2008 July: Build your own damn house
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27
That's my cardboard box. On the flap out of view the word "FREE" is written in black magic marker. Graham picked a tossed napkin out of there just before we left for lunch, a sign people would be misappropriating it as a trash can, but when we came back all our knickknack junk had been taken, and then, surprisingly, replaced. Mostly there were long sleeve shirts and fleeces in bold ugly colors, but now it looks like those things are gone too. I only see a plastic bag and don't want to know what's in it.
The day has passed, my lights are off, fog is clogging up the sky and it'll be entirely dark soon. I'm sitting here in a room full of things waiting to be shipped, a bit of furniture to send off to friends, and a few difficult things I still need to pack. I don't want to deal with any of it. My phone broke last night so nobody's calling. Too hungover to think. Thought about emailing the guy I'm dating but I haven't showered and the shower curtain is tossed. So I just sit here. It hasn't hit me that the daily sound of train cars will be gone after tomorrow, or the mumble of people walking past, or the hugeness of the Mission Dolores, which I pass everyday heading westward when backlit clouds are pushing over Twin Peaks. I don't know if it will ever hit me; those things were always unreal. The mover's impulse to take pictures, preparations to remember, isn't strong in this place; I know millions have already been here, and they'll continue to pass through with cameras and weak observations.
This is the only picture I've taken during my last days in San Francisco, with the church out of view, the stop sign cropped, and the street corner looking flat and painted. My scavenged cardboard box juts out like an object on a postcard.
21
Baltimore comes from the Irish baile an ti mhóir, town of the big house. That is where I'm moving.
My friends in San Francisco: if you go to Trouble and tell them "build your own damn house", you'll get toast, a coconut, and a hot cup of coffee. Fuel up with a good breakfast, head to the sea, suck up some salt and bring a blank postcard. I'll let you know my address when I have one.
16
There are framed portraits of the governor in every California DMV. This video was a collaboration between Baltimore artists Jimmy Joe Roche and Dan Deacon for Ultimate Reality.
15
God Chorus
A two minute, one act radio play for four actors.
Opens to the sound of a trumpet sample.
Illustration of Max Stirner. Drawn by his friend, Friedrich Engels.
MARX-ENGELS. (Two actors speak at same time. Fiery monotone.)
Revolution = holy rebellion.
Rebellion = egoistical or wordly revolution.
Revolution = transformation of existing conditions.
Rebellion = transformation of me.
Revolution = a political or social act.
Rebellion = my egoistical act.
Revolution = overthrow of the existing [state of affairs].
Rebellion = existence of overthrow.
HANDEL.
Call it not rebellion,
That thus we persevere in spirit and truth...
STIRNER.
...he would like to cease to be an egoist, he looks about in heaven and earth for higher beings to serve and sacrifice himself to; but, however much he shakes and disciplines himself, in the end he does all for his own sake...
HANDEL.
...To worship God: it is his dread command,
His whom we cannot, dare not, disobey,
Though death be our reward.
Illustration of Georg Friedrich Händel in casual attire. Found in a biography of Händel by his friend, John Mainwaring.
Long silence.
PSALM. (All. Whisper.)
Whither shall I go from thy spirit, whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend into heaven thou art there, if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. If I take wings of the morning and dwell in the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
Silence. Much shorter than the last.
HANDEL.
Whither should we fly, or fly from whom?
STIRNER. (To himself, speaking over HANDEL.)
I take everything as my own, as I set myself to work, and develop myself, only as this unique being. I do not develop mankind or man, but as I, I develop --- myself. This is the meaning of the Unique One.
HEGEL. (Stutter.)
... the task before us consists not so much in getting the individual clear of the state of sensuous immediacy ... but ... consists in actualizing the universal, and giving it spiritual vitality, by the process of breaking down and superseding fixed and determinate thoughts.
14
Haurit aquam cribis
qui vuti sine discere libris
Learning without books is like collecting water with a sieve. A modified version of the proverb was carved above Birks Reading Hall, the library in McGill's religious studies building, where I spent most of my time at the university. Across the hall was the chapel pictured above.
About the album Sung Tongs, Avey Tare said:
We mixed it ... at Noah's mom's place in Baltimore. It was very cold so we had to wear jackets the whole time. We added in all those samples and electronics there. We mixed for awhile so its sweet you like the mixing. Oh and we used AKGs and an old ribbon mike to record with. Though we had a pzm and some sm57s that we might have used as well. I remember using the pzm to record me slamming the door of the house which is what that distorted rhythm track in kids on holiday is. The person talking at the beginning of Who Could Win A Rabbit is someone in a deli in my neighborhood.
In Montreal, before Sung Tongs was released, we had weeks of winter where celsius and fahrenheit met at °40 below zero. And the following winter, in Vermont, when I was through with university, listening to that album on an endless loop ...
9
You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
8
The image is a footnote to Illusions Perdues, Honoré de Balzac, to distinguish cénacle from any religious context. The word derives from the latin cena, "dinner".
I'd very much appreciate a space with a large, communal kitchen, our "upper room", where hearty goodness is offered.
4
James Joyce and Sylvia Beach outside Shakespeare & Company
Sylvia Beach, born in Baltimore, moved to France when her father was appointed minister at the American Church in Paris. She first heard of Adrienne Monnier and her bookshop, Maison des Amis des Livres, in a literary journal; shortly afterward she introduced herself. Adrienne would come to call Sylvia her "fleur de presbytère". Shakespeare & Company was opened with much assistance from Adrienne, and eventually moved across the street from her shop on rue de l'Odéon. Over the next twenty years the greatest writers of the 20th century passed through their shops: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound... Gertrude Stein, I've read, preferred to have her books delivered, but between the salons held at 27 Rue de Fleurus, and the bookstores on rue de l'Odéon, three of the most important M.C.s of 1920's Paris were American ex-pat lesbians.
2
Gertrude Stein lived in Oakland, CA until her father's death in 1891. She then moved to Baltimore, where she met Claribel and Etta Cone, whose Saturday evening gatherings became the prototype for the salons held at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Paris, the future home of Gertrude and her lifetime lover, Alice B. Toklas.
Toklas, born in San Francisco, is more familiar to some of the locals for the inclusion of cannibus brownies into the 1954 publication, Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.
2
The furniture now beings to trickle out.
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