Things that Conduct: Mattress, Suit, Scale

I’ve had too much work lately to write – or even do – anything besides school stuff; at the end of the day (in the middle of the night) I fall onto bed with one ear turned to the mattress and hear my coffee-panicked heartbeat in it, loud as if amplified by a glass on a door or a stethoscope to a chest… “you take my heart and you give it to me”…(cat power) – not unlike the first of these two small deliberations on what may have been striking about particular men I’ve seen around recently.

Dec 11. This morning it was downpouring (in December!) when I went into the subway, but across from me in the car was a man and his suit hanging uncovered and totally dry from the rail above his seat. The car was half-lit, and he kept dozing as we sped under water, the suit swinging around like an impatient sitting kid’s leg. He would half-notice and put his hand out instinctively to steady it, as a driver does a passenger. And then, dozing more deeply, he began to rest his face against it, like some sort of pillow or other comfort… and it wasn’t so much that it was a vulnerable way to see a stranger, or even the sparseness of it, its flatness, but that it was his own garment and not another’s that his cheek hit, at about the middle waist button.

Dec 7. Today I paid the man at the bodega across the street with a bill. As he scooped change out of the register, he placed the bill on the scale for fruits and vegetables, silently betting its weight to fractions that don’t even show, based on the filth and stickinesses and scribbles it had accumulated; whether it seemed thinned along its creases from foldings; lost corners. And then he hovered his hand on it ever so slightly, like it was the small of a back of a date crossing the street or to taunt the scale, throw its numbers into a frenzy like a magnet might. Or else – this is the right one – over hours of standing there, he is learning to focus his body by degrees, so that by concentrating he can send only the weight from his fingertip onto the metal plate, or from up to the knuckle, to the elbow, like a choral warmup, slow apprenticeship no courtship of gravity.

(the way essay-writing makes me, unlike the second man, experience gravity)

WWMMD?

This past (American Thanksgiving) weekend, I went to a show: Years/The Happiness Project/Do Make Say Think. It was great. The crowd was unfamiliar with the reason I was there: the happiness project. A conceptual project that makes music of interviews with his neighbours, Charles Spearin’s album has been received well, recently nominated for Canada’s Polaris Prize. So I had hoped we could all sing along with the neighbours’ speech, dance along in a way anticipated – vaguely choreographed, even – by months of listening… And although it wasn’t that, it was genuinely awesome to be in the midst of so many people discovering something so cool for the first time (“and anyway it’s in the Frick/which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time” – O’Hara).

Yesterday it occurred to me in a daydream how great it would be to organize a flash mob around Mrs. Morris (listening to her song is a prerequisite for understanding this and – in my humble – for life in general). On her birthday, which she would celebrate in some restaurant, with Mr. Gowrie. When it came time for cake, instead of waiters singing Happy Birthday, it would be us parading in, singing (well: saying, but in singsongy voices) Happiness is Love! ‘Us’ in this daydream means us as musicians or anyone else (waiters, eg) who have had her cadence stuck in their head and could help boomerang her words back.

Not, crucially, in any way that would border on taunting, which parroting necessarily risks; the singing would require the sensitivity of therapists who repeat back their patients’ sentiments: as an extension of listening and without condescension. Except that here we would be wanting to show her the worth, and not the flaw, in her phrases.

Accordingly, the aesthetic of this daydream is low-budget, afterschool-special, pseudo-surrealist. Tacky: the camera pans out to reveal an infinitely proliferating crowd all saying things together like And the love…is right there!. When the cake is set down a close-up cuts to badly patched animation of the candles as still more people; candles because their faces are beaming, giddy to return her lesson, straining to show their solidarity, their gratitude like children thrusting out their clean palms before dinner, clean teeth before bed.

On Drying

A few weeks ago I went with some friends to see Where the Wild Things Are (Were?). I haven’t chrystallized an opinion on the film yet – I know that I think the idea is noble, and the soundtrack, and Dave Eggers. And that I was struck with how muted and undynamic it was– in a deliberate, lulling way: the background and the foreground were always similar colours; little contrast but a few notable instances of bright blue sky or sweater. The landscape of events was similarly solomonic; most scenes seemed to have been rationed the same degree of intensity, so that new events weren’t relieved too sharply against the old.

I’m suspending any other judgment partially because the context of the experience – the continual economy of snacks and spiked drinks (spikejonzed! haha…) passed sideways along the row – was not that conducive to serious attention. Afterwards we went to a local bar where we applied free jukebox credits to bad songs. And still afterwards, one of the friends and I had breakfast, at a nearly empty twenty-four hour diner, served by a lovely oldish, doting waitress. It was downpouring, and she said: “I hope it dries for you”.

I love how she said that: earnestly, in a hearty New York accent, and vaguely enough that I could quote it, in theory, in a pinch,in other circumstances without compromising its (unexpected, 3 am) eloquence. It feels like a good phrase to know exists, like a kind thing to be able to say when wounds or paintings are still fresh.  Too lofty and overwrought, of course, to ever actually say out loud of anything but the weather*. Case in point: a painter-friend recently told me about when he started using oils rather than acrylic, accidentally buying a tube and being confused when it wasn’t drying. His brother called him an idiot and taunted him with the fact that oil paint didn’t dry “FOR A HUNDRED YEARS”!** So it’s waitress vs. brother, I guess.

*Just as we wouldn’t say it ‘for me’: Kant says when we judge something (drying, eg.?) beautiful, we never admit to the ‘for me’ by saying it aloud; though it’s true, the admission ruins the objectivity (confidence; integrity) of the judgment. I think this is not unrelated to suppressing the giddiness that someone made something beautiful (themselves, eg, on some special occasion) for me.

**More of Austin’s (dried, oil) paintings, including the one above so uncannily like the Wild Thing scape, at www.austinfurtakcole.com

Yip yip.

“Does my telephone call to New York strengthen my conviction that the earth exists?”
-Wittgenstein

Living in New York (for now), this question puts me under a lot of pressure. To convince people calling me that the earth exists. If they called in a panic? To be an example of groundedness, and so testify to ground, earth, soil… To be so important to them that I make it exist? A source of support, and supported. (Wittgenstein’s point is that there are certain things we take for granted, and he stresses that, even lacking explicit guarantees, we manage to “go on”).
I used to think how insane cellphones were, the possibility of having a conversation while walking. Same with conversations in cars: there’s a movement to a conversation that seems so complicated to maintain if you’re moving through a real landscape too. (What relationship, if any, does this bear to the frustration of talking on a sofa, facing forward like driving? And for another time: Calle’s red phone on the bed (bed art! Rauschenberg etc…) cutting out the middleman between the jangle of the receiver and the lid of the heart when he calls. Also the dream of calling a phone in an abandoned cabin, being able to set the receiver down and have the rings parse out time indefinitely, to listen and have the rings be like sonar to know the shape of the room).
Recently I’ve been thinking about phonecalls on trains; I’m on them (trains) so often lately. It seems important that we consider lengthy cell conversations so rude but don’t mind if friends are traveling together, talking. Why, though? Because we’re curious and want to hear the whole thing? Does the halfness aggravate us like a chord that we want resolved? (Against this, Marshall Mcluhan’s claim that one need only ever read one of two facing pages, that we’re able to deal with blindspots.) Or the unsettlement that s/he – the telephonist – gets to confirm for someone that the earth exists; the unsought voyeurism?

First:

I kind of hate the idea of a ‘virtual’ journal – because I really love the idea of paper and pen (or ribbon). Still, this might end up working out. Two redeeming things about the prospect: the way word processing allows for a unique kind of elasticity in editing; how the screen is effectively made of light. The first thing makes really literal that line Nancy takes up that I’m so interested in, about writing leaving no trace of its drafts (as contrasted to painting – which I’m especially interested in -  where the materiality necessarily retains everything, paint as packrat). And I do love the idea of real traces (fax machines! A fax diary?) and of following what trains of thoughts get scratched out (strikethroughs like graffiti tags – maybe…). But that can be so overwhelming, too much for those of us who aren’t even sure that we want our trains followed – or get so paranoid about the followers that the prospect derails us.
The other point is about the screen. It’s upsetting to me to not have actual ink on a page but Hockney’s comments justifying his iphone paintings are comforting: “the images always look better on the screen than on the page. After all, this is a medium of pure light, not ink or pigment, if anything more akin to a stained glass window than an illustration on paper”. A medium of pure light! It’s hard to think about even the dark text as light, but it must be, otherwise I would have the words in shadow all over my face as I type this. Although – isn’t there a level on which this happens? If we had extremely developed perception, could we tell what was on a screen by the face looking at it? I mean not by the expression in response, but by the patterns of light and colour (as if the two were independent; faces going blue from tv screens vs. breath-holding).