so many words inside of me; they are spilling, just about to, the edge of the meniscus pillowing out, liquid trembling just above the level, the surface tension stretched tightly, trying to keep it together, trying to hold the edge

until it all comes out, anyways. a deluge. a torrential downpour. an endless rain. washing, clearing, crying, emptying, moving, releasing, changing, shifting, giving, wanting, taking. sober reality. honest, a cold honest sober direct look at reality, my emotions, my being, letting myself be how I am.

somewhere between: the lights flipped on after a show, the spell broken, everyone squinting their eyes. and: like looking directly into someone's eyes, actually, the real contact that is there, the hello, the witnessing, the sense of recognition. an openness. of contact, of a sort.

you see: I think this is actually quite rare, to be honest. I think actual connection, I think that point of contact is quite rare. or to be exact: connecting like that is something that anyone can do. however, it takes effort to realize when we're not present. not being present is such a thing that itself is hard to realize. and in fact, it's as if half of the challenge of being present is knowing when we're not being present. if we knew, then we're already halfway there.

to connect with someone who understands that; understands that feeling of presence, wishes to enter into co-presence, is special. and I think often times this happens in love, so somehow love and copresence and intimacy are all combined together. but I feel like this can happen with anyone, at any point.

I find this happening more, these days. something about the boundary, the barrier between myself and I feels lower. I see it now, and can feel how to move over. sometimes, I can enter into a really open clear space with someone. and if they're someone who is also being present, there is a space that we can enter into, to make a kind of contact, to hold a thread of intentional conversation. it's as if: we are truly here, present.

--

HALLAJ

For your way is yours, don’t imitate mine. You’ll find your way.

IBN ATA

When, master?

HALLAJ

When in a crowd or alone you perceive
Impatience disappearing, and you know
Just where you are and where
You’re meant to be.

IBN ATA

Where is that, master?

HALLAJ

Anywhere. You will know your action.

You are present there, not thinking of somewhere else you ought to be.

--

I think we can: always be present. it's not always easy. but usually the blockers are: trying to force a certain outcome, fearing fear. naming the fear or the nervousness can help us move into a place.

what is this that I have found? this action, this space? it is about the self, and the other. we are two mirrors. I am a mirror, to myself. I to me. I-me. I-you. we-we. there is some sort of magical connection or possibility space that this opens up.

sometimes I want to grab friends, acquaintances, by the shoulders and shake them. do you know what I mean??? there's so much more to life!! we could be communicating so much differently!! and this kind of conversation gives me more energy, somehow. it's because complete presentness is so much easier, less energy, less effort spent in saying or doing things the right way. it's just.. being. and being is so much easier than stressing. being leads to flowing. and the things we can find! the conversations we can have! are magical, special, shimming, unpredictable.

how is this possible? I want to add. how is it possible to move into spaces of contact? when it happens it is really meaningful. and I think, you know, I think it is possible with anyone. it's about our relationship to ourselves, fundamentally. the world is made out of parts of us. and the way we work with the world is about our relationship to ourselves.

it's like: we're both a light source and the eye. and when the light source is so close to the eye, I imagine we'd just see everything perfectly illuminated. no shadows. everything pretty uniform, blending into each other. it's when the light source drifts from our eye that we might see things being different shapes, colors. but fundamentally; we project light; it bounces back. do we like the thing we are projecting?

do we like the person who we project, who bounces back, and who we interact with? our understanding of ourselves, of parts of ourselves, become the methods we use to understand others; our patterns, our lenses, our eigenself.

-- and then sometimes you meet new people who seem to eat the world whole, rind and seeds and stem and all. part of it is the joyousness and/or calm deliberateness at which the person eats the fruit, full real bites taken, sitting on a rock looking out at the midpoint of a trail up a mountain, slow and deliberate and with full intensity, bites taken like steps, breathing out, looking straight horizontally out at the horizon and not at the ground or sky, for once.

if there's anything I am wholeheartedly proud of it is finding precious friends who are also all these people moving on their own accord; progressing, operating in large curved arcs that take them wherever they need to go. with surety and conviction that is not infallible or omniscient or 'goal-oriented' but just aligned around dotted-line paths of desire and introspective understanding, which I think is crucial and important and admirable. all of these things. friends whom, on a desert island, would still be pursuing the things they do. at rare moments like last night space-time curves around this group of friends with precious gravitational mass going southbound on the b44 bus, the fabric of the city bent around celestial bodies with whom you have sought and found linkages and have poured your brains and hearts out to in the form of mugs of tea, reading groups, emails, dinners, a hot toddy.

and so as such - no matter what any outcomes may be - it is nice to know (nice as in 'more-than-nice', as in 'sometimes absolutely crucial') to know of the presence of these rare people, moving and stepping deliberately, operating with conscious presence. not all of this has to have weighty gravitas of course, what is this really? it's like: every once in a while I'll walk down 9th ave and pass by the alvin ailey dance studio on 55th with its first floor glass walls, and catch a glimpse of rows of students jumping in union, and I become deeply appreciative for each jump and how deliberate it is, and how much (I imagine) it originates from self-directed desire and play and movement and exploration and practice, all simultaneously.

--

looking back over, sometime three years ago:

I am sitting in an architecture crit and wishing that these guys had really bitten into the meat into the thing of the thing, been like wild angry excited wolves and torn it apart and chewed it and spit it out and pawed at it and chewed it again. but instead they just nosed it, looked at it and circled it, and that was that, and I can't help but ask: can't anyone else see this? the magic was supposed to be in the core of your question and it's not there! as if I am mourning for its potential. alas, alas.

(sent from an iPhone)

has achieved partial brennschluss. rockets jettisoned, sir.

psshhwaaghgh.

we'll see. I hope I could have done more.

tiny moment of procrastination in the midst of frantic indesigning and editing.

inspired by this guy and his FUIs - : fantasy user interfaces

it would be interesting to take a general non-techie poll of people who don't know computers very well about which of these FUIs or hacking stories seem most realistic and accurate. data about how something is perceived, etc. user interfaces are sort of grammar-like in that you learn the language of buttons and function hierarchy and etc; it strikes me that understanding the predilections of a userbase (even though it maybe influenced by fictional user interfaces in a movie) is partially necessary to understanding the set of mental rules or vocabularies that users will carry themselves to you when they sit in front of your designed screen;

I don't give a shit, I just want you to dance.

home stretch.

Is Chantal Mouffe against a political party, which, by acting within the arena of agonistic democracy, attempts to silence another party and prevents it from speaking entirely? Is it acceptable to be pushed outside the boundaries of a discourse by those within the discourse itself? To be outside consideration?

If so, if this is okay, then the agonistic pluralism that Mouffe advocates as being expressly beneficial for a society is not a prescriptive argument per se and it's statements become denaturated into description, not argument. The argument becomes an observation. If a qualification into the bounds of agonistic democracy is not guaranteed but earned and struggled for, then this agonistic democracy is no different than any other political system-- or rather, it is less a description of a proposed system and more a deterministic or materialist modeling of all political interactions. Those in a current state of power possibly silence those without political power. So on and so forth.

And if not, if an ejection outside of the discourse is not 'fair game' for those participating in this pluralistic political system, then this is itself a public sphere, a modified version of Habermas's public sphere in which the political presence of all parties is guaranteed. This is opposed to the political equality of all parties that Habermas's ideal posited. But the equal right to participate itself is another form of equality -- the guarantee of being heard, but not necessarily to be considered seriously. Within this equal playground is another politics of domination and hierarchy, sure, but the meta-playground, the space of this discussion is itself a utopian space from which nobody is 'left out'.

This is not a critique of the notion or efficacy of an agonistic democracy per se but the line of Mouffe's reasoning that seems to separate her theory from the harmonious and consensus-idealizing notion of the public sphere. Mouffe quotes Rawls and argues that moral consensus is entirely separate from "mere agreement", and continues to say that the problematic of attempting to reach such a consensus is an ideal that disregards the extent to which that ideal itself is implicated within and induced by political dominance -- "By postulating the availability of a non exclusive public sphere of deliberation where a rational consensus could be obtained, they negate the inherently conflictual nature of modern pluralism."

I really have to do work. But two arguments against my argument. First, the concept of an ejection outside of a discourse itself is an assumption that I should examine. I'm positing an outside as opposite to the inside of a political sphere -- what's the distinction between 'left out' and 'extremely marginal'? This instant dichotomizing and differing is itself a basis; a counter argument could might as well say, 'even in politics, nobody is left out from participating, it's just that nobody listens to your voice, and your voice, even if it is being repressed, is still nonetheless an agent that speaks. It is not up to the political system to ensure that everybody is heard.' and so on and so forth. If, like the gradient between politically dominant and politically repressed, there's also a gradient between political participation and being outside consideration of political participation, then whatever issue I take with 'being outside of the discourse' is somewhat nullified.

Two. What's the second one? I forget. I need to do work. Whiteread it is.

The Streets of Europe
Jonathan LeVine Gallery
529 West 20th Street, 9E

Thomas Ruff
Jason Rhoades - Black Pussy
David Zwirner Gallery
525/519/533 w19th st

And Who Are You? Work from Saatchi Online
Sara Tecchia Roma Gallery
529 West 20th Street, 2nd Floor

Golan Levin - New Installations and Sculpture
Bitforms
529 west 20th street

Do Ho Suh
201 Chrystie St & chelsea
Lehmann Maupin Gallery

2:59am. Oh, these moments are precious; savor them.

This gushing review about Pinter's The Homecoming had a reference to Stein growing to resemble Picasso's portrait of her. In searching about it, I found:

"Only a few years ago when Gertrude Stein had had her hair cut short, she had always up to that time worn it as a crown on top of her head as Picasso has painted it, when she had had her hair cut, a day or so later she happened to come into a room and Picasso was several rooms away. She had a hat on but he caught sight of her through two doorways and approaching her quickly called out, Gertrude, what is it, what is it. What is what, Pablo, she said. Let me see, he said. She let him see. And my portrait, said he sternly. Then his face softening he added, mais, quand même tout 'y est, all the same it is all there."

Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas

from a conversation on the train today: Interactivity as a medium, yes, yes.

Three flavors of interactivity: Re-experience online, traversing through time but not space, passive reception.

But here's an idea: real interactivity as the process of generating feeling, akin to walking through a Richard Serra sculpture, but instead generative, narrative, live, stochastic, incomprehensible, claustrophobic. Imagine: a 16 x 16 grid of outdoor rooms, open above, white walls. Each room has 2-4 doors open to its adjacent rooms, white opaque sliding doors that do not open to force, closed by default such that each room is an inaccessible cell.

You enter from the outside, into a room. Upon entering the room, only one of the doors opens, leading into another room. As you pass through that door into another room, the door connecting the room to the outside closes, and a single new door opens: you have no choice but to go. You pass through this new door, and enter another room. In this way, a linear path is created through these rooms. For each room entered: a door closes, another one opens, and the process continues. Slowly, you make your way from room to room, passing through rooms that you have entered before, but at a different point in time. Exits are created, then destroyed; in doing so, paths are birthed, overlapping and intertwining. If you enter the same room multiple times, each time it will be a different part of a journey.

There is no real choice but to walk onwards, moving but trapped. Eventually, you exit.

"From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.

This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.

New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something from the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.

The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap."

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

stolid silences better felt as chilled air, a scene of particles, lights, and a not-so-dark sky, the chirpers up in the trees and in the subways. blinds up past orange hues, warmed cups, steam gasping its way curling, the slight humidity amplifying step clean clout clasp, close tonight, to-morning, of movement and directionality past and showed.

a collection of meaningful adjectives:
reification particlization deification, abstractisation, cross-continental-blues, swinging staccato polyrhyhmic?

---

taste in my mouth of morning and limited ranges. back to you, fabric supple and appropriately two-sided, one-dimensional subliming (into three, or 2-space in 3d), the duality of young and old, morning and night, light and dark, sleeping and awake. give and take, push and pull, motives motifs lying hidden, modus operandi ulterior motif motive? ulterior motif, the vectorization of intent, will gathered into a line, elongated mathematical understandings sought.

a requirement for imperatives. walk that roof, skim the surface, the limiting reagent. move, talk, exhale, a duality, who was it, nathaniel mackey, some individuals lying high and low in the grand scheme - G.S.? fuck. forget this hierarchy, the emergent nature of interactions on a higher scale, not-so-parallel movements giving way to: marks on a floor, indentations on steps.

too bad, good morning. it's an awesome time, important questions entail such as: does the sun make a sound? how do you teach hope?

(you're too sweet)

and four hours later I did push myself in {
1 hour on prince st
2 hours on bowery
1 hour on spring st.
was that stupid?
} and inside. actually, it was great, it was nice, perhaps spectacular.

three years ago some time around this time I wrote down the location of a tag in boston, somewhere around nec, the christian science museum, et cetera cetera cetera. the composition looked nice. delillo's moonman 157, from, underworld with an appropriate kertesz photo on front.

In the corner of the third floor of the building: a sixteen-year old kid and a forty-year old guy standing watching people (obviously create-ors); a young kid outside with a paint marker asking me if I wrote.

and: i mean: cellphone cameras, digital cameras. not even people photos. photography as masturbatory exertion internalized, a sort of inverse territorial marking, light sucked into the camera. p&s point-and-shit. it's the digital age, camcordering-photographing of the mona lisa age. what did sontag say? something like a perverse work ethic realized as procedural collecting, vicarious scavenging.

idea: inspired by 'blind camera' - a reflexive action, records expression, feet, sky, anything else but the image. or the lens is a squirt gun spraying a mist of garbage-water, a speaker spewing out vulgarities, shining a photons from a light scavenged from dumpsters. of ideological distaste?

what to photograph: no landscapes, no subject matters, no macro photography. moma had some really awesome winogrand photographs, no gimmicks, just pure temporal subliming, the sssp of the moment, the edge of a needle, that visceral tactile sense.

oh damn.

two more days.