...

i am a fool! in heightened emotional states it would probably be beneficial for me to not attempt to do things like public writing. parce que

1. i wrote robert hopper? what the f. clearly meant edward.
2. i am not singing harmonies with john k.'s wife, i'm just getting old
3. obviously the doppler effect follows you around. you can't run away from physics. what i meant is that i've become really aware of it and it somehow keeps coming up in conversation and dreams.
4. fuck the big dipper. it's everywhere.

out of breath or out of key

...i've been thinking about this post for maybe weeks but i just got some news that has sort of dampened my spirits - tied a stone to my heart and placed a water trough for elephants on my chest - so i'm not sure it will be quite as i planned, but i have 16 minutes to kill on this computer so this seems as good at time as any. better than most actually, given the fact that i'm actually on a computer.

there are some things that seem to be following me through all of this moving around. here's a small list:
- Edward Hopper
- the Doppler effect
- the ''space-time problem''
- the Big Dipper (this is not a new discovery)

there are others, but that will do for now. things just keep connecting themselves to others - i keep being surprised to find something i thought i just left behind in one place, right in front of me in another. maybe 16 minutes isn't very much time to get into all of this. last night some mancunian boy actually had the GALL to ask me, ''hey, what's your favourite thing?'' my favourite thing?? what a ridiculous question. well, i know but it really couldn't sound more new age or cliche. but it's definitely experience. i've just realized i'm addicted to every second like espresso. it's like i'm rubbing up against every moment, not like it's the last, but just for what it is exactly. i saw john k. samson in copenhagen - he's getting older and singing the harmonies for benediction with his wife now, which means i probably am too. and feeling all of these things for not the first time isn't disappointing, it makes me smile so hard and feel completely comfortable regardless of my situation in situ or transit. and we're dying we're dying we're dying, but it seems okay when you're living 100% life and not moments past or plans to come.

can't get this straight right now. everything the day's too small to hold seems like it might currently be residing just behind my hears or something.
oh well!
kiss my nose
and crack my toes
it's worth a try
to ignore my ennui

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

following up up up

/LANDREFORM/






Rykestrasse (!)





orangutans fucking

'

at the Berlin zoo, which also had the best playground known to man including 3 (!) different extraordinarily bouncy and unsupervised trampolines and other fun things. see -






this computer is about to die, so no more except this one. i found budapest very supportive.

ber-rake my body, hold my bones, hold my bones

alright so i spent a lot of yesterday in my own little flurry of thought provoked by finally gaining access to the weird feelings brought on by the \LANDREFORM\ piece (which was put on by KUNSTrePUBLIK e.V., fyi) i saw at bb5 the other night and i'm feeling really excited by most of it.



what do you think about this

yesterday while i was having a little nappy (after round 3 of really provocative kunst) i all of sudden thought about how much a part of the whole 'spectacle' the spectators were. hm okay let's see if i can really say what i want to here. i mean in a sense, we were all being mocked. the whole thing was so ridiculous, but you really couldn't help but want to be a part of it all as well, especially since you were being given the opportunity. i mean, certain parts of me really wanted to get in a car (the parts that were a bit cold and lonely, the parts eyeing cute artists, you know) and i definitely do not think that i'm in any sense better than the people who did gleefully ride around the circle over and over again. something about what went on there upon reflection seems to have made me feel like attention was being drawn to in the face of useless economic determinism and destruction how we are often too attached to our subjective experience to be conscious of the ways we are maybe bound first by apathy or something. hmm, that sounds like garbage. what am i trying to say.

well in the little artist's statement for the event it says, ''Bored by the wasteful tedium ofeconomic determinism, their exhibition project'' aims ''to generate hypothetical stratgeies of action,'' - hypothetical strategies of action. well, one strategy would be to continue participating and thus condoning corporate privatization of public space, like we did the other night, and do all the time when we decide to ignore when signs go up on old land in fallow, ''rezoned for commercial use.'' and since it made me weird and angry to see people so willing to be a part of it, it also left me alone to question why (besides really obvious reasons like the fucking nasty and unnecessary combustion going on).

desperately searching for meaning has kind of lead me to feel like it was maybe really good art. sneakily interactive and participatory, we became a part of the exhibition and perhaps gave it the meaning that was sort of implicitly intended.

holy shit, imagine i had spent this much time thinking about aristotle and kierkegaard.
honestly, though how could i. the whole brilliance of very bizarre contemporary art is that it comes to you from all sorts of directions, not limiting your intake to something too often limiting as language.

ALSO,
more exciting Berlin news. if anyone caught the hanne hukkelberg ref in the last post (probably only A. J.(e)R.C. would...haaaaa...) they might also be interested to hear about how i was strolling through what i think is my favourite neighbourhood in this sweet, sweet city, Prenzlauer Berg, when i glanced at my map to see that i was almost at the intersection of Knaackstrasse and...Rykestrasse!! then i remembered that the first song on that album is called Berlin and i though, ah hah! where is 68! so i trooped up and down the street, for no particular reason really because what could i do? knock on the door, ''Hello, Hanne? It's me, Emily,'' but alas, the numbers only went to 51. still, though. i hope she recorded the album around there, that would make it even better.

i have photos of both of these things but i can't be bothered to do any uplodading at this point.

plus, i'm about to run out of ti

dive into infinity

after numerous (hem hem) requests, i've decided to write a quick little thinger on the w.w.w. from my current location in Berlin to provide an update for those who want to know but also! because i want your opinions.

first order of business! i love Berlin. knew i would. want to move back here. though i have to say, all this city jumping is really making me appreciate montreal and toronto because they are (in some, not necessarily aesthetic, sense) pretty comparably interesting and exciting places to live. with lots of bikers. not as many as in holland -

sidenote: was in south-east holland visiting my old roommate last week (fun and funny for a number of reasons, one being we ate with her quite-conservative-old-world-euro parents twice, where they alternated between carefully distanced sentences in english and gabbering in dutch, and her dad told me very important things like 'north americans are too stupid to work (with martine, at the university)' and vegetarianism is dangerous; perhaps that's why i look so 'peaky'...i suggested it had something to do with not sleeping in the same bed for more than two nights for close to a month.) but also! martine and i did quite a bit of biking and i made note of some important facts that contribute to holland having a larger population of bicycles than people - 1. they are huge, heavy, easy riding machines there - no one locks them to anything, they just lock up their back wheels and assume no one would be so silly as to exert the effort to carry such a machine very far, therefore finding a parking spot is not too difficult, - 2. biking is favourable because it is a seriously social activity - they ride very close to one another and chat and laugh and chat and chat and chat. i found this very stressful especially since i was using martine's roommate's bike which was of course much, much, much too large for me (tall dutch girls - it's not just a stereotype), my feet barely stayed on the pedals while i was riding.

- but still a lot.

anyways. i want your opinions, not on cycling through rural holland (which looks convincingly like southwestern ontario, actually) but on this ahem, performance piece i suppose, i went to my first night in berlin

so the whole point of me being in germany at this particular time is because the berlin biennale is on just until sunday, which i really wanted to come to so i could pretend to be a part of the international art community (can i be? i have been to a remarkable number of galleries in the past month) and see some hopefully interesting work. the biennale is being curated by adam szymczyk & elena filipovic and is called 'when things cast no shadow'. it's supposed to have this sort of day-night dichotomy thing, but i haven't really been feeling much of that besides the fact that things are going on both in the day and in the night.

i've been really enjoying myself, but blah blah i don't really want to go into too much detail about the good stuff because i want to talk about this thing i went to a couple nights ago! i got into the city around 5 30 and had planned to go to this opening at the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, an area between the old east and west of the city that is an 'urban wasteland,' if you will. broken pieces of wood and cement in a dry and sandy little bit of land, shoved between new high-rises and old duplexes. i guess it's been at the centre of a lot of property right discrepancies since the fall of the wall and now has been claimed by a small collective of Berlin artists who are using it during the biennale as an "ambiguous site [that] exemplifies specific dialectices of change and standstill in post-unification Berlin...an odd urban void that will stand as a temporary space of possibility and a test site for research," a "reminder of a dramatic past and also a monument to failed urban development in conditions of sluggish economic growth and as a locus of investor fantasies."

i'm really excited about it, i love the public movement to reclaim supposedly private space, i love how interactive this particular space is, however! this thing i went to was just ridiculous! and it was put on by the guys from the collective so i was un poco disappointed. it was called \LANDREFORM\ and was supposed to "resort" to the Woody Guthrie song 'This Land is Your Land' to generate hypothetical strategies of action. this is what it was. in the middle of this big useless field was a wooden teepee. around the teepee were 8 black BMW sedans attached to one another by white rope with red flags hanging from them in a circle delineated by pieces of broken cement. from the car radios was a sample of the song broken up about every three minutes by a buzzer or a voice counting down from 5. for probably 4 hours the BMWs drove around the teepee stopping every three minutes and idling while the people in the cars (observors like me) got in and out, taking turns riding around and around and around. gleefully hanging out of the windows and taking photo after terrible photo, waving to their friends, waving to strangers, drinking their 2 euro beers, smoking lots of cigarettes. being very excited when it was their turn to ride. about an hour and a half in, two of the artists lit the teepee on fire. and the cars kept driving around. and more people took bad photos.

and i stayed for a very long time, a little bit grossed out by it all. it was strange and egotistical and, i thought, an incredible wasteful use of the wasted space. 8 huge cars were running for like 5 hours, just driving around a fire (which was a beautiful fire, i have to say, and something about it was appealing with regards to this whole reclamation of public space thing), and everyone there felt a little bit famous when it was their turn to get in a car...strange. sick?

hm. actually i'm having some positive feelings about it all of a sudden.
maybe my reaction is sort of useful.
oh man.
i've actually been dying to talk about this for days, but haven't really met anyone that i thought wouldn't run away once i started moving my hands and shouting in a very excited manner about it all.

okay, actually, seems that i need to sit on this for a little bit longer.
please leave comments!!

postscript - need to write more later about the luxury of the body, performance art and the matthew barney "drawing restraint" exhibit i went to at the Kunsthalle Wien. i essentially had to be taken away by security guards when the gallery was closing. there's such a fine line between arrogance and originality in creative work like he's been doing for years. i have to say, i think you're probably just jealous if all you see is self-indulgence in his art. me lo gusta mucho.

miss most of you, but don't really have any desire to come home. come to me!