BRANDTRUEBOY

Current flavors in the ever-morphing mix:

Online telepathy
Graffiti
Andy Warhol
Fiction
fiction:
ak47: yutaiguchi: 1970年代にNASAで描かれたスペースコロニー（宇宙居住地）の想像図いろいろ : ひろぶろ I looked out the window at the moody elegance of the Chrysler building and watched yellow and white lights blink all around like fireflies. I love this city because something’s always going on several levels deep.  Beneath the surface level hustle and bustle is the constant slow churning of the old parts being made into new parts—bigger and stronger than before.  Destroyed buildings come back taller—those from decimated families tumbled through and formed off-shoots.  Friends that were families. The devotion I feel towards the city is far greater than any I could ever feel towards a single person.  I wasn’t able to love the city as fully in my old life.  Back then it was something I had to do battle with—it seemed to be grinding down on me and allowing only the tiny, fleeting victories.  Now that I’ve changed everything is different than it was before—everything looks feels, sounds and tastes better. State of the Art. The further I drop out, the easier it gets.  I’m no longer killing myself to live—just like in the Radiohead song.  Next to the window is a large table made out of a piece of butcher block balanced upon four piles of cinderblock.  This is where it happens—where I download the synchs into my brain.  On one end is my desk with my laptop and my pens and magic markers and my stacks of black and white composition notebooks (labeled according to the subject matter they contained the notes of—“Psychological Weapons”, “The Matrix” and “Will Smith”) and at the other end sits a flat panel TV on a shiny plastic stand that is always on (although sometimes on mute).  I sit off to the side of my laptop so that I have an unobstructed view of the TV screen.  Sometimes, when the trail’s hot, I don’t go outside for days, living off of frozen bento boxes in my hermetically sealed bubble, 27 floors up.ak47: yutaiguchi: 1970年代にNASAで描かれたスペースコロニー（宇宙居住地）の想像図いろいろ : ひろぶろ I looked out the window at the moody elegance of the Chrysler building and watched yellow and white lights blink all around like fireflies. I love this city because something’s always going on several levels deep.  Beneath the surface level hustle and bustle is the constant slow churning of the old parts being made into new parts—bigger and stronger than before.  Destroyed buildings come back taller—those from decimated families tumbled through and formed off-shoots.  Friends that were families. The devotion I feel towards the city is far greater than any I could ever feel towards a single person.  I wasn’t able to love the city as fully in my old life.  Back then it was something I had to do battle with—it seemed to be grinding down on me and allowing only the tiny, fleeting victories.  Now that I’ve changed everything is different than it was before—everything looks feels, sounds and tastes better. State of the Art. The further I drop out, the easier it gets.  I’m no longer killing myself to live—just like in the Radiohead song.  Next to the window is a large table made out of a piece of butcher block balanced upon four piles of cinderblock.  This is where it happens—where I download the synchs into my brain.  On one end is my desk with my laptop and my pens and magic markers and my stacks of black and white composition notebooks (labeled according to the subject matter they contained the notes of—“Psychological Weapons”, “The Matrix” and “Will Smith”) and at the other end sits a flat panel TV on a shiny plastic stand that is always on (although sometimes on mute).  I sit off to the side of my laptop so that I have an unobstructed view of the TV screen.  Sometimes, when the trail’s hot, I don’t go outside for days, living off of frozen bento boxes in my hermetically sealed bubble, 27 floors up.

ak47:

yutaiguchi:

1970年代にNASAで描かれたスペースコロニー（宇宙居住地）の想像図いろいろ : ひろぶろ

I looked out the window at the moody elegance of the Chrysler building and watched yellow and white lights blink all around like fireflies. I love this city because something’s always going on several levels deep.  Beneath the surface level hustle and bustle is the constant slow churning of the old parts being made into new parts—bigger and stronger than before.  Destroyed buildings come back taller—those from decimated families tumbled through and formed off-shoots.  Friends that were families. The devotion I feel towards the city is far greater than any I could ever feel towards a single person.  I wasn’t able to love the city as fully in my old life.  Back then it was something I had to do battle with—it seemed to be grinding down on me and allowing only the tiny, fleeting victories.  Now that I’ve changed everything is different than it was before—everything looks feels, sounds and tastes better. State of the Art. The further I drop out, the easier it gets.  I’m no longer killing myself to live—just like in the Radiohead song.  Next to the window is a large table made out of a piece of butcher block balanced upon four piles of cinderblock.  This is where it happens—where I download the synchs into my brain.  On one end is my desk with my laptop and my pens and magic markers and my stacks of black and white composition notebooks (labeled according to the subject matter they contained the notes of—“Psychological Weapons”, “The Matrix” and “Will Smith”) and at the other end sits a flat panel TV on a shiny plastic stand that is always on (although sometimes on mute).  I sit off to the side of my laptop so that I have an unobstructed view of the TV screen.  Sometimes, when the trail’s hot, I don’t go outside for days, living off of frozen bento boxes in my hermetically sealed bubble, 27 floors up.

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A few months ago I had the first in an ongoing series of synchs involving the Mona Lisa. It started when I was researching pix of stencil graffiti online. The objective was to find and save pix of anonymous hotness, blow them up and print them out so I could recreate the stencil with a piece of mylar and an exacto knife for my FTW T-Shirts project—thrift store t-shirts customized with graffiti style stencil sprays.  FTW (Follow The World) T-shirts was an experiment with online telepathy—the goal was to “magically” select the perfect shirt from the ranks of second-hand goodness and to intuit the right stencil design to add to it.  As I searched through various Euro picture galleries of stencil-based street art, I felt my mind drift with the beats emanating from my red Tivoli desktop speaker, dressed in the distinctive clitter clatter it gave them—like the hard wood Italian soles racing across cobblestones. I dreamily clicked on this and that before coming across a Romanian stencil spray of the Mona Lisa—complete with the perfect accident of a tear-drop shaped paint drip in the corner of her eye.  This caught my interest—I sat up—ready and awake.  When I hit the forward button at the bottom of the pic, the next stencil was the exact same image except that this Mona Lisa had its head half-transformed into Woody Woodpecker. Perfect, I thought to myself, as I right-clicked triumphantly.  This must be the feeling a fisherman has when making a prize catch after hours of waiting knee deep in icy water. I started typing “Mona Woody” into the Save File box at the exact same moment Slick Rick’s “Mona Lisa” came on the magic shuffle—a song that I had thought, until that moment, had been accidentally purged from my iPod: Well, it was one of those days — not much to do I was chillin downtown, with my old school crew I went into a store — to buy a slice of pizza And bumped into a girl, her name was Mona — what? Mona Lisa (what?) *singing* Mona Lisa, so men made you.. I felt the buzz of the synch course through me—mixing with my happiness at hearing the track again.  I felt awake down deep, like I’d downed a cup of coffee for the spirit—setting me off to investigate further, casting the hungry hunting bird gaze of my third eye across the internets.  The synch told me this image meant something—it let me know I was on the right path.  My google research quickly revealed that Woody Woodpecker was one of the few American cartoons shown on Communist run Romanian TV—which meant that the stencil undoubtedly invoked childhood memories for many Romanians of a certain age.  Pop culture meets the masterwork, revealing the nostalgia and trauma contained within both of them.   Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to see the “real” Mona Lisa again—which is to say I wanted to see a picture file reproduction—the closest I’ve ever been to DaVinci’s work.  As familiar as the image was, that post-synch google was the first time I could ever remember taking the time to really look at it. Other times I merely sucked in the familiar face vacuum cleaner style but this time I stopped and observed the sparkle in the eyes and the upward curl of the mouth—while all along I saw the reflection of my own face on the monitor screen, adding my own layer to the cultural assemblage that was the painting.  I used what I had learned from my ongoing, virtual apprenticeship under Andy Warhol to recognize opportunities for art riffs in the exchange between the image and the culture within which it’s created.  I’ve learned that the importance of a piece has to do with the expansiveness of its reach across the centuries.  In the case of the Mona Lisa a core chunk of western culture’s expressive genius as well as its crippling repression is revealed in DaVinci’s masterpiece.  He paints a deep humanity (light! Heat! Lust! Love!) glowing through a mask of culture and class. I decided to make both stencils.  They didn’t really fit with the ones I already had— the hip-hop head silhouettes and 60’s style psychedelic chicks with stenciled stars in their eyes, but the synch and the charge that being re-introduced to the painting had given me made it feel like a necessary part of my FTW line-up.   The only way to really test the power of online telepathy was have lots of stencils to choose from so that I could intuitively choose one that was “right” for that particular shirt and person.  I could put the two faces on the front and back of a single shirt—or just use one at a time or mix them up with other stencils.  I chuckled as I imagined the possibilities of pairing ML with Eazy-E—or maybe Steven Colbert.  I felt certain that no matter how I ended up using them it would be the right way— there was significance to them—something special, something with meaning. As if in confirmation of this it seemed that as soon as I cut out the stencil I started seeing the Mona Lisa everywhere—on TV commercials and in print ads that appeared across the pages of magazines opened randomly. I saw her on display in the window of a poster store underneath the Port Authority. It seemed there was an especially large number of ML’s within a several block radius of Collective Hardware.  A series of wheat pasted ML’s seemed an hommage to Andy on Elizabeth Street.  It was a short stroll from the pizza slice bearing ML on the side of Lombardi’s Pizzeria to the Keith Haring mural of tripped-out orange and black faces on Bleeker and Houston—the eyes of which I’d considered making into a stencil for the purpose of giving the Twitter bird crazy staring eyes.  I’d forgotten that this corner was it’s home.  I wondered if seeing it again was a sign that I should cut out those crazy eye stencils—perhaps they were meant to go with the ML pix. As I contemplated the green atomic symbol, dancing men and funhouse characters on the giant slab of concrete, a man stopped in front of me and took out his iPhone. I noticed that his screen background was a picture of the Mona Lisa.A few months ago I had the first in an ongoing series of synchs involving the Mona Lisa. It started when I was researching pix of stencil graffiti online. The objective was to find and save pix of anonymous hotness, blow them up and print them out so I could recreate the stencil with a piece of mylar and an exacto knife for my FTW T-Shirts project—thrift store t-shirts customized with graffiti style stencil sprays.  FTW (Follow The World) T-shirts was an experiment with online telepathy—the goal was to “magically” select the perfect shirt from the ranks of second-hand goodness and to intuit the right stencil design to add to it.  As I searched through various Euro picture galleries of stencil-based street art, I felt my mind drift with the beats emanating from my red Tivoli desktop speaker, dressed in the distinctive clitter clatter it gave them—like the hard wood Italian soles racing across cobblestones. I dreamily clicked on this and that before coming across a Romanian stencil spray of the Mona Lisa—complete with the perfect accident of a tear-drop shaped paint drip in the corner of her eye.  This caught my interest—I sat up—ready and awake.  When I hit the forward button at the bottom of the pic, the next stencil was the exact same image except that this Mona Lisa had its head half-transformed into Woody Woodpecker. Perfect, I thought to myself, as I right-clicked triumphantly.  This must be the feeling a fisherman has when making a prize catch after hours of waiting knee deep in icy water. I started typing “Mona Woody” into the Save File box at the exact same moment Slick Rick’s “Mona Lisa” came on the magic shuffle—a song that I had thought, until that moment, had been accidentally purged from my iPod: Well, it was one of those days — not much to do I was chillin downtown, with my old school crew I went into a store — to buy a slice of pizza And bumped into a girl, her name was Mona — what? Mona Lisa (what?) *singing* Mona Lisa, so men made you.. I felt the buzz of the synch course through me—mixing with my happiness at hearing the track again.  I felt awake down deep, like I’d downed a cup of coffee for the spirit—setting me off to investigate further, casting the hungry hunting bird gaze of my third eye across the internets.  The synch told me this image meant something—it let me know I was on the right path.  My google research quickly revealed that Woody Woodpecker was one of the few American cartoons shown on Communist run Romanian TV—which meant that the stencil undoubtedly invoked childhood memories for many Romanians of a certain age.  Pop culture meets the masterwork, revealing the nostalgia and trauma contained within both of them.   Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to see the “real” Mona Lisa again—which is to say I wanted to see a picture file reproduction—the closest I’ve ever been to DaVinci’s work.  As familiar as the image was, that post-synch google was the first time I could ever remember taking the time to really look at it. Other times I merely sucked in the familiar face vacuum cleaner style but this time I stopped and observed the sparkle in the eyes and the upward curl of the mouth—while all along I saw the reflection of my own face on the monitor screen, adding my own layer to the cultural assemblage that was the painting.  I used what I had learned from my ongoing, virtual apprenticeship under Andy Warhol to recognize opportunities for art riffs in the exchange between the image and the culture within which it’s created.  I’ve learned that the importance of a piece has to do with the expansiveness of its reach across the centuries.  In the case of the Mona Lisa a core chunk of western culture’s expressive genius as well as its crippling repression is revealed in DaVinci’s masterpiece.  He paints a deep humanity (light! Heat! Lust! Love!) glowing through a mask of culture and class. I decided to make both stencils.  They didn’t really fit with the ones I already had— the hip-hop head silhouettes and 60’s style psychedelic chicks with stenciled stars in their eyes, but the synch and the charge that being re-introduced to the painting had given me made it feel like a necessary part of my FTW line-up.   The only way to really test the power of online telepathy was have lots of stencils to choose from so that I could intuitively choose one that was “right” for that particular shirt and person.  I could put the two faces on the front and back of a single shirt—or just use one at a time or mix them up with other stencils.  I chuckled as I imagined the possibilities of pairing ML with Eazy-E—or maybe Steven Colbert.  I felt certain that no matter how I ended up using them it would be the right way— there was significance to them—something special, something with meaning. As if in confirmation of this it seemed that as soon as I cut out the stencil I started seeing the Mona Lisa everywhere—on TV commercials and in print ads that appeared across the pages of magazines opened randomly. I saw her on display in the window of a poster store underneath the Port Authority. It seemed there was an especially large number of ML’s within a several block radius of Collective Hardware.  A series of wheat pasted ML’s seemed an hommage to Andy on Elizabeth Street.  It was a short stroll from the pizza slice bearing ML on the side of Lombardi’s Pizzeria to the Keith Haring mural of tripped-out orange and black faces on Bleeker and Houston—the eyes of which I’d considered making into a stencil for the purpose of giving the Twitter bird crazy staring eyes.  I’d forgotten that this corner was it’s home.  I wondered if seeing it again was a sign that I should cut out those crazy eye stencils—perhaps they were meant to go with the ML pix. As I contemplated the green atomic symbol, dancing men and funhouse characters on the giant slab of concrete, a man stopped in front of me and took out his iPhone. I noticed that his screen background was a picture of the Mona Lisa.

A few months ago I had the first in an ongoing series of synchs involving the Mona Lisa. It started when I was researching pix of stencil graffiti online. The objective was to find and save pix of anonymous hotness, blow them up and print them out so I could recreate the stencil with a piece of mylar and an exacto knife for my FTW T-Shirts project—thrift store t-shirts customized with graffiti style stencil sprays.  FTW (Follow The World) T-shirts was an experiment with online telepathy—the goal was to “magically” select the perfect shirt from the ranks of second-hand goodness and to intuit the right stencil design to add to it.  As I searched through various Euro picture galleries of stencil-based street art, I felt my mind drift with the beats emanating from my red Tivoli desktop speaker, dressed in the distinctive clitter clatter it gave them—like the hard wood Italian soles racing across cobblestones. I dreamily clicked on this and that before coming across a Romanian stencil spray of the Mona Lisa—complete with the perfect accident of a tear-drop shaped paint drip in the corner of her eye.  This caught my interest—I sat up—ready and awake.  When I hit the forward button at the bottom of the pic, the next stencil was the exact same image except that this Mona Lisa had its head half-transformed into Woody Woodpecker. Perfect, I thought to myself, as I right-clicked triumphantly.  This must be the feeling a fisherman has when making a prize catch after hours of waiting knee deep in icy water. I started typing “Mona Woody” into the Save File box at the exact same moment Slick Rick’s “Mona Lisa” came on the magic shuffle—a song that I had thought, until that moment, had been accidentally purged from my iPod:

Well, it was one of those days — not much to do

I was chillin downtown, with my old school crew

I went into a store — to buy a slice of pizza

And bumped into a girl, her name was Mona — what?

Mona Lisa (what?) *singing* Mona Lisa, so men made you..

I felt the buzz of the synch course through me—mixing with my happiness at hearing the track again.  I felt awake down deep, like I’d downed a cup of coffee for the spirit—setting me off to investigate further, casting the hungry hunting bird gaze of my third eye across the internets.  The synch told me this image meant something—it let me know I was on the right path.  My google research quickly revealed that Woody Woodpecker was one of the few American cartoons shown on Communist run Romanian TV—which meant that the stencil undoubtedly invoked childhood memories for many Romanians of a certain age.  Pop culture meets the masterwork, revealing the nostalgia and trauma contained within both of them.   Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to see the “real” Mona Lisa again—which is to say I wanted to see a picture file reproduction—the closest I’ve ever been to DaVinci’s work.  As familiar as the image was, that post-synch google was the first time I could ever remember taking the time to really look at it. Other times I merely sucked in the familiar face vacuum cleaner style but this time I stopped and observed the sparkle in the eyes and the upward curl of the mouth—while all along I saw the reflection of my own face on the monitor screen, adding my own layer to the cultural assemblage that was the painting.  I used what I had learned from my ongoing, virtual apprenticeship under Andy Warhol to recognize opportunities for art riffs in the exchange between the image and the culture within which it’s created.  I’ve learned that the importance of a piece has to do with the expansiveness of its reach across the centuries.  In the case of the Mona Lisa a core chunk of western culture’s expressive genius as well as its crippling repression is revealed in DaVinci’s masterpiece.  He paints a deep humanity (light! Heat! Lust! Love!) glowing through a mask of culture and class.

I decided to make both stencils.  They didn’t really fit with the ones I already had— the hip-hop head silhouettes and 60’s style psychedelic chicks with stenciled stars in their eyes, but the synch and the charge that being re-introduced to the painting had given me made it feel like a necessary part of my FTW line-up.   The only way to really test the power of online telepathy was have lots of stencils to choose from so that I could intuitively choose one that was “right” for that particular shirt and person.  I could put the two faces on the front and back of a single shirt—or just use one at a time or mix them up with other stencils.  I chuckled as I imagined the possibilities of pairing ML with Eazy-E—or maybe Steven Colbert.  I felt certain that no matter how I ended up using them it would be the right way— there was significance to them—something special, something with meaning.

As if in confirmation of this it seemed that as soon as I cut out the stencil I started seeing the Mona Lisa everywhere—on TV commercials and in print ads that appeared across the pages of magazines opened randomly. I saw her on display in the window of a poster store underneath the Port Authority. It seemed there was an especially large number of ML’s within a several block radius of Collective Hardware.  A series of wheat pasted ML’s seemed an hommage to Andy on Elizabeth Street.  It was a short stroll from the pizza slice bearing ML on the side of Lombardi’s Pizzeria to the Keith Haring mural of tripped-out orange and black faces on Bleeker and Houston—the eyes of which I’d considered making into a stencil for the purpose of giving the Twitter bird crazy staring eyes.  I’d forgotten that this corner was it’s home.  I wondered if seeing it again was a sign that I should cut out those crazy eye stencils—perhaps they were meant to go with the ML pix.

As I contemplated the green atomic symbol, dancing men and funhouse characters on the giant slab of concrete, a man stopped in front of me and took out his iPhone. I noticed that his screen background was a picture of the Mona Lisa.

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I was drowning in information that I knew was important if only I could figure out how to lay out all the different pieces.  I was frustrated and about to finally give up when I received a series of signs.  That was when the nature of my work changed—I went from playing detective to mining synchronicities.  Everyone’s experienced synchronicity at some time or another—whether or not that’s what you called it.  A series of uncanny “Twilight Zone” events connected not by causality but by meaning, as Sting sang in the Police song, “Synchronicity”:

A sleep trance, a dream dance,

A shared romance—synchronicity…

We know you, they know me

Extrasensory—synchronicity…

A star fall, a phone call

It joins all—synchronicity

The more I studied them the more synchronicities seemed to occur to me—each one taking me deeper into some tale to which I didn’t know the plot.  What’s more, the coincidences in my life started to link up in uncanny, yet undeniable ways to various pieces of popular media. The feeling I got when these links were revealed was usually one of bliss and awesomeness. The first few times that it happened I tried to shrug it off.  I told myself I was imagining connections where there were none.  But they kept happening.

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oxahau: blackholevacation: (via deversoir) Evening came and I felt boxed-in.  I watched TV all day and hadn’t caught a single synch—not a tremor or a gastronomical event or anything— just like the day before and the day before that.  Usually a lull meant that an intense series of synchs were making their way towards me—even so, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was it all over?  Was the download finally finished?  Did I have all the information I needed?  After all that I’d seen, a part of me still believed it possible that I’d wake up one day and everything would be back to normal…oxahau: blackholevacation: (via deversoir) Evening came and I felt boxed-in.  I watched TV all day and hadn’t caught a single synch—not a tremor or a gastronomical event or anything— just like the day before and the day before that.  Usually a lull meant that an intense series of synchs were making their way towards me—even so, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was it all over?  Was the download finally finished?  Did I have all the information I needed?  After all that I’d seen, a part of me still believed it possible that I’d wake up one day and everything would be back to normal…

oxahau:

blackholevacation: (via deversoir)

Evening came and I felt boxed-in.  I watched TV all day and hadn’t caught a single synch—not a tremor or a gastronomical event or anything— just like the day before and the day before that.  Usually a lull meant that an intense series of synchs were making their way towards me—even so, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was it all over?  Was the download finally finished?  Did I have all the information I needed?  After all that I’d seen, a part of me still believed it possible that I’d wake up one day and everything would be back to normal…

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trixietreats: seditionsgraphiques: are2: Screw Loose Today’s perfect blue September sky drenched the city in crystal splashes of light reflected off of windows and glass building facades—cool dark shadows gathered at the edges of fountains and subway entrances, where office workers enjoyed abbreviated cigarettes and attenuated cell phone conversations… If I squint my eyes the picture blurs and it’s 8 years ago…the see-saw of nostalgia goes up and down and I’m happy then sad then happy again…my love of life and this city rising high like smoke before falling back to Earth with a stomach clenching THUD… Everything seems the same but I know it’s not.  What happened to us on that day?  What happened to me? What have I become? [9/11 opened a door to another universe—hence the plethora of doubles (especially double “ones”—which signify a gate) surrounding the event itself and appearing throughout popular culture in the months preceding it.  A cursory glance reveals there are the two ones in the date of 9/11 and two planes that struck The Twin Towers, phallic skyscraper symbols of a capitalist power so great that it precluded all critique by already including its own opposition and meta-discourse, while at the same time resonating with the power of the greater two pyramids of Giza. There’s the phantasmal appearance of Frank and his twin rabbit ears in Donnie Darko (U.S. release date=1/19/01, an inversion of 9/11/01).  The ears resonate with the idea of the rabbit hole as a doorway to a magical dimension in Alice in Wonderland.  This other world exists within a surprisingly close proximity to our own reality, like Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings—a place described by Tolkien as being on our own Earth but “at a different stage of imagination”.  The cinematic adaptation of this epic was shot between the twin doublings of October 11, 1999 and December 22, 2000, the second installment (entitled, The Two Towers) was released in 2002 (a year of two twos) and includes a character called Gollum—a creation consisting of half real actor and half CGI.  Each of his scenes had to be filmed twice, the end result being a doubling of frames, a doubling of technology and humanity, and a doubling of fact and fiction.]trixietreats: seditionsgraphiques: are2: Screw Loose Today’s perfect blue September sky drenched the city in crystal splashes of light reflected off of windows and glass building facades—cool dark shadows gathered at the edges of fountains and subway entrances, where office workers enjoyed abbreviated cigarettes and attenuated cell phone conversations… If I squint my eyes the picture blurs and it’s 8 years ago…the see-saw of nostalgia goes up and down and I’m happy then sad then happy again…my love of life and this city rising high like smoke before falling back to Earth with a stomach clenching THUD… Everything seems the same but I know it’s not.  What happened to us on that day?  What happened to me? What have I become? [9/11 opened a door to another universe—hence the plethora of doubles (especially double “ones”—which signify a gate) surrounding the event itself and appearing throughout popular culture in the months preceding it.  A cursory glance reveals there are the two ones in the date of 9/11 and two planes that struck The Twin Towers, phallic skyscraper symbols of a capitalist power so great that it precluded all critique by already including its own opposition and meta-discourse, while at the same time resonating with the power of the greater two pyramids of Giza. There’s the phantasmal appearance of Frank and his twin rabbit ears in Donnie Darko (U.S. release date=1/19/01, an inversion of 9/11/01).  The ears resonate with the idea of the rabbit hole as a doorway to a magical dimension in Alice in Wonderland.  This other world exists within a surprisingly close proximity to our own reality, like Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings—a place described by Tolkien as being on our own Earth but “at a different stage of imagination”.  The cinematic adaptation of this epic was shot between the twin doublings of October 11, 1999 and December 22, 2000, the second installment (entitled, The Two Towers) was released in 2002 (a year of two twos) and includes a character called Gollum—a creation consisting of half real actor and half CGI.  Each of his scenes had to be filmed twice, the end result being a doubling of frames, a doubling of technology and humanity, and a doubling of fact and fiction.]

trixietreats:

seditionsgraphiques:

are2:

Screw Loose

Today’s perfect blue September sky drenched the city in crystal splashes of light reflected off of windows and glass building facades—cool dark shadows gathered at the edges of fountains and subway entrances, where office workers enjoyed abbreviated cigarettes and attenuated cell phone conversations…

If I squint my eyes the picture blurs and it’s 8 years ago…the see-saw of nostalgia goes up and down and I’m happy then sad then happy again…my love of life and this city rising high like smoke before falling back to Earth with a stomach clenching THUD…

Everything seems the same but I know it’s not.  What happened to us on that day?  What happened to me?

What have I become?

[9/11 opened a door to another universe—hence the plethora of doubles (especially double “ones”—which signify a gate) surrounding the event itself and appearing throughout popular culture in the months preceding it.  A cursory glance reveals there are the two ones in the date of 9/11 and two planes that struck The Twin Towers, phallic skyscraper symbols of a capitalist power so great that it precluded all critique by already including its own opposition and meta-discourse, while at the same time resonating with the power of the greater two pyramids of Giza. There’s the phantasmal appearance of Frank and his twin rabbit ears in Donnie Darko (U.S. release date=1/19/01, an inversion of 9/11/01).  The ears resonate with the idea of the rabbit hole as a doorway to a magical dimension in Alice in Wonderland.  This other world exists within a surprisingly close proximity to our own reality, like Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings—a place described by Tolkien as being on our own Earth but “at a different stage of imagination”.  The cinematic adaptation of this epic was shot between the twin doublings of October 11, 1999 and December 22, 2000, the second installment (entitled, The Two Towers) was released in 2002 (a year of two twos) and includes a character called Gollum—a creation consisting of half real actor and half CGI.  Each of his scenes had to be filmed twice, the end result being a doubling of frames, a doubling of technology and humanity, and a doubling of fact and fiction.]

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oxahau: Al unísono I took out one of the buds and placed it on a white piece of paper.  Even the shadow that it cast under the army of halogen desk lamps looked like something from another dimension.  The purple red and golden leaves (which were themselves tricked out with jagged punk rock edges) were coated with crystallized bits of what looked like thread encrusted with glittery pixie dust powder. I dug out a small clump from the bud to reveal more tiny threads—now they looked like wiring, like the inside of a gutted microphone.  Everything about it was at once very different from other plants and yet still undeniably plant-like—from the dankness of its thick green aroma to the small stalks that looked like miniature pieces of broccoli.  There were no seeds. You wouldn’t say it was dirt or mineral or flesh.  It wasn’t fruit, synthetic or manmade in any way.  And yet man had been an influence, a caretaker and a guide to it becoming an advanced version of itself.oxahau: Al unísono I took out one of the buds and placed it on a white piece of paper.  Even the shadow that it cast under the army of halogen desk lamps looked like something from another dimension.  The purple red and golden leaves (which were themselves tricked out with jagged punk rock edges) were coated with crystallized bits of what looked like thread encrusted with glittery pixie dust powder. I dug out a small clump from the bud to reveal more tiny threads—now they looked like wiring, like the inside of a gutted microphone.  Everything about it was at once very different from other plants and yet still undeniably plant-like—from the dankness of its thick green aroma to the small stalks that looked like miniature pieces of broccoli.  There were no seeds. You wouldn’t say it was dirt or mineral or flesh.  It wasn’t fruit, synthetic or manmade in any way.  And yet man had been an influence, a caretaker and a guide to it becoming an advanced version of itself.

oxahau:

Al unísono

I took out one of the buds and placed it on a white piece of paper.  Even the shadow that it cast under the army of halogen desk lamps looked like something from another dimension.  The purple red and golden leaves (which were themselves tricked out with jagged punk rock edges) were coated with crystallized bits of what looked like thread encrusted with glittery pixie dust powder. I dug out a small clump from the bud to reveal more tiny threads—now they looked like wiring, like the inside of a gutted microphone.  Everything about it was at once very different from other plants and yet still undeniably plant-like—from the dankness of its thick green aroma to the small stalks that looked like miniature pieces of broccoli.  There were no seeds. You wouldn’t say it was dirt or mineral or flesh.  It wasn’t fruit, synthetic or manmade in any way.  And yet man had been an influence, a caretaker and a guide to it becoming an advanced version of itself.

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oxahau: likesbears: (via: brightredlemons) fiction inspired by rundonotwalk and stanley kubrick I looked out my window at the tree branches, which were still waving wildly. Once again I had the strange notion that the white flowers on the branches were somehow “more than flowers” and once again I felt like I was on the verge of understanding something—but then it was gone.  In its wake I found myself thinking again about my last purchase, during which the usually reticent, hipster delivery dude with his skinny black jeans and Chuey wool biking cap suddenly opened up and started talking a mile a minute about his time spent working in a growhouse in college.  There was something about the plants that he liked being around.  He used to sit in the shadowy living room in a canvas camping chair with an iced mango green tea and read science fiction novels (sometimes aloud, he informed me) among these enormous, crystal encrusted pot trees that sprouted pod shaped purple buds like something from another world. “There was this one season that was really wild,” he said, “The plants seemed to be radiating or something.  I’d have these visions of something coming out of them—a crazy spirit being like a plant version of the Aliens from the Alien movies.”  He looked at me to gage my reaction and I nodded instinctively, although I was having a hard time processing everything he said. “I only smoked it once,” he said.  “Believe it or not—one toke of that switched your shit up. It was like a super weed. American Beauty Gob-ment styles.  We only moved it for a week before the whole shop got closed.  Permanent-like.  Hewhocannotbenamed didn’t want that stuff getting out on the streets and waking everyone up—calling them to revolution and shit.  No way.” He’d spoken more in those few minutes than he had in the course of several months of deliveries, when he’d glance up from his texting to ask me politely what was up and nod when I told him nothing much as he texted on his phone.  I didn’t mind as I preferred to keep it professional with whoever they sent over.  I noticed his occasional side glances to the piles of books lying about and wondered which ones he recognized. Was it Crime and Punishment, or The Trial?  Maybe Hemingway or The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson that caught his eye? Was it Heidegger?  Nietzsche, Derrida or Deleuze?  Midnight’s Children or Shakespeare?  Gertrude Stein or Shirley Jackson? Or maybe it was the short stack of Manga novels whose colorful spines were slices of art candy? At one point while talking about the growhouse he bent over to silence the relentless buzz of his phone and revealed a band of white flesh with bones sticking out above the elastic band of his boxers. That night I’d dream about seeing him as a small dot standing way out on a metal beam at some kind of immense construction site.  They were building a skyscraper next to a pit.  In the dream I found myself predicting that he was about to be blown off the metal plank and falling down for thousands of years, Gandalf style. “It was almost like they were trying to talk to me about whatever I was thinking…or reading…” he seemed excited by this last bit, and I finally realized that during the entire time he’d been delivering this unexpected monologue, he’d been staring at the Netflix envelope next to the TV. The DVD was on top with its painted title side clearly visible: “2001, A Space Odyssey.” “That was one of the books I read,” he said, when he felt me watching him stare. “It’s actually the one that really got me wondering if I was meant to be there, reading that book at that moment, in that growhouse with those particular plants close-by.” I didn’t know what to say, so I looked down at the floor. “Do you like science fiction?” he asked—his voice low and conspiratorial. “Yeah,” I said from behind my bangs. “Have you seen that movie before?” “2001?  Oh, um, no.  But I’ve seen a few of the famous scenes, and I know the general idea.” “Oh.  So now you’re finally going to watch it.” “I guess so.  It’s one of those movies that I always knew I wanted to see but never did…cuz, well I dunno why I didn’t.  It’s weird cuz it’s the kind of movie you’d think I’d see…just knowing what its about—it seems right up my alley.  Given the things I’m interested in.” My voice sounded funny.  I wasn’t use to talking to him, and I certainly wasn’t used to him staring at my mouth while it moved. “What are you interested in?” he asked, his green eyes sparkling. My first thought—out of habit—was to shut down.  I wanted to hold on to all of this stuff for just a little while longer.  At which point it would be necessary to be calm and measured. A few months ago I would never have been having this conversation at all. But this was the new era—the law of 6 degrees shined over my head like the hundreds of bulbs I’d wired up the apartment with—keeping me lit up and AWAKE—gathering clues like a detective, knowing that each and every person I came into contact could provide the information and the identity of the boy.  He could be a friend of a friend—a little brother or the son of the Con Ed guy I never let in to read the meter.  It seemed that it was left to me to remain open when I’d be clamped shut. “Me? Um well, I dunno—time and consciousness, mainly.  The next level of human evolution and how it’s all happening on the internets. Through technology, but you know—in a non-Fascist way.” I stopped talking.  I heard birds tweeting outside. “Wow,” he said, but I couldn’t tell how he meant it. “Wow—what? Are you interested in any of that stuff?” “All of it,” he said softly, smiling in a way so open and unabashed that I had to look down again.oxahau: likesbears: (via: brightredlemons) fiction inspired by rundonotwalk and stanley kubrick I looked out my window at the tree branches, which were still waving wildly. Once again I had the strange notion that the white flowers on the branches were somehow “more than flowers” and once again I felt like I was on the verge of understanding something—but then it was gone.  In its wake I found myself thinking again about my last purchase, during which the usually reticent, hipster delivery dude with his skinny black jeans and Chuey wool biking cap suddenly opened up and started talking a mile a minute about his time spent working in a growhouse in college.  There was something about the plants that he liked being around.  He used to sit in the shadowy living room in a canvas camping chair with an iced mango green tea and read science fiction novels (sometimes aloud, he informed me) among these enormous, crystal encrusted pot trees that sprouted pod shaped purple buds like something from another world. “There was this one season that was really wild,” he said, “The plants seemed to be radiating or something.  I’d have these visions of something coming out of them—a crazy spirit being like a plant version of the Aliens from the Alien movies.”  He looked at me to gage my reaction and I nodded instinctively, although I was having a hard time processing everything he said. “I only smoked it once,” he said.  “Believe it or not—one toke of that switched your shit up. It was like a super weed. American Beauty Gob-ment styles.  We only moved it for a week before the whole shop got closed.  Permanent-like.  Hewhocannotbenamed didn’t want that stuff getting out on the streets and waking everyone up—calling them to revolution and shit.  No way.” He’d spoken more in those few minutes than he had in the course of several months of deliveries, when he’d glance up from his texting to ask me politely what was up and nod when I told him nothing much as he texted on his phone.  I didn’t mind as I preferred to keep it professional with whoever they sent over.  I noticed his occasional side glances to the piles of books lying about and wondered which ones he recognized. Was it Crime and Punishment, or The Trial?  Maybe Hemingway or The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson that caught his eye? Was it Heidegger?  Nietzsche, Derrida or Deleuze?  Midnight’s Children or Shakespeare?  Gertrude Stein or Shirley Jackson? Or maybe it was the short stack of Manga novels whose colorful spines were slices of art candy? At one point while talking about the growhouse he bent over to silence the relentless buzz of his phone and revealed a band of white flesh with bones sticking out above the elastic band of his boxers. That night I’d dream about seeing him as a small dot standing way out on a metal beam at some kind of immense construction site.  They were building a skyscraper next to a pit.  In the dream I found myself predicting that he was about to be blown off the metal plank and falling down for thousands of years, Gandalf style. “It was almost like they were trying to talk to me about whatever I was thinking…or reading…” he seemed excited by this last bit, and I finally realized that during the entire time he’d been delivering this unexpected monologue, he’d been staring at the Netflix envelope next to the TV. The DVD was on top with its painted title side clearly visible: “2001, A Space Odyssey.” “That was one of the books I read,” he said, when he felt me watching him stare. “It’s actually the one that really got me wondering if I was meant to be there, reading that book at that moment, in that growhouse with those particular plants close-by.” I didn’t know what to say, so I looked down at the floor. “Do you like science fiction?” he asked—his voice low and conspiratorial. “Yeah,” I said from behind my bangs. “Have you seen that movie before?” “2001?  Oh, um, no.  But I’ve seen a few of the famous scenes, and I know the general idea.” “Oh.  So now you’re finally going to watch it.” “I guess so.  It’s one of those movies that I always knew I wanted to see but never did…cuz, well I dunno why I didn’t.  It’s weird cuz it’s the kind of movie you’d think I’d see…just knowing what its about—it seems right up my alley.  Given the things I’m interested in.” My voice sounded funny.  I wasn’t use to talking to him, and I certainly wasn’t used to him staring at my mouth while it moved. “What are you interested in?” he asked, his green eyes sparkling. My first thought—out of habit—was to shut down.  I wanted to hold on to all of this stuff for just a little while longer.  At which point it would be necessary to be calm and measured. A few months ago I would never have been having this conversation at all. But this was the new era—the law of 6 degrees shined over my head like the hundreds of bulbs I’d wired up the apartment with—keeping me lit up and AWAKE—gathering clues like a detective, knowing that each and every person I came into contact could provide the information and the identity of the boy.  He could be a friend of a friend—a little brother or the son of the Con Ed guy I never let in to read the meter.  It seemed that it was left to me to remain open when I’d be clamped shut. “Me? Um well, I dunno—time and consciousness, mainly.  The next level of human evolution and how it’s all happening on the internets. Through technology, but you know—in a non-Fascist way.” I stopped talking.  I heard birds tweeting outside. “Wow,” he said, but I couldn’t tell how he meant it. “Wow—what? Are you interested in any of that stuff?” “All of it,” he said softly, smiling in a way so open and unabashed that I had to look down again.

oxahau:

likesbears: (via: brightredlemons)

fiction inspired by rundonotwalk and stanley kubrick

I looked out my window at the tree branches, which were still waving wildly. Once again I had the strange notion that the white flowers on the branches were somehow “more than flowers” and once again I felt like I was on the verge of understanding something—but then it was gone.  In its wake I found myself thinking again about my last purchase, during which the usually reticent, hipster delivery dude with his skinny black jeans and Chuey wool biking cap suddenly opened up and started talking a mile a minute about his time spent working in a growhouse in college.  There was something about the plants that he liked being around.  He used to sit in the shadowy living room in a canvas camping chair with an iced mango green tea and read science fiction novels (sometimes aloud, he informed me) among these enormous, crystal encrusted pot trees that sprouted pod shaped purple buds like something from another world.

“There was this one season that was really wild,” he said, “The plants seemed to be radiating or something.  I’d have these visions of something coming out of them—a crazy spirit being like a plant version of the Aliens from the Alien movies.”  He looked at me to gage my reaction and I nodded instinctively, although I was having a hard time processing everything he said.

“I only smoked it once,” he said.  “Believe it or not—one toke of that switched your shit up. It was like a super weed. American Beauty Gob-ment styles.  We only moved it for a week before the whole shop got closed.  Permanent-like.  Hewhocannotbenamed didn’t want that stuff getting out on the streets and waking everyone up—calling them to revolution and shit.  No way.”

He’d spoken more in those few minutes than he had in the course of several months of deliveries, when he’d glance up from his texting to ask me politely what was up and nod when I told him nothing much as he texted on his phone.  I didn’t mind as I preferred to keep it professional with whoever they sent over.  I noticed his occasional side glances to the piles of books lying about and wondered which ones he recognized.

Was it Crime and Punishment, or The Trial?  Maybe Hemingway or The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson that caught his eye?

Was it Heidegger?  Nietzsche, Derrida or Deleuze?  Midnight’s Children or Shakespeare?  Gertrude Stein or Shirley Jackson?

Or maybe it was the short stack of Manga novels whose colorful spines were slices of art candy?

At one point while talking about the growhouse he bent over to silence the relentless buzz of his phone and revealed a band of white flesh with bones sticking out above the elastic band of his boxers. That night I’d dream about seeing him as a small dot standing way out on a metal beam at some kind of immense construction site.  They were building a skyscraper next to a pit.  In the dream I found myself predicting that he was about to be blown off the metal plank and falling down for thousands of years, Gandalf style.

“It was almost like they were trying to talk to me about whatever I was thinking…or reading…” he seemed excited by this last bit, and I finally realized that during the entire time he’d been delivering this unexpected monologue, he’d been staring at the Netflix envelope next to the TV. The DVD was on top with its painted title side clearly visible: “2001, A Space Odyssey.”

“That was one of the books I read,” he said, when he felt me watching him stare. “It’s actually the one that really got me wondering if I was meant to be there, reading that book at that moment, in that growhouse with those particular plants close-by.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I looked down at the floor.

“Do you like science fiction?” he asked—his voice low and conspiratorial.

“Yeah,” I said from behind my bangs.

“Have you seen that movie before?”

“2001?  Oh, um, no.  But I’ve seen a few of the famous scenes, and I know the general idea.”

“Oh.  So now you’re finally going to watch it.”

“I guess so.  It’s one of those movies that I always knew I wanted to see but never did…cuz, well I dunno why I didn’t.  It’s weird cuz it’s the kind of movie you’d think I’d see…just knowing what its about—it seems right up my alley.  Given the things I’m interested in.”

My voice sounded funny.  I wasn’t use to talking to him, and I certainly wasn’t used to him staring at my mouth while it moved.

“What are you interested in?” he asked, his green eyes sparkling.

My first thought—out of habit—was to shut down.  I wanted to hold on to all of this stuff for just a little while longer.  At which point it would be necessary to be calm and measured. A few months ago I would never have been having this conversation at all.

But this was the new era—the law of 6 degrees shined over my head like the hundreds of bulbs I’d wired up the apartment with—keeping me lit up and AWAKE—gathering clues like a detective, knowing that each and every person I came into contact could provide the information and the identity of the boy.  He could be a friend of a friend—a little brother or the son of the Con Ed guy I never let in to read the meter.  It seemed that it was left to me to remain open when I’d be clamped shut.

“Me? Um well, I dunno—time and consciousness, mainly.  The next level of human evolution and how it’s all happening on the internets. Through technology, but you know—in a non-Fascist way.”

I stopped talking.  I heard birds tweeting outside.

“Wow,” he said, but I couldn’t tell how he meant it.

“Wow—what? Are you interested in any of that stuff?”

“All of it,” he said softly, smiling in a way so open and unabashed that I had to look down again.

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markie: petapeta: vexation: officek3: yaruo: zono: gkojaxlabo: handa: via img.2chan.net 2007-06-09 あははははは 合格した美少女に東大ラグビー部の魔の手が！ Surfing feels so right when I’m already dazing out amongst the big buzzing TV, refrigerator, and Air Conditioning machines.  I love being online when there is no where to be and nothing specific to do…I drift off into the webs of infinite associations…one thing leads to another—I go from a person I follow to clicking on a link to watching a video and then switching over to Word and jotting out a few rough ideas. Now and then dragging songs into a playlist—the beta for my next mix.  There’s a fluidity that doesn’t feel like multi-tasking. In fact, it doesn’t feel like work—at least not in the sense of busting yr ass over a finite task.  This is more about seeing ripples through to wherever they end up.  It’s about going on hunches.markie: petapeta: vexation: officek3: yaruo: zono: gkojaxlabo: handa: via img.2chan.net 2007-06-09 あははははは 合格した美少女に東大ラグビー部の魔の手が！ Surfing feels so right when I’m already dazing out amongst the big buzzing TV, refrigerator, and Air Conditioning machines.  I love being online when there is no where to be and nothing specific to do…I drift off into the webs of infinite associations…one thing leads to another—I go from a person I follow to clicking on a link to watching a video and then switching over to Word and jotting out a few rough ideas. Now and then dragging songs into a playlist—the beta for my next mix.  There’s a fluidity that doesn’t feel like multi-tasking. In fact, it doesn’t feel like work—at least not in the sense of busting yr ass over a finite task.  This is more about seeing ripples through to wherever they end up.  It’s about going on hunches.

markie:

petapeta:

vexation:

officek3:

yaruo:

zono:

gkojaxlabo:

handa:

via img.2chan.net
2007-06-09

あははははは

合格した美少女に東大ラグビー部の魔の手が！

Surfing feels so right when I’m already dazing out amongst the big buzzing TV, refrigerator, and Air Conditioning machines.  I love being online when there is no where to be and nothing specific to do…I drift off into the webs of infinite associations…one thing leads to another—I go from a person I follow to clicking on a link to watching a video and then switching over to Word and jotting out a few rough ideas. Now and then dragging songs into a playlist—the beta for my next mix.  There’s a fluidity that doesn’t feel like multi-tasking. In fact, it doesn’t feel like work—at least not in the sense of busting yr ass over a finite task.  This is more about seeing ripples through to wherever they end up.  It’s about going on hunches.

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eatsleepdraw: I call this: ALTER-EGO An artwork that was featured in our group exhibit last year. Recently, I had an idea that I keep coming back to—a Matrix-inspired notion that we, as humans are the flowering fruit and technology is the plant.  While we grow, blossom and die they upload and update—creating off-shoots via cut/copy.  We live connected to one another via their long green stalks, eventually shrivilling up and rotting on the ground while they live for hundreds of years like trees… I keep coming back to this idea because as nighmarish as its initial resonances might be, the act of contemplating it acts like a springboard into an innerworld of endless corridors, each lined with doors leading to new realities. (it’s up to me to pick one and push it open)eatsleepdraw: I call this: ALTER-EGO An artwork that was featured in our group exhibit last year. Recently, I had an idea that I keep coming back to—a Matrix-inspired notion that we, as humans are the flowering fruit and technology is the plant.  While we grow, blossom and die they upload and update—creating off-shoots via cut/copy.  We live connected to one another via their long green stalks, eventually shrivilling up and rotting on the ground while they live for hundreds of years like trees… I keep coming back to this idea because as nighmarish as its initial resonances might be, the act of contemplating it acts like a springboard into an innerworld of endless corridors, each lined with doors leading to new realities. (it’s up to me to pick one and push it open)

eatsleepdraw:

I call this: ALTER-EGO

An artwork that was featured in our group exhibit last year.

Recently, I had an idea that I keep coming back to—a Matrix-inspired notion that we, as humans are the flowering fruit and technology is the plant.  While we grow, blossom and die they upload and update—creating off-shoots via cut/copy.  We live connected to one another via their long green stalks, eventually shrivilling up and rotting on the ground while they live for hundreds of years like trees…

I keep coming back to this idea because as nighmarish as its initial resonances might be, the act of contemplating it acts like a springboard into an innerworld of endless corridors, each lined with doors leading to new realities.

(it’s up to me to pick one and push it open)

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booktumbling: richndelicious: thelovelybones: <3 “Ever since her death there have been an increasing number of strange occurrences…threads of interwoven synchronicities and repetitive dreams about tidal waves and zombies.  Not to mention messages I seem to be getting in popular movies.  Underlying, interwoven trends in the plot lines laser beam through and between the actors, illuminating their own connections to the material and the larger superstructure of popular culture. I get the feeling there’s something I’m meant to figure out.  Something for the novel—that one small piece of the plot that’s still missing…”booktumbling: richndelicious: thelovelybones: <3 “Ever since her death there have been an increasing number of strange occurrences…threads of interwoven synchronicities and repetitive dreams about tidal waves and zombies.  Not to mention messages I seem to be getting in popular movies.  Underlying, interwoven trends in the plot lines laser beam through and between the actors, illuminating their own connections to the material and the larger superstructure of popular culture. I get the feeling there’s something I’m meant to figure out.  Something for the novel—that one small piece of the plot that’s still missing…”

booktumbling:

richndelicious:

thelovelybones:

<3

“Ever since her death there have been an increasing number of strange occurrences…threads of interwoven synchronicities and repetitive dreams about tidal waves and zombies.  Not to mention messages I seem to be getting in popular movies.  Underlying, interwoven trends in the plot lines laser beam through and between the actors, illuminating their own connections to the material and the larger superstructure of popular culture.

I get the feeling there’s something I’m meant to figure out.  Something for the novel—that one small piece of the plot that’s still missing…”

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