Which is more exciting, complexity or simplicity?
Complexity.
Which is more sustainable and healthy, complexity or simplicity?
Obviously simplicity.

Sometimes I wish I could be really asinine and deductive. Apples or oranges and nothing the fuck else!

François Dufrêne obviously had a sense of humor and an incredible distaste for Planet Earth: http://ubu.wfmu.org/sound/dufrene_francois/catalog/Dufrene-Francois_Catalog_01-Kochel.mp3

Francesca Woodman

woke up at 9 AM feeling infernally hung over, desiccated and sore. rolled over, had an entire bottle of water without breathing, turned on chopin's waltzes, went back to bed. super glamorous first day of being 22.

when will we meet again, and where?

Apparently at Tufts we have one of those three-dimensional printers!! Read about it, pg. 77-79 in The Economist for this week. It's outrageous that technology can manufacture and "print" random shit like usable batteries but also medical implants?!

I'm seriously considering forfeiting the post-graduation-get-your-life-together thing and just taking to playing chess and mah jong with those old men in park benches for a couple of years

you wonder what it is exactly about hangovers caused by whatever solid or liquid you had too much of this weekend that make you ask yourself, sometimes, "what the fuck are you doing with your life!". you wonder if it is from the pure shittiness of having everything churn around in you for unforeseeable hours ahead. or, you wonder if the world really is actually out to get you, in every possible way. but mostly you realize that it is the contrast that kills you. you felt invincible, out of your body, flying. and then suddenly you felt like scum of the earth. Being able to juxtapose those two days side by side (ie the thrill and then the hangover) it's almost scary that you can measure the contrast between the two...brain stimulation, brain death. loving the world, hating the world. vertical and moving, horizontal and inanimate. jumpy, slumpy. etc etc

Breton said a LOT of stuff in Le Manifeste du Surrélisme (read it sometime) BUT you think one of the most articulate things Breton conceptualized was what he called "convulsive beauty": you feel extraordinary happiness AND crushing anxiety. You feel a mixture of panic, joy, and terror. The difference in these kinds of contrasts and then the party-hangover thing is that Breton meant that you feel those contrasts simultaneously. You've been thinking about this a lot in the past month or so, the extremeness (for lack of better term) of feeling two or sometimes more emotions warring and colliding inside you. Mostly for you lately, for the past two months, it's been pain and hope. The most difficult thing about convulsive beauty to explain in words like this is that it almost romanticizes reality sometimes a little too much. You don't mean the kind of universal pain that makes you cry...no, you mean the kind of pain which at first is amorphous and numb, and then whose force pushes out so hard that it makes your mind and body feel like they can't sustain themselves. It's not pitiful, it's not artistic melancholy. But then simultaneously feeling a newfound hope bubble up out of nowhere-"We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illuminated and everlasting road." Stride not into chaos...

It's bizarre that you haven't felt these things one after another or in rises and dips but literally, at the same time. Perhaps you've just never actually sat down and thought about simultaneity because it is so human to organize and to demarcate. But simultaneity; that's existence, isn't it?

One last thing, you thought 30 seconds ago about this piece you haven't thought about in a really long time. It's this big, red, semi-cylindrical wax object made by Anish Kapoor in Museum de Nantes in 2007. He called it "Svayambh", which is Sanskrit for that which is formed with one's own energy, self-created. Basically this thing was on a long rail that spanned a good chunk of the museum's width and would move back and forth on the rail, eroding slowly from the process. You don't exactly know what he means by it...it could be anything, really, institutional critique, some bloody history reference, etc. But really you think it's a damn good example that ties humanity and convulsive beauty together. Which is simply that life is that gigantic, red block: emotive, brutal, ever-progressing.

Listening to Flying Lotus..have you ever noticed how a lot of his stuff sounds like there's a slight, membrane film or something like that between your ears and the music?

Paint sound sculptures

Apparently, you can put high viscosity paint on top of a thin membrane you put on high power speakers, and you get shit like this. I REALLY want to try this

here's the article/really cool video: http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/11774/dentsu-paint-sound-sculptures.html

I was on par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again.

Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but the half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. it has always been here. What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail, like this.

This is the snake which uncoiled itself long enough to offer Eve the apple, which looked like this.

What was the apple which Eve and Adam ate? It was the Creator of the Universe.

And so on. Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

-Breakfast of Champions, K. Vonnegut

"Altermodernism can be defined as that moment when it became possible for us to produce something that made sense starting from an assumed heterochrony, that is, from a vision of human history as constituted by multiple temporalities, disdaining nostalgia for the avant-garde and indeed for any era- a positive vision of chaos and complexity. It is neither a petrified kind of time advancing in loops (postmodernism) nor a linear vision of ihstory (modernism), but a positive experience of disorientation through an art-form exploring all dimensions of the present, tracing lines in all directions of time and space." -Nicolas Bourriaud

I became obsessed with him after I read this in an article in Artforum, if you ever feel like exploding read "Relational Esthetics" and/or "The Radicant". Bourriaud is absolutely, wonderfully crazy.

Picture caption: Here's one of Kusama's infinity mirror rooms at the Gagosian, ridiculous title: "Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity". Also, Sebastien Preschoux and his string/light installations.

madness is my mantra

How much time does one spend absorbing? Then how much time does one spend expelling/re-circulating?

I am precariously tightrope walking between a 70/30 ratio this week...no good.