A week of friendship and statements

Past week:
Friends that are not on friendly terms which makes me feel like a child caught between divorcing parents again, one friend I’m slightly pissed off at, one woman who made my heart go ouch and one woman who might be un-ouching it, while other people have privacy issues with the blog, and I’m slowly but surely running out of money.

Seen in relative terms, I really have no cause for complaints. I’m even coming to grips with some sort of life artistique, in that I might be able to put together one of those hated artist statements.

Artist statement in short: The process is the interesting bit. Learning lockpicking and reading about the esthetic of hate and global social movements seen from a non-west point of view, and fixing our leaking faucet using wax instead of a bought plastic drainpipe.

On the project description of guiltyguiltyguilty.org I wrote that I’d like to be a superhero known as the facilitator, and the image has stuck in my mind. It’s not that I’m only passing on information or helping people find stuff, I like to scrutinize ideas and debate things and even though I often end up going for the lowest common denominator (e.g. ending up in existentialism territory, what with personal morals and relativity) I’m good. Seriously.

It’s not the facilitating itself that I’m into. It’s seeing my behaviour as a valid approach to art practice: It’s not the end product, it’s not the documentation or anything tangible (necessarly) that is the art, it’s the combination of seeking things out and manifesting the combination of those as new queries – occasionly producing a work of art, but not striving towards it.

Actually, this is the closest thing to an artist statement that I’ve gotten.

Of course I could write that i’m fascinated by all the things that make up human existence. But that’s just so lame and filler. There needs to be a boundry of my interests. How about I’m interested in people as a phenomena, but not interested in the people themselves. Is that good enough? That would mirror my approach to an artistic practice, even though it’s still somewhat fuzzy around the edges (and slightly sociapathic).

I’m working on a poster entitled “twenty things i’ve learned from women i’ve been together with in a more or less chronological order & in a horribly simplified fashion”. I’m thinking about going about this thing much the same way i did the relationship evaluation form a couple of years ago: I sat down with different friends at different times and jotted down their suggestions, ending up with a two page questionére.

Obviously, if I’m soliciting suggestions from others, then the whole biographical overtone might seem diluted. I’d argue that it’s more or less stilistic help – most people have had a couple of relationships, and been both the asshole and the one being assholed and all shades of shit in between, and I’m quite certain that barring extreme gender role experiences men and women have similar experiences.

So see this as an invitation to post comments with sentences or sentiments pertaining to what you’ve learned from relationships. Bitter, honest and funny are key words here.

As a sidenote, of course this project was born out of bitterness and an emotional trainwreck, but it’s flexing it’s legs and moving about on it’s own by now, and I’ll want to have this as a finished poster in two weeks time or so. I’m thinking like one of those cabare type posters: Different typefaces, all scribbly and crap, and some hand lettering and my horrendous drawings as well.

The above idea has an imposed time limit because I’d like to finish it before a sell-your-soul art fair in a couple of weeks. The second thing I’d like to do is to finally use those 9GB of xmas songs i downloaded last year. A one hour horrendous mix containing all the songs, running simultaniously but within different freaquency ranges. I did a small scale version of this a while back, and it’s just as nauseating as it sounds – nightmarish low AM-radio type ambient. Just the thing to set the correct christmas spirit, I’d say.

Jolly fuck. Just had another uplifting msn chat. MSN is turning into this goddam minefield. About the only person left in my 40-something list that I’m actually talking to is my dad. And that’s mostly business. I’m gonna bloody print all the chat-logs and use those as a diary. Maybe i should take a hint and fake my own death and start over: Too many things on my to-do list regarding people.

Fun with your body:
I think I’ve lost almost all the subcutanious fat on my legs. As a result, my legs look like they’re bending inwards. Hum. All pain, no gain?

I link, you blink!

Todays sentiments:

1) Yes, everyone and everything is against you.
2) Friends are few and far between.
3) You are born, you live, and you will die alone. Get used to it.

• Findagrave.com: Find out where people are buried, both famous and not. There’s a spyware thingy that might try to install itself on your computer if you’re running windows and javascript (don’t know if it applies to all browsers) that’s emanating from errorsafe.com. Block any traffic to that site if you can, or just use the firefox browser with high security settings.
(version 2.0 of firefox is officially appearing tomorrow, so wait a few days before setting out – there are always some bugs. I just downloaded it for shit and giggles)

• In the usa, tax lawyers have started to patent different ways of managing your taxes. Not tax applications or forms, but the actual combination of tax deductions you can do. Awesome. If i lived there I’d patent a way of breathing. Imagine the money I’d be making!
International herald tribune article here.

Image A) If this is what your to-do list looks like, you might want to act on that.
Image B) If you buy another pack before the old one runs out, you might want to focus on your to-do list instead of smoking.

• Speaking of nothing in particular: Remember when North Korea was trying out their intercontinental ballistic missiles a while back and the western leaders had a fit? How the fuck is it possible for south korea to test an ICBM and I can’t even find it on google.com/news? C’mon people! we know NK is evil and there’s no love lost on Kim Jong II, but do you seriously have to be so obvious?

Hot in here

Most of the interesting stuff I see comes from ads. Prolly cause ads come to me, as opposed to books, movies, art exhibitions, concerts, and so on.

The effect used in this live outdoors ad is an old one (first instance i recall is from nightmare on elm street) but it’s still superduper, imho.

I got this off of reklam.feber.se which is a Swedish site that covers ads and commercials. (i think Bonniers — the largest media group in Sweden — bought them out a while ago, but they still try to be cool kids and manage it most of the time).

Peddling human package material

If sexual innuendo sells, outright sex sells.

Sexpacking.com is a site for clothing company shaiwear.com where they’ve done short porn movies to advertise their wares. Neither the clothes nor the porn is particularly interesting, but the combination is. They also swing all ways, m/m – m/f – f/f, so they are trying to really blanket the demographic.

In the long run, I imagine this kind of stuff really get’s tedius – I mean, all that cock sort of gets in the way of the clothes. Then again, you do want to know how easily those pants slip off in a similar situation, so what the hell? I don’t know. check the link out and let me know what you make of this.

[Found through coolhunting.com]

Abortion n’ stuff

I felt sad all day yesterday. Don’t know why. Maybe I’m not drinking enough, or maybe I’m just in stage three. The list goes: numbness, denial, despair, acceptance.

So to cheer myself up I made a whole lotta food and read late into the night. I’m still reading up on Leibniz for my thesis, and need to send in a synopsis later today. Not a problem. Synopsis I can do.
I’ve been multitasking quite a lot the past two weeks, reading a lot, sketching a lot, making some lockpicks and helped Anna shoot a remake of the bang-bang-bang videos I did three years ago. She’s doing something on appropriation.

And for your reading pleasure: A story about a women who shot herself in the stomach because she couldn’t afford an abortion. I found this story at warrenellis.com, a blog you should be reading from time to time.

Exercise & exorcism

Brilliant party at HFF this weekend. Haven’t bunnyhopped that much in a long time (I was shouting “woooooo-o” as well, which doesn’t happen often) (Although I was drunk, which happens quite a bit) and my legs are still sore.

Re: Sore legs: I entertained the workout habit this morning, and ended up going failure on my legs. Especially the inner thighs are hurting, and a thought struck me: If I keep on working out I’ll be able to get off just by squeezing my legs together. Is that the reason why there are so many guys at the gym? But what’s in it for the women then? A muscular labia?

I don’t recall properly, but I seemed to get rejected by someone, and hit on by someone else. Now, if I could only have somehow combined the two occurrences, I’m quite certain that they would negate each other, resulting in something interesting. The rejection was “Sorry, but i have better judgement than that“, but I cannot for the life of me recall what prompted it.

Half an hour before the speakers were turned off, I ran around using the horrible video function on my mobile. Try as i may I can’t make something out of nothing, so most of it is just a blur and a horrendous screeching sound. (Although the sound is more or less realistic – the volume was above average)

I generally dance like a god; Perhaps a god of destruction rather than a graceful being full of love, but either way I kept the carnage up until eight in the morning and slept until 21:00 Sunday.

Money is the stuff, work is the pimp.

I should:

a) Be working on my quite interesting master thesis that will somehow include Leibniz monadologie.
b) Be doing at least one art-work a day.
c) Be happy to be alive.
d) Write that goddam grant application!
e) Throw a party?
f) Appreciate my friends more, I think.

I should not:

a) Worry about money.
b) Being utterly crushed by the sinking sensation that even those horrible rent-a-worker places might not have any use for me.
d) Consider medical testing or prison a viable solutions.

General mood indicator:

Pity of self —78%
Shame ——–60%
Physique —– Pretty good, getting awesome.

Neat illustration

I’m helping my dad out finding online bookstores, and I stumbled upon a really nice book cover on a Taiwanese site. Don’t know what it’s for or who did the illustration, but I share, I share until it hurts:

The first one to identify the author, title of the book and illustrator gets bragging rights and maybe a handjob some pizza.

The original page is here.

karlstad & back

i blow donkey at keeping in touch with old friends. take albrecht for example: i’ve known him for twenty years and if we ever meet these days it’s cause he’s coming around. ok, fair enough, i’m way more broke than he is, but still. it leaves me with a tad bit of a guilty conscience.

the other week he got his doctorate (doctors hat?) in physics, or rather quantum mechanics, or rather in string theory, or rather, a two dimentional analysys of string theory? seriously, for two hours i sat giggling at the examination – these people use scientific theorems as adjectives fer crying out loud. i understood the language, i understood the seperate words, but i could not under any circumstance (except when they talked semantics) understand what they were talking about.

in short, it was awesome to watch and i’m way impressed by whatever-the-hell ali has been doing these past years. in my head, it’s rewarding to know that there are so many things still to learn, and that there’s no chance in hell i’ll ever learn even a smidgen of that.

my ambition has always been to know a little about a lot of things,i don’t know if ambition is the correct term. maybe predisposition or, well, symptoms of attention deficit disorder. but not to spend more than a month or two researching it . in contrast, ali has been doing this non-stop (as i recall it) since high-school. i was thrilled.

after two hours (ok, two hours was the upper limit of even my chuckling) i left the university and plodded around town for a bit. my date had fucked off on a train, leaving me with a crushed heart, so i proceded to the dinner thingy ali had gotten together. 20-odd people were at the bar/restaurant and to compensate for my mood i used what little i know of physics and made chatty with the people from alis’ university.

once you don’t live close to each other, it’s an odd sensation when you meet your old friends’ new friends. they have a different take on the person you think you know so well, and it’s disconcerning. on the other hand, they were all nice people and i ended up talking politics, radical activism and medical implantations until the bar closed. plopped down on a couch at alis and his girlfriends house (which was more tempting than my original plan of wandering the streets for six hours, wallowing in hate and self-pity and maybe getting into a fight) and was frightened the night through by their two cats that played “tag” on me.

next day: bought a ticket, went to the library and read up on futurist photography, saw a jenny holtz exhibition, sat on a train, then got slightly drunk in the company of friends. all in all, an enlightening trip.