zen koan inspiration

the friend i stayed with in arizona had a small collection of amazing little zen koan 'zines from the 70s. they were done by paul reps. on the front, it says you can send away for a bag with all six for $3. they were so amazing, i had to photograph them.  i had vaguely heard of zen koans, but never worked with them, what with my inability to meditate properly and all. i can see the attraction - an enigmatic phrase to ponder in silence, what could be better?  i have a couple that have always stuck with me, though they are not official buddhist zen koans, i think they have a koanesque quality. one is a quote from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: "reality is frequently inaccurate." and from my favorite 20th century russian author, andrei bitov, "unreality is a condition of life." funny, i think they're related. maybe when i try the 15 minutes of meditation tomorrow morning (for the sake of my brain), i'll ponder those. i also feel inspired by paul reps' art, to dig out a typewriter, work with them and a little bit of payne's grey. do you have a personal zen koan (maybe you didn't even know it was one) you ponder when you have a moment of stillness?

reality is frequently inaccurate

i am a confirmed collector of quotations. i have small notebooks full of them. many from books and a few from films, but mostly from the clever people who surround me. i remember some years ago, a friend complaining that he could never make my quote book. but if you are trying too hard, you'll never make it. and he did eventually do so, with some quote about biology, as i recall (i cannot currently locate that small notebook, as many of my books are still packed away awaiting the renovations of this house).

but i've found myself thinking about quotations recently. because a lot of them seem to be floating around. there are these trendy postcards with pithy comments on them that i think have been brought on by an odd combination of mad men and pinterest. and those "keep calm and ..." variations. and my facebook feed is full of self-help quotes. platitudes really. and i wonder what it is that makes us need platitudes so much at this particular juncture? they're generally quite obvious and a bit vapid and aimed at boosting our self-esteem. but why do we need that?

is it really more prevalent now than in other times? has world economic crisis really shaken our confidence so much that we need empty reassurance that it's all going to be ok if we just believe, don't look back, crush monsanto, eat right, live in the now, stop medicating, eat raw, grow our own, look for the silver lining?

but what if it's not...what if all of the true Idea People are gone and all we're left with is mediocrity? and these platitudes are the logical conclusion. and what we're witnessing is the end of civilization as we knew it? what if it's not going to be ok?

where are the cutesy 50s postcards about that?

museum of everyday reality or how she got pissy about pinterest

i have what is becoming a love-hate relationship with pinterest. i love that i can use it to find things again, rather than bookmarking 10,000 pages in my browser. i hate that everyone is up in arms over the terms. i love it visually - it just pleases my eye to open the page. i hate when random strangers categorize my boards. i love how it helps me see trends in my own taste and thinking and just generally gives me a big picture, holistic overview of what i want (e.g. with regard to the new kitchen). i hate all of the pretentiousness in the descriptions people write for their pins. here are just a couple from last evening:

~ people referring to salt as "artisan sea salt". what, have they painted little pictures on the salt flakes? (if so, i want to pin that!)

~ a reference to "butter and other primal fats" as ideal to serve on your fiddleheads. now i am as interested in foraging and found food as anyone and intend to learn more and eat a whole lot more of it this year, but really, do we have to be so PRETENTIOUS about it?

and this whole curation movement - pinners as curators. that just strikes me as so, to use the word again...pretentious.  i was rather disgusted by all of this last evening and so i picked up dubravka ugresic's museum of unconditional surrender to take my mind off of it. sometimes, you just pick up exactly the right thing to read at the moment you need to read it.

i opened to a page where dubravka wrote about ilya kabakov, a russian artist who illustrated children's books for status as a "legitimate artist" during the soviet years, but who lives today in new york and is known as "an archaeologist of the everyday," in the tradition of kurt schwitters, robert rauschenberg and others.  he gathers the detritus and everyday bits and pieces of trash, classifies them and makes them into art in order to make sense of reality. dubravka quotes the novel of a forgotten russian avant-garde writer, konstantin vaginov, "classification is one of the most creative activities. essentially, classification shapes the world. without classification there would be no memory. without classification it would be impossible to imagine reality." she characterizes kabakov as a descendent of this russian avant-garde tradition and describes his work, saying "the material of bureaucratized everyday life transposed on to magnified boards obliges the observer/reader to read into it his own meaning." and it hit me that it's what we're doing with pinterest.

this obsessive collecting and classification is quite possibly our attempt to find some kind of pattern, sense and meaning in a world that seems increasingly to have gone mad. of course, that mad world cannot help but impose itself on the classifications all the time in the form of pretentions designed to set us apart from the mundane everyday, and so we work against that which we ourselves construct. we want to find our own outlook of the world, our own conception of beauty, our own visual language with which to express our everyday. beautifully photographed. categorized. labeled. curated. one giant inspiration board in which we ultimately reveal the underlying kitsch of everyday reality. endlessly repinned and replicated.

my world now has two moons

murakami, like no one other than dostoevsky and perhaps gabriel garcia marquez, can transport me to another world and leave me seeing the cracks in this one and wondering where i really am.  the power of words to transport is awe-inspiring, to say the least.  i'm nearly done with 1Q84. tho' it will remain in my mind for a very long time.

if you haven't read it. get it. now.

the truth about reality

the truth about all of this truth thing is that what i've been writing this week isn't really different from what i usually write. because with me, you tend to get the truth...if i'm in a bad mood, have a headache, am happy or sad, frustrated, ecstatic - i don't hide these things very well. but, just as a map can't truly depict a place, you can never write everything. and let's face it, no one would want to read it if you did. so we all pick the highlights and sometimes the lowlights. it's just how it is. and it's what i love about the genre of blog - it's really whatever you want it to be. i think i just got a little tired of all of the in-your-face, groomed, styled and curated perfection i was seeing out there.

the truth is that despite living in an old house which needs lots of work, we have a pretty good life. and although all of the changes we've been through in past year and a half have been stressful and even worrying at times, we're happy with where we're at and the decisions that have brought us here. on a still evening, when we step outside and breathe in the fresh air and hear the sounds of birds in the trees or the crunching of a horse, life seems pretty much to be exactly as it should be.

that's not to say that it can't be improved. yes, we should have less stuff. yes, we should have a place to put it all away. yes, i should waste less time in front of the computer and spend more time in the garden. i should procrastinate less and sew more. i should more consistently believe in the things i'm working on and in my abilities. i should watch fewer crappy television shows. but it's a process. and nothing happens overnight. but all of that messy process is where life is lived - in the contradictions, the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the happiness and the unhappiness and the moments of feeling like a heroic parent in comparison to those crazy people on toddlers & tiaras or that awful show about the insanely expensive themed child parties.

as one of my favorite russian writers, andrei bitov, wrote, "unreality is a condition of life." so i think i'll just chill about it. hang out with the cool bloggy people who seem real (you know who you are) and try to avoid all that curated perfection for awhile.

notes from the outer edge of the galaxy

real beauty

i have a bad habit of drinking too many caffeinated beverages during the day and into the evening. if i keep the coffee confined to before about 4 p.m. and only drink one cup of tea in the evening, i can sleep. but often, i do not abide by my own rules and so i'm up late. and i actually like it that way, what can i say? last night was oscar night, so it meant i could stay awake for a bit of the red carpet (the show didn't start til 3 a.m. here, and it wasn't THAT bad).

there was a time in my life when i'd always seen all of the films nominated for best picture. i could recognize the stars on the red carpet and i had opinions about who should win (i was almost never right about who actually did win). i'm no longer that person. i had heard of black swan but not seen it. and hadn't even heard of many of the other films, let alone the actors and actresses involved. (slight digression here: why is the word actress still ok but we can't use seamstress?)

so i watched the red carpet coverage on TV2 film (they apparently had a live feed from what i think was ABC - i was a little sad not to see joan rivers' catty assessment, but those rights apparently weren't bought in denmark). since i knew so little, it was a bit like watching from another planet. or at the very least like being from another planet.

and from that perspective, it's a strange spectacle. rail thin women with tightly stretched faces and plumped up lips in beautiful but ultimately unwearable-looking uncomfortable dresses walking down a red bit of cloth, cameras snapping away. stopped here and there by mannequin-like presenters who ask vapid, empty questions about how they're feeing and how their peers might be feeling. aside from being somewhat pleasing to the eye (that red archival valentino anne hathaway wore was stunning), it all seemed like much ado about nothing. peacocks on parade, empty of meaning and genuineness and well, reality.

i do realize it's not meant to be real and it is on another level entirely, somewhere up in the clouds, where mere mortals never tread. but the whole spectacle of it is odd - especially the "reporters" there on the scene, grabbing the stars for a quick but formulaic chat - try to make "news" out of something that is, as yet, in its pre-ceremony state, not news. pretending to care about feelings, but mostly caring about who designed the dress and jewelry and in many instances, clearly more about the "reporter" getting to pose for the cameras with someone they'd otherwise never even get close to.

what is with the obsession reporters have with feelings? "how do you feel? "how do the best actress nominees feel?" "how does your dog feel?" "is your dog wearing versace?" "what were you thinking getting an orange dress?" "don't you have a stylist?" "does your stylist hate you?" ok, granted, those last few questions were the ones i asked in my head.

i blame CNN for this. or rather the whole concept of 24 hour news. it gives us this odd pantomime that we must be subjected to before the news actually happens. the build up, the feelings, the empty interviews - because you can't have content when nothing has actually happened yet. but you still have to fill air time. and apparently they take "air" seriously and fill it with a whole lot of hot air.

it all leaves me feeling quite fortunate to be residing on a remote planet these days.

ack! a random post without pictures!

so much input and so many impressions and so little bloggy time. and although i'm taking photos, i neglected to bring my card reader with me. sigh.

: : the teletubbies totally speak to the under two set. and i had forgotten how that works. what is it about the teletubbies?

: : i'm not sure i can continue to refer to wind turbines as either windmills or fans. it's like referring to an 11,000TEU container vessel as a boat.

: : i can only see yellow cars when sabin isn't present (we play a version of the old "slug bug" car game involving yellow cars). when i called her to say i'd seen one, she said she'd saved up 12 slugs for me.

: : our new house gives me a little flutter of butterflies when i see it in the sunshine.

: : if you're really dressed up and wearing your signature wolford tights, it's really hard for anyone to be condescending to you.

: : even tho' i know who will win project runway from watching the show from the models' perspective the other day, it's still exciting to watch the finale. and i still think carol hannah should have won.

: : there is a lot of plastic surgery on american television.

: : while waiting for my new work computer, i went a little nuts on LinkedIn.

; ; things have a way of falling into place as they should. when they should.

: : i already miss hanging out in my sweatpants.

: : the corporate world is full of people doing loads of busywork powerpoints in which they make up terminology according to some kind of elusive and perhaps unspeakable buzz word dictionary. and no one says, "this is meaningless," because they're afraid they didn't understand and they don't want to be exposed for not being up on the latest buzz words. it's a condition exacerbated by english being the business language of choice without necessarily being the native language of many of the people involved. it seems to be an overwhelmingly unbreakable circle. and when i try to really think about it and wrap my head around it, it makes me a little dizzy.

: : i wonder how productive the world would be if everyone just stopped all that shit and did some work.

: : jutland is the new black: totally trendy.

the end of postmodernity

we've been inundated over the past few days with the news of michael jackson's death. it seems that the canonization began almost immediately, with the amnesiac collective memory forgetting that he had become at best a freak and at worst a sickening, mangled, pale spectre of himself.

i wasn't a fan and never had any of his albums. while i think the music he made in the early 80s was something special in comparison to the crap that's churned out today, it never really spoke to me. i think for me, even then, the premise of a song like billy jean--that he would impregnate someone and leave them--seemed so absurd that i just couldn't get into him. the spangled glove and the red band uniform just didn't do it for me.  give me madonna. give me prince. but you could keep michael jackson.

so, to be honest, i just can't participate in the mass hysterical grief. in fact, i can't muster any feelings about it whatsover, i am completely and utterly ambivalent. but there are a few things i keep thinking about...

: : are madonna and prince, who both turned 50 this year as well, freaking out?

: : can you imagine being the team of doctors and nurses who worked with him at the hospital, trying to resuscitate him? how they must have seen his real face, mangled beyond any normalcy by countless plastic surgeries? it must have been very sad to see him like that.

: : does this mark the end of postmodernity once and for all? because michael jackson was the very embodiment of postmodernity, wasn't he? a parody so unreal he took on a reality as a parody. the ultimate pastiche of references...the moonwalking, the glove, the red leather, the epaulettes, the spats, the bling before it was called bling, the falsetto, the amusement park at neverland, the ever-more-bizarrely sculpted face, living in bahrain, dangling his baby off a balcony. he was the ultimate postmodern icon. so full of multiple realities that he was stripped entirely of reality. how do we even really know what's gone now?

: : does it also mark, once and for all, the end of the 80s? because while his contemporaries madonna and prince seemed to move on and recognize that new decades came and with them a need for new incarnations of themselves, he never really seemed to realize the 80s were over. and although he tried, with the freaky plastic surgery and bleached skin, to change, he never really left that decade of excess, he never gained any ironic distance to it.

at least the good things he did create - his music - will live on and we can hope that he's found the peace he was so clearly searching for and never found.