Author: Mateusz

Here be flat country

The other week, I travelled with Sara to Copenhagen for a couple days, and boy is that city annoying when you don’t have a bike. I mean, the distances! The flattyness! The being-run-over-by-bikeiness! Other than that it’s rather pleasant, although the allure of moving there for a bit has diminished over the last couple of times I’ve been there, for some reason.

We stayed with photographer and all-round interesting person Kajsa Gullberg, which was terribly nice of her. Waking up to the smell of newly baked cinnamon buns was awesome, and would have been even more awesome if they’d been vegan; it was the pastry equivalent of cock-teasing. I did get to try oatmeal made with ginger though, which was really good.

I was a bit miffed when I couldn’t get vegan cake even in Christiania, bastion of alternative lifestyles that it is, when both Kajsa and Sara were stuffing their faces with banankage. The baker, probably knowing pretty well the tastes of his largely baked crowd, said he didn’t do vegan cakes “cause they’re crap” and I was this close to whipping out my phone and go all like Instructables Chocolate Cake, bitch! but thought better of it since the muscle-relaxed people behind me seemed rather eager to eat cake nom nom nom.

The city subway is all automatic, allowing you to sit in front and watch the tracks whizz by. Très cool. As an added bonus, any picture you take while in motion will come out as a wormhole tunnel / space anus combination, which looks fascinating.

Almost ten years ago I visited Gothenburg to cover the demonstrations against the EU ministers meeting. On the heels of that, in the fall of the same year, I visited Copenhagen during a workshop with Tone O Nielsen, this time as a participant in demonstrations and walks through the city. I didn’t pay attention to where I was at the time, my retention of street names being piss-poor at the best of times, but when we crossed a bridge and Kajsa mentioned that the building just across the wall was a prison, I realised that this was the place where I had marched with the black bloc, trying to push past the police to get to the people detained the previous night.

The push was half-hearted, and except the attempts at breaking up the demo by the police and their constant harassment, I remember freezing. The walk wasn’t all that long, but we were snaking our way through the city for the better part of four hours, and it was awfully cold. Once we reached Nørreport — iirc — there was collective release of pent up tension, and I felt exalted and happy. It’d odd how much you are affected by something as intangible as the collected stress and resolve of the people around you.

It is by will alone I set the hoe in motion

I’m getting the hang of this whole “gardening” thing. It mostly consists of moving a whole lot of earth a very short distance — usually just inverting the vertical position of a “shovelful” — and exterminating everything which grows there, supplanting the thriving and natural state of things with a chastised vassal fief, creating orderly rows of ambitious homogeny and thrift. A colonialism of dirt, one might say. I’m currently looking for a pith helmet and should anyone volunteer as my “man servant” or “boy,” I promise to be a lenient master and offer perks, such as an abundance of radishes.

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Make: Excuse

You know how it is. One day when you’re cleaning up the terrible mess which is your apartment you find all the bills, reminders and last notices you were meaning to get to, and you yelp a little. Or like earlier today, when I couldn’t find my other glove — I had to leave in a hurry to get the voting done — and felt stupid for not having lost a single glove all winter, and waiting until spring before managing it.

Then again, I later found the glove further down in my man-purse, so perhaps the example isn’t valid. An example which is valid, is my realisation the other day that I have fuck-all to do all summer. Being self-employed, this means I got fuck-all income. So, I set myself to task with filling the weeks ahead with dilligent work and ambition, trying to see if any of my almost-competencies can be harnessed for cash and/or grants.

So far, I’ve managed to code a webpage for the Mateusz Saves project (I’ll post it here as soon as it stops blowing squid balls) and today we had an etching workshop at KKV. I managed to etch my first PCB ever, which was somewhat similar to doing my first photographic print, only more corrosive and smelling of chloride gas.

The purpose of todays exercise was to establish a standard process of making PCBs, and with just a few adjustments — and enthusiastic support for building a bubble tank from some quarters — it seems as if we succeeded. Watching paper dissolve from an ironed-on piece of copper and glass fibers might not be the most exciting thing to do, but it sure feels productive in a sciency-sort-of-way. The stuff we tried printing was the control board for a RepRap, which co-incidentally is what I need for the SUMU residency later this fall. I’m thinking of setting up a table in the kitchen and have the RepRap there, come odours or noxious fumes, allowing for the possibility of the following dialogue:

— Y’know, you really ought to get small holders for these chopsticks.
— Oh, why don’t you describe them to me and I’ll FUCKING PRINT THEM FOR YOU!

Because that is what every adult with a 3D printer dreams of saying, right?

Delusion? Grand!

Most of my projects are solo acts. Attribute that to my inability to work with other people or poor personal hygiene if you will, but I do occasionally try to mix things up, as with Guilty Guilty Guilty a couple of years ago, and again with To whomever more recently. I’ve been mulling over another idea the past months, and right now I can’t do much more without involving other people, so please consider this a casting call for your participation!

I want people to briefly tell the story of how Mateusz saved their life. These stories, three to five minuts long, accompanied by pictures and documentary material, will be printed in a tabloid magazine dedicated to the subject. The publication will be bilingual, so the original language in which the story is told doesn’t really matter, as long as I can get some help translating it into English (or Swedish, and I’ll do the English).

If you know of someone who is good at coming up with stories, I’d appreciate it if you would convince them to participate. I think that the stories will be better if you tell them of this assignment in your own words, rather than have them read my description. They are allowed to be anonymous or use an fake name, and if they don’t want to have their face published, that can be worked around.

I’d like you to take their picture and record the audio of their story, using a cellphone or whatever is at hand. It is the story which is important, and technical quality is secondary.

The resulting magazine will be printed by a commercial tabloid printer, in a limited print run. The prints will be numbered and signed, and if it’s feasible I’ll handprint parts of it as well. Everyone who is included in the tabloid, or has helped making it, will get a copy.

While living in Karlstad I ran a weekly hour-long radio show named Siberia. In one of the episodes I had convinced a friend to pose as a member of a local criminal organization. It was all made as if I was clandestinely recording our conversation, and he was frightfully good. He was so convincing, and was so good at improvising answers to my questions, that I had to break the recording a couple of times cause he was too intense. The experience of having a convincing story told to me which I 100% knew wasn’t true, is still vivid in my mind, and this project is a further experiment along these lines. Using myself is the only way I can be certain that the stories are made up — barring advanced somnambulism on my part — and thinking of Mateusz in third person will make it easier to edit into something coherent.

I’m fascinated by people who — knowing or unknowing — are spinning convincing narratives. Those people make for good story tellers and liars, two moral sides of the same coin, and I’m profusely jealous of their ability. And having people so gifted speak on the same subject, I’m curious in how convincing the manufactured mass delusion would be.

The reason I want people who are not my immediate friends to do this is because with one or two exceptions, they are only slightly better liars than I am, and would make for effect instead of story if they were presented with this. Also, their story might relate to me instead of Mateusz, which would be no good at all. The stories don’t have to be positive, but they do have to be about Mateusz saving their life.

Knowingly being deceived is part of civilised society. As a social function, it is a polite convention which allows us to get by in everyday life. But once we start to acknowledge these known unknowns and act upon them, we can get stuck trying to find our way to something more “real.” By buying into a compelling narrative we can escape the digestive tract of scepticism the natural way: Having pulled ourselves out the ass we can start to believe what we say.

There’s a PDF you can download with some instructions and photos below, but you are not obliged to use it in any way. It’s intended as a help for prompting whoever is telling the story; Although, it’s my experience that those good at making up stories need very little prompting. Download the PDF by clicking here: Mateusz_saves.pdf

Thanks for your attention and I hope you’ll consider participating!

Take me to those stars.

I’ve lived in Gothenburg for almost as many years as I’ve wanted to visit the star observatory in the park, and not until yesterday did I actually go. Bus 60 took me and Sara to the top of the hill, and after a while Olle and Helga joined us at the small building which houses four telescopes and dioramas left over from other, probably upgraded, museums.

At the observatory, a gawky guide shuffled us around telescopes swaying in the wind, requiring constant adjustment to remain fixed on the Pleiades or twinkly Sirius. The stars look nothing like in the movies, and even less like the colour-composite images NASA releases. Turns out that when you’re looking closely at bright dots, what you see is slightly larger bright dots, and even more dots around those. It’s dots all the way, so to say, which was the sentiment of one vocal woman, who exclaimed “you have got to be bloody shitting me, I can see as much in my binoculars at home!” It was a tense moment, and with the exception for a brat who just wouldn’t shut the hell up — his parents resigned to his annoying existence — twenty or so people held their breath, expecting the woman to lay into the poor, bumbling, guide. She was somewhat placated by seeing the Andromeda galaxy.

At the end of it all, we got to see some constellations and their constituent stars, and even got to see a blurry Saturn with a blurry ring. According to the other guide — the jovial one with the nose ring — this popping of ones Saturn cherry is a big moment in any stargazers career, and we did our best to feel properly awed. It was very nice to see it for real, and next time I’ll be in a city with a bigger telescope I’ll do my best to sneak a peek at the other planets. Not buying my own telescope yet though.

Wednesday: a day, well, spend

In any other city I wouldn’t hesitate to move about, but here in Warsaw I have old habits and they are difficult to break. My expensive Apple phone finally became useful with some creative use of offline maps and the GPS, and me and Tomasz managed to bus about with a minimum of confusion and lost time. Tomorrow we’re heading to a barn and then to a commentator for an interview; we’re actually watching the guy on TV right now, and I’m trying to come up with a lighting strategy. Somehow, it’s far simpler to tell other people how to take pictures than to improvise yourself, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out.

The Internets did lie to me as for the weather – I was told, in no uncertain terms, that there’d be 8 degrees and sunny today, but I really should have packed something besides my optimistic jacket. Also, I ought to be a better brother to my brother and get him a present, seeing as it’s his birthday today. (Which reminds me that I missed Matildas birthday three days ago. Oh well, I guess we’re even now)

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We go to country. No, other country

Fridges are ultimate todo-lists, I’ve discovered. I’m going to Poland for a couple of days with my brother. I haven’t been for a while except for funerals, so it’s a good change of pace tagging along to something which is less depressing. I don’t know how I’ll fit all the orders for Zubrowka, but I’ll manage somehow. I might be difficult to get hold of, but SMS ought to work as usual. If there are requests, I might upload video and stuff! How about that!

Nukes, flies, guns and nerds

While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag — I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.

→ Webstock, Bruce Sterling: The Blast Shack

July 18, 2010—California Highway Patrol officers arrest Byron Williams, 45, after a shootout on I-580 in which more than 60 rounds are fired. Officers had pulled Williams over in his pick-up for speeding and weaving in and out of traffic when he opened fire on them with a handgun and a long gun. Williams, a convicted felon, is shot several times, but survives because he is wearing body armor. Williams, a convicted felon, reveals that he was on his way to San Francisco to “start a revolution” by killing employees of the ACLU and Tides Foundation. Williams’ mother says her son was angry at “Left-wing politicians” and upset by “the way Congress was railroading through all these Left-wing agenda items.”

→ Coalition to stop gun violence: Insurrectionism Timeline

Though I never doubted that I would execute a launch order without question, other misgivings occasionally surfaced. We arrested a group of Catholic nuns staging a peaceful protest on one of our launch facilities a few years back. For a missileer who is a practicing Catholic, such a situation brings up questions: If women who have committed themselves to the Word of God feel so strongly about the immorality of nuclear weapons that they’re willing to be confined for their convictions, what kind of Christian am I to sit at the launch switch? How do you resolve a conflict between duty to your God and duty to your country? Who wins, faith or flag?

Danger Room, John Noonan: In nuclear silos, death wears a snuggie

Now Joe and I are good feminists, like our hero, and we believe in rapprochement between the sexes, and do everything we can to encourage it; we’re sweet-natured and respectful of women and big fun on dates (which is irrelevant, since neither of us will ever have another date after Dec. 8). We don’t actually believe that men are irredeemable, and we especially don’t like to contemplate the possibility that there is some sort of surly misogynistic brute deep down inside us, lurking behind all those layers of wit, charm, and sophistication. But that’s exactly what this little thought experiment required. In some weird gender-inverted way it was like being Andrea Dworkin for six weeks. Six long weeks.

→ The Sideshow, Avedon Carol: Interview with Sam Hamm about scripting The Screwfly Solution

Adjustable table: adult rollercoaster

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Last fall I got a grant in order to take some time off, buy some equipment, read a book and hopefully produce some new art. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve done fuck-all since I got that grant except working on non-art related things. What the grant money did get me — in addition to a very nice knife, new running shoes and tights, an unending supply of freshly squeezed juice and some new in-ear-headphones — is some peace of mind and a bourgeois disposition. Just cause I’m not flat out broke, I suddenly felt that getting a stockbroker account was a “sound idea” and it feels as though I’m spiraling into a bad habit which will end up with me crashing at the end anyway, when I’m back to hand-to-mouth.

The new apartment is nice enough but I keep putting off inviting people. I don’t know if it’s cause I’ve still not gotten around to getting a proper lamp in the hall, where the rechargeable flashlight is getting electronically incontinent, or if I’m in a reclusive state of mind of late. I have an adjustable table which goes up and down at the touch of a button, and standing at it I can watch the ferries pass my window, which is nice and occasionally disconcerting, creating an illusion of the whole building moving. I would have liked to have learned the names of the ships by now but they don’t seem to stick. Perhaps I need a diagram.

Earlier today, my barber Hasse told me of a friend of his who, having spent his life and career on land, decided to fulfill his dream and signed on to a ship at the age of 57. He had dreamed of going to sea for all his life, and when he finally badgered the shipping line to give him a chance he concluded after the three month stint that it sucked balls. The moral being that you set some goals for yourself in life, and even if those don’t become fulfilled at least you did some fun stuff along the way, made some good friends and didn’t start a genocide or something similarly awful. As morals go, it’s not that bad.

It means giving, it means taking.

The spirit of aloha is embodied in the friendly and open faces of the locals, who, straining somewhat under a load of 15000 visitors per day, are very accommodating and nice. So friendly and nice, in fact, that they’ll go out of their way to help you. Like for example earlier today, when some kindly fellow helped us unload all our stuff from the car. Without us knowing, or, as my police affidavit indicates, approving all that much.

Getting our car broken into is a lousy way to end a fabulous week, but sooner or later the statistics get you if you don’t get them and leave stuff in the boot at the beach. The valet staff were nudging each other after I told them about it, saying “guess where they got their car broken into! Waimanalo Beach Park‎!” and saying it like that it sounded as if we’d parked at crackhead central. But besides the knowing nudging and general admonition that we “really should’t leave stuff in the car” they were helpful and nice and offered me popcorn. But seriously, I dare you to imagine something bad happening at the daytime beaches, this place is as Disney-pretty as I’ve ever seen. Apparently it’s now made even prettier by someone with a screwdriver and rather petit pink sneakers.

Bonus thought: I wish I had a microscope at hand to check closely what it is that I’m coughing up all the time. The colours and texture are fascinating, even though I’m still bummed about not being able to dive. Let’s just hope that the vertigo passes soon cause I’m mighty tired of being dizzy all the time.