Thursday 23 April 2009

here, let me help you with that




i thought i would helpfully assist you in your wonderings about what you could do to make me happy today.

you could teach me how to make slightly odd, sweet paper animations.


you could arrange to have michel gondry draw my portrait. (you can be in it too, if you like.)

you could assuage my quasi erotic longings for the amazing honey gelato that i was eating this time last week at san crispino in rome.

you could turn up at my house with a picnic blanket, a watermelon and this magnificent record player all set for an afternoon in the park.



knowledge is power, innit?

time to go listen to nina simone singing 'here comes the sun' one more time. loving this enthusiastic british spring the way that alveoli love oxygen.

but i still love you more.

Wednesday 22 April 2009

Tuesday 21 April 2009

we gave ourselves away

tiding myself over until Where The Wild Things Are blows my tiny mind watching other pupil-dilating Spike Jonze efforts, like this music video for UNKLE's song, 'Heaven'...




the sun's out. go kiss somebody.

Wednesday 8 April 2009

when it's time to work, WORK.



Originally uploaded by themarkpike

************BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE******
List of Essentials

********************************************************************************************

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

4. Be in love with yr wife

5. Something that your feel will find its own form

6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

7. Blow as deep as you want to blow

8. Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest

12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time

15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

17. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself

18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

19. Accept loss forever

20. Believe in the hold contour of life

21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better

23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr monrning

24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazzier the better

29. You're a Genius all the time

30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

as ever,

Jack

[By Jack Kerouac, exerpted precisely as published [sic] from a letter to Don Allen 1958]

from Heaven & Other Poems, Grey Fox Press, San Francisco 1994

Monday 6 April 2009

a little bit light, a little bit dark

Marcel Dzama's new music video for Department of Eagles is the stuff of (dark, engrossing, fantastical) dreams...

Friday 3 April 2009

care to dance?

i was going to say, 'should i ever get married...', but screw it, i'm just going to dance to it now, whilst taking lessons from tammy terell in the fine art of eyebrow batting.

Thursday 2 April 2009

the day gets bigger



Originally uploaded by Jaako

Reading the lovely Scout’s blog, I come across Maira Kalman, whose name I have never heard before, and am intrigued. I start digging and find a book, a wonderful TED talk, a website, and a NY Times column. She’s wonderful. The world cracks open slightly and is brighter.

I want to know more about her: does she have children? Where does she live? Does she have a pot-bellied pig, a fancy studio, red tights like the ones I’m wearing today? If I understand her life more, can I live more like her? Can I live better? Can I die better? (Because like her, I think those are the only two things worth dedicated yourself to the study of.)

I find out she has two children, a series of children’s books, a mischievous face. I find out she had a husband, Tibor, a renegade graphic designer now dead. Renegade graphic designers – my specialist subject. I read his obituary.

It mentions how he went to live in Cuba, his politics, and that he wrote a rare book called Chairman Rolf Fehlbaum. I look to the left of my desk: I have this book; it’s been there for months, untouched.

I read this book, and it makes me marvel. The world cracks open slightly and is brighter.

I go back to finish reading his obituary, feeling I’ve found new friends today. At the end of the obit, one of Tibor’s friends gives a wonderful testimonial: "He remained charming and prickly and funny literally until the end. Since people our age have not yet died in great numbers, it's a great model for us all as a way to die, not just with dignity, but with effervescence."

The friend is Kurt Andersen, a writer, whose name is at once new and familiar. I realise – yesterday, waiting for a friend, I picked an old magazine from a rack and opened it, randomly, to a writer’s description of his perfect final meal. The writer was Kurt Andersen, and I had never heard of him until last night.

I sit here and the world feels bigger, and smaller, and brighter, and closer, and strung through with possibility.