what does it mean to enter into someone's space which, let's say, is in the process of being painted, or organized, and to have that person apologize to you? as if that would be something to be apologetic about in the first place. what is it to consider the messiness and the unfinished state of a place something to excuse, to tolerate, to squint one's eyes and pass by barely flinching?

the assumed normal state of things being a finished state -- or not even finished, just a specifically curated state. post studs. post drywall. post joint compound. point paint. the finality and the cleanliness of a space having taken hold. that is the moment of presentation.

I am thinking about salads - a salad as essentially a collection of 'unfinished' things, or at least objects that have not touched fire, or that it is at its most direct a collection or an assemblage that happens to merge together into a whole. at no point does one's critique of a salad extend into a finishedness ("I'm sorry that this thing wasn't seared in a pan with some olive oil") but rather a celebration of directness. or: the object speaks, there is no transformation or production process engaged here, no act of 'cooking' but just mostly the direct appearance of (ostensibly) labor-limited objects here. a bell pepper, kind of chopped. some greens, roughly washed and thrown in a bowl. some cheese, jabbed at and crumbled with a fork. olive oil and balsamic vinegar, sprinkled over in eyeballed amounts, the tilt of the bottle, level of liquid sloshing briefly. that is it.

why not space? space as salad. why is the careful curation of objects and places such an emphasized point? is it because the aesthetic qualities of 'finished' space can be strong, can hold a kind of power, and so a pursuit of this 'finish' is of an aesthetic one, not one of decorum or propriety? the lesser of two evils would be such - that the continuity of the smooth white wall is a desired visual attribute that drives this 'finishedness' rather than the proper finitude of being-done. being-right.

biting into a space-salad would be the process of experiencing every element in continuous succession. !-#-@-$-%, and a kind of persistence-of-sensation overlaying them on top of each other. spaces beholden in a continual gradient. some overall dressing that is the pretense of continuity. the elements of a building presented as they are - drywall, studs, screws, tools, dust, roughness, sweat, leftover scraps, contractor bags. and more importantly to step into that space without apology or withdrawal but a full on appreciation of discrete elements that would assemble together into a whole, but only through the process of experience.

--

more to talk. but:

why is it that, within 3d/2d space, drawing a box is one of the easiest things ever -- yet making a box, a perfectly rectilinear planar surface, is immensely difficult?

or better question -- how is it that the logic of representation and drawing dominates architectural design processes, but the logic of material manipulation dominates construction processes? how are these two things reconciled, if at all?

--

why is it that some people have time to do things, and other people have their time cut short, so suddenly and nonsensically? why is it that you work in an office twenty floors up, and she works in a office over there, and she works at a studio space, and he works in a restaurant, and we all do these different things, spend the same time, are paid so differently, and have such different valuations of our own lives imposed onto us?

the punch of a singular event slices through these sections of time and effort and evaluation, reminds me that all I have is time, so little time, just time.

it's been a while. long gaps, long gaps.

a series of short bulletpoints to illustrate the montage of things seen and past:

1. dealing with things is always hard.

2. this is because everything is made out of people.

3. because everything is made out of people and made by people, this means that making anything is always about dealing with the interactions between people.

4. everything is politics; everything is management; everything is logistics; everything happens in the moment where you open your mouth and speak; the interface between people. it is all that. everything done and made and reified into the world is a balance between 1) you and your being, and 2) you and others, and while this definition may seem obvious and over-encompassing it's also focused and slim, a slender line drawn on a cream-colored page.

Things, of course, never really happen as I would want them to, and then things happen better than I would want them to.

If anything I want to say something like: Sorry, St. Petersburg, sorry for ignoring you, sorry for having you be the backdrop for endless hours running between subways, areas, pulling out guidebook translators that I never thought would come in handy.

Here's to calmness, to settledness, to the infrastructures of bureaucracy that I will jump through, to meeting strangers and have it be effortless, suddenly, knowing all the right things to say, here's to ffriendly candidness.

Sometimes when I write on my site, I write to me, or I write to an
imaginary other, or I write while deliberately not thinking about it
so that I am just focused on the sound of my words, because the
concept of a blog/website where I'm sort of absently ignoring this
openness (but at the same time somewhat intimate with my thoughts) is
a little bit of a contradiction, an opposition asking for a solution.

Tonight, tonight I will write as if I'm writing you an email, and I'll
type as if that is so, and here you go, whoever you are; either you're
reading my email to you or you're reading my email that I'm sending to
him/her, looking me look at you straight in the eye or looking at me
look at you from an angle, three-quarters also. (Like the family of
analyses of cubism that declares cubism to be about a simultaneous
multiplicity of perspectival viewpoints.)

--

I would like to say something here about St. Petersburg, about being
here. Nothing comes to the ends of my fingertips except the taste of
infrastructure in my mouth. That is:

In Dusseldorf, the curvature of the monorail linking the metro to the
airport. The boxiness of the buildings around the Dusseldorf
hauptbahnhof. The quality of sunlight on a Sunday morning, very quiet,
very still, very poised.

In St. Petersburg, the metro, with lights, with paint, with
infrastructure bolted together, neither old nor new, semi-outdated, of
a bygone era, etc. this is what people call and abbreviate as
'soviet', I understand, which takes on a meaning just more than the
word itself. The metro coming out of the deep, deep, ground. Feeling
an unfamiliar alphabet come to familiarity, unlocking the phonetics of
a place.

Interestingly enough there's no puncture here. I feel like I have
always been here. Perhaps this is because I have not been wandering
alone; perhaps this is because I've made acquaintances and talked and
aimed in a country that is a) not mine and b) not familiarized by me
and so I have already put up this barrier, I realize, already
preventing myself from displacement.

Tomorrow I will wander, alone, for a bit, buy train tickets, go see
some young independent art, buy some blinis, and so on. Eat another
bowl of borsht. Liquify, Spongeify. Become permeable.

I lose all powers of description tonight, tonight there is nothing but
the joy at being here, and the joy of moving. With valence.

st. petersburg to seoul, vis train and ferry. without lifting a wing.
here we go.

am to sleepy to talk, but wanderlust is kicking into effect, I am
seeing the unfamiliar syntaxes of infrastructure: different bottle
sizes, can sizes. People are different. I will be pulled out of
myself, and be pushed into myself, more external, more quiet, more
talkative, more introspective. I will redraw my boundaries.

I can't remember where exactly but somewhere in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze
(and Guattari) talks about the loss of the self, how we are afraid to
encounter the loss of the self. And immediately when I read that I
thought, "of course, obviously; the loss of the self is unmooring,
freewheeling, disorienting. It's more a meta-disorienting then a
disorienting; the question is not of the jumbling of senses, but of
the jumbling of the definition of which senses are which." It's a
hygiene problem, so to speak. Keeping the world out, having me be
solid.

and I think sometime a few days ago I talked about a phenomenological
puncture of sorts, or maybe what I really meant was a phenomenological
punctum, something that makes you say "wow" with all the force of a
sudden change, a rapid difference, a rupture. Travel is the inverse of
Serra, in that the world moves around you.

I go to travel alone to be apprehensive, confident, available, to let
myself be porous and fill with the atmosphere and energy of the air,
to be soaking up newness with every step.

here's to ruptures and porousness and redrawing the exterior edges of
my self and being powerfully okay with that.

9:52pm EST, july 18th, saturday, on the plane to dusseldorf.

another one of those dreams I don't realize that I had dreamt it before until the time comes.

The last time I had this semi-recurring dream was two years ago, maybe.

Metropolis, entangled highways and parking lots, dark and enclosed, high elevators with precarious places to drop and fall endlessly.

Inside, an underground floor with vinyl green floor much like korean underground apartment parking lots. The walls occasionally have the same two-digit story number spray painted on them. The rumble of a monolithic rivulet of cars nearby.

The elevator's large and circular, a room-size platform suspended in the middle of a tube. One wrong step and I fall for who-knows-how-many floors. Someone's looking for me all the while. Am I escaping, or entering? I enter into a hallway where similar elevators exit similarly. Are I running? Beneath I on this platform without guardrails I see a network of cars running and tangling. I go somewhere, and then go somewhere else.

Entering an elevator again the doors close. Inside this space is pure vulnerability -- as I look on in horror, the elevator slides up, down, moves sideways, mockingly denies me access to my chosen floor, starts accelerating upwards endlessly, disappears. Elevators are to be avoided. I take the stairs, which is a rectilinear spiraling strand suspended in empty space. Somehow I reach the end but it's not certain whether this is end is the same end I started from; still uncertain I wake up.

Profiling
Until September 9, at the Whitney
"Profiling features two artworks that present a dialogue on issues surrounding surveillance, protection, privacy, and identity by exploring the use of automated systems for tracking and "profiling" people in public spaces. A continuously accumulating history of movements of visitors that is both a statistical plot of gallery activities and a record of each act of each visitor; and a catalog of visitors' head shots with classifying adjectives randomly attributed to them (i.e. unsuspecting, complicit, hungry)"

What the Dormouse Said #2:
Exceptional excursions into the way new and old media should be done
Sunday July 29, 8 & 10:30pm, $7, $10 minimum, MonkeyTown
There's no introduction to this, but the former What the Dormouse Said looks like it was interesting.

Also: Location One Artists-In-Residence exhibition ends on Saturday!

It's too bad. Here there's change, I'm trying to project my mind's eye onto walls and seeing myself twelve months later and full of uncertainty hope and doubt and all that. Touchingly here and there I'm walking back doing these invisible dances in trainful underbellies wondering, thinking.

When I enter someone's home, in the process of this hobby of mine (entering others' homes in search of one of my own) I usually take off my headphones and slip my left arm out of the straps of my backpack and let it hang askew, asymmetricality lending informality to my posture. The weight difference lifts my left foot off the ground slightly. I scan the bookshelves for authors I recognize, sometimes none, sometimes the usual suspects, sartre rushdie marquez plato shakespeare mamet and whatnot.

I'm not sure how this is relevant but I ordered the GPS logger and at the same time I felt myself withdraw and disconnect more. A lack of communication verified, attempted translation into the wanderings of my physical location seen orthogonal to this flat earth, this mortal coil.

change and solitude permeates my summer.