the art of being grateful

i came back to ny after three months of leaving, it felt like a quick return. i still feel like i´m assimilating all the things that happened on my last trip. on this occasion it has been more of a mapping of experiences, retracing steps, and moving forward. lingering in the past, but moving on to the present/future.

i received an email from my father yesterday around 2 am here/1 am mexico, he was wishing me a happy thanksgiving, and telling me other stuff. he got me thinking on direction, instinct, and trust; figure out what direction you want to go, walk firmly north/south/east/west, trusting with some strange intuition that life will eventually lead you to the place you need to be.. story of my life, sometimes i have to remind myself to keep gliding, taking the good, learning from the "bad", repeat.

it astounds me how we´re standing side by side so many people on this automatic impulse to move forward, most of us don´t know where we´re moving, we just know we have to wake up and move... what fuels the impulse? why do we want more? what mechanism sparks the one step after the next?
what?
life?
love?
company?
friendship?
routine?
contempt?
it´s this longing to feel alive right? and how we pinch the air for it to react.
and all of us essentially looking for the same thing; integrity, grasping a whole/hole for a rough instant.

it´s so strange to live this pre-thanksgiving buildup after not living it for more than 10 years, my family still celebrates back in mexico and to me it was just some other night where we got together and my mother made pre-christmas turkey, didn´t take much account of it until now and didn´t really understand why they still celebrated it. it felt ridiculous telling your friends that you´re having thanksgiving dinner, and you couldn´t go out. now that i am "consciously" back here, i kind of get it. i´m beginning to observe what it means to so many people. i mean this is the city that makes you move away from your family, it´s the city that makes you fight and squirm to move every which way on your own, where you never actually feel alone because you´re always surrounded, that´s why the loneliness is bearable (the distraction), here is where you can have so many things instantly (all an illusion). the city is starting to feel a bit "empty", everyone´s gone back "home", back to some origin, some place where it all began, the smell, the sight, the surrounding, remembering when you thought everything was possible, a comfort zone.
a second to come back,
another second to numb that out.

a void everyone is trying to fill, swapping cards to see what fits, constructing the puzzle, figuring out the instructions of the map, creating the way, inventing the directions... the city you had in mind.



as i was writing, i let prefuse 73s -meditation upon meditations- play on, a fusion of jazz, idm, and of course, glitch electro, characteristic of mr. scott herren. i think it´s a pretty good instrumental album for cold nights, goes well with a oversize grey knit sweater and a cup of berry infused tea.

on some other note, i´ve been getting comments on how i´m a nice person, i´m not actually sure how this makes me feel... i´m not sure i like being nice, is that bad?... should i be grateful for being nice?

i feel so disperse, i´ve been trying to write this for a while and i´ve been going back and forth from twitter, facebook, cellphone, phone, hotmail, youtube, blogger, gmail, zipeg, some movie on tv, liquor store, shower, joe goddard, prefuse 73 and a couple of four tet remixes.
i´m not even sure if what i´ve written makes any sense or if i like what i wrote, i had to write it... so i´ll hit publish post and i´ll be off.

oceans in a meteor shower

I was feeling pretty good
Thought I finally understood
How to be free, free, free, free
Like the birds, like the bees
Like the wind in the trees
So I went out on a limb
Thinking maybe we could swim
Into the river of light
Into the ocean of pain
Where angels get their wings
Where babies get their names
I wonder if you were aware
How much
You rock my boat
I wonder if you were aware
How much
You rock my boat
I wonder if you were aware
How much
You rock my boat
You rock my boat


it was my birthday this weekend, i´m being very specific, and i´m still pretty much lost in translation, but this could sum it up, except the part where it says:
"Where angels get their wings
Where babies get their names"...
that´s just wayyy too cheesy for anyone to handle, even for one who is sentimental, or dramatic.

god, science, life, death

this quote has been circling my mind ever since i left the airport...

shit turbulence.

it always crosses my mind that i´m going to die every time i´m on a plane, i´m always sarcastic about it because i don´t usually get scared, so i think, "what if this is the airplane that´s going to fall, even if everyone tells you it´s the safest way to travel?", or what if it´s my turn or whatever..
i find comfort knowing that if i do die, my life has been awesome, even if some parts haven´t been all that much, i couldn´t really complain, i feel happy... anyways, way too much melodrama for this blog and for my arrival at my always favorite destination..

so i´ll leave the quote i was talking about in the beginning, it ties into flying in the sky and feeling so small among the immensity of space/time, and at the same time feeling contained in our ever expanding universe.


poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars- mere globs of gas atoms. nothing is "mere". i too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. but do i see less or more? the vastness of the heavens streches my imagination- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. a vast pattern- of which i am part- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. or see them with the greater eye of palomar, rushing apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. what is the pattern, or the meaning or the why? it does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. for far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! why do the poets of the present not speak of it? what men are poets who can speak of jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia be silent?
richard feynman



i love flying.
this is what came along with my ears (gracias a dea & a alex por el regalo pre-cumpleaños.)

making lists

color coordinating my shelves
30 min looking for the right pen
making tea
jumping from one idea to the next
checking emails
writing emails
making tea
starring out the window
smoking a cigarette
doodling
tapping pencil
doing 8 things at once
getting drunk
avoiding the inevitable
not finishing something.....
not knowing how to finish something.

take me to your leader

make me really happy.

blank

count me in for architecture inspired anything..
OMRs opening for the jorge mendez blake´s 3 bibliotecas.

architecture, the space that contains, books, and trees..
such coherent elements in a chain of imperfect ideas.

how fitting to see the clear imposition of the "artificial" in nature.
yet nature returns with such artifice as the death of the author mr. roland barthes so wisely stated in his essay.
the author exists only by his text, there is no author without a text, thus there is no creator without a creation. & vice versa.
all this left in the hands of the spectator.
"readers must separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny"...
i would ask barthes to please give me the formula on how to liberate myself from my subconscious.

art tends to stray far from subtracting the creator from the creation, even if some claim to do this in a noble manner, i have not yet met the artist who has successfully denied his ego, barthes just points us in the right direction.
a process maybe.

another discourse that also came to mind was foucault´s text on the panopticon, blake did these drawings with charcoal picturing a tall tower in the middle of the forest..
the tower, watching over the forest in an "omnipresent" manner, the artificial, the man made, serving as the obliteration of the organic...
the weight of structures constructed upon a space that has no physical words in response.

i saw a full circle assembled in this short but complete exhibition of work; the library, infinite texts that have been written, all sculpted out of a tree... forming an intrinsic, yet subtle whisper of our future movements that irrevocably will have a profound effect on the world around us.

hard to find some type of catharsis amidst the spectators, a note worthy experience, and i found myself, hungover ameliorated, continuing the dialogue in my head...
my head was saying this..
searching for the interesting title, a captivating preface, a pretty cover...
the endless works and words written all contained under a single roof, circular walls forming a cycle, mirror making shapes, sentences waiting to be chosen, or forever lost in the decay of time over a page of once white paper.

a cleaver way of saying everything is giving a book a blank cover..

blake did it right.



GALERIA OMR
Plaza Río de Janeiro 54
Colonia Roma
México 06700 DF
T +52 55 /5511 1179/5207 1080
F +52 55 /5533 4244

Horarios de atención y visita a la galería:
Martes a Viernes de 10 a 15 hs. y de 16 a 19 hs.
Sábado de 10 a 14 hs.

skyscraper

what an adequate name for something.

guilty pleasure

· not sleeping.
· sleeping.
· being a geek.
· finding amazing things for less than 100 pesos.
· taking wayyy too many pictures of sunsets/sunrises/sky.
· having wayyy too many pictures of myself on facebook (thanks mr. drama for pointing that out./ he´s just jealous because he wants more photos of himself).
· over conceptualizing.
· bear grylls.
· hooters buffalo chicken sandwich (best hangover food).
· showering at 1 am.
· dos equis ambar.

"cogito, ergo sum"

chapter 1 of "cosmos & psyche" by richard tarnas quotes descartes, "i think, therefore i am". undeniable building block of western philosophy and origin to a new perspective.. thus spouts forth a 569 page analysis into the understanding of our universe and our existence.
seems like this will be a transcendental and revelatory walk/jog/run into fathoming a complex yet diminutive period of the human timeline.
can´t wait.

in the meantime...
an exert from cosmos & psyche by r.t

preface

skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, santayana declared and the metaphor is apt. the mind that seeks the deepest intellectual fulfillment does not give itself up to every passing idea. yet what is sometimes forgotten is the larger purpose of such a virtue. for in the end, chastity is something one preserves not for its own sake, which would be barren, but rather so that one may be fully ready for the moment of surrender to the beloved, the suitor whose aim is true. whether in knowledge or in love, the capacity to recognize and embrace that moment when it finally arrives, is perhaps in quite unexpected circumstances, is essential to the virtue. only with that discernment and inward opening can the full participatory engagement unfold that brings forth new realities and new knowledge. without this capacity, at once active and receptive, the long discipline would be fruitless. the carefully cultivated skeptical posture would become finally an empty prison, an armored state of unfulfillment, a permanently confining end in itself rather than the rigorous means to a sublime result.

first, the profound metaphysical disorientation and groundlessness that pervades contemporary human experience: the widely felt absece of an adequate publicly accessible larger order of purpose and significance, a guiding metanarrative that transcends separate cultures and subcultures, an encompassing pattern of meaning that could give to collective human existence a nourishing coherence and intelligibility.

second, the deep sense of alienation that affects the modern self: here i refer to not only the personal isolation of the individual in modern mass society but also the spiritual estrangement of the modern psyche in a disenchanted universe, as well as, at the species level, the subjective schism separating the modern human being from the rest of nature and the cosmos.

and third, the critical need, on the part of both individuals and societies, for a deeper insight into those unconscious forces and tendencies, creative and destructive, that play such a powerful role in shaping human lives, history, and the life of the planet.

these conditions, all intricately interconnected and interpenetrating, surround and permeate our contemporary consciousness like the atmosphere in which we live and breathe. from a longer historical perspective, they represent the distillate of many centuries of extraordinary intellectual and psychological development. the compelling paradox of this long development is that these problematic conditions seem to have emerged from, and be subtly interwoven with, the very qualities and achievements of our civilization that have been most progressive, liberating, and admired.

........

cosmological situation today

in the course of the past century, the modern world has both seen its greatest ascendancy and its unexpected breakdown. every field and discipline, from philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics to physics, ecology, and medicine, has brought forth new data and new perspectives that have challenged long-established assumptions and strategies of the modern mind. this challenge has been considerably magnified and made more urgent by the multitude of concrete consequences produced by those assumptions and strategies, many of them problematic. as of the first decade of the new millennium, almost every defining attitude of the modern world view has been critically reassessed and deconstructed, though often not relinquished, even when failure to do so is costly. the result in our own, postmodern time has been a state of extraordinary intellectual ferment and fragmentation, fluidity and uncertainty. ours is an age between world views, creative yet disoriented, a transitional era when the old cultural vision no longer holds and the new has not yet constellated. yet we are not without signs of what the new might look like.

recently there have been emerging from the deconstructive flux of the postmodern mind the tentative outlines of a new understanding of reality, one very different from the conventional modern view. impelled by the developments in many fields, this shift in intellectual vision has encompassed a wide range of ideas and principles, among which can be identified a few common themes. perhaps the most conspicuous and pervasive of these can be summed up as a deeper appreciation of both the multidimensional complexity of reality and the plurality of perspectives necessary to approach it. closely related to this new appreciation, both cause and effect, is a critical reappraisal of the epistemological limits and pragmatic consequences of the conventional scientific approach to knowledge. this reappraisal includes a more acute sensitivity to the ways in which subject and object are mutually implicated in the act of knowing, a revised understanding of the relationship of whole and part in all phenomena, a new grasp of complex interdependence and subtle order in living systems, and an acknowledgement of the inadequacy of reductionist, mechanistic, and objectivized concepts of nature.



_gracias a alejandro por compartir su insight a este libro.

short circuits

on another and less ephemeral note, my fingers, eyes and ears bumped into the bugged out/bugged in remixes by hot chip, released earlier this year. it´s about as random as it gets, ranging from techno, downtempo, experimental, dubstep, calypso, 80s classics, expected r&b, rap, & other additions.
what glues this pastiche all together is hot chip´s almost unmistakable electro sound and alexis taylor´s beautiful honey producing mouth... evidently, not a whole lot of glue.

as 42 tracks poured into my itunes, i must admit i got pretty excited. a part from my brief and vague chat a few months ago with al doyle, telling me he likes INXS and his wife works at commes des garçons, that was pretty much it for 09... i needed more, made in the dark seemed so far away, and haven´t been able to listen to ABOUT...
so i wondered off into hot chip´s psyche. (here is where i would like to point out that i consider myself the over-analytical type of fan that doesn´t get enough with a plain "hot chip is a british electropop band...". but i guess most of you already deduced that.)

i felt like bugged out totally redounds on the instrumental, then gradually and painfully turns ibizaesque (a mistake i tend to do myself on my mixtapes, the instrumental not the ibizaesque part)...
disc 1. finally vindicates itself on its "intermission" (track 13-14) with hot chip´s take it in, then continues on flatlining up until ican´s chiclet´s theme, ending on max cooper´s i.
formula = putting three of their favorites at the beginning, one in the middle and two at the end = everything else has a hard time keeping up.
it begins and ends well, burning in the middle (i´m not referring to the good type of heat, but the bad one, the one that actually makes things turn into ash).
a part from that, no noteworthy punch.
bugged out could be characterized as a DFA/LCD soundsystem dj set, infinite sound alliteration, which made me yawn and if i hadn´t had a bit of peace of mind, i would not have been able to go through with it
what i could say is that hot chip (in this series) definitely has the ability to weave a very long thread and make it seem like it is made out of the same material, you hear the first 24 tracks and each song flows and fits like a puzzle into the next. chronologically shameless. its shame resides in the lack of spark that could make my mind flare (now i´m referring to the good type of heat).

i found the alluring, the aesthetic and admirable on bugged in, a far less club inspired compilation, which to me was the interesting part, it´s all over the place, chaotic and entertaining. totally nerdy, dorky and beyond, a retake on the kinks apeman, was the dork epitome for me.
it still flows, but a creative flow, not the boring and repetitive. seems like they´re making fun of everything. i can picture them doing the whole "i feel so cool listening and dancing cheesely to luther vandross and terrence trent d´arby".

favorites range from the exquisite winter home disco by the pictish trail, chiclet´s theme by ican, nah und fern by gas, which is perfectly layered into the first three tracks of bugged out, (this is the hook, at least this was mine), osborne´s 16th stage, hall & oats classic i can´t go for that, which is a bit predictable, but efficient, cheeky lyrics presented in shake a puddin´by dub narcotic sound system make me love this group, london town by man like me saying "get out your matching moschino´s and your gucci loafers oh/yo...", jaja, biz markie´s just a friend "have you ever met a girl that you tried to date, but a year to make love she wanted you to wait" is priceless. and an inevitable flashback to my childhood growing up in texas with zapp & roger´s i wanna be your man.

this piece of faded wisdom pretty much sums up the remixes.
"i´ll wine you, dine you, and then leave you, all in one motion"
technically 42 motions, and yes, i still want more hot chip.

aetiology

yesterday afternoon, on my way to dinner, turned the radio on to hear a somewhat interesting interview with MURCOF, well to be honest the music did most of the talking.
it happened to be one of those moments when you´re hearing the precise song in the precise moment.
one begins tripping out and all of a sudden the surroundings dilute in a bleached out manner.
the funny thing was that i wasn´t even in "that" mood, i was simply driving, as my head was filled with a ton of involuntary and recurring thoughts.

texture out of sound
texture out of invisibility
touch to the unstructured
structure to the untouchable
abstraction of a reality,
to be heard on a roof.