extra·fen·es·tra·ted

food nouns

2012-01-27T09:36:00.003-05:00

two nouns that don't exist as single words in English or Spanish:

はごたえ = hagotae = the texture of food item has when you chew it

のどごし = nodogoshi = the feeling when a certain food item goes down your throat

young girl on the metro

2011-12-20T14:16:00.006-05:00

yesterday on the subway there was a dad and daughter sitting in front of me. the young girl was half smiling half figgity/nervous. i looked up at the dad, and he said to me: "es la primera vez que sube al metro" (it´s her first time on the subway).

microcosm day notes

2011-12-17T06:23:00.035-05:00

[The city] isn’t just a place to live, to shop, to go out and have kids play. It’s a place that implicates how one derives one’s ethics, how one develops a sense of justice, how one learns to talk with and learn from people who are unlike oneself, which is how a human becomes human. (Sennet, “Civitas” 83)

- found new library, Sofia Barat on career Girona where I browsed through 15M related comic book "Revolution Complex" and discovered a stretchy transparent plastic book cover. i liked this. i asked the librarian where one could find this, she was nicer than most local strangers I talk to, she told me "probably in any stationary store"

- I decided i wanted to buy the book because it could be useful for my teaching/research, so I walked towards the Raval neighborhood, towards the CCCB. While I was in the Raval I stopped to tie my shoe and an older woman in approached me, maybe French (from her accent), she was looking for the Facultad de Geografía y Filosofía. I took her there and we chatted

- browsed books at the CCCB and purchased "Revolution Complex" with a 5% discount

- leaving the CCCB, in the Plaza de los Ángeles I saw some pee trickling down the sidewalk. I often see trickling pee, but this time it was more than the usual. my eyes followed it to source. An old thin man with blond and white hair had peed his blue jeans... he stared at me with half-closed eyes and his mouth drooped open...

- I continued forward on Ferlandina street and I passed a young African chatarrero (why define him as African? because I´m 99% sure he was an African immigrant and because his skin color is related to his precarious situation). he had accumulated several junk items in a cart. some will critique my response, but I felt bad. it has to be really shitty to make a living going through garbage. I thought about my money in the bank and how much money I spend on sweets. i turned around, walked back towards him and handed him 10 euros and kept walking. This made me feel elitist, and I don´t like that, but I didn´t know what else to do, i only mention it here because it was a yet another unexpected encounter with a social difference and because the dominating media and knowledge-makers ignore chatarreros, as if they didn't exist.

- islamic pastelería. bought two baklava, one chicken curry roll, and one water.

- changed direction, wanted to get photos of the Forat de la vergonya plaza. Walked towards the back of the Boqueria market. A Murakami moment--I spotted a very interesting fenced off Jardin dels gats on the side of a small plaza (Cat Garden). A bit stinky but colorful and safe playground for stray cats.

- Then I came across some red leaves growing down a building behind the Boqueria. my housemate Joan had previously shown me a picture of these. I was taking a picture of this area when two girls approached me and asked for directions to the Guell Palace. the map was in Korean. I walked with them for about 5 minutes showing them where they needed to go and told them that I liked Korean film and we mentioned a couple titles. They seemed really happy.

- I looked at the sky trying to figure out what time it was. I needed to meet a friend to see a film at 5pm. It usually gets dark at 5:30pm and it still seemed quite light out. So, I headed over towards Forat de la vergonya. along the way I spotted a clock somewhere-- 4:50pm. Shoot! I rushed to the Urquioana metro stop and got on the yellow line, I was going to be late for the movie and I didn't have a way to contact my friend... (notice my difficulty in comparison to others'.)

- After the movie ("Interferencies", it was ok...) I went to my friend´s place. She had a migraine and needed to take some medicine. She also needed to meet her boyfriend´s mother, who is from a far away country. She didn´t want to go because the lady is not that nice. she asked me if I would come along. I said yes. We met her at a coffeeshop and I ate a palmera de chocolate. This woman had suffered and continues to suffer from domestic violence and I could see it in her face. It was hard for me to digest this...

- Nevertheless, we were still hungry so we went to eat a piadina, an italian flat bread grilled sandwich. it was very good.

Forat de la vergonya - Hole of Shame

2011-12-06T09:23:00.006-05:00

dominos, soccer, benches, and a garden.

"forat de la vergonya"´s year-round citizen-sustained garden and free vegetables for all in the middle of a dense hodge podge of buildings dating from 20 to 2000 years ago. this area (actually it´s a large plaza) represents a citizen-based victory after a long fight against speculators. a decade ago the municipal gov´t was going to construct a private parking structure here. a large portion of the area was demolished, citizens evicted, small local businesses shut down, police squashed the protests... but after several ongoing protests, the bulldozers withdrew and the people got their plaza back, but of course it was a mess. since then, the local neighborhood association has cleaned it up and maintained it themselves, but police still circulate the plaza.

my geoslip

2011-11-26T18:07:00.019-05:00

Returning to Barcelona´s streets after a long time away is strangely as easy as mindlessly slipping into an ______[insert old piece of clothing]______.
So much info and mundane responses that had not consciously entered my mind for two years have seamlessly and effortlessly come back to me. for example—
knowing exactly where to look when crossing certain streets, and how to manuever through certain crowded areas,
anticipating street light signals,
reproducing the local way of interacting with strangers (dryly, kind of depressed like),
not giving foul smells a second thought (urine, car exhast, sewer mold),
speaking words that I haven´t said or heard in years (cundir, rentable, parches, despistar, difundir...),
enthusiastically stating a specific preference for a type of bread, cheese or bean that I don´t even recall liking so much (garrafón!)…..
It's as if I have snapped into a different me, a me who has been here in Barcelona all long while the real me has been away.
(Oh this is very 1Q84, parallel realities with glitches.) Yes, some things aren´t registering or matching up and have stopped me in my path. (This is what I expected would happen since the city inevitably would have changed while I was away.) For example, I don´t recognize the new intersection lights, or the red paint on the streets at intersections; I got lost because I got the Ronda de Sant Pau mixed up with la Avenida del Paralelo, and I got turned around in the underground train-metro division at Plaza de Cataluña. Example 4 and example 5

7 minutes of modernist and moving barcelona, captured in 1908

2011-11-20T03:55:00.000-05:00

video here: http://www.europafilmtreasures.eu/PY/245/see-the-film-barcelona_by_tram

small junk mail tactic

2011-10-29T17:20:00.007-04:00

For those living in the US and receiving loads of junkmail, here´s a very easy and non-violent way to protest financial corruption (and even support your local post office).
When our representatives don´t listen, we have to get creative. This is very creative.

the evolution of asking why?

2011-10-22T05:10:00.010-04:00

universal separation

2011-09-18T17:42:00.035-04:00

Re-reading old notes on Henri Lefebvre I came across a passage that seemed so multi-applicable, not just to space, but all objects of analysis across time. Here are a couple lines of it:

"A comparable approach is called for today, an approach which would analyse not things in space, but space itself, with a view to uncovering the social relationship embedded in it. The dominant tendency fragments space and cuts it up into pieces. It enumerates the things, the various objects, that space contains. [. . . ]" (page 90, The Production of Space, 1974)

Someone could say this is naive or obvious because the ideas on social division have been re-worked and re-published over the last 4 decades, but we only have to look around, look at our institutions, the organization of our neighborhoods, our personal work environments, and local ways of political representation to see that the divided conditions Lefebvre assume are overwhelmingly present today, and so his proposal to disclose them is still urgent and worthwhile.

This continuity also evokes the unoriginal and generalized question as to why we have not come very far (this could be measured at least in terms of humans killed per yer) after decades of progressive discourse. I think a main cause lies in the fact that our centers of knowledge and education are still too spatially, geographically and socially isolated, "cut up into pieces." An epitome could be the typical American college campus, separated from the rest of society and the diversity of the nearest city by approximately 30 miles of flat cement and thousands of dollars in tuition fees. In spite of the internet and freer access to information, the reworking and republishing of ideas on social division have ocurred predominantly within these isolated campuses.

The opposite of separation/division would be the lack of any at all, which would be like spatial relativity and chaos. But he's not calling for chaos. I can't prove it right now, but I imagine he's calling for a more public recognition and more democratic dealing with division.

I'll end this post on a related tangent. Lefebvre's passage links me to another spatial and multi-applicable passage I came across the other day in Fernando Arrabal's Carta al General Franco, which was written three years before The Production of Space and reflects on the violence and hatred of the Franco regime:

"España no era sino un cárcel compuesta de pequeñas cárceles que se precipitaban hacia el infierno." (42) ["Spain was a prison composed of little prisons, which precipitated towards hell."]

(I'd be grateful if you could leave feedback because I am currently isolated!)

chapas chungas

2011-09-11T02:09:00.013-04:00

The economic ways of some prostitutes and immigrants, thieves, and pick pockets. Their realities of Barcelona were projected on decorative pins and sold in the local bookstore La Central.
Here you can see the pins foregrounding a colorful Bus Turistic:

The municipal government must have found their content scandalous as it has ordered the removal of these pins from the bookstore.
These pins fulfilled at least a valuable component of the alternative tourist package, and more seriously and lesser known, they add to the pile of proof that the contentious workings of city branding are omnipresent.
A few determine what will and will not be acceptable for public knowledge.
Full article here. The artists have made their pins available for purchase directly from their website here.

Rafa Zumbiría - No Way Home

2011-09-02T06:14:00.003-04:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlegumbre/sets/72157622933742475/

ways of dodging memories

2011-08-24T12:12:00.004-04:00

"Cuando las moscas del dolor vienen a perturbar la nostalgia, lo más conveniente es ponerse un libro delante de los ojos. Uno se siente gratificado, colmado de dones impredecibles. Al leer un libro, uno se siente lleno de cosas que no se pueden explicar." (Nuria Amat, Casa de verano)

"When the flies of pain come to disturb nostalgia, the best thing is to put a book in front of your eyes. You feel gratified, loaded with unpredictable gifts. Reading a book, you feel full of things that can’t be explained."

the lives of lambs

2011-08-22T17:28:00.017-04:00

High up in the clouds, J tries to catch a lost lamb.

Eventually, somehow, the owners got news of their lost lamb, they appeared in their truck, caught it by hand, lifted it up (it looked heavy) and dropped in on the other side of the fence. Very Haruki Murakami! And considering what happened the following day, I would like to write a short story later when I have time, of the grotesque genre (but maybe by the time I have time-- the visceral feeling and hence creativity will have died down).

The following day, we headed towards Mount Cook. It was sunny, blue sky, fluffy clouds (looked like lambs?) big brownish-yellow snow-capped mountains all around us. At one point we came across a large flock of lambs that recently had their coats shaved. There must have been about 120 of them. They were running along the highway towards Mount Cook. It was fun to stop the car for a flock of lambs (there´s very little traffic on this highway). When I slowly approached in the car I was able to get a close look at them; and what I saw was so repugnant and stomach-churning that I won´t ruin your day by writing it here or posting the photos. (At least not for now!) Lambs don´t live such a cute pastoral life as many many imagine. I will never be able to think "cute" when i think of lambs anymore. I´ll hint, though, that it wasn´t death, and that the color and texture of the lambs´recently-shaved coats--snow-white, thick and wavy--emitted a tremendous emotional effect, created a sharp color-affective contrast with...the grotesque aspect.

There were two other times when I experienced this feeling. Fictional textual experiences. One was in Michael Haneke´s excellent film Caché, and the other was in one of the best novels ever: Haruki Murakami´s Chronicle of a Wind-Up Bird when a soldier is skinned alive. (...)

May be on my way to becoming a vegetarian.

reforming education with mindful writing and communication

2011-06-01T17:05:00.004-04:00

I highly recommend this documentary:

May 2011 La Puerta del Sol

2011-05-29T01:30:00.007-04:00

More info on the 15-M movement here.

commecial short review Linda Linda Linda

2011-04-29T18:23:00.017-04:00

"Feminism is anti-sexism. [. . . ] We have created no schools founded on feminist [anti-sexist] principles for girls and boys, for women and men. By failing to create a mass-based educational movement to teach everyone about feminism [anti-sexism] we allow mainstream patriarchal mass media to remain the primary place where folks learn about feminism, and most of what they learn is negative." -- bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody

Director Nobuhiro Yamashita, Japan 2005.

Linda Linda Linda relates the endearing and humorous story of a group of four high school girls who put their hearts into performing as a rock band at their high school’s festival.

With talented actresses and a simple storyline, director Nobuhiro Yamashita creates an innocent, tender, and feminist [anti-sexist] reality in which social prejudices, high school cliques, and vanity are nonexistent. It could be considered a “girl power” film or subtly a “gender-bender” one, in the sense that, it is what life, or at least high school, would look like if "girls could be girls."

Driven by friendship and dedication, and undeterred by their imperfect music skills, the four unpretentious girls are determined to perform together as a band. Practicing incessantly and under time pressure, each band member has charm in her own humble way. Bae Doona in particular, the school’s foreign exchange student from Korea and lanky-legged wide-eyed vocalist, overcomes her initial foreign language and singing insecurities to add color to the otherwise quiet and mundane suburban high school. Messy hair, scuffed knees and no make-up--the band surpasses the passive kawaii Japanese school-girl stereotype. Unlike most high school stories in which the girls try to secure a boyfriend, or deal with teenage awkwardness, or win first place or top grades in something, these protagonists put their energy and emotions into simply making a rock band work as a team. A commendable goal, in my opinion.

The film manages to be a "feel good" one without the cheesy Hollywood ending. After you view the it you might have a smile on your face and the songs in your head. And if you're like me, you'll be wishing your high school had been like this one!

しょうがない

2011-04-25T07:16:00.002-04:00

Good night.

haiku?

2011-04-20T06:26:00.011-04:00

Why do I have
so many questions
that I shouldn´t ask?

inazuma no
kaina wo karan
kusamakura?

(Can you share your arms,
fast as thunderbolts,
for a pillow on my journey?)

suspension

2011-04-18T22:14:00.027-04:00

eyes become like heavy sticky lenses
looking out an everyday window
the depth-of-view always causes reflection and emotion
that can go any which way
a heart beats so strongly it shakes the bed, like a shivering rabbit
wanting to slip a hand behind the chest, grasp it to calm it down
pills, sleep, and novels to question what´s real
finding a little relief in walking, listening to cliche songs, and comparing oneself to barbaric situations on the news
imagining the little details that have become unknown...

La pirueta

2011-04-09T19:23:00.009-04:00

thing 061384 to do on a boring saturday: onsen painting

matcha series

2011-02-23T02:27:00.014-05:00

ↄ M Saltzman

Sayoonara Part II

2011-02-21T22:02:00.005-05:00

Sayoonara Tokyo desu

Sayoonara high-speed internet and fancy toilets

Sayoonara exquisite noodles ~~~~~~~

cute and commendable public transportation

city lights

Sayoonara careful spatial organization and calm weather

Sayoonara to so many people who smiled and greeted me daily but with whom I couldn’t communicate because of my poor language skills

to the humans and cats at Waseda University who made me feel at home and gave me so many ideas,

to the people working (long shifts) at the coffeeshops on Waseda Dori and the 24-hour neighborhood grocery store:

I greatly appreciate your kindness, poise, and different ways. Sumimasen for my inability to tell you so.

one place, many places

2011-02-19T23:02:00.010-05:00

Sayoonara Part I

What really fascinated me about this coffeeshop was that, although we were joined by such a small space, drinking the same couple drinks (matcha, tea, coffee, the menu was quite limited), sharing the same enclosed air and coffee smells, hearing the same coffee-grinding noises and background chitter-chatter, each of us were in completely different worlds. We seemed to be wrapped up in different stories, in separate emotional capsules, and I think the isolation is visible in this photo.

Waseda to Hachiko Exit

2011-02-09T00:55:00.008-05:00

Here are the results from my 2nd playtime w a pocket video camera and iMovie. I recorded my journey from my apartment to a very busy intersection called "Hachiko". It took about 20 minutes and in the video I´ve reduced that to 7, which is probably still too long...but at least those who are interested can see what some of these public spaces look like.
(Warning--the jittery parts cause dizziness.)

Costa de Sol and immigration

2011-02-08T08:06:00.009-05:00

from http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2011/feb/07/food-spain-migrants

right to live in a house

2011-01-21T23:44:00.012-05:00

As of today adult humans living in Basque Country and earning 15,000 euros or less a year are guaranteed decent housing.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/vascos/pocos/ingresos/podran/exigir/juez/derecho/vivienda/elpepusoc/20110121elpepusoc_4/Tes

What a difference from throwing people out of their homes when they lose their job!

déjà vu street inversion

2011-01-19T21:33:00.016-05:00

yesterday, walking through the labyrinth of narrow neon streets in Shibuya, i had a déjà vu moment of walking through similar streets in the historic quarter of Seville 12 years ago. it was weird, like two superimposed maps and times under my feet.

Baba

2011-01-19T08:48:00.046-05:00

Waseda Dori from Baba subway station (click to enlarge)

This photo probably doesn't convey the
shuffling doors,
fat cats,
hot soups,
new shoes,
whining babies,
crooked walks,
long-gone conversations,
uncertainties,
daydreams...
at the base of those buildings, on top of those roofs, and within each of those multicolored squares.

Murakami's Void and the American Suburb

2011-01-05T19:25:00.071-05:00

Fluffy was not an indoor cat. Since she traveled to Madrid when she was a mid-sized teen she learned that the world has a lot to offer, and so the domestic realm doesn’t suit her. The American suburbs, for Fluffy, are the domestic indoors exteriorized—privatized, predictable, philistine, repressive, lazyboy'd, apathetic, eco-wasteful. The white short-haired apolitical, patriarchal cat families seem to feel most comfortable there. In the suburbs animal injustice and diversity are masked by multinational strip-malls, neutered nature, and the lack of any public space (where one could resist or get away from its void). A lot like a bad dream. A long time indoors, or in the suburbs, and she feels limited and drained of her physical and mental energy. But clearly aware that she must leave, and grateful that she can. Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood reminded her of this and motivated her to write something. (H. Murakami is adept to writing about the metaphysical depths of the feline specie.)

Fluffy couldn’t continue with Norwegian Wood. One quarter of the way through and she put it aside, curled up, and fell asleep in her temporary suburban accomodation. She didn’t want to read another story about elite undergraduate relationship-explorations with a 1970s Americana soundtrack. (Murakami's other novels were much more original!) But a couple hours later the novel revisted her, in her dream, or nightmare. Fluffy was taken back to the loneliness of her years in East Quad at U of Cheshire, where mid-size cats “became of age,” and she was excluded. As usual her hearing apparatuses and glasses didn’t exist; she could only see red-orangeness, and sounds were muffled. But somehow she managed to look out her dorm window and see that--they were moving! The entire dorm was on train tracks! They were taking her somewhere! Fluffy managed to escape through a flimsy hollow-core door. Later she discovered Kitkat in a classroom. Kitkat was crying like never before. Fluffy licked Kitkat on the ear, and Kitkat sobbed that her thesis adviser had decided to transfer to a different university. Fluffy woke up upset and decided that she would not take Norwegian Wood back with her to Tokyo. Today, while packing, she placed the novel on a shelf. (If for some reason she really wants to read it later she has it in pdf file.)

Is Fluffy too hard on the suburb? Should she give Norwegian Wood another try?

Suburb-Eating Robot by Andrew Maynard

I wonder if Murakami knows how far his story has traveled, how it has been read through the eyes of suburban homes, farm houses, flourescent-lighted Walmarts on the other side of the world, how much his story has twisted and turned into other stories, incorporating, leaving behind, branching out into other experiences along the way. What difference does it make if he knows or not. Well, the difference would be if a majority within a democracy could recognize intertextuality, if so, it would improve the quality of everyday life, and save some lives. Yesterday, in her script reading on the Tucson shooting, automaton S. Palin (stomach cringes), on national television, denied collective influence. In other words, ideology and intertextuality... If this is true, why does she even bother speaking? (Speaking entails responding to something in the past.) As long as the public continues to be misinformed, literature will continue to be a vital antagonism.

CANELA - reunión de hispanistas en Tokio

2010-12-11T22:57:00.006-05:00

¡Un estupendo día de tertulia literaria con hispanistas en Tokio! ¡Gracias López Sensei!
http://www.canela.org.es/

encounter

2010-12-10T03:04:00.003-05:00

I was walking home from school today when I found myself in front of...

an enormous golden turtle wearing red shoes!

紅葉狩り "momijigari"

2010-12-05T06:04:00.019-05:00

ↄ Megan Saltman (photos can be enlarged with a single click)

紅葉狩り momijigari. A Japanese word meaning "to watch the autumn leaves change colors."

This activity may be somewhat common in Tokyo (in Autumn).

Some momiji trees that live in the city are artificially illuminated at night.

Autumn in Central Japan lasts about two months (mid-October to mid-December).

The momiji leaves are small and thin, like paper stars.

A long shutter speed after sundown can intensify their color.

What is this doing hear?

2010-09-13T23:23:00.100-04:00

Intro: I'm going to keep a log of my observations about my new, expensive, and much-needed ears that I just received, thanks to J's encouragement. I've decided to make the log public (on this blog) because few people experience and/or talk about this and because it will motivate me to keep this updated, which will facilitate the adjustment period. So far my observations have collided into three categories--physical feeling, positive/neutral new sounds, and negative new sounds--so that's how I'll organize my log.
Hypothesis: over the next couple weeks the negative observations will decrease and I will feel more relaxed, less on alert, and a little less auditorily conscious.

Day 1
Physical feeling
nauseous (stomach)
very alert
tired
short concentration span

Positive/Neutral new sounds
I don't see them, but there are birds everywhere, many different kinds, even downtown.
what I thought was a car motor running turned out to be water running into a gutter.
my keyboard makes a soft noise when I type.
my printer has a little fan that runs for a couple minutes after I print something.
noises outside my office window (birds, cars beeping, someone hammering).
wind sound is MUCH LESS distracting than before!
trucks sound like monsters when they are going uphill.
I can hear all cars now so I feel more confidence jaywalking.
much more than before, I am aware from what direction noises are coming.
there is music coming from my colleague's office.
music from my laptop is a bit more nuanced, more "high frequencies."
there is some fan or soft motor noise in my apartment...
random thumps from the apartment above.

Negative new sounds
my jacket makes an annoying crackling noise when I walk!
peoples' voices sound weird, kind of booming.
my voice sounds like I'm speaking on a microphone, especially when there is background noise.
because the microphones are now behind my ears, when my near-ear hair moves (like when I'm walking) it makes a brushing-rustling-crunchy-plastic-bag noise over the microphone. I might need to start pulling my hair back.

Day 2
Physical feeling
Normal, as I usually feel, kind of tired.

Positive/Neutral new sounds
In a quiet situation, I don´t hear soft static as I did before.
the couch creaks.
pretty comfortable outside, sometimes I forget I'm wearing new ears.

Negative new sounds
These new ears are not doing so well when there are different sound sources. An example: the microwave was running on my left side, and then I played some music on my laptop (in front of me) and within about 3 seconds the left ear faded out the sound of the music almost completely blocking it and mostly just picking up the sound of the microwave. I hope this doesn´t turn out to be a big annoyance because the next step up technology is $3000 more...
there is a fan in my classroom, there are fans or motors everywhere!
my voice doesn't sound clear or loud enough when I teach, a bit muffled... and students' voices seem a bit too soft from a distance.
when there is a loud low-frequency noise, there seems to be some lagging between the time the sound is made and the time it gets into my ears.
this might be my imagination, but it seems that when there is a loud noise on one side it sort of blocks sound out of that side, and then over the next 1-4 seconds it increases the general volume on the opposite side! this is very frustrating/confusing. I will have to double check to see if this is really happening.

Day 3
Physical feeling
Fine

Positive/Neutral new sounds
I´m comfortably working at home with my ears. Before, home alone = comfortable deafness/silence.
In a quiet situation, these new ears work very well in picking up minor/soft sounds (a fan, something far away...).

Negative new sounds
Something weird happened again when there was a long ongoing fan noise on one side... must figure out what´s happening... I think I figured it out with a bit of microwave experimentation: when one side hears the loud/medium ongoing fan the closest ear focuses on that noise solely, blocking out other noises, then after about 4-5 seconds, as if it were adjusting to the new acoustic situation, it gradually starts to "open up" and incorporate a better balance of all the surrounding sounds... This lag-time confuses my brain.
I'm convinced now that there might be a problem with both or the left one. Today I had two meetings in semi-noisy public places and I noticed that occasionally the focus, regardless if I was speaking or not, was moving from my mouth-outwards to include background noise-and then back to my mouth again. This meant that I could hear myself clearly and then not...etc.
Even though the audiologist insisted that the volume level was set correctly in both ears, simple sounds (mouse click, keyboard...) are in fact louder in the right ear. I´m pretty sure this will need to be corrected, but I´m wondering if I should get it corrected now or wait a while in case this is just part of the "adjustment."
I ate at a restaurant tonight and it was pretty unbearable. Voices, including my own, were on volume-par with tons of background noise. There was no "depth" as the audiologist put it. It sounded all pixelated (after all, my ears are digital), little clarity, and I could barely make out any conversations on my left side (this possibly could be improved a little bit by increasing the volume on the left side--a feature to which I don't have automatic access). It made speaking, listening, following conversations so unnatural that, since I was surrounded by people that didn't know me, I had to politely interrupt several one-on-one conversations to say "look, I can't hear, I'm dealing with these new ears..." which seemed to have a bit of shock factor to it (I guess because it broke protocol). This is disappointing because it means I ought to have the next up technology level, but it´s another $3,000, which I don´t have... [sigh].

Day 4 (gave up--increased the volume by 2 db in left ear)
Positive/Neutral new sounds
Giving oral exams is so much better! I can hear my voice clearly, I can hear my soft-spoken students. What a relief!

Day 5
Positive/Neutral new sounds
Wind on windows. Previously I had only heard this in movies.

Negative new sounds
My new ears prioritize low-frequency fan noises (even when they´re far away) over other noises to the point that sometimes it sounds as if the ears have stopped working because I can´t hear anything. (This might be related to what a reader has called "compression.")
I´m not sure, but I´m wondering if the left ear is not picking up high-frequency noises as well as the right ear.

Day 7
It´s Saturday. I´m staying at home to work and I need my peace and concentration. No ears today. My brain and ears are tired and need a break from hearing technology.

Day 8
Negative new sounds
I think these are three more pretty-frustrating "compression" or "directional" issues:
- I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth. The washing machine was running on my left. Suddenly the volume on my right ear notably increased (maybe by 3 or 4 decibels).
- I was talking face-to-face with my housemate. The washing machine was running, about 7 meters behind me and was stopping and starting intermittently while it went through the cycles. My ears were fluctuating in volume and focus making it quite difficult to follow the conversation with my housemate.
- I was at a birthday party this evening. There were about 10 people in front of me and to my left. I was chatting with three people who also were in front of me and to my left a little. Through out the whole 3 hours or so the volume in my left and right ears kept fluctuating asynchronously like every 5-10 minutes... I would be speaking to someone and half way through my sentence the volume would suddenly decrease or increase in one ear. I have no idea what was triggering this, but I think it might be related to the "directional" feature of the ears (although sometimes the volume would go up or down regardless if I had moved my head or not). This was very frustrating, and maybe and unfortunately the last straw/indication that I cannot deal with these ears. I need to get different ones, or these need major correction. Hopefully this won't require spending thousands of dollars more.

Day 9
Feeling
disillusioned, losing patience

Positive
In quiet, non-conversational settings, the ears work very well.

Negative
- fan in one ear --> volume decreases in opposite ear. Doesn't make any sense.
- ears do not work with telephone use if there is background noise.
- on a busy street (background noise) i was speaking to someone and about 1 minute later both ears suddenly amplified my voice. ???

Day 10
After yesterday´s low, today was a better day.

Positive/Neutral
- I had a Department meeting and my ears worked very well. I heard almost everyone, almost everything they said, including my boss who I used to always have trouble understanding.
- Then I taught for 3.5 hours and quality was so so. Overall, my ears fared well but they did change focus, volume level, and clarity quite a bit (from background music, to my voice, to students' individual comments and students' collective chatter). This shifting, as usual, was undepredictable, unnatural, confusing and made me lose my confiderence a couple times, but overall I could hear louder, more than before.
- I am getting used to some new sounds!! Small sounds such as those listed on days 1 and 2 seem natural to me now and don't bother me (my voice, other peoples' voices, noises seeping into my office...).
- I have to wear my hair pulled up, otherwise it makes to much noise over the microphones. I'm wondering, though, if I could wear the microphones pieces on the outside of my ears instead of behind my ears. Of course this would look strange, but it would avoid the hair problem.

Negative
- A couple times while teaching today I found myself in the "restaurant" type of scenario. The classroom was loud because students were engaging in a speaking activity in small groups, and then a student would ask me a question, but the amplified background noise blared out what the student was trying to ask me...

Day 11
Negative
- new difficult scenario: large enclosed spaces. Ears focus on far away medium-volume background noise and when someone speaks directly to me, 1 meter in front of me, I can barely make their voice out amongst the background noise; the ears mesh it all together.

Day 12
Positive
- While I still struggle with English, foreign languages, namely Spanish, are coming out of my mouth with great ease!!! How can this be? Maybe because the foreign languages I speak are phonetic and English isn´t... and maybe this phonetic-ness has something to do with the new sounds my ears are picking up... ? I think the audiologist mentioned something about consonants being sharper. (For those who don´t know-- the ability to hear is directly related to the ability able to speak.)

Negative
- part of this "compression" issue is that, in a situation with a variety of noises, my ears asynchronously feel like they are plugged up (like airplane plugged up) and then unplugged [repeat]. While one side focuses or zooms in on 1 sounds, the other side plugs up. Occasionally I find myself moving my jaw around in order to try to get my ears "unplugged." This has been the case since day 1. I thought about it today while teaching. My students have absolutely no idea about the crap psychedelic sounds that are entering my ears, so incredibly different from what is entering their ears. Even if I try to explain it...

Day 13
Positive
- Taught an advanced-level two-student class today in Spanish in a quiet room and acoustics were very good. The words were coming into my ears and out of my mouth with more ease than ever before.

Day 15
Positive
Went to the audiologist today. He adjusted several of the features and I think my ears are working significantly better now!! If they fare bearable and audiable in a restaurant setting, then these will be a keeper!

Day 16
Positive
Yesss! Things are so much miraculously better!
Hair crunch problem is gone.
Directional/focus volume mumbo jumbo is gone!
And the most irritating-- the compression/plug problem is pretty much gone!
For the first time since I can remember, hearing feels almost totally natural now!
I taught today for 3.5 noisy hours and everything (music, my voice, students singular and collective voices...) sounded great except for when I spoke loudly (see negative).
(I haven´t been in a restaurant/coffeeshop yet, we´ll see what happens...)

Negative
There are two small problems that perhaps the audiologist can fix.
- One is that cars are unbearably loud now, and trucks don´t sound like monsters anymore, they sound like angry dinosaurs. I don´t know why, but this can be resolved by getting out the remote control and decreasing the volume.
- The other problem is that if I´m in an enclosed area and am speaking loudly there tends to be a bit of a boggle-rattle noise with the highest frequencies, as if the ear technology can´t take the sharp loudness and is boggling on the verge of busting its acoustic threshold. It´s not terrible, but it didn´t happen before.

tiempo de Barcelona

2010-06-15T04:21:00.005-04:00

Barcelona has been experiencing some strange weather lately...

kunst aufräumen

2010-06-13T06:13:00.017-04:00

one of the reasons why I love being in Barcelona is because I discover so many personally meaningful + exciting things everyday.
this is what I discovered this morning: Kunst Aufräumen! The creator, Ursus Wehrli, rearranges well-known paintings to make his own in a way that, for him, is more "organized" (aufräumen means organized). A million big ideas come to my mind. Subjectivity. Relativity. Life. Tolerance. Creativity/Imagination. Truth. (De)contextualization. Figurative vs Abstract representation. Resistance. Infinity. I´ve come up w a plan to use this process in the classroom.
(Maybe later I will write more here.)

panspective

2010-06-11T03:35:00.018-04:00

playing around w panorama + perspective:

abandoned lot turned into petanca court
road turned into pedestrian leisure space

homes turned into construction site (do you see the winking eye? it´s just an optical illusion. click on the photo and see it up close!)plaza turned into star

ↄ Megan Saltman (photos can be enlarged with a single click)

tables and chairs

2010-05-07T19:38:00.009-04:00

How would social relations change in classes, meetings, conferences, offices, eating places, libraries... if chairs and tables didn´t exist?

Just thinking that, like the hard circles (clocks), these hard squares also dictate a lot in our lives...

More later.

work, non-work, and numerical time

2010-05-05T06:51:00.048-04:00

X is disappointing, discouraging, and sometimes restraining. I don´t know what to think about it because there´s not much I can do about it at the moment. Many people at X impose what Jameson calls the "machine logic of time" and Lefebvre "linear time," which quantifies the time an individual spends producing "work." But what the heck is "work"? The general idea and definition come from the factory or office job--individuals as part of mass production of things-that-can-sell; the agents of mass production carve out the mass work day as: 9:00:00 am to 5:00:00 pm, Monday through Friday. Although I do produce things-that-sell (I do "work" according to that 19th century defintion), I don´t think much about what day or time it is. And since I pursued a career that I enjoy--one that is being done always, at all times--I can´t comprehend how people divide work from non-work, and give a numerical value to each. (And much less when they impose this logic on others.) Of course, when I´m tired, doing something can seem like "work" but, unless I´m tired most of the time, then the awareness of "I´m doing work now" doesn´t dawn often.

Well, I shouldn´t say that I can´t comprehend it. I understand obviously that those who reinforce this (what EP Thompson calls "a new Puritan discipline and bourgeois exactitude") have their reasons. They may need lots of structure or control in their life; or they might run a factory where they want to squeeze out maximum profits; they might do work that they don´t enjoy; or they may be paid by the hour or minute. I guess what I meant by not comprehending is that I find people of the machine-logic nature unpleasant to... work with! Perhaps they make work feel like "work" in the tick-tock sense?

Of course, to survive, time nowadays = money, but what good does it do to be constantly reminded? Well, the reminder does remind us to think of better alternatives.

Speaking of which, is my belief "better" or "different" from other beliefs on work and time? If one believes in normative relativism, it's simply different. However, if one´s objective is a more quality and social oriented life (as opposed to quantity and less-social oriented life), I think it can be "better." What does my imaginary audience think?

I remember now when I was a teenager and worked an hourly-paid job at a calendar store at a suburban mall in the US, a coworker and I used to mess around with the wallclock near the sign-in sign-out sheet...We found it pretty funny to see our coworkers faces when they went to jot down their sign-out time.

(I made that last paragraph up.)

SB1070

2010-05-01T20:51:00.006-04:00

For all the humans, kids included, who are being hurt by Arizona´s new law SB1070.

Here for more info.
Here for a petition against the measures.
Here for the arrest of Dora the Explorer.

has the pancake flipped?

2010-03-24T20:16:00.019-04:00

The next two weeks will tell. Life is schizophrenic, like fiords. I need to reconcile the heart with the mind, short intense periods with long empty ones, instincts with poise, the fiords with the great plains. And everything in between. And not come out a stone stoic, a stonic.

Lake Wakatipu, New Zealand, April 2010

Central Iowa, October 2008

legal discrimination in the US against binational couples

2010-01-24T16:52:00.009-05:00

Dear US residence friends,

Perhaps you can sign the petition, and maybe one day many humans won´t have to choose between their partner or home country: http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5036/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=42

More info: http://immigrationequalityactionfund.org/

Thanks.

notes and tourist pictures of Charleston, SC

2010-01-22T20:48:00.061-05:00

(posting pics here these days because my flickr is down). i enjoyed the architecture in Charleston, really beautiful, historical, colorful, and diverse in style. we saw some buildings and gravestones from the 18th century, very impressive!! the preserved spaces (churches, homes of politicians, diplomats, militarymen, people with high ranking in the church), were clearly "monumental" spaces--only those which originally belonging to the wealthy, white, Christian, and mostly slave-owning class. i guess spaces that didn't fit under that lucky profile weren't deemed worthy of preserving as cultural heritage (or getting their photos posted on my blog...). {:-7

besides the architecture, in the bustling downtown area I also saw segregated neighborhoods, African-American beggars, African-Americans primarily working as street basket sellers, an abundance of SUVs in the whiter part of town, whites wearing Polo RL shirts, two white-owned stores that had door-signs reading "only serious buyers please," and overall almost no socialization between blacks and whites. this made me wonder how much "the nation is progressing," as a gravestone I saw read (Charles Pinckney's gravestone). i'd have to research to say for sure, but i got the wary impression that (like around Detroit, my hometown), 200 years later, the economic and racial divide between the haves and the have-nots is still abysmal/ intimately tied to slavery.

(some research that appears to verify the hypothesis: Racial Segregation and Redlining in Cities")

however, cities can foster solidarity and some level of tolerance. and from what i've browsed online, it looks like Charleston eventually became important in slavery abolition, at least in the early phases. it looks like several unsuccessful slave uprisings occurred. the most famous one was led by Denmark Vesey, who was hung with his followers in 1822. but eventually the cause he fought for gained some white supporters (most notably a female: Angelina Grimke) and sparked debates across the South.

other bibliography (thanks Google Books): The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences (pp 59-60) and Forgotten Readers... (pp 25-).

dawned on me at the grocery store (a vent)

2010-01-01T17:17:00.027-05:00

It dawned on me at a Kroger in Buford, Georgia, that I was really in the US. At that moment the strange vacuum or non-place of the airport-highway-suburbia took specific and familiar references. What came to my mind were memories of the last months before leaving for New Zealand. The smell and lighting of the grocery store reminded me of the Hyvees in Iowa. A euphoric time; with the exciting prospects of an upcoming move, and job, accompanied by a long-awaited loved one, I felt, for the most part, that only good things could happen. That was only six months ago, but it feels like several years ago. So much has changed and become uncertain since then.

5 hours in Shibuya, a foreigner's account

2009-12-12T04:12:00.009-05:00

Last night was one of my most fun nights ever. I’ve been writing lists of things I’ve been doing each day in Tokyo, but Yesterday is worth a thorough narrative. It took place in Shibuya, a neighborhood in downtown Tokyo. (warning--this is a long!)

It started at Ichiran Ramen around 7pm. I had read about this ramen place on this website and it seemed so bizarre that I wanted to experience it for myself. So J and I took the bus from Waseda, changed to the above-ground train at Takadano"baba" Station. There on the train platform we had an elevated view of a neon-lit boulevard, I wanted to get a picture, but by the time I reached for my camera the train had arrived. On and off 4 stops later, exited at Hachiko Exit. Amazing! (see pic) I read this is the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world. Unlike most crossings, people from all 4 sides of the street cross simultaneously while traffic is stopped (on all four sides). Since Tokyoites are so civilized (as it seems to me), a massive sea of people was more welcoming than frightening.

After spotting and eating one of my favorite and very hard-to-find chocolate bars (milk chocolate strawberry filling from Germany) we found Ichiran Ramen. It’s a basement place. We went down the narrow stairway to the vending machine. It seems that the payment method at a lot of the cheaper food places in Tokyo is via vending machine (I’m sure this will catch on in the rest of the world soon).

We selected 2 Ramen, inserted the cash and out popped two tickets. The customer has five options for tweaking his/her Ramen to his/her liking, he/she controls the level of oiliness, spicyness, and firmness of the noodle, and pork or not and green onions or not. One's preferences are indicated on a card that can either be printed from their website or picked up at the establishment. After getting our tickets from the vending machine, we entered a small waiting area where there is an illuminated sign indicating which seats are available. Seats 5 and 6 were lit blue, which means available, so we proceeded along the narrow row of seats to numbers 5 and 6. The stool-seats and desk-like tables have dividers between them (reminds me of something I saw on Comedy Central once, “table dividers for dysfunctional families”…), and individual red curtain hung between the back of the desk-table from the kitchen area behind. We individually placed our tickets towards the back of the desk-table and Mystery Waiter slid his hands under the curtain to pick them up.

(After having read that online article, I thought the place would be dauntingly impersonal and cold and that we’d be hurried in and out, like an inhumane assembly line for eating, but people ate slowly, it was surprisingly lively and fun, with the waiters and chefs yelling out at one another, upbeat music playing, and those who came with company were chatting over the dividers.)

Probably about 5 minutes later the disembodied hands slid a large boiling hot bowl of soup onto our desk-tables.

I peeked over the divider to see what J’s looked like--like mine but with more red spicy sauce, a slice of lean pork and green onions. Then we ate, I laughed and took pictures, the whole situation seemed hilarious to me! The soup was good, especially the noodle, I usually don’t like spicyness, but whatever the red spicy paste was that they put in the soup—it was very very tasty and didn’t burn my mouth (though did clear our nostrils a bit). At one point J wanted an egg and some extra rice to add to her leftover broth. She got up and went back to the vending machine to purchase them, but Mystery Waiter assumed she had finished and left, so the curtain was lifted and her bowl of broth was swiped away. Since I barely speak the language and the protocol was unfamiliar, I didn’t know what to do. (What lies beyond the curtain?) Over the divider I lifted J’s curtain and with my hands I signaled to the dark vacant space to bring the bowl back, but no one saw me. J came back with her egg and rice tickets to find her table-desk cleared off. I told her what happened, she raised the curtain and caught a waiter, the waiter lowered his head attentively (he did have a face, it was wearing an anti-germ face mask like many Tokyoites do), and J told him that they accidentally took her bowl. He apologized and within a couple seconds someone brought her bowl of leftover broth back, untouched. [. . . ] After we finished we left Ichiran Ramen.

Then we walked a bit down some wide avenues with a lot of neon-lit shops and skyscrapers, the sidewalks and roads were immaculately clean with a couple yellow fall leaves here and there. J knows I like paper/notebooks/pen/stationary stuff, so she led me to a 7-story home-and-office type of Department Store called Loft. We spent a while there, they had a lot of beautiful origami paper and notebook styles I had never seen before and every kind of pen you can imagine. It was 9pm, the store was closing, so we had to leave.

Then we took a turn into what I’d call a sub-neighborhood, which was similarly neon-lit, many clothing, shoe, and music shops, entertainment places (photobooths, peekshow shops for males, arcades…) and bustling with good-humored people (probably ages 15 to 50), but the streets in this sub-neighborhood were narrow, just for pedestrians, overflowing with small places to eat, and the buildings were a bit lower (maybe 3-6 stories). I smelled soups and fried seafood and Teriyaki BBQ. A lot of the men were still in their black work suits (J says they work late and then go out with their coworkers to drink sake). We passed by a place where people were sitting and eating around a circular belt on which different sushi items slowly moved along. We walked through an arcade.

Then J spotted a place “Oh! Do you want custard?” she asked me. I looked, it was a corner place that was making pastries in fish-shaped iron molds. J ordered two, a chocolate pastry with custard filling for me, and a vanilla pastry with sweet black bean filling for her. YUM! Crunchy on the outside, hot and creamy on the inside! J later told me that the place and the pastry are called Taiyaki, and that the sweet bean pastry is a traditional Japanese dessert.

After that J wanted to find a certain coffeeshop called 名曲喫茶ライオン(known in English as Lion, literally "Famous Song and Enjoy the Tea, Lion") that she had found online. It was about a 10 minute walk from where we were. The area, another sub-neighborhood of Shibuya, was a little seedier, J thinks it one of the older parts of Tokyo. It was hard to find the place because Tokyo doesn’t have regular street names, each establishment has 3 numbers (if you’re interested you can read here about the complex system of Japanese addresses). Anyway, she eventually found it. We entered—classical music was BLARRING from darkness! This place was SO gothic and baroque, high ceilings, long chandeliers, everything painted black, or gold, old hand-carved wood, everything covered in natural patina, very low lighting, old chairs covered in maroon velvet tapestry, dark green linoleum floors, old dark wooden tables, small wooden crooked windows, rickety dark wood staircases... I expected an emaciated Edward Scissorhands type waiter to appear out of the darkness, but instead a teenage girl in fluorescent pink Crocs approached us to ask us what we’d like to drink. The music was coming from a wall that looked like an 18^th century European stage, each side was cornered by dark-colored spiraling wood column, and connecting the two columns at the top was a triangular dark wood pediment. In between was an enormous set of speakers embedded in an even larger wood frame from which the classical music boomed… there were very few people there, a couple people smoking, and/or reading and/or sipping some beverage (absinthe would have complemented the atmosphere, but no alcoholic beverages were served there), one couple looked like there were sleeping, but they were immersed in the music. In spite of the kitsch gold painted cloverleaf-form arches, the atmosphere was very serious and no picture-taking or loud voices were allowed. We stayed there a little while until it closed at 10:30.

Lastly I didn’t want to leave Shibuya without trying sake so we walked around a bit more and J kept her eyes open for a izakaya (sake place). At one point a teenage boy approached her with a menu, telling her about the restaurant he worked for. In Spain that is a clear sign of a tourist trap, but J says “hai, let’s follow him” and so we followed the boy to the 3rd floor of a building where the restaurant was. It turned out to be a nice informal and inexpensive (Tokyo standards) place called Sai; and it wasn’t a tourist trap, almost everyone there was Japanese.

J ordered some food, much of which I delightfully had never tried before, it all came in miniscule but delectable portions: a piece of teriyaki chicken, a grilled rice ball, 5 gingko nuts, a small bowl of soup, and 4 pieces of grilled asparagus. She ordered sake for herself and plum sake (called umeshu) for me—it was THE BEST alcoholic drink I had ever tried! In fact, it was so tasty that I would have never guessed it had any alcohol in it, but my cheeks turned bright red. J said umeshu is made out of fermented plums.

We needed to catch the last train so we left a little after midnight. Everyone else had the same idea so the train was packed shoulder to shoulder, stomach to back, as packed as humans can possibly be packed. Luckily Tokyoites seem to have good hygiene so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, and because I was taller than the majority of the others, my air higher up was fresher. Again I found the situation to be humorous, but maybe if I had to ride like that everyday the situation would lose its humor. I thought about how vulnerable the situation was, anyone could easily steal from you or grope your body, and you’d have no idea who it was, I told J about that and she said it’s true, and it does sometimes happen, but that the laws are strict, if someone is merely accused of groping someone else they have to pay a large fine…

That’s a lot of stimuli, learning, and company for 5 hours. Arigato gozaimasu, J, for making it possible!

my goals without company

2009-09-19T00:08:00.011-04:00

- walk everywhere
- write more
- eat less cookies and sweets
- be more tolerant of convoluted and/or pretentious writing
- think and act more positive about/for the present and future

Dunedin (New Zealand) haiku

2009-08-24T23:13:00.012-04:00

Dunedin, where ex-
otic flora thrives peaceful-
ly alongside litter.

-rhododendrons, cocoa puffs, and mcdonalds

virtual 360 panorama -- crawl the prohibited walls

2009-08-09T19:15:00.006-04:00

the interior of the crumbling detroit central train station

click on the image, it'll take you to the 360-photo website of photographer Lowell Boileau. be sure to scroll up and down!

an almost miracle

2009-08-02T00:06:00.013-04:00

In her dream, she vulnerably yelled out Special Person's name.

______ ! _______ !

Seconds later--

she was awoken.

Someone took the blanket off her face.

It was Special Person!

new definitions of winter and academia

2009-07-16T20:30:00.003-04:00

Hills like turtle shells, and flowers that sprout feathers...
Gills out of water, and flopping not wherever...
I´m astonished by the view, university policies, and Dr. Suess flora.

frequent reminders of mindblank

2009-05-22T22:20:00.014-04:00

oh man i´ve
forgotten all my words
i´m scraping at an empty bowl
my thoughts don't want to verbalate
my ideas don't want to penetrize
bad poetry
(searching searching...)
null
sterile
stoic
months of mindblank

redes chaterreras

2009-04-29T17:13:00.007-04:00

El Born, may 2005, Saltzman

"A saber lo que arrojan por las ventanas a estas horas de la noche. Vecinos desesperados. En las redes hay botelas de cava, recipientes de plástico, medias y calcetines, condones y pájaros muertos..."

-- Juan Marsé, referring to the building Walden 7, p.67, El amante bilingüe

urban occurrences

2009-03-23T08:09:00.007-04:00

could it be any city?

day 1

day 2

mindfulness as too inward-looking

2009-03-07T10:57:00.002-05:00

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/the-worst-buddhist-in-the-world/?em

i want to come back to comment on this

fun fact 8: Banksy

2009-02-12T17:54:00.013-05:00

A street or graffiti artist one of my students told me about: Banksy. I love how he harmlessly makes use of the dents in urban space for questionable purposes. Click on the photo for his website. I think his "outdoor" work is the most creative and effective (since it´s more public).

Guernica, Norman Foster, Deleuze, Edward Gorey

2008-10-27T17:49:00.036-04:00

the other day i was grading papers and listening to my itunes on shuffle when i was stopped by the last line of the poem (below) by norman rosten, read by joan baez on her album "baptism" (1968). it's representative of baez´s stark tragic ballads and anti-war songs. my purposes for sharing this depressing poem: to remember what our tax dollars are used for, to illuminate and learn from some historical connections between 1943 and 2008, maybe to add that election day is around the corner, and finally (it's kind of far out, but why not while i'm on the soapbox) to promote adoption.

Guernica by Norman Roster, 1943

In Guernica the dead children were laid out in order upon the sidewalk, in their white starched dressed, in their pitiful white dresses.

On their foreheads and breasts are the little holes where death came in as thunder, while they were playing their important summer games.

Do not weep for them, madre. They are gone forever, the little ones, straight to heaven to the saints, and God will fill the bullet holes with candy.

(Side note-- I often thought: What if Roster had included a description of the children before the bombs fell, one that depicted the children bickering about petty things, saying mean things, as children often do, maybe one boy hits another or spits on someone...etc. It would have been interesting to include that. Not so much because it would suggest that the children were being punished for their bickering, literally and excessively with the death penalty. Nor so much as to call our attention to the analogy between war and infantile disagreements, between our human tendency to spit bombs and saliva at those we dislike. But rather to complicate our conventional emotional response, to challenge our immediate cause-effect logic. As Deleuze would say: to scramble up our sensorial "intensities." Colebrook says that for Deleuze's, "It is the task of art to dislodge affects from their recognised and expected origins" (23) He generally attributes this to film, where "the usual sequence of images--our usually ordered world with its expected flow of events--and allow us to perceive affects with out the standard order and meaning" (39). The purpose of all this, I think, is to recognize the world's subjectivity and also to create a new and more open, tolerant, and less reductive way of thinking.

Edward Gorey wrote and illustrated a similar story, called "The Stupid Joke" (in Amphigorey Also), about a boy who stubbornly refuses to get out of bed (I don’t remember the reason) and then one night he's swallowed up by a monster that had been hiding under his bed (or something like that).

soloblokus

2008-09-12T23:26:00.009-04:00

things to do in Grinnell, Iowa on a friday night:

current events 3: what's wrong with the picture?

2008-09-01T20:22:00.026-04:00

ethics, fashion, and economic difference? article in today's nytimes about millionaire fashion companies dressing the poorest in designer clothing in order to take publicity pictures of them. reminds me of when i was in tangier, morroco. we were walking through the narrow dirt streets of a lower-income historic quarter and i watched a group of frat boys in our tour group laugh and impress their friends as they took condoms out of their pockets and tossed them out to local kids who were playing in the streets. what does it come down to? an exposure of an unethical and unsympathetic juxtaposition between two extreme levels of basic needs? ...that would assume a sympathy for the have-nots. OK. but, who are we to determine who are and who aren't the have-nots? and what good does sympathy do if it doesn't... do anything? ...

time and the spatial tactics of birds

2008-08-11T15:16:00.012-04:00

(click on the image to find your niche)

Barrio Gótico, Barcelona

por ti, mi globo rojo (post dissertation defense)

2008-08-07T07:22:00.058-04:00

libre libre libre como un globo sin cuerda

free free free like a balloon without a string

----------------------------------------------------------------

Le voyage du ballon rouge (hou, 2007) in the beautiful and warm open-air patio of the CCCB

symbols

the red balloon is optimism. it´s always bopping around around nearby when we look for it.

juliet binoche is the postmodern woman with too much on her plate. she´s also the depressed frenchperson who takes pleasure in gazing out windows while piano notes linger in the background. also, she reads out loud remarkably well.

song is the robot slave. she´s actually not a real person, but a robot. she´s secretly in love with juliet, and will do anything for juliet in hope of receiving 2 seconds of her attention.

the little boy is a poorly directed and an unrealistically dressed actor. (how could a 6 year old be dressed so fashionably if his father is in belgium and his mother is always busy?)

the blind piano tuner is the mortal incarnation of the red balloon. he´s also the hero of the movie. one day he will pop, and the red balloon will send us a replacement to populate the earth.

the parisian neighborhood is the one that always gets represented.

situation 3

2008-06-21T11:14:00.019-04:00

this is great, harmlessly playing with the silly boundaries between private and public space. i love things that we don't know how to respond to, and that question our taken-for-granteds. What would you do if you found a bright orange stairway peeking over your gated community?

(if you click on the images you can see them enlarged.)

from the excellent book design like you give a damn by architecture for humanity, pp314-315.

dissertation cover

2008-06-19T23:29:00.008-04:00

one space, two times--march 2005 and november 2006. (click on the image for a more realistic experience.)

Thanks to Eva Megias for the colored photograph.

night bus

2008-06-19T01:02:00.008-04:00

"where will we go tonight?" she wondered.

"close your eyes, and you'll see" smiled a bus driver.

Meredith the Seamstress (a la Edward Gorey)

2008-05-19T20:26:00.027-04:00

Meredith was deaf. She went deaf when she was six years old during a mild case of yellow fever. While she lay in bed that year, she learned to sew. Meredith was quick and precise, and by the age of seven she became the town’s seamstress, replacing Francis’s reputation of being “good with her hands.”

One Spring day she decided to take a leisure walk down the train track. The refreshing smell of the blooming flowers, soft sun, and a couple hand salutes from her fellow townspeoples made her feel confident and content. The train track hadn’t been in service since the time of her grandfathers. She was thinking about the legend of the ghost train and how she might sew it along the hem of a blanket.

The next day Meredith was found dead on the train track. The doctor's biopsy concluded that she had been hit by a train. Meredith must not have heard nor felt the train approaching. Some members of the town were heartbroken and suggested she have an open coffin and be draped in her sewing pieces. Several invitees took the occasion to purchase new clothes. While Meredith's mother felt the coffin garment was in bad taste, one attendant commented that it was symbolic of her unfinished talent.

fun fact 7: make a floor

2008-05-13T00:43:00.022-04:00

a fun way to waste time if you like tiles and wasting time like me. the designs come from "hydraulic tiles", which were produced in western europe in the mid 19th century. nowadays one can find the treaded originals in w. european and latin american interiors.

if you´re still interested, these photos of actual floors tiled in hydraulic tile s are incredible.

miércoles

2008-04-16T23:01:00.001-04:00

no me he olvidado que hoy es su día libre
como si fuera su cumpleaños semanal
su día de libre
el día que dormía una hora más
y tomaba un desayuno más lento
de tostadas y cigarrillos.

fun fact 5: antología poética popular

2008-04-11T23:25:00.003-04:00

amigos:

una página bonita, poesía con sus canciones correspondientes:

http://antologiapoeticamultimedia.blogspot.com

("aceituneros" y "era un niño que soñaba" son algunas de mis preferidas.)

xoxo
m

the floating island

2008-02-25T08:11:00.014-05:00

Feb. 25, 2008. Last night I dreamt I was searching for a floating island. I found out that it is: Small, Flat, Moss-covered, and Meanders off a foggy coast near a swimming pond. If anyone has any other clues, please let me know.

Update-- April 28, 2010. I found it! It was off the coast of Auckland...!

February in Grinnell

2008-02-05T20:18:00.006-05:00

thick mute

thick silence

thick white

thick cold

thick distance

6th Ave. & Broad, Grinnell, Iowa

amigos amics friends amici

2007-12-25T10:29:00.006-05:00

You know, I don't celebrate Christmas, but the spirit of gratitude from all the people who take time to decorate everything with cheesy green and red smiley things in order to cheer us up has gotten into me and I want to give thanks to all my friends. To you who are reading this, to those who don't read English, and those who don't read. For your ears, eyes, time, company, care, love, thoughts, and imperfections. Is there anything on earth better than good friends? Shouldn't the biggest holiday of the year be Friendsmas? I love you all very much and without you all I would be much worse off. I hope we are friends forever. I am infinitely grateful. Merry Friendsmas, and Thanks.

xoxo
Megan

The Story of Smallville

2007-12-06T13:31:00.007-05:00

Part 1: Smallville

Today the sky is gray in the tiny town of Smallville, also known as the town of "Chestnut", not because it produces chestnuts (the climate in Smallville is much too dry and bitter-cold to cultivate chestnuts), but rather because, from afar, the brown rowhouses clustered together on top of this frozen hill resemble a chestnut, or so they say, for I can´t tell you for sure, as I am blind since birth.

reviving the city, idea under construction

2007-07-30T18:44:00.002-04:00

hello, i'm posting this from my dissertation to see if posting it will sharpen my attention and generate any helpful ideas from a reader or two. so please send me your reaction/thoughts if you're reading this. i suppose it doesn't really make sense without providing some background, but i don't have time right now. maybe later. sorry if this sounds stuck up, but that's what higher ed is all about. i'll take it down or better explain it later. thank you in advance!

Andreas Huyssen in his academic book Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory talks about “the explosion of memory discourses at the end of the twentieth century” (__). The tendency in nearly all of the academic scholarship that has been published in the last two decades on historic memory is to advocate a need for recuperating the memory and history what has been lost to past dictatorships, wars, exile. While I agree with him that “memory discourses are absolutely essential to imagine the future and to regain a strong temporal and spatial grounding of life and the imagination in a media and consumer society that increasingly voids temporality and collapses space” (__). I also see the politically and emotionally stalling and depressing nostalgia it produces this makes me wonder: when will the process of recuperating historical memory complete? When a certain quota of monuments that commemorate marginalized subjects in the center of the city has been fulfilled? When utopia is achieved? What is needed to demystify and defragmentize urban history? These are important questions if we want to alleviate the pain of us urban-nostalgics and increase a more humanitarian historical consciousness in theory and practice. Perhaps the only solution lies in the hypothetical? Now I’d like to share a hypothetical scenario that has been tickling my imagination for a couple years now. What if nothing was ever destroyed in the city? Let us use our imagination to rewind Barcelona for a moment. Imagine if the turn-of-the-century textile factories returned to the Raval and the SEAT factory to Poble Nou, if the cheap desarrollismo construction in the periphery remained, if Franco’s equestrian statues returned to the plazas, if the shabby barracas reappeared along the coast, if the trolleys began retracing their routes from Gràcia to the Plaça de Catalunya, if in the Eixample still glimmering with beautiful modernist buildings but next to them grazed pigs and sheep and the wheat that preceded it, if the medieval walls went back up around the historic quarter, and so did the medieval synagogue on Call street, and if the streets were dirt, cobblestone and slick asphalt at the same time, and the Greek and Phoenician tombstones rose to the surface? Many questions occur to me. For example, by what names would we call the streets? Would there be unemployment? What would happen with places whose function is out-dated, such as dirt roads and the Roman cloacae? With so much ethnic architectural diversity would there be more social tolerance? How long would the farm animals survive in the Eixample? Why is this scenario confined to the hypothetical realm to begin with? Because there’s not enough space in Barcelona or any European city. The city would have had extended lengthwise running itself into the sea and mountains. But what if space were unlimited or in more abundance like in American cities? So much monumental and abolished history would be disclosed and on top of each other. It’s a hypothetical translation of Benjamin’s/Klee’s angel, the ultimate palimpsest, loads and loads of historical residues accumulated before us. Architects, students of art history, architectural preservationists, sociologists, and tourists would have a ball with their notepads and cameras. Not only that, but, returning to the topic of this chapter, could one still critique censorship, fragmentation, and mystification of history/memory if all its material references reappeared in public space? What would we learn about history? How would the state redefine cultural heritage (patrimonio cultural)? How would that time-intense scenario make us feel? Would we be able to emotionally take it--would we pass out or would we simply get used to it, developing an even thicker version of Simmel’s numbing blasé attitude to protect ourselves from the abundance of stimuli and surprises?

While the idea is fun to think about, in practical terms, I believe that the process of recuperating historical memory will be more so “complete” when authority stops exerting their hegemony over history, when memory is liberated to take it’s own organic narrative and duration. I suppose this could be reduced to our basic need for “belongingness” (Abraham Maslow). This need relies on ontological competition, the creation of enemies. With competition and enemies, memories of different political ideologies, different religions, different genders... will always be in conflict and one will continue to shade the other. If we could abolish the competitive instinct, then perhaps we would be able to strike a more peaceful balance with temporality (and our neighbors)!!

Help!

starfish

2007-07-22T16:02:00.002-04:00

I woke up this morning to find starfish all over my body.

fun fact 3: 20 best metropolises to live in

2007-07-15T13:17:00.001-04:00

The British urbanism magazine Monocle set out to find the worlds best metropolises to live in, rating them by:

- quality of life
- crime and delinquency
- nightlife after 1am
- cultural options
- cleanliness
- nature areas
- quality of schools
- social tolerance
- quality and price of public transportation
- communication/information access (internet, phone...)
- hours of sun per year
- average outdoor temperature
- medical care

and in their July 2007 issue, the results were published:

1. Munich
2. Copenhagen
3. Zürich
4. Tokyo
5. Vienna
6. Helsinki
7. Sydney
8. Stockholm
9. Honolulu
10. Madrid
11. Melbourne
12. Montreal
13. Barcelona
14. Kyoto
15. Vancouver
16. Auckland
17. Singapore
18. Hamburg
19. Paris
20. Ginebra

Should some other factor have been considered? Maybe "courtesy to strangers"? (Or maybe that fits into "social tolerance"? Although I think they measure social tolerance by the amount of gay bars...) Or perhaps something to do with the price and quality of housing? Maybe that's "quality of life"? I never liked the "quality of life" factor because it's so vague. Bush once said that we can't join the Kyoto pact because it would affect our "quality of life." Anyway, for more info about the city report: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/18/arts/rmon1munich.php

null dull

2007-07-14T21:14:00.003-04:00

Gray like immobile

Nothingness like gray

Repetition like nothingness

Nothingness like impossibilities/impotence

Silence of nothingness

Unfulfillness like infinite

Repeat

centuries of waiting

2007-07-06T21:17:00.002-04:00

NPR, July 6, 2007: “In the last two months, 125 mexicans died of heat stroke trying to cross the border”

El país, July 5, 2007: “Un alud sepulta un autobús lleno de pasajeros en México”

Charlotte Observer, June 30, 2007: “Monterrey is flooded; at least 20 dead”

waiting

waiting

waiting

Now I know what it must feel like for those cinematic women who waited helplessly for news of their beloveds miles away fighting some war. Looking out the window, fiddling with a hem, rereading the newspaper, mumbling to the maid to recheck to see if the mailman is anywhere near, hoping the sleepy feeling will come soon, staring motionless while the imagination runs wild...

but nowadays war is Voluntary
and Waiting isn't!

...

Johannes Vermeer, 1654

musac en león

2007-06-20T22:46:00.001-04:00

A new big and expensive building I like:
MUSAC: El museo de arte contemporáneo de Castilla y León
in León, Spain. Architects: Mansilla + Tuñón.

Se han ido

2007-06-20T16:19:00.001-04:00

para México. ¿Qué será de ellas?

They packed their clothes
They packed their maps
Anxiety in one bag, Apathy in another
They packed their materials to make puppets.

And they left their watches here with me.
¿Qué será de ellas?

On the other side of the border
the magic trunk will open

and in front of the kitsch church
kitsch puppets will be born
to blow their horn
to the nosey kids in the streets
and the skinny dog with drippy teats
to the sun when it glows
and the dirt between their toes
¿Qué será de ellas?

confiscation, flat tires
contamination, dead batteries
coyotes, heat strokes
thieves, lost directions.

¿Qué será de ellas?!

Lili, on and off screen

2007-04-15T18:18:00.010-04:00

childish french accordion music of Lili ("hi Lili hi Lili hi lo hi lo..."), 1953 but could be today, right now

I’m a problem

The abnormal one

The one who annoys, 'pesada'

Treated nicely like the retard

Watching the movie in front of you through clogged wells of hot gooey balls

'Keep away from me.

Do you have to be so close?'

Oh just shoot me in the back with your laser stare

That way it will appear accidental

Flat chalky vintage colors

Sometimes dazzling

Typical naïve innocent young girl

What good does it do to be naïve and innocent?

in a typical insensitive sexually-hungry reality

that devours

she’s sitting behind me

and my writing is motivated by the assumed laser-stare on my back

two translucent-gray lasers, zoom zoom

but she’s not really looking at my back

rather the TV, or nothing (asleep)

and without the lasers?

Why not just be devoured

Could it be so bad?

We will never know until we try

But everything will be all better

Like when someone has died

or someone has cheated

ah it was just a joke

or a dream, or a movie, or a puppet show

If sadness was as simple as Lili makes it appear

A gray blouse and a solemn face

the final credits.

"A song of love is a sad song,
Hi lili, hi lili, hi lo.
A song of love is a song of woe.
Don't ask me how I know.
A song of love is a sad song,
For I have loved and it's so.
I sit at the window and watch the rain,
Hi lili, hi lili, hi lo.
Tomorrow I'll probably love again.
Hi lili, hi lili, hi lo..........."

Leslie Caron and Carrot Top in Lili (1953)

situation 2 and dream 5

2007-03-30T09:53:00.001-04:00

Welcome back to writing, we haven´t seen you in many months.

It has been over a year since I last participated in a Situation.

A night of flourescent lights, stench, and mood swings from different souls
"te duele la espalda fuck it a mí me duele todo el alma"

with a stiff back and a sensitive chest
I set my alarm for 7:15am
I silently said "goodnight" and
laid down on my stomach and my melancholic thoughts quickly turned into fog.

I dreamt something quite boring
I was playing soccer with some kids
but instead of a ball we were kicking a red poker chip
and instead of a field of green grass were were playing indoors on thin grey carpet
I don´t know why I bothered playing
my back hurt, no one was on my team, and the kids were much more agile than me
Then I lightly kicked the chip with my right foot
Raaaaaaaaa
The crowd roared and cheered!
Raaaaaaaaa!
I must of marked a goal!?
then I realized that it was 7:15am
the Raaaaaaaaa! was the static of my alarm clock
an unexisting radio station set on full volume.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

And I came to my conscious
I was to help Marta with an unorganized, unlikely-feasible, bus project
The ghastly night before, the fluorescent studio lights
When I got on my feet would my back hurt?
Would we make history, a fool out of ourselves, or a police record????

I was to be the driver, la chófer, of Pepe's large van.
In Spanish, I was to ask the 18 freshman of Spanish 232
1) what country they were going to illegally immigrate to and
2) what type of work they hoped to do in the foreign country.
Then I was to drive around the block, picking up groups of students.
Marta was going to do the explaining: a simulated illegal immigration experience.
And she was going to record the event with a small video camera.
The catch: there were 20 of us total, and the van comfortably fits 10 human beings (regardless of legal status).

I was to wait in the van till she called me on my cell phone.
When she called I was to come out of the van and present myself as la chófer to her students.

From the van I watched the class.
Marta standing, in that red fleece jacket, talking with her hands and exaggerated facial expressions that I could recognize from a quarter-mile away.
Her students sitting around her on the cold dewy grass like sheep.

Then my phone rang.

To be continued...

bared walls

2007-01-25T14:14:00.004-05:00

from 2008:
"Unlike those bared walls that remain standing after a war, medianeras have been carefully undressed by bulldozers. Once exposed, they do not bother to hide their intimate parts—bathroom tiles, children’s scribbles, severed pipes and wooden beams, a kitchen cabinet, a division between the bathroom and kitchen, a peeling sheet of wallpaper. All are exposed to the sun and rain, made visible to the public, and eventually adopted by strangers as their new and indifferent family (passers-by). The interior, once heated, echoed someone’s private thoughts, words, and gestures.[1] Medianeras are harmless, ephemeral, in-transition, unpolished, and unintentionally and visually disruptive to the nicety of the city’s exclusive image. They are embarrassing for speculators, because they detract from the city’s aesthetic harmony and could trigger disturbing historical questions such as “What happened here?” Translating medianeras to generate democratic discussion about urban policy is urgent because soon they will be re-dressed, and forgotten."

[1] These bare walls have also become a canvas for social resistance.

With the exception of the last photo of Ernest Pignon´s work, the following are pics I took between 2005 and 2008 in the historic quarter of Barcelona.

unlearning numbers II

2006-10-11T17:59:00.002-04:00

"Researchers estimated that as a result of the war, about 655,000 people in a country of about 27 million have died above the number expected to have died without war, Bernham said. that means 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population has died because of the invasion and ensuing strife, he said.

At a White House news conference Bush said, "I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does General (George) Casey (top U.S. commander in Iraq) and neither do Iraqi officials."

Casey, at a separate Pentagon briefing, said he had not seen the study but the 650,000 number "seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen. I've not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don't give it that much credibility at all."

Bush said, "I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me. And it grieves me." But he called the study's methodology "pretty well discredited." Last December, Bush estimated 30,000 Iraqis had died in the war.

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told Reuters, "The report is unbelievable. These numbers are exaggerated and not precise." Iraqi government officials put the total Iraqi death toll since the war started at 40,000."

--"Study sees 655,000 Iraqi war deaths; Bush disputes" (Reuters, 11 October 2006)

A slow conversation between Ferdinand and Marianne in a car. Ferdinand, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, is calmly driving. It is night. We know they're in the city because of the colored lights that repetively flash over the windshield. A line from the radio breaks the silence:

Radio: Garrison massacred by the Viet Cong who lost 115 men.

Marianne: Awful, isn't it? So anonymous...

Fernindand: What is?

Marianne: They say "115 guerrillas" and it doesn't mean a thing to us.

[Pause]

Marianne: Yet each one is a man, and we don't even know who he is. We don't know if he loves his wife, if he has kids, if he prefers movies or plays. We don't know anything. All they say is "115 killed." It's like photographs. They've always fascinated me. You see a snapshot of a guy with a caption underneath. He was a coward maybe, or a nice guy. But at the time when it was taken no one can say exactly when he was thinking about. His wife? His mistress? The past? The future? A basketball game? Nobody will ever know.

Ferdinand: That's life for you.

Marianne: Yes...that's what makes me sad: life is so different from books. I wish it were the same: clear logical organized... Only it isn't.

Ferdinand: Yes it is... a lot more than people think.

Marianne: No, it isn't, Pierrot.

[Pause.]

Ferdinand: My name's Ferdinand.

-- Pierrot le fou, 1965, director Jean-Luc Godard.

un cortitometraje de veraneo

2006-09-27T00:28:00.002-04:00

some of my happiest solo moments were the fortunate weekends when after the midday meal i would take a bike out and go riding through the little towns around fontclara...

the air was so fresh!

i recently discovered a very-easy movie making program on my computer called ¨windows movie maker¨ and in about 30 minutes i put together this 1-minute piece of clips i shot with a digital camera in 2005.

if you could have been there!

PS- a friend recommended i change the title from "fontclara en bici" to "siesta" or "nap time." those titles would suggest contrast and explain the absence of people, but "fontclara en bici" is more simple and carefree, what i felt when i was riding... what do you think?
i suppose it´s irrelevant in the greater scheme of things...

come walk with me

2006-08-14T09:42:00.003-04:00

to walk with me: click on the picture below, zoom in,

come close to the computer screen, and scroll right

30 minute break

2006-08-06T11:37:00.004-04:00

She was hungry this evening but her stomach was bloated
in the grey-tan old quarter
She walked down one street
and another
short breaths
(faint pee-garbage smell)
looking for something cheap to eat, not sweet, not another bocadillo
She came across a free exhibit
She went in, it was dark, empty, damp, old vaulted ceilings, large squared rocks
She looked at some video exhibits
probably done by young artists
She didn’t really understand the messages
She picked up their corresponding pamphlets
and walked back outside
LIGHT
across the street she spotted the Islamic pastisseria
She didn’t know if they would have non-sweet stuff or not
rows of honey-dripping baklava filled the shop-front window
It looked like inside they had some non-sweet stuff
so she went in and purchased a frosted custard cream something
and a pack of Lebanese pita bread
and a large curry chicken fritter.
3,50€
She gave the smiley curly-beard man a 5€ bill, forgetting that she had coins
“shukaran” she said, and he smiled
She wondered if he understood her Arabic
and she wondered if his long beard meant he was extra religious
like “jamón extra” (supposedly a superior type of pre-packaged ham)
She walked out
headed back to her study place
on the narrow sidewalk
opened up the plastic bag of pita bread
opened up the oil-stained paper bag of the large curry chicken fritter
and wrapped the bread around it.
Yummm it was good,
it was white meat
not too spicy
She stopped.

and thought…

I could eat this for dinner too…

...
She turned around
headed back to the Islamic pastesseria.
“¿me puede poner uno más de esos de pollo?”
it was a different guy (also with a long curly beard)
he gave her another chicken fritter
She put it in her plastic bag
She said “shukaran” and gave him 1€
No response
She left and headed back toward her study place
then on, on a façade, she saw something that might be worth sharing with academia
there was some graffiti, and among it a Nike symbol
but instead of Nike it said “BCN” (Barcelona)
with the non-fritter hand
she got out her digital camera
took a picture
put the camera back in its case
back in the plastic bag
and headed back to the study place
thinking about graffiti and why it was that her stomach was always bloated.

Update: She returned to the ¨Pastisseria Islámica¨ the other day and learned that the shopowners are not Arabic but Pakistani and that thank you in Pakistani is ¨shukria.¨

children´s poem or hallmark card in need of a drawing

2006-07-30T19:16:00.001-04:00

imagine
a
giraffe
whose
spots

are

fall

leaves

and

one

fell

off

miss

in the raval a la nit or ________________ (2 spatial tactics)

2006-07-17T16:01:00.002-04:00

Garden City, S. Carolina May 25 2006 or some other time and place

2006-06-22T10:09:00.001-04:00

the comedia

2006-06-05T09:54:00.004-04:00

HA HA HA
look at yourself pouting
a tiny part in an never-ending comedia
what clever props
what intense drama
what goofy masks
who are you trying to fool
are you trying to make me laugh?
why don't you spare yourself the petty
if you only knew
what came before you
and what is to come!
HA HA HA

[repeat]

Dream 4: the immortal turquoise sea

2006-04-12T22:25:00.005-04:00

Early this morning i dreamt that i had gotten off a plane or train and i was leaving the station which was right in front of the sea or ocean. (This was a mute dream, no sound, all visual and physical.) I remember looking out at the sea/ocean, seeing how dark-blue almost black it appeared. From the calmness and soft sun, i would guess it was early morning, like 8am. I watched a hard-plastic wind-operated jet ski go by. Next scene, for some reason, i was in the water with my clothes on, it was warm, my eyes were not being blinded by the sun or burned by the salt water, i wasn’t getting sunburned, it was perfect. I was waste-deep, my pants clinged to my legs, when a big black inner tube rolled my way on top of a wave. It was almost like a tire, i thought it would be safe and strong with these big waves. I caught it and put it under my backside, laid over it, and clinged on with my legs and arms. The waves were big and the tube took me for a ride, it was fun. At one put it took me far/deep out and i went on top of a very large wave, and then, the tube and i were safely dropped with a plunk. The drop gave me a bit of the roller-coaster-butterflies-in-my-stomach and i thought “how fun!” The water was a beautiful turquoise now. I felt at peace, I felt weightless, my extremities swayed and melted with the warm waves. I had a strong urge to stay there forever, let myself slowly dissolve into the water-- regardless of the consequences/risks involved. Laying there, with thin consciousness, I began thinking: it would be such a nice escape, a fun warm bath with Nature, to vanish under the soft sun; abstract, ubiquitous, turquoise, warm, and mute. But at another point i thought of my parents, and thought this could be dangerous, i could die... i could disappear... and they would worry. I thought the only news my parents would have would be that i disappeared abroad. It would take them a couple weeks to find out, and they would not-- for the slightest moment-- think that i disappeared happily in the sea, they would have dark frightful visions, they would think the worst and more-common, they would think some male did something grotesquely terrible to me, their minds would go wild with blood and knives and physical force and foreign stereotypes. I began to think that i could write a message in a bottle, saying something like Dear Mom and Dad, don’t worry, I’ve disappeared with the turquoise sea, left life the same way I came into life: wrapped in a blue, comforting, soft and warm blanket. But then I thought: but the bottle could break in these strong waves, and so, they would think something terrible happened. I thought: well i could fill many bottles with the message... then the tube started edging towards the shore. My toes hit the sand and I jumped off limp-legged and walked up to the narrow cement boardwalk.

spatial tactics

2006-03-28T01:45:00.006-05:00

One winter afternoon I was wandering around the Raval neighborhood (in the Historic Quarter of Barcelona) and I came upon a volleyball game taking place in a homemade volleyball court. Immigrants were playing inside an abandoned lot where a building had been razed. The lot was fenced off; the bottom couple of feet were cemented off. How did they get in there? I walked around it to see how they had gotten inside. On one side I found a jagged hole in the lower part of the fence, about 1.5 foot by 1.5 foot. I thought how they must have had to crawl in individually and slip the poles and the net through. Very clever, I thought, and I took this picture from inside that hole. After that day I began to find all sorts of spatial tactics in the city: heated 24-hour ATM nooks and storefronts being used as bedrooms; balconies used to hang clothes and protest signs, left-out construction materials and those big plant pots used as benches; dumpsters used as urinals…

And I began to think of how these spatial tactics not only fulfilled a basic need, but also functioned as little harmless, creative, political resistances, breaking through the city’s image, an international image ultra-protected by the increasing presence of video cameras, policemen, and tour books. Since spatial tactics are usually temporal, mobile, sneaky, spontaneous, small, and semi-hidden, for me they’re also a unique form of resistance because they hard to crack down on, categorize, or put your finger on them. (Like little sparks of truth amongst the ubiquitous stimuli and simulacra.)

I’ll end with a quote. "[Those who create spatial tactics] must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse." (The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau, 1984)

May you find many spatial tactics then next time you walk outside.

No. I’ll end with a color picture of that abandoned lot, or volleyball court, one year later.

Color photo taken by Eva Megias.

(Published in Tiresias, vol. 1)

my niece and i, or, childpinkhood

2006-03-07T09:35:00.001-05:00

couldn´t find an epigraph, so i made one up:

2006-02-12T19:13:00.002-05:00

She didn't need to pick up the ramparts,
a milk lid would do,
placed on her head,
the city would be hers.

the three musicians

2006-01-31T08:55:00.001-05:00

Seaquins

2006-01-26T21:26:00.002-05:00

Section of a new painting. I named it Seaquins and it´s dedicated to the person who gave me the paint. Feedback is appreciated. Click on it to see the marvelous grain/texture of the paper.

"the ghost of material things" --Gérard de Nerval and the Bad Rhymer

2006-01-22T23:40:00.003-05:00

I thought those everyday things
had been long thrown away...
but then I discovered them
on a friend´s webpage today.

A message, like the food,
read and discarded
appears as a trivial memory
a pleasure surface-hearted.

(No, I don't like inside jokes either, so I'll turn this inside-out: I often left messages on food for my housemates in Barcelona. The cookie box reads: "eat me because I'm yummy and I don't want to make Megan fat" and the banana: "thank you for printing.")

fun fact 2: postsecret

2006-01-02T19:52:00.004-05:00

Megan recommends:
postsecret.blogspot.com/
Enjoy!

c l o u d s

2006-01-01T21:37:00.001-05:00

I've never thought much of clouds, but they've come up a bit this past week.

Iris said that there was an experiment in which one group of college students were told to think about life for a certain amount of time everyday, another group was told to think about clouds. The group that thought about clouds was much better off.

And then later that night I had a dream. Some prestigious woman said "let me see your portfolio." And I thought "hmm...do I have a portfolio?" And she reached to the shelve behind me and pulled out a black binder and browsed through it carelessly. It was replete of photos of paintings of mine and I wondered when I had put all that together and how much more/what was in those other binders of mine on the shelf. Then, she, pointing to my pictures of some neatly-diagonally-gridded clouds and the photos from Barcelona of empty facades (windows through which the sky is visible) she said "don't you see the resemblances here?" I didn't respond. But she was right. (And she was me...) It was a great juxtaposition. Both were relatively-flat planes that defy gravity and distort light.

Clouds are cumbersome to paint. Have you ever tried to recreate clouds? They even resist cameras. Maybe the only good representations of them are the abstract ones.

From my new apartment, whose chapter is only 2 days old, I no longer see clouds, or sky, or anything organic for that matter, with the exception of some food, water, and a plant that I found hanging from the bathroom ceiling. I look up and say "Hello, Plant." [It doesn't respond...] I'm going to try to keep it alive. In return will it keep me company?

Clouds I recently saw from Interstate-77 in Virginia on December 28, 2005.

Empty facade from the streets Corcega-Bailen in Barcelona, May 2005.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
"Esas fachadas, en verdad, son como sus caparazones después de que haya sido sorbida su carne, aspirado todo la blando y jugoso, suculento, sustanciosa, que tenían dentro. Las manzanas, los bloques y las casas de algunos barrios de BCN han sido vaciados también de esa carne y esos jugos de que está hecha, al fin y al cabo, la vida, una vida atesorada por el tiempo, acumulada. Las fachadas no son más que lo duro, el caparazón, el hueso que está afuera, una triste armadura. A veces, en las marisquerías, uno encuentra langostas disecadas, rojas y brillantes, no muy distintas de las de plástico: ¿qué puede haber más cruel, de más feroz, que aspirar toda la carne de una barrio conservando sus huesos o caparazones, y de más vergonzado que usarlos como signos de supuesto respeto, de recuerdo o de memoria? Memoria: ¿de qué o de quién?" (Juanjo Lahuerta "La destrucción de Barcelona")

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

Update: September 2006: From 36,000 feet in the air I spotted some strange spots. At first I thought they were clouds.

But then, using my camera as a telescope ;-) I realized that the spots weren't clouds but icebergs, Greenlandian icebergs!

situation 1

2005-12-18T19:59:00.001-05:00

Today she did a good deed. She fulfilled part of her purpose in life. She made a harmless situation, and stood back to watch it. She will brag about it: She parked in the Barnes and Nobles parking lot. She turned the car off and to her left she saw a parked Hummer. It occured to her that she had her art supplies with her. She got out a sheet of yellow paper and with a red marker wrote "How many dead bodies does it take to fill your gas tank? Asshole. Find another way to work on your low self-esteem." She was disturbed by having written the word "asshole." For a couple minutes she thought about crossing it out, but in the end she didn't because she thought that the-word-asshole-crossed-out would look silly. Then she got out of the car. Looked around. She was a bit afraid that if she touched the Hummer sirens might go off. She gently placed the yellow sheet under the right windshield wiper with the message facing the interior of the car, and then she went into the store. She felt like people were watching her. She kept an eye on the Hummer from inside the store. About 5 minutes later when she was looking at greeting cards by the window she saw a young skinny Orchard-lake-type (high heels, tight pants, black leather jacket, done-up hair) woman leave the store and approach the Hummer. Ah-ha! So she was the victim! She unlocked and opened the heavy Hummer door and got in. About 10 seconds later she got out of the car! Went around to the front of the car, took the paper off, (didn't throw it away) and got back in the car with the paper in her hand. (From inside the store, she imagined her tossing the paper in the passenger seat.) About 2 seconds later she drove off.
(For both of them, this situation was the excitement of their day.)

unlearning numbers

2005-11-10T18:57:00.002-05:00

when you're face feels warm
and your body comfortable
and the sounds are muffled
and what you love, doesn't love you back
and yet- you know in the end you are your own suffering
and every time I show the documentary 30,000 individuals are tortured again in Argentina
and two weeks ago the earth swallowed a group of 73,000 in Pakistan
big numbers, little numbers, single numbers
usually estimated numbers
but always whole numbers, never fractions or decimals

and the upcoming week's events giggle in the back of your head.
In moments like this it seems like one human life is just a miniscule spark of light
insufficent, even as a big number, to illimunate an entire void.

Dream 3: maternal miracle

2005-10-29T12:00:00.001-04:00

last night i dreamt that i heard a baby cry out, i don't know where i was, maybe in a mall or something, there were people around, their noise in the distance. there was a woman standing on my right and she told me: "look, you've lactated!" i looked down and sure enough my left breast had dampened my turquoise cotton turtleneck with a dribble of wetness.
not being pregnant and not having any children, a feeling of wide-eyed incredibility and beauty came over me, and i started to silently cry.

that's all i remember.
i think this scene was triggered by something i read and i can't figure out what!...

El País, Sept. 22, 2005: "Rita se convierte en el tercer huracán más fuerte en la historia del Caribe"

2005-09-22T01:37:00.002-04:00

The headline of El País read: "Rita turns into the third strongest hurricane in the history of the Caribbean."

A man who learns that another massive hurricane is coming his way and simply does not believe it. How can it possibly be true if people are still waiting on their roofs from the last hurricane?! (Why a man, I don´t know.)
He shuts himself in his one-level American-style home. Alone.
Sits in a chair, in his brown-carpeted living room.
And thinks, and reflects, calmly.
The rain is an incessant and soothing roar coming from some side of the house.
He meditates in denial.
He plays cards with himself on a small wooden table,
he chuckles at his own folly,
gets bored;
tidies up the coffee table,
gets up to turn a record on. (the stereo system belonged to his parents. )
The carpet soaks his white socks.
He sits back down and continues thinking about different things:
Person 1,
meditation techniques,
Person 2,
his youth,
Person 1...
As it becomes darker outside, he doesn't get up to turn the lights on.
Several hours later he is sitting Indian style on top of the china cabinet.
The music is barely audible over the downpour.
His thoughts have now become delusional and aggressive.
He jumps down, finds the table and
BOOM!- BREAKS IT once- and
AGAIN- CRACK!
against the cheap wood wall.
How good it felt, how good it sounded!
Staring down beyond the bobbing legs of his once table, he feels relief, he has reached tranquility, defeated..defeated what?
He takes slow deep breaths, tries to forget about the "what?"
he extends his arms and slowly brings his legs up.
He floats on his back, and the chair splinters tickle him.
His thoughts become calm again;
peaceful,
thick,
Person 1,
posthumous.

surrogate mother nature

2005-08-11T14:29:00.002-04:00

Though much of the veneration of the old is just hegemonic and corporate image/media spoof, we could ask ourselves if there is something real in this relation, something in our biological natural instincts that attracts us to the old? If we eliminated all collective influence, what urban public spaces would we be drawn to/holding history/meaning for us? Could it be reduced to those spaces which we recognize as authentically natural (which usually are old)? Entirely man-made, the city, to begin with, is the antithesis of Nature.Nature and humanness have been being replaced by heightened global warming, technology, architecture that reflects technology, and surveillance, all of which favor a more independent/private lifestyle particularly in areas (such as the new balconyless flat buildings in Barcelona's Ciutat Vella, the general lack of benches, and the recent installation of bancos unipersonales (to stop people from lying down), and personal mobile music players become more popular…) which decrease social interactions particularly where tourists and upper-class residents frequent. In many of the dry cities of South-West Europe there is little green. Parks are replaced by “plazas duras” —flat sheets of gray cement with a thin sprouting tree exactly every some calculable distance. For this reason, one hot summer day when I took refuge on the shaded steps of an old church it occurred to me that, in the city, Mother Nature had appropriate the old; a true urban “Giving Tree.” Contrary to the impersonal, generic, banal, hard and flimsy Postmodern urban spaces (like those that were constructed in Barcelona for and after the Olympics, the old spaces/ruins (particularly those not surrounded by gates, surveillance or tourist stands) are generally public, imperfect, approachable, generous, palpable, they’re soft and soothing but solid and dependable, moss or vine-covered, pigeons and stray cats make they’re homes in the organic niches between their stones, they offer you a place to rest. Unfortunately, they’re also going extinct.