a free umbrella, and harsh light

T-Shirts

No. 1 by OBEY
No. 2 by Mighty Healthy
available for sale at Karmaloop.com

UBU Web

http://www.ubu.com/

If you have some time, check out this site. Be sure to look at the Film and Video page. There is also a great mp3 archive as well as a lot of great papers.

Post Graffiti

Documentary about early 80s graffitiartists bringing their work to the galleries. Featuring Rammellzee, Futura, Daze, Crash, Basquiat, and Keith Haring.

The Last Temptation of Christ

This movie was written by Martin Scorsese. It was based on the book written by Nikos Kazantzakis. The score was done by Peter Gabriel. Jesus is played by William Defoe. Judas is played by Harvey Keitel. As for the execution of the film, its solid. The imagery, the acting, the story, the sound. This is the best religious film I've ever seen. It reminded me of reading Paradise Lost by John Milton, where Satan is given these human qualities. In this film Jesus is overflowing with humanity. He confesses his sins and he shivers in terror at his obligation to God. We can feel the pain. I'm not a christian, but this film has completely changed my image of Jesus. It makes you really think about fighting to live your life, whoever you are. A lot of people feel really alone when they go through hard times. They think they don't deserve there miseries. But the reality of it, is that everyone goes through it one way or another. We are forced to fight to live.

Dim Lights Small City

Scary

Sid

The Genius of a Crowd

changing neighborhoods

changing neighborhoods

A Nostalgia of Happiness, Beauty, and Longing

The prefect piece for driving slowly through the city, your window slightly cracked letting the sounds of a rainy downtown sprinkle into your ears; a perfect compliment to this beautiful minimalism:

Part !: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj7CelwJOfk
Part II: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=wFifqvD2GK4

Lonesome Jim

Lonesome Jim is a movie directed by Steve Buscemi. It stars Casey Affleck and Liv Tyler. The casting of this movie is great. I really loved the dad and the drug addict cousin. Its a story about a guy who fails to make it in the big city and comes home to live with his family. I like this movie for its sublety, its beautiful imagery, and dark honest comedy. I say subtley because its low budget. You don't need a lot of money to make a great movie. The story, which is very literary, is filled with twists and turns. I liked that one of the main elements is girls juniour high basketball. I loved the tie in of the small town factory that makes ladders. Subtle and poetic. Second the images are done really well, I'm pretty sure this movie was shot digitally. At times, It has this really eerie quality. One of my favorite images is up above, Jim lying on his bed. I don't know, I'm a sucker for ordinary things with great color. And lastely the dark honest comedy brings it all home. The story is about being down in the dumps and having a laugh about it. I think anybody's life, no matter how sad or pathetic could make a great film. A lot of people think their lives are horrible, and rightfully they should, however if you catch a little distance, just maybe you can see the humour of your humiliation. In the beginning Jim goes to all these bars. They are called Riki's, Riki's II, and Riki's III. The first two bars he goes into, he has to leave because he can't just fit in. I guess I can relate , so I laughed. Sometimes you just can't bother to be in public alone. But yeah, I love this movie. It's very midwestern American,, dysfunctional, and funny.

Heaven

This place is in Izu, which is about a 3 hour drive from Tokyo. You can't ask for anything better, truly. As far as experiencing scenery, this is perfection. Everything about this place was strictly designed. Walking out of the hotel, you walk along this path and come upon the changing room. And out of the changing room is this view of the ocean. You sit in the bath and soak it in.

Avril 14th

Date: October 21st, 2007
Location: On the train to work

Music: 'Avril 14th' by Aphex Twin as performed by Alarm Will Sound

The Autumn breeze drifts through the train's open doors. i sit positioned one of the many blood-orange bench seats within this transportation device. The sun shines in from behind; warming my shoulders, my neck. The doors let out a hiss of air pressure release as they close, and the train resumes its ascent. i feel my body absorbing the sun's brilliance as if i am a plant. The train careens its way through tunnels, areas of greenery, residences, the sun's bursting rays. Avril 14th repeats.

The shadows cast on the floor ahead show the silhouettes of my neighbors and i, as we sit together in our common situation. Our silhouettes seem to dance slowly along with the piano's melody, the train swaying and turning as if orchestrated by that golden sun.

i feel synchronicity.

The sun, the shadows, the melody, the moment; a reassurance, an affirmation of life's beauty.

The train continues its course. The sun shines on. The shadows dance. We admire Autumn's presence. Avril 14th repeats.

open space

Some paintings I've been working on....Posted from my email

New Babylon

"# In 1956, the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys started working on a visionary architectural proposal for a future society; he didn't stop for almost twenty years. Having been a co-founder of the Cobra group of artists in the late forties, he abandoned painting in 1953 to concentrate on the question of "construction". He became a founding member of the Situationist International in 1957 and played a central role in their experiments until his resignation in 1960. New Babylon, as his project would eventually be called, is a situationist city intended as a polemical provocation.
# New Babylon was elaborated in an endless series of models, sketches, etchings, lithographs, collages, architectural drawings, and photocollages, as well as in manifestos, essays, lectures, and films. New Babylon is a form of propaganda that critiques conventional social structures.
# New Babylon envisages a society of total automation in which the need to work is replaced with a nomadic life of creative play, in which traditional architecture has disintegrated along with the social institutions that it propped up. A vast network of enormous multilevel interior spaces propagates to eventually cover the planet. These interconnected "sectors" float above the ground on tall columns. While vehicular traffic rushes underneath and air traffic lands on the roof, the inhabitants drift by foot through the huge labyrinthine interiors, endlessly reconstructing the atmospheres of the spaces. Every aspect of the environment can be be controlled and reconfigured spontaneously. Social life becomes architectural play. Architecture becomes a flickering display of interacting desires.
# Constant always saw New Babylon as a realizable project, which provoked intense debates at schools of architecture and fine arts about the future role of the architect. Constant insisted that the traditional arts would be displaced by a collective form of creativity. He positioned his project at the threshold of the end of art and architecture. Yet it had a major influence on the work of subsequent generations of architects. It was published widely in the international press in the 1960s and Constant quickly attained a prominent position in the world of experimental architecture. But this influence would eventually be forgotten; the project has not been displayed since Constant stopped working on it in 1974."
# Constant died 1 August 2005.
# source
Text by Mark Wigley from 'New Babylon. The Hyper-architecture of Desire' [website lost]

li·brar·y (lī'brĕr'ē) n., pl. -ies.

1. A collection of information, sources, resources, and service

2. An institution or foundation maintaining such a collection.

3. A collection of recorded data or tapes arranged for ease of use.

4. A collection of such materials, especially when systematically arranged.

Darfur and Iraqi refugees in Egypt

I sit in my room. I read two articles today that blew my mind. I realize they are from a newspaper. That the writer didn't grow up here. But the imbalance of the world is just incredible to me. I think I believe in God. I grew up Jewish and went to Sunday School. But I don't even really enjoy my life most of the time. I find it really painful a lot of the time actually. Reading these articles I guess I have it easier, but I don't think it makes its going to make me enjoy my life anymore. I don't understand the world at all. If you read the article you'll find that even the presence of help in some ways is just adding to the problem. I guess we just let it happen, what in the fucking god damn am I gonna do? I've experienced and seen beauty in so many ways, but the destruction and violence in this world is just as sublime.

to read
go to the latimes website
search for "Another disaster brews in Darfur"

and "A refuge without welcome for Iraqis"

mao mao, means drunk in Loation

I was reading this great Warhol childrens book to sunny the other day. It is called, Cats, cats, cats, a must read if you have children. This is Andy Warhol's Mao at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, MO

Osamu Dazai and Andy Warhol

Together for the first time. I doubt they knew each other. But for some reason I read them one after the other. The Philosohy of Andy Warhol was really fun to read. I felt really hip reading it on the train. The cover has a really cool picture of him with a skull on his head. The first thing that comes to mind about this book is
shopping. He talks a lot about Americanness, if there is such thing.

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see coca-cola, and you know that the President drinks coke, Liz Taylor drinks coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, The President knows it, and you know it.

In Europe the royalty and the aristocracy used to eat a lot better than the peasants-they weren't eating the same things at all. It was either partridge or porridge, and each class stuck to its own food. But when Queen Elizabeth came here and President Eisenhower bought her a hot dog I'm sure he felt confident that she couldn't have had delivered to Buckingham palace a better hot dog than the one he bought her for maybe twenty cents at the ballpark. Because there is no better hot dog than a ballpark hot dog. Not for a dollar, not for ten dollars, not for a hundred thousand dollars could she get a better hot dog. She could get one for twenty cents and so could anybody else.

Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up there and rich and living it up have something you don't have, that their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you. But they drink the same Cokes and eat the same hot dogs and wear the same ILGWU clothes and see the same TV shows and the same movies. Rich people can't see a sillier version of Truth or Consequences, or a scarier version of The Exorcist. You can get just as revolted as they can- you can have the same nightmares. All of this is really American.

The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is. For instance, a lot of places give you special treatment when you're famous, but that's not really American. The other day something very American happened to me. I was going into an auction at Parke-Bernet and they wouldn't let me in because I had my dog with me, so I had to wait in the lobby for the friend I was meeting there to tell him I'd been turned away. And while I was waiting in the lobby I signed autographs. It was a really American situation to be in."

So thats Andy's idea of America. I don't know if I agree with it, but its funny to me. I think I'd rather read that than Karl Marx. There are also some good chapters on topics, such as, Beauty, Economics, Fame, Work, Love, Time, and Buying Underwear. One chapter is really odd, where a woman is going into a quite detailed description of how she obsessively cleans her apartment in the nude. Apparently he used to tape all his telephone conversations and claims to have married his tape recorder. I really just like how natural it all feels. I think Andy Warhol saw things purely, and I mean that he saw them his own way. In a way its quite Buddhist. On the one hand he can seem very superficial, but there's something everlasting as well. I think perhaps most people who write a book called a philosophy are very serious, but this philosophy is easy to understand, funny, and not pressing.

I'm not sure yet exactly what Osamu Dazai has in common with Andy Warhol, but I'm sure I could propose some relationship. His book, No Longer Human, is a story about a man who is so ferociously uncomfortable around other human beings. He is a fine actor to the people around him, but feels very differently on the inside. In one passage he talks about going to a communist party meeting for the mere pleasure.

"Horiki also took me to a secret communist meeting. A secret Communist meeting may have been for Horiki just one more of the sights for Tokyo. I was introduced to the "comrades" and obliged to buy a pamphlet. I then heard a lecture on Marxian economics delivered by an extraordinarily ugly man, the guest of honor. Everything he said seemed exceedingly obvious, and undoubtedly true, but I felt sure that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings. Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed.
I wasn't sure what it was, but I felt that there was something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics. Terrified as I was by this weird element, I assented to materialism as naturally as water finding its own level. But materialism could not free me from my dread of human beings; I could not feel the joy of hope a man experiences when he opens his eyes on young leaves.

Nevertheless I regularly attended the meetings of the Reading Society. I found it uproariously amusing to see my "comrades," and their faces tense as though they were discussing matters of life and death, absorbed in the study of theories so elementary they were on the order of "one and one makes two." I tried to take some of the strain out of the meetings with my usual antics. That was why, I imagine, the oppressive atmosphere of the group gradually relaxed. I came to be so popular that I was considered indispensable at the meetings. These simple people perhaps fancied that I was just as simple as they-an optimistic, laughter-loving comrade-but if such was their view, I was deceiving them completely. I was not their comrade. Yet I attended every single meeting and performed for them my full repertory of farce.

I did it because I liked to, because these people pleased me-and not necessarily because we were linked by any common affection derived from Marx.

Irrationality. I found the thought faintly pleasurable. Or rather, I felt at ease with it. What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned.

People talk of "social outcasts". The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a "social outcast" from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness."

I don't know if this explains the mood of the book, but I really like this passage. I like the way he is so important to the Communist meetings, but really doesn't give a damn. I like the exposure of his deception. I think we often say one thing and think another. Which, however, I think this acting, helps keep some peace. If everyone said how they felt all the time, there would be a whole lot of nothing happening. "Think before you speak", I think the phrase goes. I think it does us some good. But I also think language is real slippery. What's good is sometimes bad, and vice versa. After reading this story of one's individual self-pitying alienation, I don't think that good and bad are opposites at all. I think language itself really messes things up because it separates. Good and bad are really no different from one another. Acting one way and feeling another aren't really separated either. Its all part of the individual.

He goes on later to say that the problem of society is the individual. If we are something at all like this charachter in the book, we are at war with ourselves. We have an ideal that we are constantly chasing. We want to do better. We live in hope that tomorrow will be better than today. I haven't met anyone who is truly content and satisfied. If we were all satisfied, I think that World Peace would be possible.

I constantly think about why there is so much violence in this world. Why are so many people just killing each other. Of course some wars could be avoided, like the American invasion of Iraq, but I think that individuals are at a root of something much much larger than themselves. But is this a problem to be solved? Could it be solved if we tried. I wish I could say that War could be finished forever, but the only way thats going to happen, is if humans become extinct. I think Hereclitus said that War is of the essence of Human Beings. We are at war with ourselves and the world around us. I don't use guns, but then again guns have never been around me.

So there it is Andy Warhol's The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, and Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, two really great books. One light, one heavy. I think both of them have something unique and powerful to say.

Arnaud de Borchgrave

Arnaud is a consultant for the U.S. government. He is over 80 years old. He worked for Newsweek for about 40. This guy knows politics like no one else. On the Vice TV website, which is like MTV but a million times more fresh, you can see his interview. He is asked many interesting questions about The Muslim and the Western World, about War, about Journalism back in the day. This guy has had probably one of the most interesting lives I've ever heard of. Check this out and hold onto your wig.

http://www.vbs.tv/shows/index.php?show=VBS%20Meets

I feel optimistic

September 21 is the international day for peace. I love life!

Last Night in a Drunken Sleep

So I had this dream last night. I went to some rave party. This girl gave me 3 different types of drugs. She told me not to take one of them. I took the one that had a 46 on it. At the party I was given these video glasses. I remember walking down this long bridge. At the end there was a door, because I had the glasses I was allowed to pass, then all of the sudden I am on this speed boat. We approached a silver tent. I could see the tent swallow other boats. As boats got close enough the tent just kind of sucked them in, like the opposite of a bubble. Near the tent are cars that are flat .jpgs that suddenly become 3D and back again. I don't ever remember listening to music or dancing. The drug I was on wasn't euphoric in the least, but made everything more lucid and somehow more real than everything was before.

City Agents 002: SIGNS-They only come out at night...

Signs of life in Valencia's Barrio del Carmen

sustenance