Spring has arrived. I spent two days outdoors in short sleeves, leaving my face sun-tinged, my hair wind-swept, my mood bright. My days are filling with things to do.
I’ve also discovered the wonder of the local library — wandering the isles, coming across books of interest and return day after day until I have finished it.
I like hand-me-downs. I like collecting items from people’s past lives, when they move on and leave things behind. I like stumbling across a basement that’s been forgotten for 50 years. I like when a friend is moving and leaves behind a fully-furnished life. I am a collection of such things. Snapshots of hopes and dreams. Reflections of worldviews. Experiences architected. Past intentions and alternate visions. Sorted, arranged, and reconfigured. As such I am not a very creative presence – I am merely a collage artist.
These surroundings they put work into selecting – everything has a story, a history, a context – have a lot more character than something straight from the sweatshop (and not that weight on my conscience, of putting new waste into the world). These are the rich details they have selected and designed to augment experience. I am living in their building, I am riding their rollercoaster, I am watching their film. And though they wrote the original script for these details, when left behind they become profoundly mine.
When Jamie was moving from Santa Cruz to Kansas City he left a bit of stuff behind. I painted my room with his paints, I used his cartravision as a bedside table, I used his lights to illuminate the Birds Fled From Me music video, and I still sometimes wear a pair of his old shoes! Another of these items was a book that he hadn’t yet read but came highly recommended – Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.
I am since then fanscinated by Bruno Schulz – both his writing and his art. The book is a portrait of a Polish town on the verge of modernization/Americanization, but also of that world being intruded into, one precious, spirited, and furnished with interior adventures. Of that existential alienation, the aloneness that comes with being a seperate conscious being, and of having everything, having the world, having your very own world, nonetheless. His drawings are perhaps the same. It’s in the facial expressions, the dynamic between subjects. I have rarely liked art, and even then only for superficial reasons–aesthetic or consciously ideological alignment. And so I am surprised to find myself having such a profound appreciation for this. I feel like Carol King in Killing Me Softly With His Song, I feel like Friedrich Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy. Somebody has read the secret stories of my soul and is retelling them.
This week we had a good deal of snowfall. The streets sheets of white ice. A good week for sauntering about.
Life is strange. I was eating some soft vegetable patties and over-boiled potatoes, and something sharp is either lodged in my throat or sliced me up bad going down. So it’s been an uncomfortable couple days. But that passes.
I don’t have internet at my place, which is fantastic. So updated will be much sparser. There is where I live:
I want to paint the walls, but haven’t gotten around to it. Not sure what colors. I’m thinking green for the lower half, a light yellow for the upper half, and leaving the top white.
On Saturdays I’m out at Lækjatorg with Food Not Bombs. Come by and say hello and partake in the feast – dish after dish of the finest finery. Or, come by the apartment for tea or pancakes or something. It’s above Noodle Station on Skólavörðustígur; my doorbell is the orange one.
I’ve been working on more songs, so expect to hear those soon! I’ve been making lots of banana barley flax pancakes. I’ve been eating like a king. I’ve also been making good progress on my music video for Birds Fled From Me, which has also been a crash course in painting.
If anybody here in Reykjavík would like to play music with me, I would love that — Please be in touch.
The “Surf Songs” compilation is out now, featuring tracks by Red Pony Clock, iji, and a bunch of other rad bands, and yours truly as well. Comes with a fold-out poster by Zach Burba from iji. Here’s the full tracklist:
It’s five surf dollars from Wizards of the Ghost, just send an email to wizardsoftheghost@gmail.com to order.
Listening to music sometimes there’s an instrument and I’m like oh that’s cool, that one sounds like somebody hitting a piano’s strings with a stick, sort of sounds like a harpsichord – Which is silly, because I’ve played around with a dulcimer once and I definitely know what one is. I just never really put two and two together. Today I did, and now I really want to learn how to play the hammer dulcimer.
Actually, I sort of want to try my hand at making a hammered dulcimer. Just not sure how to do the tuning pegs. Also not sure if it would sound any good.
Can you guess which one is mine?
I was reading about A. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close. The book covers the history of night – a forgotten realm.
“This book sets out to explore the history of nighttime in Western society before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. My chief interest lies in the way of life people fashioned after dark in the face of both real and supernatural perils. Notwithstanding major studies on crime and witchcraft, night, in its own right, has received scant attention, principally due to the longstanding presumption that little else of consequence transpired. ‘No occupation but sleepe, feed, and fart,’ to quote the Jacobean poet Thomas Middleton, might best express this traditional mindset. . . . Nighttime has remained a terra incognita of peripheral concern, the forgotten half of the human experience, even though families spent long hours in obscurity.”
What interested me was the history of sleep patterns, specifically preindustrial sleep patterns. Peoples without electricity experience a phenomenon called divided sleep – falling asleep shortly after darkness, then waking up around midnight, spending a few hours either sitting quietly in contemplation or perhaps finding something to do for those 2-3 hours (chores, even socializing), and then going back to sleep until morning. The continuous 6-8 hour sleep pattern is relatively new to human civilization, and is a result of electricity, clocks, and the demands of industrialized society. It is not the normal way humans sleep.
if there was ever an overarching theme — our civilization values the abstracted over the real. Experience as it is reduced into the form of representation is the ideal, is the idol. Only that which can be indexed and quantified, and filed into annals of history (Cosmopolitanism) — Oh, that arbiter of meaning, of value. We live according to Plato’s mistake — a phantom larger than life. A value greater than life. A part more meaningful than the whole. Oh, what a person will give up to matter (ideally). To be part of what is no more than an illusion.
Turn off the TV. Throw away the book. Flood the gallery and burn the paintings. Forget the camera. Unplug the computer. Have an authentic, personal, full experience. Embrace sensuous, temporal being. Everything else is a lie.
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