Subway L

all your versions,
your important life events
skimmed across my mind and left
only a train of residue for
at this stage of my life, i am
an invalid being left with pure associations
rather than systematic memory.
why didn't you tell me of your (right to an) affair,
that someone actually threw
a bucket of water
on you,
on a train?
you too should forget about it,
and see if you will remember 2046.
yes i thought i found
a message in a hole in a tree
in hyde park
of a tree in a hole in a message.
no there wasn't a cobra and
if there was it would definitely not
be the same one in darjeeling limited.

t(is).raining
d

authenticity again

the more Singaporean the Hainanese Chicken Rice in Singapore, the less Hainanese it is.

d.

in the middle of: 2

void is also in the middle of avoiding.

d.

While Nosing Around

To P.R.

In the beginning I began making sporadic associations with Auge's 'Non-Place' and Süskind's 'Parfum' and wondered if you had ever spoken to Sim of the WTO (the olfactory one). I indulged without reservations in your portrayals of the void until I got to the middle when you suggested performing the tourist. And you left me dangling for some days.

When I arrived at Changi Airport, wasn't I already the tourist in which you made me? Did I become someone else along the way because if that was intention, it didn't work with me. Then again perhaps you were you alluding to a kind of 'tourist practice' and asking me to perform it reflexively. If so, then the post-tourist mentality sets in and we're back in business, safe for a minute problem: that I am a Singaporean and I wonder to whom you appeal your text. If it was a rhetorical device to reinstate the fundamental existential question, then I say congratulations. I am more aware of my dormant schizophrenia as I watch your soliloquy questioning (your?) performance.

After coming to grips with myself, I traversed your other stages which I found intriguing in their abilities to incorporate the sensualities of experience. It reminded me of the infamous 'tao' proverb of seeing the mountain, not seeing it and seeing it again. At the end I am left wondering if I am more than the observer, detective, consumer, tourist, client in performing the 'local'.

d.

Kopi

Being defined by negation, Kopi includes not only by way of milk, but by the very spaces that capture its existence. The Singaporean cannot elude a Kopi-tiam and its everyday gregariousness. Kopi as a cultural object defines Singaporean identity and consuming it is a way of playing with representation. As it unfolds to become a text, we notice elements of mimicry, transience and fragility that shapes the way we portray ourselves. And if we peer into a cup of kopi under a fluorescent lamp, it is sometimes possible to see reflections of how we practice being Singaporean.

d.

es verdad, kemosabe

the merlion has been struck by lightning
and i am unsure if i am more
kato,
man friday,
passepartout
or
tonto

About UnLibrary

Not quite the Borgesian one. UnLibrary is less depressing, although its magnitude is as infinite, as dynamic. It is invisible and meaningful only in the presence of the actors and audiences constituting it. It is organic as it grapples the world and embodies a life that has not only happened, but is ready to happen. It is reflexive as a medium somewhere between mirror and glass; sometimes it affords you the framing of the universe and sometimes, you see a self you claim to know. You see, the (un)library is not a repository of knowledge, it is knowledge.

d.

onto ontologies

She starts flipping the pages, but from back to front. She has this gift of reading backwards, but today she is not reading; she is doing some kind of referencing, tracing or checking. From the confidence of her gaze, she has already read it. From the confidence of mine, she has already underlined particular words like long, one and everyone. At first I thought it was about meaning and the prolific search for it, then I refuted that and gravitated towards phonetics and an attempt at its perfection. It was only later that I understood that it was all about form, its inadequacies and incompleteness, its contradicting consistencies, its organic mysteriousness, its lack and its dance of signifiers. Amongst many other words, I realised she underlined every on and every on in the midst of every word.

d.

An ode to Whitman in less than a minute

(I had wanted to say that it was) where space is determined by the influx of ideas of ingenuity, where expression condones a freedom of exploration of what it means to read, to understand or not to understand, and to (re)produce facets of thought that defy conventional structure. Such is the impetus and fury of the need to exist, to survive in a menial world of compromises. And afterwhich we can stand back, at a distance, and remark what a conquest we have made, not of the world, but of ourselves.

What are the ways in which we can contain the aftermath of a thought: a writing which fears the resultant of its origins?

d.

Lunch Break

It was only after lunch with the ploughman when you decided it was going to be your last. If histories were going to be constantly rewritten, you felt that you could at least be reflexive about it. When the ALARM (Apparatus for Linear Action and Regulation of Modernity) rang, you were already sauntering into a new space.

The alarm
That dictates the
Order of hunger is the same
Alarm that shrills when
You break out
Of lunch

There are no guards, just multitudes of penetrating gazes from your inmates in empty flats. You stroll the city without ever wondering why you wouldn’t make soup out of your tortoise on a leash. Once in a while, you strain your neck to admire vertical inflexions to relieve yourself of the grounded clutter. And you begin to realise that you are adopting a novel consumption, unsure of where this is leading you.

d.

security guard doing her job at the entrance

"So you are a re-ser-cher-er ah."
She paused momentarily and continued,
"What are you a re-ser-cher-er of?"
And then she looked once more at my ID and remarked,
"Oh you research fellow!"

d.

a note on stomp

Different discourses seem to fluctuate around a box of messy cakes (or was it all 20 boxes or maybe 19 with a cockroach in the 20th) leading all the way to a denigration of heartland aunties and foreign labour.

If it was a question of face, wouldn't its publication with over 3000 views be a greater loss of face? What about the blaring visual reiteration of Pine Gardens Pte Ltd bolstered with a full address?

I have never tried the cakes at Pine Gardens Pte Ltd, did I say, Pine Gardens Pte Ltd, I mean, Pine Gardens Pte Ltd, yes the Pine Gardens Pte Ltd in Ang Mo Kio. But I am now intrigued to patronise the store to see if I can find messy cakes. And why am I so confident that I'm not going to find any, and end up lapping up the cakes instead?

d.

the outside paradox

semen
is in
amusement.

d

wanted (dead or alive)

i am still in a little daze as to why i shot the sheriff, or perhaps why i didn't shoot the deputy. if you would like to send me something to prove the existence of cosmology, i would most welcome it. as for my part, i find it difficult to send you anything since it is dead; not effectively because it is dead, but because it is not buried; and i do not want it buried for now.

you are not allowed to ask me the next question which would be, "are you dead?" in denying you this question, i am provoking another which is, "would you know if you were dead or alive, if you were dead or alive?" would it help if i admitted the fact that i am constantly trapped with/in thoughts, concepts and objects in liminal states. more than doing a houdini, our assemblages of beings and becomings contort the self in ways more illocutionary than abracadabra.

Burials are convenient because it is only in forgetting that you do not forget. This is when you feel wanted, when you are
wanted.
d.

ser o no estar,

esa es la cuestión.

d.

northern lights

no i didn't grow up with pipi and mumin.
i grew up with the people who grew up with pipi and mumin.

d.

Ribbing cosmology

To s.i.c.b.e.e.

S. kept posing a question and a certitude: Who created you? and Cosmology.

The question, rather than being superficially ontological, is really an attempt at an epistemology. How does he know the things he knows, or something more down to earth, how does he exist the way he does. The easy way out would be to historicize my existence and provide facts which will very conveniently steer you away from the topos; as a kind of default, a defence mechanism if you like, which is perhaps always already da, or that every existential quest is presumably loaded with nooks and crannies which you probably know exists, but you haven’t the capacity for engagement. It wears you out like every case in modernity.

How much of the Borgesian library can you tolerate? At first you marvel at its flamboyant form and its protrusion into infinity, then you realise the helplessness of your being in space. Borges was cunning enough to lure us into a fragment of the endless spiral, for a whirlwind tour without needing to stay. He doesn’t trap us the way Poe would, in a cask, in darkness, in narrative. It brings to mind the other realer kind of narrative tour with an escape pod beginning with Anne: Frank, Hathaway and of Green Gables. Your immense desire to gaze nostalgically into their homes counterpoints your innards of revulsion should you inhabit their abode in their places. More than dealing with alien proxemics, you have to contend with a performance of being a ghost unto yourself.

I have said this many times: that I am invisible, yet you cannot quite see through me. By using S’s second prompt to answer the first, I will say that I cannot exist save for cosmology. Maybe the better question for now would be: to whose cosmology do I belong? In Mona I was alive by order of the concentric circle first opened by Brathwaite’s chord. Under the cosmos somewhere between the Blue and Dallas mountains was a manifestation of fluidity. You were laughing because you couldn’t make a rib for me out of dirt to save your life. Then you died laughing after you made me one eventually out of your 24: ribs, grammes and red stripes.

then (cosmology is)
i became (humorous)
funny,
d.

de certeau, bachelard and the zionists

The difference between a wide shot of a living room and a CU where you pan first one way then the other is not just sheer movement. It is about you: the discourse moves in a way in which every moment is a reconstruction of a multitude of vectors. De Certeau would say it moves over the whole panorama, to the accelerated succession of actions that multiply spaces. Some years later, Stilgoe would remark of Bachelard, that he skews his scrutiny, moving through the house not as mere visitor, but as the master penetrator of anthro-cosmology. Bachelard would collect the resonance of echos from every lived house, and questions the nature of human habitation of geometrical form, and vice versa, the impact of the form upon human inhabitants.

i was trying to configure the relationship between the possibility to represent the rituals of black zionism in lucid photographic images and the impossibility to express its meanings in words. I suppose it is like a spatial story in that the not-being-able-to-reveal is at once, the delimitation process that creates the frontier; and the bridge that spurs the desire for knowledge. the very secret exploits itself into existence: that it can only exist without being known.

n's mother would, when the hermeneutical question was put, either walk away or change the subject, and later on grounds of accustomed familiarity, explicitly divulge the facticity of its being invisible. She almost rebuked the security guard, who should not have mentioned that even he remained oblivious to the ways of his grandmother. it is that that remains: the meaning of its existence being untranslatable, flashing illusions of coconuts and hair cutting, whizzing possessions and candles atop fizzy drink bottles that burn forever.

contrasting islands

Is it about desiring to be burnt on the beach or that being burnt is constitutive of the stuff that makes up the narrative of being on a good beach holiday? The tanned Scandinavian tourist would offer the body up as the production of a holiday well-enjoyed on the sand, wave lapping and palm tree rocking. The burnt British would reinforce the self-effacement of his being in true Brit, where the failure of achievement of being body boastful, would still give way to a spatial story of a successful experience.

(This quality of being British, bearing extreme self-mockery, of being the indisputable loser, is highly admirable.)

d.

winifred beach

i saw them all make a beeline for her the moment they saw her. but the one which caused more than a reaction was:

"you're the first white woman i know who don't shave your armpits."

d.

chou-bleu

as rare as it snows on maromokotro, what would you say are the chances of finding something endemically there, here and there? the wild chou-bleu prancing on itself from petal to petal, question to question, to the point where it had to confront its own exquisite gaze. the way you would remember it all would be psychosomatic, tilting your head backwards, clasping your hands, noticing the little distances, from a bench then a plank then a stone then a chair. even a table if you would like to add which overlooked the caribbean or sand which saw the overcast shadow of the goat devouring the leaves of the indian almond tree or a white pellet being launched in the air and landing in a pot full of signifiers.

it is the accidental brush that soothes even the skeptic. and i would be lying if i didn't say that i swum naked with brooke shields.

d.

the Bottom of Bournemouth

To P.

He called his local, the Oak (at least it was known as the Oak then). Before entering, P dropped by the shop next door for cigars. He never really made it into the pub as he had to indulge the cigar while indulging the outside. From the inside we would see him sitting in his usual upright position exhaling what seemed like mist, already conversing with the conversant about locality perhaps, or at least we would like to believe, blending with the gray and wet, soaking in his element.

I met Richard in the loo as I was in the tapping and flicking stage. Some men would substitute one for the other but Richard (should I call him Dick?) seemed to pronounce its futility. I told him how much I had enjoyed the tour by P who was a tourist remembering when he was a local, or should I say, who had become a tourist since he was a local, and that I was going to return next time the sun shone. It was at that moment that Richard spat into his faithful hand and shook mine rigorously, sealing a pact which promised that he would be waiting for me next time I returned to the Oak.

While contemplating the status of my blessed hand and feeling like it was part of an age old rite of passage, I imagined the gelling of the lone ranger and Tonto cutting palms and merging blood or in the case of the Mayans where another limb was cut (should I call it Dick?). Ours was conceivably, a concoction of a minimum of three potent fluids in the absence of blood. I didn’t manage to narrate the impact of this to the 5 girls I was with, and to A, whom B would call East Village, it was sheer impossibility.

We didn’t see the Polar Bear on the Isle of Wight due to unsurprising weather, nor Thomas Harding since he has already passed, nor the steeple that didn’t exist since it was struck by lightning, nor the girls’ school which didn’t seem to need a reason for its non-current existence, nor the dentist who extracted P’s wisdom tooth.

What we did see was the street where P used to live, the best fish and chips shop in Southbourne, the Argos where his mother used to work, a nondescript store which hasn’t change its façade in thirty years, its neighbouring shop in which he used to fetch his newspapers from before he distributed them and the laundry shop which had the name of Bollom until a line was drawn across the two ‘L’s.

d.

3 franks

in 24hrs, i came across franco of urbanism, franco of spain and frank o of guggenheim.

what more?

d.

not between

i had an occasion where one nose hair was measurable with a vernier calliper. i wonder if that is remotely connected with the white hair which m plucked out. she said it was white; that they were white, never grey.

d.

ps. grey i think is a shade, lighter and shinier than gray.

wolaile!

in chinese, it could be "i'm coming!", but it could also mean "i'm here (i've already come)". i'm wondering about the implications of its direct collocation in english, in bed? funny how time and space commingle. what is lacked in description is compensated by expression, perhaps. or action.

d.

less glass

i am a peerless window, a sheet of invisible glass when i take the shot. but instead of she facing the mirror, where i foreground her naked back and rump, and find in its reflection her full frontal, i would prefer to have her facing me. (i look at her looking at me.)

in seeing her, and her back in the mirror, i realise that i too am a mirror.

d.

the other row

yesterday there was oil in the tree and oil in the film; and on cars, mondrian and wonder woman.

d.

Travel Guide to the World

a treatise for b. who leaves the centre for another.

The world is,
And it ticks as well.

Which one, if it is about a stage?

Exits and Entrances are convenient extrapolations of the self into a solitary stage. But we seem to have forgotten that the entrance following an exit is not only an entry into another, but a re-entry into the previous. Every step seems to posit an exponential potential of space and if we tread dangerously into the others, we have the temporal problem where we are confronted with a just magnificence. Can we deny how dry Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and Yul Bryner looked without the reflexivity of the liquid? Or can we pack it all into one of these commodified igloos and go camping? I suppose it depends if we can extract ourselves, put ourselves onto the pedestal, and instead of admiring our extensions, see if we can observe our reflection gazing back at us.

The Germans were the first to revive the ancient remedy known as Lebenswelt which can be plucked off a special tree and eaten in order to heal the confusion. Of course once everyone got wind of it, the tree started to perish due to overuse and they had to find new buds. Czech Republic was the first place to come to mind, but it was too close and it was overwhelmingly beautiful packed with a host of romantic and cultural insights. On a more pragmatic level, it wasn’t exotic enough and lacked any dramatic or media appeal. England, it had to be, near London to be more precise.

But really, why England?

Because: If the George of Messiah is acknowledged as a naturalised British, surely a similar (albeit converse) arrangement could be made for the George of 1984. Believe it or not, Lebenswelt is about possessive identity, and the plan was, naturally, to kidnap Orwell in order to naturalise him, German.

In 1938, the Germans invaded England with an invincible fighting machine known as red weed guised in black smoke. The English were hopelessly lost, but they also had friends in America who had buds. The Americans, who were known to be very helpful in fighting wars to end all wars, quickly invented the magic bullet in retaliation. (Or)son (Well)es in an earth-shaking radio broadcast launched a counter assault through narration about the Martians (no one knows till this day if “Martian” was coded to mean “German” or if it was an inherent part of the linguistic weapon). And this was the uncanny psychosis: the collective hysteria caused by a vicarious invasion of America actually vaporized the Martian red weed and German black smoke, leaving the English practically unscathed. Then time lapsed in a coma between 1939 and 1945, until the birth of Bob Marley who tried in his lifetime to advocate a reconciliation of the world, a redemption of colourful adjectives over weed and smoke.

While contemplating the various st(age)s we live in, and not bothering to uncover your affinity to this land and Anglophilia at large, I wish you many worlds.

d.

may you?

can this idea exist in quotidian speech?

what about the woman, k. suggested, who is laying and waiting for me in my bed all the time, only to disappear when i walk into the room. for some reason, i thought of schrodinger's cat.

may you, cat or woman, stay in the room?
d.

two gaps

It is that there are so many things to say and the not-knowing-how to say them. If it is about needing to revert to the epistemological (given our failed attempts of finding the ontological), even this seems to be stumbling.

i wrote you once the story of the nun who fell in love with the priest. During confession which she went to everyday, there were always only two things she would confess: that she has fallen in love with a priest and that her confession of love was a confession of faith. Her sin was confessing her sin.

For penance the father would ask her to recite the Lord's Prayer, twice. The first one, only the first half, and the second one, only the second half. The nun thought this to be strange, but did so dutifully. But one day after many moments, she couldn't resist, and asked the priest why he had asked her to do penance in this unusual manner rather than simply one Our Father. He replied, "the gaps and silences have to be confessed by the other."

d.

not-black tea

k. asked k. if she wanted black tea. "of course not, i'm british!" she answered. it was only when he asked her what kind of tea she would like, that the cultural code was acknowledged.

not-black tea is commonly green, even red, exclusively white or naturally, milky.

d.

DAsein

in view of the fact that j. and myself are officially depressed, we have formed DA. and since i have once again indulged myself in heidegger and the miserable others who deal with the phenomenology of being,
DAsein.
d.

el terremoto

it was 5.2 on the richter scale. and no one was hurt save for the 19-yr old who was sleeping when the chimney fell on him. he's alive; so are all of us in northern england who felt it. i was studying when it happened and it was a strange feeling because i thought that someone was trying to break into the house. i shut off the lights before looking out of the window and concluded that if a crowbar was used, it must have been stolen from thor, and I would have witnessed flashes of lightning at the very least. i remembered a similar incident in morelia, in mexico. everyone had asked me after i got back from the toilet if i had felt it, but i suppose i must have been dealing with my own fair share of bomb blasts when i said, "really?"

d.

stars war

to n.

amidst the ballyhooed chisel-cut mien of heroes with blown back hair lies an underscoped terrain. i wonder how many birds would lay beside vader with his mask on, in order that they may hear him breathe or have yoda from a distance, your inner most desires, gratify, you must. who wouldn't appreciate the walking carpet showing off his hirsute wookiehood or a Chance date with R2D2's son?

it is this inner battle for attention, not so much from the unstarry stars, but from the fickle audience that a system of normalcy has to be imposed. you have a given system of abstraction, a level concept of beauty and a set parameter of desires to contain your experience. and you don't even need to ask why.

the force be with you.

d.

test

yes, if you googled desmond wee.
how about desmond singapore?

d.

Die Vorstellung

Hallo! Ich bin Desmond, das problematisch Kind von meinem Vater.

d.

leopards as well

they all roar
but i'm certain
there is definitely
a leopard in the basement

d.

more than liberating farts

i wanted to ask l. if i could play with her pussy.
but she didn't have one.

so how did she find the one hair in her basement?

d.

the orgasm in chess

(m. was the other 'not so right in the head' who engaged in this dialogue willingly.)

Chess as we know today is only a scaled down or unglorified version of what it used to be, or rather, what we know it to be. We have been so preoccupied with generals and strategies that we have conveniently forgotten the life in which we have given to entities on the board. You are not simply playing someone, but you are playing something; and that something warrants a little respect.

Assume a masterplayer if you're semitic, or two, if you're not. And let us pick two players, say Poseidon and Shiva, who ordain the world of chess with human pieces, primal elements and fatalistic decisions. The pawn is the least significant in terms of power, but the most present: she is usually the first to go (and the last to stay). But before her exit, the black Knight would dismount and disrobe her, honour her dutifully and so honour himself, before being assigned a reconnaissance mission in between the Queen and the Rook. Later he would be honoured one last time as the white Knight discharges into him.

The white bishop looks on in disgrace, but relents due to the gravity of the situation. He buggers the black knight in a motion to end the war, then the black bishop to convert the black masses, and a couple of female pawns to demonstrate the futility of existence. Later he would be avenged by the raging Black Queen who deflowers him with her crown of hard diamonds, to which he perishes with a smile up to heaven.

Meanwhile, the white pawn and the black pawn are in a deep state of caress, not needing traditional weapons of encounter. The black pawn later succeeds in what must be the most challenging endeavour, to become the black Queen, only to sacrifice herself unconditionally to the massive white tower, so that her genuine blue blood counterpart could be one less fabric closer to the white King. In the end, it is not she who engulfs the white King, but the Black Knight who we realise is a transvestite upon brandishing his non-equipment.

The straight King is riveted to see a sheath rather than a sword for a change. The only problem is that the game is always finished before the King unloads. (No I am not refering to stalemates given the worst possible scenario where the anti-climax is worse than not being aroused at all.) Here we have on both ends, two kings vying to be the first to die by orgasm, and yet, the King is never knocked off, but asked to vacate with everyone else in a civilized fashion, even though we all know that he deserves a worthy blow job at the very least.

Of course the consolation is that before the next game, all the previously dead pieces will be busy making out behind while awaiting the end of the game (although the white bishop's not getting any outside the performance, due largely to his warped world views). But even that, the King never has the time before he is back onto his stasis.

The story of the sad King begs the question of the orgasm. Many would assume the patriarchical system where only the winning piece cums. It could also be a case somewhere between chivalry and irony where the losing piece hollers the final ecstatic blow. Or a romantic one in which both have orgasms simultaneous, fall into relapse, and only the winner awakes.

Ideally in chess, the ultimate fantasy is to have as many battles on the board as possible, in as short time as possible, die before midway into the game, and continue into off-stage pursuits. It is also a strategy, a forgotten one that exists in a microcosm which I wonder if Poseidon or Shiva know about.

d.

P.S. both hold sharp things. otherwise it could also have been Saturn and Zeus.

no...

Una abuela caminaba por la calle Mayor. Era madrugada y todo el pueblo blanco estaba en la oscuridad. Ella siempre estaba caminando por las noches, pero aquella noche se movió con otra convicción.

Se rumorea que tenía una familia pero ella le sobrevivío. Nadie sabia mucho sobre esta anciana sin nombre, salvo que cada vez que ella llegó cerca, su olor nos hipnotizaba. Nadie estaba ahí cuando se tropezó con una tortuga, se caído en la calle de las piedras, orientada hacia el cielo vivo.

No hay motivo porque la tortuga la mató. Y dónde estaban los borrachos y los vagabundos cuando se los necesita con urgencia. Quizá están sabiendo qu era 'matar' el tiempo.

Ahora sé porque: nos regaló una cosa, la planta que se puede lo llamadó, no la planta pero su nombre.

¿Hueles bien solo en la madrugada, la Dama de la Noche?

d.

Auf eine Insel

im Pazifischen Ozean
Und ich darf nur fünf Dinge mitnehmen

Ich würde das Seil mitnehmen. Es ist wichtig denn man kann Schaukeln machen, Baum steigen, den Fluss hinauffahren, Höhlenwanderungen machen und ein Boot bauen. Die Brille braucht man zum Feuer machen aber die nackte Wahrheit ist: sie lässt mich wie einen Kulturanthropologe fühlen. Deswegen ist der Spiegel unbedingt notwendig. Vielleicht gibt es (da) Eingeborene, die man damit beeindrucken kann. Es ist auch gut für das Geschäft. Das Telefonbuch ist notwendig, weil es mir das Gefühl gibt, viele Freunde zu haben. Es deckt auch den Grundbedarf: Klopapier. Die Wolldecke braucht man zum Warmschlafen. Wenn ich auf die Insel zu Langweile habe, kann ich mit der Wolldecke ein Segel machen, anderswohin wegsegeln. Und wenn alle Stricke reißen, habe ich das Seil, mich aufzuhängen.

d.

lightning rat

i wanted to think of today as the whitest day i have ever seen here. or could it be at the same time, the grayest? we want to invoke the way of the sled, but yet, it is also the human trickle filled with a lot more substance than snow, that people around me have evoked. a dragon fly is both a dragon and a fly.

of mice and men,
i remember,
but this year i am once again a rat,
and for the third time,
ostentatiously red,
lightning rat.

d.

the question on board

who is not a tourist on board?

d.

After the film

Unlike moments, acts or theatre, you actually grow old with films.

You think you live the moment until you realize you are part of the script, that you walk out of the cinema into another cinema. You like the dark because in this universe, you could at least pretend that you are not the protagonist. If you would watch yourself, you would have watched yourself watching. Perhaps the other yous would be so bored, they would be more interested in what you were watching.

But when you are (back) on the street, you shift right back onto the silver screen, having already traversed the multitudes of takes which you have already forgotten. If you wanted to ask if there is a way out, you might also ask why and how you got in, in the first place. The problem with panopticons, Orwellianisms and shadowy caves are how they first came to be, and how historicities commence with their being rather than their epistemologies. I suppose we could premise the transcendental nature of them all and treat them as we would treat God. In a way, Aquinas would be happy and Ignatius would be whipping himself a little less than usually.

Sometimes we would even consider ourselves lucky to wallow in this thing called choice, say if Wong Kar Wai was observing on his foldable chair. But if you think what I am saying falls somewhere between the Gnostics and Mr. Calvin, you are being misled. Every momentary decision is a product of infinite layers of possibility. Every subsequent moment is defined only by the lighting of a pathway surrounded by darker stairwells in the Borgesian library.

But is there a kind of deviance which hasn’t been accounted for, or in other words, can you surprise your other yous?

Moments become scripts the moment they start to contextualize, when time awakes and history sets sail. They exist as part of your memory as a temporal setting, ephemeral in terms of the then experience, lasting, in terms of a nostalgia engraved as a clump of representation, amidst all the others. A slice of representation is the repetition of experience.

The theatre of the quotidian is timeless if you can resituate yourself and the film can only relapse to this quality under exceptional circumstances. Wenders tried to tell us that with the runaway cowboy who rode off the set to remember a past in which he forgot he was not suppose to remember. Memory is a tricky thing: it doesn’t know how to deal with forgetting.

There is the moment, there is the film and there is a resurrection of the moment. I am now in search of the latter’s l(e)tter.

d.

permission

he really said it officer, he gave me permission to steal his bicycle without his permission.

d.

dirt

to j.

dirt is never dirty.
nature can never be dirty, it can only be dirtied.
is the brown slimy mud you see in the mountains dirty?
no, but i am dirty only after the hike in the mountains.
but i am not dirtied, because i am the active agent.
i have dirtied the mountains, the nature.
in that sense i have polluted it.

d.

not

like the inquisition or the witch hunt, there is no difference between the not-knowing and the not-telling (if the telling presupposes a knowledge that even exists).

d.

of Rabelais' book4 chap67

"One of the symptoms and mishaps of fear is that it usually opens the back door of the rotunda where fecal guests await their turn to emerge."

"Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho! What the devil is this? Do you call this ordure, ejection, excrement, evacuation, dejecta, fecal matter, egesta, copros, scatos, dung, crap, turds? Not at all, not at all: it is but the fruit of the shittim tree, "Selah! Let us drink."

ologies, ys and istics

has it ever occurred to you that all these -ologies, -ys and -istics, are products of being Western?

d.

known

in the formulation of cultural capital, you have the known which is made known or unknown. the purely unknown is left for people like us to muse.

d.

Das Klima und ich

Ist die Melancholie ein Produkt der grauen Wolken? Oder ist es die romantische Idee im Regen mit einem Schirm und eine potentielle Geliebte? Nehmen wir einmal an: das Wort bestimmt die Existenz des Konzeptes. Das Wort war immer schon im Kopf und es weiß das Vokabular meiner Emotionen. Krank bin nicht ich, aber das Wetter. Es macht mich, spielt mit meinen Gefühlen. Ich habe mit dem Klima ein Geschäft gemacht.

Ich liebe die Kälte, solange ich das Himmelblau habe. Aber ich bin schon wieder blau, werde in einen Rausch versetzt. Es ist nicht meine Schuld, weil es mich immer schon im Spiegel erkennt.

d.

4 women and a double-barrel shot gun

any sane man would react to the giant baked portobello (with a cut-off knobbly stem resembling the umbilicus mundi on a beer belly) seasoned only with white garlic splashed with olive oil, sitting beside an inverted bowl of basmati rice steamed with ginger (with prickly sprinkling of parsley atop bearing no connection to the island between spain and morocco) and presented without the bowl; wondering if its an imagination of his ultimate set of voluptuous prehensile desire, round and robust of the most nipable kind.

that was why i needed four hysterical women around me; the manic depressive who doesn't wear black tops (like the argentinians) and has hang-ups about other people (like the french) wearing black tops, the schizophrenic canadian who thinks she is german after having crossed the atlantic, the obsessive compulsive who returns to her animal-shaped chocolate eventhough she is swiss and the italian suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after she confused squirrels for pigs. Their presence was not to stimulate those desires, rather, to curb them.

the plate was served and the double-barrel shot gun was staring at me. i seem to be an object of what i am about to eat, about to be riddled with shells everlasting, barrel pulling back into infinity for a cock and recocking, lunging at me incesssantly. suddenly, the bullets spurted forth, but with a tempo a little slower than the trajectory of my eyes popping out, in such a way where no one would recognise the difference between shells and eye balls. you could also imagine my pulsating eye balls deflecting those bullets while still hanging onto their optical nerve fibres. i was being blown to smithereens by my invention.

but that couldn't be, as we raised our forks and knives following a murmur of 'bon apetite' in a delicate and cultural operation which many would assume a ritual. you wonder who was on the other end, this sinister entity in black with a trigger happy index, this mysterious somebody whom you have conveniently employed to kill yourself. you think over the story of how this one man invited only women to his birthday party, and ask why that laughable convention doesn't apply to you. perhaps it was to do with the salad which incorporated the tofu, water cress and sesame seed oil of the burmese, and the pesto rosso, spinach and rocket of the italians; reddish, but adumbrated in low light to reveal the nuanced identities of the four women who were brave enough to traverse the obvious trap. or was it the dessert of triple chocolate ice cream with kiwi and melon which confused national boundaries in terms of taste, originality and production?

you remember now the syndicate you hired. they were black tiger prawns, fried with onions and armoured with a soupçon of cummin, poised for battle behind the giant portobello and clump of rice. It was a good thing you sunk your utensils into lusciousness, because peering from the cleavage, it was a wonder why the fighting shrimp remained dormant.

d.

poco sobre mi nacimiento

En 1819, un hombre de Inglaterra (ahora hay un “Sir” antes de su nombre) llegó al sureste de Asia y bautizó mi isla exótica, Singapur. Desde entonces, existia la influencia de los ingleses entre los chinos, los malasios y los indios (de India). En 1965 antes de nacer yo, Singapur ganó su independencia. Siete años después, un bebé se llama Desmond lo pusieron en este país (aunque hubo un nacimiento más importante en 0 AD). En 2003, mucha gente en Singapur vivió temerosa de la infección SARS: las calles estaban vacías como un pueblo fantasma. Pero para mi es solo un instinto visual regresar a casa, porque estaba en Alemania en aquel entonces, estaba en las nubes.

beds

if the US actually borrowed language from the UK, then there should be a measure of consistency at least in its categorizations. why don't the brits have a queen size bed? everyone knows the discursive size that matters, but what about the comparisons between the two biggest sizes on the planet? at 6'6"× 6'8", the American King outweighs its colonial past (5' × 6'3"). Even the British Super King at 6' × 6'6" is unmatchable. the double is the only consistent. perhaps it, in its definition of an assumed duo, allows for an agreement between both counterparts, both off the bed and on it.

d.

inscription

there are many parts to the inscription process.

there is the desirous that activate the masses; but that is too common, too cheap and probably not your style. there is the experimentation that exhort a kind of negotiation, or tension if you prefer, to wonder the infinite what-ifs which flash in front, and yet, finally condone. There is the writing for the sake of producing ideas, a muse-like quality of a high culture we would like to ascribe to, an excusable end. There are the impulsions which need no rationalizing, for it exists for its self, for a definition of a time which has stopped. There is the exotic, the same reason why new lands have to be conquered before you perish. There is the random, the most exquisite of them all, where you end up doodling the recollection of sparkles.

i wouldn't say you have choice between a single self-contained magnus opus versus prolific notes, scattered memos, sporadic poetry and a memorable set of pieces. it is a default which attests to your presence, that those metonymic bits make you as much as you make them.

inscription is passive. you etch only when the plate is palpable, when your contextual existence is based on the initial actions of the other. although it is of course debatable if your échoppe is always represented in your gait. but i prefer to think of the tacit knowledge infused without chemicals, with essentials that creases the medium.

i suppose it is really about touching without intersecting.

d.

the best halloween costume

i couldn't forget the fateful halloween while atop the double decker, i glanced out to see the other double decker loaded to the brim with beasts, nurses, dandys, tarts, clowns, superheros, and even humans on the way to town. then i saw the most outstanding costume donned on a bloke who was climbing up the stairs to the top amidst the cheering of his mates above, the wonder of the people below and the shock of the people across. halfway to the top he started gyrating with his hand between his legs. then it looked as if he slipped and landed onto the railing on his behind. no you shouldn't heave that sigh of relief: his costume was totally invisible.

d.

etymology of the platypus

my platy,
i'm in
your pussy

la luna azul

junio e(re)s
mas noche
menos dias

¿sabías que en esta año
hubo una luna azul?

h.h.

mares stella

last night i watched the fireworks atop the dark hill with five mares. they seemed to be as interested in the spectacle as i was. but why they didn't react to the rambunctious was somewhat a mystery to me. perhaps they were used to it, being in the countryside that is not quite a countryside. nevertheless it was a romantic (or perhaps i should say baroque) clef when one of them, the most magnificent, snuggled up to me and asked me if i too listened to handel.

d.

what are you writing?

i wonder why my ideas about what i am writing about (yes i admit to the sense of covertness here for now) have to be this complex. on one hand it alludes to my perpetual interest in everything that comes within my optic reference, but on the other, there is this faulty cartesian hope that the haptic ideas of my choosing have a point in their existence within my mental faculty, that i could possibly (if not necessarily) derive a meaningful sense to this rhizomatic (my lack of understanding of D. and G. is implied here) diversification of sense. i want it to be 'eventful' by clustering it all and depositing it all into a very convenient frame. should i cheat the system this way, and pretend to be lucid or should i continue this wayward ambulation on board a drowning vessel?

d.

he

He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment – and this would require a night darker than any night has even been yet – he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.

Kafka

fireworks

there is already a war going on. i suppose guy fawkes can wait.
d.

lying in wait

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

Kafka

Italiano IoI: di Falstaff

Atto I
Che dunque l'onore? Una parola

Finzione II
È sogno o realtà?

Rappresentazione III
Tutto nel mondo è burla

Fine

god and its inversions

for a. and c., notwithstanding c.

strange to say, late nights and waxing moons sometimes forces the uncanny out of people. one such topic, other than usual ones like sex, is about animals. i could not help it if i had reason to believe that what i ate last week was squirrel. as i had seen squirrels running around in the backyard of the host's home, as i recalled the host screaming incessantly to not touch the squirrels, and as i consumed what i believed to be pork loin, i am now of the inclination to believe that there existed (until it was made into chops) a squirrel the size of a decent pig.

what tenacity to cultivate such and what audacity to slaughter it for a feast that knows no bounds? and think of the sacrifice of the giant brown squirrels so that the endemic red ones would flourish once again? it's about inverting the course of life, the nature of things we know, to feel like god. imagine looking at a closed wine opener. which would it resemble more: the cuttlefish, the ostrich or the rhinoceros horned beetle? Would it make a difference if I inverted it or if i daringly opened it to reveal the cockscrew?

under an omnipresent light, a shadow of the fighting shrimp is cast; to be more precise, a shrimp with an M-16 (no, not an AK-47; remember the shrimp is american, not russian). there is also this thing with size, simply because the american shrimp is bigger than most others in the world, not so much in terms of taxonomy, but rather, its common usage. where i come from, my prawn is comparable to your shrimp. if we restrict the american fighting shrimp which has prolongued exposure in South East Asia (say a product of vietnam), it would probably be tiny. if eaten, it would be consumed en masse, rather than individually; you would eat a bunch of them, instead of saying "gee i'd like 6 of 'em big 'uns". sometimes it would emerge as a paste, a concentration of a delectable set of dead fighting shrimp. otherwise, a preserve for posterity like ho chi minh, you could find it along the straits of melaka, pink as a virgin, known as cincalok.

the fighting must go on, but not just yet. the army has to be first recruited from all the wine openers in Europe which have erect cockscrews. while that is happening, we shift our attention to that which is endemic to australiasia, the one other thing that can also be inverted, and which is said to be the exemplification of god's humour. if i slapped you with a platypus, you couldn't guess if you were hit with more tail or more snout. The flatness of its duck bill and scaly behind, or even its webbed feet, is a regression pre-copernicus.

platypussies like us must sustain. we are by default the eulogies of our own life. the only consistency is the temporality of our known existence, followed by the frailty of our forgetfulness. the things we fight to remember are perhaps already be dead.

d.

que os 'engancho'

es una anti-obsesión
que atrae una compasión
para nada

a veces estoy
en algún nombre entre
un zorro y una zorra

es verdad
deseo la influencia
de los géneros todos

borges y lorca
buñuel y dalí
almodóvar y amenábar

pero no puedo sucumbir
a las tentaciones
descubrir que hay el divino

y Parra dice:
Comencé por casarme con la tierra
abrazos besos discusiones inútiles

no me enganchan
las cosas con la tierra
es mejor con los sueños

como una historia romántica
cuanto más quieres, más sabes sobre
la inutilidad de la cosa

d.

After Don Quixote

"Thou mayest well say that, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "as thou sawest her in the full perfection of her beauty; for the enchantment does not go so far as to pervert thy vision or hide her loveliness from thee; against me alone and against my eyes is the strength of its venom directed. Nevertheless, there is one thing which has occurred to me, and that is that thou didst ill describe her beauty to me, for, as well as I recollect, thou saidst that her eyes were pearls; but eyes that are like pearls are rather the eyes of a sea-bream than of a lady, and I am persuaded that Dulcinea's must be green emeralds, full and soft, with two rainbows for eyebrows; take away those pearls from her eyes and transfer them to her teeth; for beyond a doubt, Sancho, thou hast taken the one for the other, the eyes for the teeth."

Chapter XI: Of the strange adventure which the valiant Don Quixote had with the car or cart of "The Cortes of Death"

un 'e'

c.

1. Les cinq mots de moi pour toi: body, performance, identity, local, invisibility.

2. Tengo una pregunta: ¿se pronuncia 'don quixote' con un entero 'e' como yo o como tu, con un suave, 'e' subliminal? Y me explicas si lo que dices es una opinión, una perspectiva o una cosa de fonética. Quisa el 'e' es "el fin del principio" de un otro sentimiento.

3. Ich habe auch eine andere Frage: was ist Heideggers "always already" auf Deutsch? 'Schon immer'? Wenn ja ist "always already" ungleich 'schon immer'. Ich glaube dass wir 'wieder' vergessen: zunächst "schon wieder" dann "immer wieder"...

le 'e' 'ist' always already 'Da'.

d.

Last month and the Sanskrit Svasti

I felt like greeting the sawasdee when I walked into the Thai restaurant last week. But I didn't.

The Sanskrit Svasti or the Kuna octopus creator, the sun wheel in Sintashta (Russia) in the bronze age, the Iron Age designs of the northern Caucasus (Koban culture), in Azerbaijan, of the Scythians and Sarmatians, the city of Troy and in the ruins of Pompeii, in Greco-Roman art and architecture, Romanesque and Gothic art in the West, Ganesha sitting on a bed rock of them and the evolution of the universe, in every yantra, a manji of the dharma inscribed on the chest of Gautama, of Jina the seventh, Empress Wu of the Tang dynasty, the Navajo for whirling winds, on the drums of the druid drums of the Sami, Svarog in slavic mythology, a celtic engraving here in West Yorkshire, on the northern edge of Ikley Moor, known as the Swastika Stone.

Last month the US Navy announced it would spend $600,000 to "camouflage" a barracks at the Naval building near San Diego, so that it would no longer resemble a "Nazi swastika" from the air, observable over google earth, the same reason the sacred symbol of the Navajo is no longer a part of them. We choose to remember the one imagery that lingers. What the Nazis did to Jews, das Hakenkreuz must have done to its ancestry.

I now know why Sawasdee left my lips, along with every other who still allow one nightmare to overpower every other consolation of beauty, representation of light and embodiment of truth, here in ungoogleable Earth.

d.

the real

we cannot quite pinpoint the real, unlike what we can do with the artificial or the hyperreal. The real can only be imagined and the artificial can only be real.

reality is a reification of the real.

d.

note to proV

i couldn't forget what you've said about the only one sense we have: the touching eye. i want to refine that in terms of the mouth, that which i was trying to explain to you at c. de Engelbewaarder. you were right about Falk. he is 'into' the mouth and has talked about the eating community and the notion of the eating eye. But it is not the eating eye which he alludes to which is essential, it is the seeing mouth: the reason why every kiss is sealed with closed eyes. if you remember that one postcard which no one with a decent palette would glance at. the mouth that consumes the other mouth, together, is the 'return', the congelation of the universe.

d.

experience

the snail on the window was sliding ever slowly downward when i saw it. how it got up to my height on the window pane was something i couldn't quite imagine; why it went up was something as inconceivable as the dragonfly that posed for dead.

they say that even death is an experience.

d.

on abjection

d: Would you consider all the girls here to be beautiful?
x: Of course!
d: Well so do I. Now would you consider me to a man?
x: But of course!
d: And a typical man I am; and like all men, I’d wish to jump into the pants of all these (beautiful) women. Can you acknowledge this fact?
x: For the sake of this argument, ok.
d: But I don’t jump at them. Perhaps due to my social inadequacies aka loserhood, but mainly due to the fact that I have been armoured by the Eliasian psychogenesis: I have learnt how to define disgust, champion it and defend it. I use disgust to isolate it, trap it in its order so I can be disgusted, thus protecting myself from it, and in so doing, protecting you, protecting them….

d.

Der Telefonanruf

Yesterday I have killed my cock for you. I use a long knife and I cut the head off. It was still alive for 5 minutes. Tomorrow I go to my friend’s place. He has 5 cocks. I catch the most beautiful one for you. He will sing for you zu Weihnachten.

Conversation over the phone with Pit Rüppell about poultry culture in the Kirchbarkau backyard.

d.

Liquid Love (quote Bauman)

The kind of knowledge that rises in volume as the string of love episodes grows longer is that of ‘love’ as sharp, short and shocking episodes, shot through by the a priori awareness of brittleness and brevity. The kinds of skills that are acquired are those of ‘finishing quickly and starting from the beginning’, of which, according to Søren Kierkegaard, Mozart’s Don Giovanni was the archetypal virtuoso. But guided as he was by the compulsion to try again, and obsessed with preventing each successive attempt in the present from standing in the way of further trying, Don Giovanni was also an archetypal ‘love impotent’. Were love the purpose of Don Giovanni’s indefatigable searching and experimenting, the compulsion to experiment would defy the purpose. It is tempting to say that the effect of the ostensible ‘acquisition of skills’ is bound to be, as in Don Giovanni’s case, the de-learning of love….

Zygmunt Baumann in Liquid Love.

my name is charlie

someday i'm going to tell the 3 beautiful women in my house who i really am.

color

what kind of synchronous nature would warrant all the males in a 'communitas' to wear trousers of the same kind? or rather the type which we can identify as the same, say what is not-jeans. or what is of the same drab, the hue army uniforms are constructed of, the liminal somewhere between olive and muck.

in the name of anti-racism there is such a entity in universities known as faculty of colour. it is probably more creative than our streamlined trousers, definitely more sexy, and unlike ours, it cannot be burnt. A was looking down like rapunzel watching the fire, but her hair wasn't burnt because it was wasn't blonde.

at a point it looked almost as if T's trousers would have been the first to be burnt. But the photograph saved the piece of fabric by taking a picture. Or was it the other A's comment to 'apagar el fuego'?

¿pero cual es el color del fuego? lo mismo lo que los pantalones.

se puede apagar tambien el color.
d.

america

the reason for the break. a reminder of those dusty road trips, the envy of a truck driver i was, running those 12hour a day rides, but this time it was different, i had the cow fur cowboy hat to replace my lost cow phallus, a set of shocking red dice dangling by the rear view, and company on different occasions to set the clock ticking. no bombs to explode, relaxed, and i'll remember you.

road side ad that ran about 200m apart per line:

a man a miss

a car a curve

he kissed the miss

he missed the curve

Burma Shave

and that was on route 66, took it all in, the grand canyon, bryce, zion, monument, grazed them as if it was like a dream, until las vegas, where you need to be told that. i was trying to explain the hyperreal to the few who didn't have tubes stuffed up their noses, didn't torture the chairs they sat on in ways undeniably, or didn't have to echo the world their everyday conversations on a hike in the canyon:

"gee did you see those things on the ground?"
"sure as heck i see them. beautiful i'd say!"
"we must be be going back to nature or something!"

wasn't it on george carlin show where he said that when you're born, you're introduced to a freak show, and in america, you get front row seats.

d.

statice

I realize why it is taking me so long to settle down here, or anywhere for that matter. It is not about not being able to adapt to a place. On the contrary, it is about being too adaptable to the point where your somatic metabolism will not allow for the regularities of a fixed and static momentum. The more adaptable you are, the harder it is for you to stay put. You seem uncertain when you might need to move again. It is like a fate you cannot resist, a call that you know and you want at the same time. The half way house is when you find that compromise, until the postponed adventure.

d.

An ode to fuzzy cow on the nameless bicycle

In two days I would render an end to my mourning. My fuzzy cow radar on my bicycle disappeared. It wasn't always a radar which could detect the most beautiful girls in Leeds. Sometimes it worked as a burglar alarm, at other times, a handy gratification to D. who took it most eagerly, C. whom I forced, A. who kept gazing and speaking about it and A. who was trying to correlate it to our 3 minutes of discourse on life every time we meet. It was the insignia the Rover or Royce would be envious of, the uni-directional wind flapper, the erect tail in the front, the metonymic cow that stood English rains, the velvety phallocrypt which extrapolated (and protected) my essential design, the Koteka for which this piece is dedicated to.

It is funny how a broken hanger I found on the street would be fetishized, commoditized and valued in a way that warrants its being stolen. I suppose I can give myself credit for leasing it a new life. Perhaps someone else may objectify it in a different way which could lend itself to "Good Stuff" as M. would say in Geordie. But in this country, 'stuff' is also sexy, it is also about filling, fulfil(l)ment and pushing it in, containing its limits. And once the can is full, you roll it into the brook and wonder about its existence underneath with tampons (I saw a used one on the way to the bicycle box) and condoms (I saw a broken packet in B.'s bicycle box).

That is why I decided to honour B's proposal of using the bicycle box for the period when she is gone. At first I was reluctant because I thought I would grow accustomed to the luxury. But I also realise that we take holidays rather than live holidays. My bicycle (which I am still comtemplating if I should name it, because every moniker comes with greater attachment) deserves a break, and you would of course allude to the powered relationship, which is true. As true as the fact that I ride it and I decide when I ride it, the way the Oak covers the dandelions on the other side. Perhaps until there comes a point where it decides to ride me, I'll welcome that possibility.

d.

Rawling

It is true that I live in a pseudo-gated community. But my room also faces the forest, and from where I sit to write, I see only rustling trees and the ubiquitous squirrel. And in the nights if I remember to listen, I would hear the running brook. Being at home looking at my white wall with a red hose, a Sri Lankan map, a wooden crutch, a Takraw ball and an old record with a pink elephant, tea is immensely pleasurable.

extreme

Amongst the distinguished people receiving honorary doctorates this year at Leeds Met, are two familiar names for me. Shilpa Shetty and Zygmunt Bauman. I seem to be having problems conceiving the contradictory identities.
d.

heart or love?

It struck me when M. remarked about the 'I ♥ Leeds' T-shirt that we gave to A. For me it was always 'I ♥ Leeds'. I wasn't sure if M. was playing with the phrase, but it wasn't the first time I've heard it being mentioned in the UK.

Love is signified by the heart which is signified by the symbol of the heart signified by ♥. Perhaps it is because of the difficulty in dealing with the multiple semiotic layers that culminates in a modern simplicity: I Amsterdam.

I Leeds
I say,
d.

objective communitas

There is some 'stuff' about all four of them,
Can O'Beans, Dirty Sock, Conch Shell and Painted Stick,
after they 'became' alive in the cave,
after the orgiastic cry of the woman,
after being written about by Tom Robbins in 'Skinny Legs and All',
as they traversed trans-America in a semitic voyage.

Conch Shell and Painted Stick 'became' sacred relics (albeit a long long time ago). It means that they exist for the sake of posterity, the consumption of them presuppose their longevity. The can of baked beans and sock are consumed in a manner which culminates in their non-existence. For dirty sock, unless it is relished as a sentimental keepsake at some point in time, its depreciation usually endorses its disposal. And in the case of the Anglophonic staple, it is a one-off.

When the Can was scraped and damaged in an animated frenzy, was there any pathos to the fact that it didn't 'die'? Or that its initial animation and embarkation on the journey was a revelation of a death defying escape, that unlike the others, it had a shelf-life, that it only existed so that it could die? How did the champion of all the other gladiators who is rewarded with a new lease of life become also a philosopher?

When Andy Warhol did Campbells, all his cans were intact, useful and ready to be consumed. They were also displayed with the potential of being slaughted. Their lifeform (or its mimesis) being represented on canvas in a museum was a memory dedicated to their end, like in the pictures of all the exterminated vicims of S-11 in Phnom Penh.

content

the bus driver wouldn't let the lady onto the bus because the rules are that only one pram be allowed on board. she said it was one pram. he said there were 2 youngsters in the pram.

it was a double pram, but is that more one pram or two prams?

i suppose content precedes form today. and i wondered if i made any sense during closing remarks?

d.

everytime

i see charlotte everytime i'm at o'neills. she's looking at me everytime i piss.
there.
d.

before and after carmina burana

to smell it again
like the one on the way up Hume
the condom you forget to discard

they smelt it in pain
a truth reconciled
with evidence of the flower

on the way back again
i smelt another
and i found the leaves

i will seek d. from russia on monday
d.

twice carmina burana

There is a time between twilight and night,
where you see the world in black and white,
a gray scape that moves faster than the clouds.

the white balloon flew by the white violinist,
it didn't have a black bow tie,
and i am writing on a gray cloud.

d.

the naked trumpeter

i keep talking about him eventhough i haven't met him. and i wonder what i would say to him if i glimpsed his dangle. the imagery and its myth is perhaps something which intrigues me more than the person,
he who blows his trumpet
blowing his horn
(be)llowing himself
d.

Really fake ID

It was one of these things you had to do on Khao San in Bangkok. While wearing your T-shirt that read ‘bad Bush, good bush’ (which mismatched your fisherman trousers and Rastafari hairdo) and savouring your cheap Pad Thai, you wondered the appeal of:

1. a UN driving licence
2. an IPA pass as a journalist
3. an International Student Identity Card

Option three gave me the possibility to believe in God, that there was divine intervention in my longing for the fountain of youth. My sacred self made me born on New Year’s Eve with an age where I could still ride with discounted fares on National Rail.

It lets me pretend to be a student despite being a student, like a clown pretending to be a clown. It is (un)real and you will probably find it in my wallet after its expiry date on my birthday this year.

(150 words exactly)

Moustache Brothers T-shirt

I am not so much a collector of T-shirts as I am a collector of the ‘essential’ touristic product of a particular place. On khao San in Bangkok, T-shirts have a special role which seem to parallel my subliminal essence of being both exhibitionistic and provocative. But what happens when everybody wears a variation of its form? Its meaningful representation is displaced by a coded identity; my identity of having traversed the region as a bag-packer. I decided not to speak of my T-shirts illustrating the hare humping the duck or the difference between good bush and bad Bush, but one which expels a different message in Myanmar.

Based in Mandalay, the Moustache brothers are a traditional dance and bawdy comedy troupe with political affiliation in the wind of Aung San Suu Kyi. It is no surprise that Lu Zaw and Par Par Lay were arrested for disseminating seditious ideas through their jests at Suu Kyi’s abode during her house arrest. Now that they have been released, the brothers have been advised that their performance appeal only to tourists.

Suu Kyi advocates the boycott of tourism as it is seen to endorse the military junta. Ironically, it is through tourism that the rhetoric of the Moustache brothers is reproduced in countless magazines all over: the message being simply that the Moustache Brothers exist. It seems that their very being is a voice against the governing regime.

The Moustache Brothers honoured me with the same seat that Suu Kyi sat on when she first attended the performance. I wonder if the angle from my seat was the same as hers when I returned the honour by buying the T-shirt thereafter.

(id)entity

imagine a torpedo coming straight for you. if you looked carefully, its a black circle, like the kind you find in the 'yellow submarine'. there is a way out, or rather, a way in.

PART 1: three blondes and the naked trumpeter

N says that he is seen in the woods between headingley and us.
L, whose room it faces says that she is going to install a set of binoculars by the window.
A is going to have her labrador over in a week.
I say that i could walk the dog naked.
L is going to be in her room.
A exclaims the not-needing-to-worry as the cars in the poshy hood outflash the cars in front of our garage.
N feels that the woods see but don't shout.
I say that you could at least say that your car was stolen by the naked trumpeter.

part 2: two germans, a french and the un-naked theft

my sentimental commitment was that the bicycle was one which i sold her. M claims that i did it so i could sell him the bicycle. they actually wranggled the entire vertical metal piping to steal C's bicycle.

B announced that both the pipe and the bike are gone.
M mused to break the pipe is to steal the bike.
C decided to steal a bike and break his pipe.

perhaps, but
he/they was/were un/naked,
i am pretty sure.

Part 3: post-larceny

it is true that i have a story now about my wife, my boyfriend and his husband.

green

Great Hall is now Gandhi Hall, a coincidence that Amitabh Bachchan and Shabana Azmi would probably have noticed as they received honorary doctorates from the university. I wonder if hints of green would be woven onto the convocation drapes to mark royalty, and to commemorate the most green university in the UK. I suppose Bollywood is here to stay and I have no absolutely no qualms about this, afterall, I did choose my chesty cough mixture because of the colour of the box. Meltus, it is called, so pleasant is its taste I would even consume it the way I did Cod Liver Oil. It is with a week of this dosage that I didn't need to cough myself to sleep last night. I awoke this morning and the rain has finally stopped after some days, a wee indication that midsummer madness tonight is a possibility.

about the kite runner

m told me about it. really i have at least hundred titles on my to-read list, journals, books, fiction, classics, academic and the lot, but i wanted to honour her for this read. in doing so, it becomes a landmark for me to begin my onslaught of "reading", my structuration amidst this idleness of flaccid torpidity, my self examination of a necessary renewal in this not-so-new place. i will finish this read in a single sitting, a single longish day, absorbed and uncoerced. this is the challenge for me, and a present for you, m.
d.

“I feel like a tourist in my own country,” I said, taking in a goatherd leading a half-dozen emaciated goats along the side of the road. Farid snickered. Tossed his cigarette. “you still think of this place as your country?”
“I think a part of me always will,” I said, more defensively than I had intended.
“After twenty years of living in America,” he said, swerving the truck to avoid a pothole the size of a beach ball.
I nodded. “I grew up in Afghanistan.”
Farid snickered again.
“Why do you do that?”
“Never mind,” he murmured.
“No, I want to know. Why do you do that?”
In his rearview mirror, I saw something flash in his eyes.
“You want to know?” he sneered. “Let me imagine, Agha sahib. You probably live in a big two- or three-story house with a nice backyard that your gardener filled with flowers and fruit trees. All gated, of course. Your father drove an American car. You had servants, probably Hazaras. Your parents hired workers to decorate the house for the fancy mehmanis they threw, so their friends would come over to drink and boast about their travels to Europe or America. And I would bet my first son’s eyes that this is the first time you’ve ever worn a pakol.” He grinned at me, revealing a mouthful of prematurely rotting teeth. “Am I close?”
“Why are you saying these things?” I said.
“Because you wanted to know,” he spat. He pointed to an old man dressed in ragged clothes trudging down a dirt path. A large burlap pack filled with scrub grass tied to his back. “That’s the real Afghanistan, Agha sahib. That’s the Afganistan I know. You? You’ve always been a tourist here, you just didn’t know it.”

Hosseini, Khaled (2003) The Kite Runner, Bloomsbury: London. (Pp214-215)

behind

i'm actually rather proud of this "rabbit fucking duck" t-shirt i have from thailand. aside from all the attention i get in pubs and such, and the numerous conversations which ensue from it, it seems to exemplify the provocative "me", the jester wannabe, the hyperderelict. perhaps the only problem with it, i thought, was the "wrong" placed directly below the image.

some days ago in london, i saw a "rabbit pHucking chicken" for £15 (i got mine for the equivalent of £1), and my first association was instantaneous identification. and then it started to rot on me: what kind of rabbit would pHuck a chicken? Or rather, under what kinds of contexts would a rabbit pHuck a chicken, or a chicken allow the rabbit to pHuck it? it had to be experimentally manipulated or coerced in sublime ways, artificial to the value made to an exactitude of pH neutral. you see, except for the jungle fowl which survives for the most part only in the asian eco-systems, the general we have assumed the pHucked chickadee (not to say that the chicken couldn't be enjoying itself/herself, if it could actually experience such) without its accompanying trademark of displacement. good lord gallus gallus domesticus in a laboratory with a deprived bugs (do you know that there is a theory that bugs bunny was gay?) coming from behind, perhaps placed behind a screen with an illusion of another wabbit's behind (it doesn't really matter now whether it was male or female) at its behind, to protract the infamous insertion, with a subtle rub-off like in any good animation of that prevalent membrane, to produce the hyperreal postmodern condition.

a stroll along st james park (or say a piece of green with some water some where, say in england) you will find squirrels scurrying up your hand and jumping off taking their place among the mallards, mandarins, pochards, pintails, widgeons, shelducks, tufted ducks, gadwalls, teals, shovelers and goldeneyes, but even 007 wouldn't find you the wild chicken. unless of course we go behind the scenes into the sexual dimorphism behind playboy bunny, say hef the man contemplating ambivalence and humping rocky gibson, the RAF chicken runner. ceteris paribus, i'm sure the ride would have been wilder with a more-than-willing gaucho in duck soup.

did i say i liked my rabbit fuck duck: they're wild, and natural.