Often, when I see something I like, I want to drop all my own ideas, methods, habits and goals and just adopt those new ones.

I've got a short little span of attention(, and oh my nights are so long).

These days

I feel almost physically sick when I check my email these days. I would be really happy not to have to have it any more, except obviously I have to.

This feeling has been current for some time. One of the results of it is that most of my correspondents have pretty much given up on me, so I hardly have any emails when I do check. In one way, this is pleasing, as I don't have to answer any emails (which I don't know why makes me feel wrong sometimes - I think it's not my preferred way to interact with people: I'm reflective enough as it is); in another way, I feel sad because I'm losing touch with people. Which is very bad.

In other news, I was going to post the pictures I took from my vantage point high over Glebe and Annandale of the post-apocalyptic [-looking] orange dust storm that woke me up at 5.30am (something pounds on the exterior wall of the bedroom during gale force winds and it's not conducive to sweet dreams - and for once it wasn't the nightmare neighbours, more on whom later). But everyone else in the world already posted them. Here, look.

It was a very unsettling thing to wake up, not merely because I see that time of the morning perhaps twice a year at most, but because it looked like a mammoth super-fire was roaring in from Western Sydney. All the windows of our place were open, and in my sleepy state I couldn't understand why I couldn't smell the smoke. I had a flashback to the late eighties and thought the end of the world was nigh. And there were not yet pictures of red sky on the Herald website, so I thought maybe all the journalists had been liquified. Once I had looked up BOM and seen that the meteorologists were still living, breathing and updating their site, I relaxed a bit. Couldn't go back to sleep, though (see tree issue, previous paragraph).

I took photos to show MW when he woke up but it was extraordinarily still completely orange when the proper day started about two hours later. Now there's a yucky film of dust over everything in my studio, because of the vents-I-haven't-yet-found-a-stepladder-to-climb-up-on-and-cover-with-plastic-or-paper-or-something-because-of-the-white-dust-that-blows-in-through-them-when-there's-wind. Fortunately all the fragile masterpieces-in-progress are covered in glad wrap (or as they'd say in Adrian Mole or The Young Ones, 'cling film'. [Cling film, heh]). Dustiness is a place my work goes to in its nightmares.

I've just been in the library so I'm all full of mental blurgh. I don't mean mental 'blah' like 'meh', I mean blurgh like 'urge to blurt things out'.

I so loved Adrian Mole. I always think of him when I'm sorting through 'the heavy papers' on the weekend.

Other things are progressing pleasingly. Time is always a problem; but if there was no time there couldn't be any doing at all so I suppose I shouldn't complain that it's passing.

Favourites

Two of the best films I think I've seen over the last twelve months are 'Happy Go Lucky' and 'Man on Wire'.

Goodness me they're wonderful.

I love Mike Leigh so very very much.

That's all I have to say about it for the moment.

Here's a little warning sign if you have a cocaine problem

You have this dream and you're doing cocaine in your sleep and can't fall asleep and you're doing cocaine in your sleep and you can't fall asleep and you wake up and you're doing cocaine ... bingo.

(Robin Williams, when he was good).
I remember being kind of addicted to tetris, you know, when you're falling asleep and the bricks start falling behind your eyelids as they sag.

Art dreams, too, there's that.

Jemande musste Josef K verleumdet haben ...

What Christopher Hitchens says to do with Kafka:

... When I went to Czechoslovakia under the old Communist regime one day in the '80s, I thought to myself whatever I do, whatever happens to me in Prague I'm not going to use the name Kafka, I'm just not going to do it. I won't do it; it's so easy, everyone else does, I'm not going to. I'll write the first non-Kafka mentioning piece. So I went to this meeting of this then-unknown dissident, Vaclav Havel and various of his Czech friends and Slovak friends in an apartment in Prague and we thought that no-one knew that he had these visitors coming from America, but someone must have given us away because it wasn't long before the door fell in and in come police dogs and guys in leather coats carrying heavy electric torches and truncheons and so on, slammed me up against the wall and said, 'You're under arrest and you've got to come with us.' And I said - I thought of saying 'I demand to see the Ambassador', and I said, 'What's the charge?' And they said, 'We don't have to tell you the charge'. And I thought 'fuck. Now I do have to mention Kafka'. Totalitarian is a cliché, dictatorship is based on clichéd thinking, on very tried and tested uniform stuff. They don't mind that they're boring, they don't mind that they're obvious, their point is made and I thought 'Now you've made me, I know you're going to make me do it'.

Flailing about in the dark

There's also this:

It's an exhibition. Don't try reading the little bits of text, they're too small and I couldn't be arsed mucking about with preparing images properly. You should know by now that that sort of thing isn't what goes on in these parts.

On the show, though, I was down on my work, but the parts that insisted on not being able to be fixed knew better than me how to self-actualise their constituent selves into a successful work.

I was battling every part of it all the way, and it beat me, and I learned that I was beaten because the work itself is superior to my understanding of what makes it good (when it is). That's a little scary. But it can be no other way. My little brain isn't capable of logically following through to the conclusions of its instincts.

This is what makes it hard to write artist statements, but at the same time is what is the appealing mystery of, like, yanno, art. It needs to reach for something slightly further than your own understanding. Maybe.

I don't learn something from every project I undertake but I have from this... I don't know exactly what it is, but it's there somewhere.

Anyhoo.

Tom Polo is awesome, btw. He's good people.

OMG generic post title

I made florentines.

They are freaking amazing. Hence, I am the best pastry chef ever. Don't bother arguing with me, because you'll lose.

ION, I'm back in the studio, finally. Freaking about time. Not much excitement is going on there, but I'm working, anyway.

Such a Good Thing.

Sigh

I am the worst procrastinator in the world. (Or do I mean the best?)

I just made Melting Moments, and I don't even particularly like shortbread.

Photophobia?

Man, have I got a corker of a headache.

I looked at lots of art today

Not much of it was terribly inspiring.

I'm confused again. I was over it for a few days, but I feel a little bit of confusion returning.

It’s okay for artists to make money… no, really, it is.

The title is the same as a Harvard Business School paper posted by NAVA on their website. It's kind of timely, given this blog's recent self-flagellation about art and purposelessness and ... well, all that stuff. I haven't read it all yet so I don't know if it's any good. I'm posting it anyway... because that's what I do these days. I post!

Here it is.

In other news, I just baked a cake.

Unprecedented! It's cooling as we speak.

UPDATE: I read that paper now ... most of it. I got annoyed after a while and stopped.

There's four left in the box/Eureka moments

Direct quote from source:

"A single grain of sand is not a heap; that’s obvious. A heap is a collection of things, you need several things to make it up. Two grains of sand isn’t a heap either; a heap is a collection of several things, more than just a couple.

The concept of a heap is fuzzy, though; there’s no precise number that marks the difference between heaps and non-heaps. It’s not as though 37 grains of sand aren’t a heap but 38 are. Defining precisely how many things one needs in order to have a heap is impossible.

This is what gives rise to the paradox of the heap (also called the “Sorites paradox”, sorites being the Greek word for heap).

Suppose that we have a collection of a million grains of sand. That is absolutely, definitely, undeniably a heap.

Because there is no precise number that separates heaps from non-heaps, removing a single grain of sand from a heap will never turn it into a non-heap. If you have a heap of sand, and you take away a single grain, then you still have a heap.

If you have a heap of a million grains of sand, though, and repeatedly take away a single grain of sand, doing so 999,999 times, then what do we have at the end of the process? Is it a heap or not?

Taking away a single grain of sand cannot turn a heap into a non-heap. We had a heap of sand at that beginning of the process. All we did was take away single grains of sand. Therefore what we have at the end of this process can only be a heap.

What we have at end of the process, though, is a single grain of sand, and, as we said at the beginning, a single grain of sand is obviously not a heap. The single grain, then, both is and is not a heap."

Master and slave

It's a bit blurry. Also craply made. Text reads, 'master' and 'exhibition copy'.

Media art!

Do you ever feel it's all been done before?

This Tom Friedman thingy is made out of 30,000 toothpicks. I was prompted by AG's comment that she likes things that look like they were fun to make. I agree, I do too. I covet the having made them myself-ness. I like things that look like they lead out of something that was efficient or made sense according to some unspoken natural law (the tapered shape of the end of the toothpick). I like to think of his play with a thing and discovery of what the natural properties of that thing are and where it should go, and then he takes it all the way there.

Cereal boxes can also have natural properties.


This is, like, the seminal Friedman work (IMHO, obvs). This is just made out of several identical cereal boxes. It's the thing in itself only more of it and bigger, and because of that vaguer. Like, the accumulation and aggregation of many equals more volume but less specificity. The trade-off for scale is lack of resolution; this is like a 3d jpeg. Blur = dilution of exactness caused by excessive multiplication. Too much same = no longer separately clear.

You can get all this from a thing that simply looks (ie is visual. As in, looks like only without the simile). There's power in something that can be seen and not said, but you can't explain that power by saying, because it's in the seeing not the saying. Things that can only be known by seeing are everywhere, in graphics, in photography, images of all kinds. In the dialectics of streets and buildings and trees and the light from the sky. But how can you explain any of that without the thing that is seen that is the explanation in and of itself? (Eh?) It's like the difference between doing and planning.

Yesterday I joined a small group of friends trying to help a collaborative pair of artist friends to workshop a long-running project they've got going on. Because of the kind of project it is (connected to a festival) with lots of planning time, they are researching and researching and trying to draw the work out of that. But they're blocked, stymied by what is a non-intuitive process for them. Can't make the leap from research to performance/work. From what it's meant to be about, to thing-that's-independent-of-all-else-but-itself-and-embodies-ideas-rather-than-illustrates-them. Which is what they normally do intuitively. We have so much to prove/explain all the time, it reduces our confidence just to do. It sounds so airy-fairy, intuition, but the thing is our intelligence as artists needs to be trusted (inc. by us) that we will be able to embody intelligentness (intelligence?) in the thing itself, in how the thing itself is executed, rather than in via how known a quantity it is before it is undertaken.

I'm struggling with this meself.

I seem also to be making a collection of works that are pieces of A4 paper.

I owe someone a nail. It's waiting patiently in my studio. It's actually nail plus these days. It's accrued interest. But not in anyway that undoes the inherent simplicity of nail as nail, fear not. It's just more practical now. Shall I show you? OK, hang on. Maybe next post.

More on this

A Goodreader's comment on the letters of Vincent Van Gogh:

"he was definitely not crazy, just someone who, sadly, was incredibly talented but got hit with an extremely severe mental illness:"

Heh. Not crazy; just had a mental illness.

It's like, one is medicalised, and the other means 'out of control'. But who exactly is crazy if not the mentally ill?

Anyway, whatever.

Procrastinatin'

I was cataloguing books on Goodreads, a task I allowed myself as a reward for finishing Dreams From My Father. A chance encounter with Spike Milligan on said site reminded me of how much I loved his war memoirs when I discovered them as a young 'un (teen). I mean to read them again, now. Soon praps. (Or not - I have to read according to the rules first). Anyway. I added a new category to account for his description of shellshock in the fourth of the trilogy (and his bi-polarness in general), which I called mental illness. Then I needed to go through all my 'read' books (I know, I know) and mark up the other books with that tag. This proved a problem; is (for example) The Virgin Suicides about mental illness? They all killed themselves - something must have been going wrong in their brains, right? Or what about American Psycho? Does he have an illness? Is sublimation an illness? Or nihilism? What constitutes a mental illness anyway? How about Louis Riel? Is going a bit nuts not a rational response to oppression? And maybe his vision was true, truly from god - who am I to say?

Anyway, the anti-climax here is that I changed the label to the more inclusive and unreconstructed 'madness_mental illness', which allowed me to tag tales involving things like depression and OCD.

This labelling thing is a lark, innit. In the words of Sandra Bernhard, "don't label me: I'm a people person".

If I gave up art

I could
* spend more time with my friends and family
* save money
* read more books
* learn (a) language/s
* be more interested in my job, which is not uninteresting, and do it better
* take up a proper exercise program
* cook more and hence eat better
* take up sewing, crochet, carpentry, or any other skill or craft
* be at peace


It's a theory, anyway.

Progress on Rules

Today I had to exercise some self-control. In keeping with the new rules, I did not buy either of the two books I was considering at Gleebooks second-hand.

I will probably long for them for a couple more days, then I'll be over it.

If not, I'll go back for them in blatant disregard of my commitment.

Our apartment is bitterly cold today, despite the sun outside. Studio calling! (There's a heater in there.)

Statistical negligibility

I just did a double take upon closing my Blogger window at the new tab, 'monetize'.

WTF?, I asked myself.

Apparently I can put ads on my blog. It claims:

"AdSense for content automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (you can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience and your site content—ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful."

Curious, I thought. My readership is so low and my content so negligible that I cannot imagine what the ads would contain that could possibly make them relevant. I'm almost tempted to do it, just to see what Adsense makes of La Di Da.

It would like having the blog reviewed by a bot. Automated interpretation: intriguing.

OMG

Four. Days. Off.

This pleases me.

I must not waste the next three like the first.

My return to blogging has thus far been kind of banal, of late in any case. I suppose it was often like that in the old days anyway.

Tomorrow may well be a less banal day, as well as being at the very least another in the series. (Of days.)