I was teaching what is closest to my heart and to my daily life. I would never deem my habits or practices as a 'calling' but it is possible that I talk about it like it is. My skin crawls to feel that I am part of a movement of 'networkers' working in a 'sphere' that ultimately creates its own models of surveillance, mistrust, and dirtiness that have been designed and serenely embedded by the perfect corporate model. Perhaps we are no longer mocking the corporate systems but sincerely recreating them for ourselves. Maybe I should get a well paying job designing at a company desk so I can afford the subscription to Adbusters and Harpers so I can be inspired to continue on with my seamless payed art dreams.

Fear two: being the 'networker'. By the way, you should really come over for dinner, I have this friend you should really meet. I think you two would have a lot to talk about and the potential to work together or make out or something.

'The computer and its attendant devices are at once industrial and cultural tools, embodying a compromise between control and creativity that has temporarily resolved the cultural crisis unleashed by artistic critique. Freedom of movement, which can be idealized in the figures of nomadism and roving desire, is one of the central features of this compromise. The laptop computer frees the skilled intellectual worker or the nomadic manager for forms of mobility both physical and fantasmatic, while at the same time serving as a portable instrument of control over the casualized laborer and the fragmented production process; it successfully miniaturizes one's access to the remaining bureaucratic functions, while also opening a private channel into the realms of virtual or "fictitious" capital, the financial markets where surplus value is produced as if by magic, despite the accumulating signs of environmental decay. In this way, the organizational paradigm of the network grants an autonomy which can be channeled into a new productive discipline, wherein the management of social relations over distance is a key factor, constantly open to a double interpretation. To recognize this profound ambivalence of the networked computer—that is, the way its communicative and creative potentials have been turned into the basis of an ideology masking its remote control functions—is to recognize the substance and the fragility of the hegemonic compromise on which the flexible accumulation regime of globalizing capital has been built.

First day is thinking day.

Today is the first day I have had time to think in Finland.
So far it has been a long day spent rotating between bed, desk, kitchen table, couch, other kitchen table inside the library, and back around again. I haven't gone outside since last night at 2am.

I officially met my roommate, Mayuki, who I have been thoughtfully paired with by THE MANAGEMENT. By thoughtful I mean that she is friendly and her art is very good. She makes houses out of paper mache that you can look into. There is a series of houses with secret lives happening inside, viewable through a peephole, which are titled something like 'Light comes from the outside' or 'the house of Jack' (I am becoming more sure by the moment that my attempts to remember the titles are only approximations)... Anyway, I hope to interview her in the next few days. We don't speak the same language exactly so it will be a face to face writing/speaking interview of sorts. A buffet of the senses for understanding of a person, all at our little ikea kitchen table in the woods.

Right now I think that we are both trying to figure out what we are doing here in Finland on the edge of many forests and lakes that the weather prohibits us from wandering to.


One thought I had this morning when I woke up with a start at 8am is that in NY I have been in the CHAOS-EFFICIENCY-ARMY, and it has prepared me for the trenches of the silent-order-forest. Like, maybe I can complete a thought or something here. Maybe I can finish a sentence and follow it with another completed sentence about the same idea. But I might not have been ready to do this ever before. Nor would I have known enough to want it. The good news to self is that all signs of schizophrenia melted off of me as I flew over NYC. It is not just me, it is me mixed with the kinetic humping thumping grinding big time city that makes it difficult to concentrate enough to remember that the water is on because I was going to take a bath.

Last night as I was too excited to sleep after a little wandering in the snow, I began to read If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. How appropriate to come to this:


'It’s all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place. I, in fact, find myself here without a here or an elsewhere, recognized as an outsider by the nonoutsiders at least as clearly as I recognize the nonoutsiders and envy them. Yes, envy. I am looking from the outside at the life of an ordinary evening in an ordinary little city, and I realize I am cut off from ordinary evenings for God knows how long, and I think of thousands of cities like this, of hundreds of thousands of lighted places where at this hour people allow the evenings for God knows how long, and I think of thousands of cities like this, of hundreds of thousands of lighted places where at this hour people allow the evening’s darkness to descend and have none of the thoughts in their head that I have in mine; maybe they have other thoughts that aren’t at all enviable, but at this moment I would be willing to trade with any one of them. For example, with one of these young men who are making the rounds of local shopkeepers collecting signatures on a petition to City Hall, concerning the tax on neon signs, and who are now reading it to the barman.

However, I don't actually feel much envy for the people I have seen yet as I usually do. I think that is because I have had very limited experience of people because I am in an extremely remote place. People really don't have nearly the effect on the environment that they have had everywhere else I have ever been. If they have had an impact, it is well covered by snow and trees.

Everyone that I have met has boasted about homemade breads and family recipes, home remedies, ice fishing, and singing, and their clear skin and rosy cheeks brag about their simple life and great skin care products. Ha, just kidding about the skincare products.

rainbow for sadness

Defrost rainbow at Zurich Airport yesterday.

Harmony competition playground.

Big savings happen close to heaven.

Construction is a natural phenomenon like rainbow.

Forceful traffic patterns form natural wonders too.

Packing up for Merida

Fast breaking news is that I am leaving for Merida in the Yucatan on Sunday. It looks like a pretty big city, I know it contains half the population of the Yucatan which is in the 2 million neighborhood. I cannot imagine what it will look like or feel like beyond what I see on people's blogs and in y tu mamá también. I was talking to someone last night about ancient pictograms and I am most excited about learning about Mayan culture, which as advertised maintains its hold on the community despite the tourist culture that has descended on the scene. There is also supposed to be a center for traditional medicine in Hopelchen in the Campeche state where a lot of Canadians go for herbalists, bonesetters and midwives. Mmmm, Canadians.
I think I am mostly ready to go. I even said goodbye to Martin on the Block. Martin sits in his old green Lincoln every day (when he is not on his stoop) and if I don't say hi to him two times a day, things are a little out of whack. Since I was in Wisconsin for a week without telling him he got a little nervous and started asking every white person on the block where I was. So I made it back, only to have to tell him I would be gone for 6 weeks! All the alternate side street parking revolutions I will miss! So many times Martin will sand and re-bondo the patchworked green coat on the car that I will not compliment, and how many times the inside will be re upholstered with new found blankets and fabrics! Martin has lived on Halsey since his kids were small, and he is probably 150 years old even though he looks like he is 50. So he has been here a while and he knows EVERYTHING that happens on the street. It is his job. One time when someone in my building got rid of an old Apple 2e and a tv, we installed them at Martin's house. He asked me if the tv was the type of thing with 'movin pictures'! So we welcomed him to the age of technology. Now you can see the tv on at night, lighting his living room. After about three days with the computer, I found it on the curb. Martin doesn't have time for that junk. I understand.
So even if only for 6 weeks, I feel like I have to say goodbye to Halsey St. By fall there are less people on the stoop. All the Jamaican men will have to put their canaries back inside. So goodbye Bed-Stuy, my warm and hostile home sweet home.

Northampton Massachusetts

There are still places within 4 hours of the city where a grilled cheese sandwich on 7 grain bread with tomatoes and swiss cheese costs $2.