Unpacking the Office
It's only taken me about 5 months, but I've finally started unpacking the office.
There's a reason it's taken me so long, 4 moves in the past 3 years, I'm loathe to ornament any of my surroundings with the slightest permanence.
But it has to be done, there are projects that will require me be somewhat organized, have a desk, a place to work, and so I begin.
The Office, without a doubt, is the coolest room in my house.
First there are the boxes of books. Now there is no way I'll be able to unpack even the smallest portion of the books I'll need, so I go through a few of the opened boxes and pick out a few I think I might need. Unread books command their own shelf. Later, when I renovate I'll fill the closet with shelves and unpack more of them.
There's the printing boxes to be hung and filled with curios, this takes a number of efforts, like me they seem to resist any attempts at permanent installation, after a few false starts they're hung and filled with precariously balanced curios and knick-knacks. There are paintings hung all over the wall, more paintings, pictures, more curios to be dusted and displayed, antlers, clocks, microscopes, rosaries, voodoo and ju-ju dolls, artifacts, fossils, the list is endless. It's like Christmas, unpacking these countless things I'd forgotten I even have.
Eventually it begins to come together. There's about a half dozen boxes filled with papers and notebooks - scraps of ideas, poems, drawings for when I learn to draw (better!), art ideas, treatments for plays and movies. These will be sorted through - one at a time, reduced, notes without illustrations will be ripped from their binding and transcribed - in an equally loose and disorganized fashion, onto the computer. It's psychic baggage, almost 25 years of not-writing to be organized and not-typed onto the computer; it's grueling, this, like moving: To move someone else's belongings requires but trivial time and strength; to move ones own stuff demands Herculean effort.
But there's a vague resolve to get this dealt with this year. This will be the year. Meanwhile I go downstairs, loot amongst the many boxes for the possessions I believe I've mislaid, help to find them and help them to find their place in the office.
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- Category: Miscellany
Vivian Maier, street photographer and nanny
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- Category: Found
Zero
Now it seems like a simple enough thing, the invention of or discovery of zero. And if you're me, where the sum of your bank account/groceries/life savings/investments/ is nil, then it's a logical enough extension to assign it a value. But really - think about it - that point where all quantities become equal - where you can compare all things - for zero apples is indeed equal to zero oranges, and think of how much our current number systems, computing, banking - depend upon the number zero, and maybe you'll realize that it's not such a small discovery. Or invention - (another post - are numbers and their inherent laws invented or discovered?). But as my mind certainly isn't up to fathoming the intricacies and nuances of such accounting, here are a few sites to lead your thinking on:
"Without the notion of zero, the descriptive and prescriptive modeling processes in commerce, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and industry would have been unthinkable."
Link: Wikipedia on the Number Zero
Link: Zero Saga
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- Category: Ideas & Questions
Dear Sword Swallower
I understand your being busy and I would not want your lack of interest to stand in the way of a possibly great working relationship. So I've taken the liberty of continuing the development of your life story in a couple of formats: (let me know what you think):
Having brooded over the circumstances of your injury for perhaps far too long now I've decided the best format to portray it (in film at least) would probably be in a mixed-media animation style, similar to what the Brothers Quay did in "Street of Crocodiles". I've toned the events described to me down somewhat to appeal to a broader audience, substituted the human pincushion for "Bendy Girl" (ah, carnival love, but who has not been a carny would understand) and thought to portray you as a pleasing assortment of fruit (like those old fruit & vegetable people portraits). We'd give you a strawberry beating heart (here we use 2 or three different sizes of strawberry to animate the beating), we'll give you blueberry eyes, a banana body and, well, we'll work the rest out depending what's in season.
The rest of the characters would be papier mache except for the midgets and we'd make them out of clay. Midgets aren't like everybody else, but you know that already.
Anyways, we begin with the tattooed man - he'd be kind of evil so there would be evil music, dark lighting, his eyes would be painted on and he'd have all sorts of weird sh*t written all over his body in indelible India ink. We'd probably have a few different bodies for him as the message would change every time he was in a shot, for one shot it would be all these Celtic braids, in another it would be UPC bar codes, and yet in another it would be bits of fruit posed in all sorts of rude and naughty poses, which would show us that despite being a villain he was a complex and sensitive villain.
Music for him, I imagine the violin and cello, percussive strings plucked with long suspensive pauses, then the sound of breaking glass.
Enter Bendy Girl, made out of rubber bands and licorice and erasers, "wah-wah" music and the sound of bed-springs and creaking as she's forever trying to get his attention and bending in all sorts of obscene directions. She's new to the carnival and is hot for the tattooed man.
And then finally there would be you entering, and wherever you were you'd light the stage with your fruity goodness and conspicuous would be your beating strawberry heart which would foreshadow the impending "accident", if indeed it was an "accident" which I think we should leave to the viewers to interpret as people love to puzzle over that sort of stuff.
Whenever the tattooed man came near you he'd pluck a piece of fruit off and then eat it so we'd have to imply your romance without having any great animated love scenes or you'd be completely devoured, and in any event since he's seen the bendy girl he hasn't been his usual doting self.
For you, the music would be like that of a summers day, and wherever you walked in the sideshow (between the magicians chests or the dog-boys pen or between the cages with the origami unicorns and paper tigers) there would be a beam of sunlight and the sound of birds singing, as that is how I like to imagine you.
Now that's as far as I've gotten with the Animated Story of your Life, but I've also done a short treatment for OYR's "High Performance Rodeo" - Freakshow bit, which involves you sitting in a freight elevator on a crimson swathe of fabric, sword protruding from your mouth (hilt only, "Excalibur" written upon the side as I thought that was a nice touch) and a trio of midgets dancing about you. Then they would stop and it would be your chance for a speech:
"aahghhhhghh kkkkasgagaga agagagag" you'd say, then the first midget would say:
"Who would pull the sword from the stone and be king?"
"I think she wants a glass of water" would say the second
"Fie, there are no kings here" would say the third, and wave dismissively at the audience.
Then they'd keep dancing around you a bit longer and you'd say:
"kkkaaaagagagagaaaaaaghhhhhagh"
And the midgets would stop dancing and the second one would say knowingly and touching the side of her nose:
"The show must go on"
Then they'd begin dancing again and now it would be your chance to grab the hilt of the sword and begin to pull it out of your mouth, a huge scarlet ribbon attached, unending (symbolic of the fountain of blood issuing forth from your insides) and you'd say:
"glug glug glug glug"
And the third midget would say:
"The End"
And then the freight elevator doors would close and the audience (outside) would hear screaming and loud banging noises from the inside.
Probably it's too late to get this in this years "High Performance Rodeo" and in any event you seem to be too busy, but next year, next year could be our year.
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- Category: Unsent Letters
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