31
August, 2000
Computer
invents robot.
An
interesting article
in ABCnews.com about Heather
Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, who make images
on grass, by manipulating the amount of light
to which the grass is exposed. They found a
way to preserve the image in the grass... but
I loved the idea of the images fading after
a few days... It's a twitchy reaction. The result
of a chip planted in my brain in architecture
school. At least I didn't say ephemeral or
juxtapose.
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29
August, 2000
The
happiest thing. My beautiful genius friend shares
some of her work. Now everyone can hear
the songs I've been listening to non-stop for
the last two weeks.
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22
August, 2000
Looking
at Pat
Steir's work. Hasn't she done some book
covers and isn't that a dream job? Freely associating
to discover Katsuo
Tachi.
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21
August, 2000
Research
on sleep disorders. Specifically interesting
with respect to hallucinations.
I
think Graeme Zielinski enjoys being a journalist.
Read his article
on some poor guy who fell through the floor
of his outhouse.
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August
07, 2000
This
article in the New York Times on "How
Culture Molds Habits of Thought", is particularly
interesting to me at the moment. Dr. Nisbett's
research supports what seems intuitive. It's
interesting / intuitive to me for a couple of
reasons. First, some time ago, contrary to what
always felt natural to me (and perhaps a lot
of other people?), I figured out that it doesn't
work to try to read an individual's communication
at a level secondary to their speech and body
language-- at a contextual level (where speech
and body language are mitigated by environmental
factors)... It doesn't work in North America
is because there is no consistent language for
that kind of communication, and because not
everyone bothers to do it. You can never tell
when you're just imagining that communication
or if the person desperately wants you to hear
them. Listening and guessing could make you
insane... This is just a guess based on fragmented
experiences, rather than anything cohesive--
but it seems that in East Asia, there is a particular
vocabulary for that second communication. That
means that everyone is listening and everyone
is communicating in a way that depends heavily
on their context. Which sounds, to an American,
as if the speaker is being indirect and evasive
and not just saying what she means, dammit.
And from the other way 'round, I s'pose the
American or European sounds shortsighted and
imperceptive... But that's just the confusing
aspect of the difference... I've been trying
to figure what it is I'm so attracted to in
contemporary Japanese literature. Ever since
I was in college and my friend Daisy gave me
photocopies of a short story by Kenzaburo Oe,
I've been searching for more writing with that
particular quality. I don't know exactly what
it is, but I'm starting to suspect it has something
to do with a kind of communication that depends
on establishing an atmosphere (is that the right
word?). Good and awkward translations alike,
it's present in works by authors as diverse
as Kenzaburo Oe, Yasunari Kawabata, Banana Yoshimoto,
Junichiro Tanizaki, or Haruki Murakami... What
is it?
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August
04, 2000
Really
interesting article on the music industry.
The
last few days I've been reading Murakami's Underground.
It's a compassionate and disturbing snapshot
of the Tokyo subway gas attacks by Aum cult
members. At one point he talks about the idea
of personal autonomy and how it's meaningless
without the mirror image of dependence. He talks
about how we look quickly away when we divine
that mirror image. How we force ourselves not
to think about it, not even to consider it in
order not to imagine what might be waiting behind
that plane...
In
the middle of the night, I accidentally read
from Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams. I wasn't
thinking straight. It made my nostrils flare,
so I read Banana
Yoshimoto instead. Her writing is so genuinely
happy and transparent. She resists the urge
to poke vicious fun of herself... I wonder if
she even has that urge. And I wonder if I'm
confusing the author with her work.
I
left the house in the middle of the night. Before
last night, it had been a long time since I'd
had trouble sleeping. When it was bad, I used
to go for weeks without getting more than minutes
of sleep at a time. Lately I had gotten good
at willing myself to sleep. Anyhow, I willed
myself to sleep last night only to wake up at
1.15 in the morning. I felt hot and anxious,
though when I touched my face it was cold. I
tried reading a short story by Martin Amis on
the Internet, but I started feeling a bit sick,
so I got a blanket and left. I went to Washington
Square Park and sat on a bench for a long time.
From across the park I could hear the cool constant
sound of some sort of machinery. That kind of
sound has always hypnotized me. When I was a
child I used to fall asleep whenever someone
was vacuuming or using the hair dryer. I crossed
my legs on the bench and sat motionless until
I felt my heart slow and my palms cool.
I
wrapped the blanket tighter around myself and
closed my eyes. After a while all I could hear
was the whirring sound. It surrounded me until
I was suspended in a dark cool liquid noise.
I saw a windowless room again. This time it
was full of children. Girls. They all looked
similar in the dim light. One by one they climbed
a ladder through an inky hole in the ceiling.
A moment after each disappeared, her broken
body was tossed down from the hole. Soon the
room was a soft jumble of child limbs and dead
faces. I took the last living child in my arms
and pulled her with me into the viscous sound.
Without
warning the sound stopped. It was starting get
light and all I could hear was garbage trucks
and people cursing. I threw the blanket off
and walked home.
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August
01, 2000
An
article in Lingua Franca summarizing George
Price's life and work... It's painful to
read this.
My
father has described our lovely new home as
possessing a "sort of ambiance of workers
paradise and historical reality." Is that
a compliment? We are getting a toilet
and we don't consider our plumbing the
appropriate forum for polemics.
An
article
on artnet.com on the MOMA strike. Yuck. Client
work seems ingeniously ethical compared to academia
or the art world.
I
can still see them together: two tiny forms
at the far end of a bright corridor, the length
of which must be exaggerated in my memory. Everyone
recognized them, but no one I knew had ever
spoken to either of them. They were lacquered
in elegance and made remote by experience.
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June,
July
