all in all, i’ve spend 12 hours at uni today, printing the flyers that are my contribution to the lounge that anna is putting together. they came out quite nicely, and i even have some numbered copies that you can buy instead of food!
oh, and if someone could massage my poor back, that would be super.
hannas exhibition was well received, and it was fun watching some children trace the lines on the wall, asking their parents what it was all about. the parents said that it was a map of who had kissed whom. if those children only knew.
before coming to the show, people were quite upset about the whole thing – a sense of privacy and betrayal tainting phonecalls, emails and sms-s that was telling that the idea struck a chord with the memories of people you’ve woken up next to and rather not advertise as knowing you intimately. once there though, most people found it interesting and rather harmless.
there’s another exhibition coming up in a few days, and washing the walls of the ink is a slight pain in the ass. not that i’m doing that, mind you; i’m fervently trying to get my shit together and render the video from my mfa presentation. i’ve been looking into building a render farm for the home, and that would kick ass, but as usual i’m more interested in that than i am of actually using it, so there you go.
oh, and in case anyone in my audience has the same misconception of flossing as i had, let me set things straight: flossing is something that you should do not only when your teeth hurt and there’s blood involved, but might be a good idea to add to that daily routine that people are talking about. goddamit i ended up butchering my own mouth.
Marriage:
My friend Mirjana got married on Saturday. It was a short ceremony at city hall. And by short I mean really short. Less than one minute in fact. The halls were full of couples getting wed, and they were all processed on a conveyour belt (not really, but sort of):
In the image they have just turned their heads as the man doing the ceremony sped by like a small and quite fast japanese car. Do you? Do you? You’re done!
He even managed to include an aphorism about love that had us scratching our heads for a while: “To love is nothing, to be loved is something, to love and be loved is everything”. I think he liked the rhythm of “nothing-something-everything”. If it was “something-something-everything” we wouldn’t have had as much trouble parsing it as we had.
All the best to Mirjana and Dimitri on the endevour. Yay you! Etc.
Masturbation:
I was innocently browsing the internets for images of cute puppies and things that would make my mom proud when I stumbled upon this art porn site. I’ve been suggesting to my friends that we should get in on this neoporn thing while the getting is good – there has to be other ways of turning people on rather than showing the same worn out cumshots – but since I’m not a very prolific porn-surfer I haven’t seen much of this new-wave porn but rather heard it thrown around a bit (mostly on high profile blogs like boingboing.net or violet blues’ tinynibbles.com).
It’s videos showing the faces of people helping themselves to a handful of loving. All the pretentious stuff aside, it’s very onturning. Oh, and if you click the image and subscribe I might actually get a free months’ subscription. help me help myself, so to speak.
Mortality:
I was on the phone with mom the other day and she told me that a kid I grew up and went to kindergarden with got stabbed to death on new years eve. His name was Samir and during a fight outside a party he and some other people got knifed. I haven’t found any accounts of it (there were a few stabbings in Stockholm on new years), so I don’t know what happened.
He was living in the apartment building across from my moms when I was in grade school, and we would have fallouts because we both were stubborn. The strongest memory I have of him was when we were in afterschool daycare and after a spat I accidentally threw a baking pin in his face (the handle came off while I was waving it around), forcing him to visit a hospital and get his forehead stiched up. I recall being quite frightened at the small trail of blood leading to the bathroom where one of the grown-ups cleaned up the wound.
I was too engrossed in the taunting and ostracizing I was experiencing at school to consider if I was being overly mean to him (he was two years my junior I think) but I might have been. Anyways. RIP Samir
Melvin:
Mark Melvin came by to visit us gothenburgians, and it was much appreciated. I missed his show cause of the marriage but he did get a small telegram (with picture!) in the national/local paper about the exhibition.
Yes, he usually covers his face whenever being photographed. I don’t know why. It might be because he doesn’t want any bad images to appear on any blogs or such. Too bad I have enough decency not to show the image I have of him doing the face he always does when frustrated. Damn shame.
There’s a term for searching for misspelled things which I don’t recall. Since I’m the only “Mateusz Pozar” out there I searched for variations on my name (people tend to get it wrong), and found this:
It’s a collection of shorts Leonard Palmestål did a while back. He asked me to do the filming for one of them, and I haven’t seen the finished result until now (Mateus Pozar is credited for filming.
I like the way he’s solved subtitling, and althought it’s acted kinda over-the-top, and dealing with a heavy topic a bit too easily, it’s neat. Sort of coffee and cigarettes and a gun.
If you want to see the subs properly you need to click this link, cause I had to shrink the film to fit it in the blog.
Back in GBG after a few days spend christmasing with family in Stockholm. Lots and lots of food. I now have a, whaddayacallit, jacket? Jaquette? Sports coat? Makes me look all grown up and full of stylish responsibility.
Managed to piss Anna off by vocalising what I guess is my general lack of approval of things, or, y’know, life in general. And at some point you have to pay attention to how you are perceived and act accordingly; Especially if it’s good friends that speak with urgency.
So I figure I might as well give my planned new years resolution a slow start. A transitional period if you will. Last years promis was to “just say yes“. It has worked quite well, and I’m sorta pleased with myself. I haven’t gotten myself into too many strange situations, but I’ve met some new people and had more fun than what I would have had had I not made the resolution. (very convoluted sentence)
I came up with 2007 years resolution a couple of weeks ago when I realised that I am not having much fun, and I whine and complain a lot. Granted, this has always been a mainstay of the Mateusz charm, but it’s gotten out of hand lately what with the unemployment, MFA essay and show. Basically, I’m being boring and bored.
So the resolution for 2007 is this:
I promise to not be bored (and not be boring) in 2007 by combining some sort of effort with the 2006 years resolution (the “say yes” thing). I’m going to use words like “fun” and “awesome” more, and with what I’ve read about cognitive behavioural psychology this will result in me sooner or later actually meaning what I say. You only have as fun as you allow yourself would be the hopeful creed.
• Not wasting time
• Put myself in situations that have funpotential
• “Grab life by the balls” and kick the living shit out of it
;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;:;°
I stumbled upon this “history of religion” and thought that it illustrates both what I was suggesting for a graphical representation of history, as well as the problems and pitfalls:
Making this must have taken quite some time in research and production, and yet it doesn’t cover much at all. It’s extremely general and doesn’t present an explanation of anything, although it gives a good overview of chronology and geography of the five main religions.
Ideally, you’d be able to add to this; edit the relationships and explanations and motivations while retaining the graphical presentation and making it “meldable” with others’ maps and explanations.
Eh. I’ll get back to this when I’ve thought things through a bit. (They have a cia secret prison map as well. it’s odd)
In the mean time, here are two links on “semantic web” to check out. (I interpret semantic web as meaning that the links and relationships between nodes/pages/resources actually become usable for us humans):
• http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com
• http://search.wikia.com/
[both links from todays boingboing.net, because I’m boingboings bitch.
And I don’t know what the deal is with this guy, but I’m sure he has something interesting to tell you:
• nalts.wordpress.com
Somehow related to Ze Frank (whom you should watch and cherish like a tasty cake):
• zefrank.com/theshow.
And for those of you who are lucky enough to read Swedish, this is a very nice blog that lists interesting internet thingies:
• http://betaalfa.polymono.net/
1) Still no job at the horizon.
2) My lip has split again. The price you pay for a full & kissable mouth.
3) I drink too much coffee
4) Caught the great white hope on camera last weekend, but it took me all of three days to find a way for a windows application to convert the fucking 3gpp format, finally settling on quicktime pro:
Also, because of my rather bleak mood of late, I just wrote this cover of summertime: Now, hum along with me:
Wintertime,
and the weather is comparatively easy.
Money’s tight,
and your friends are getting high.
Your daddy’s not rich,
although mom looks good for her age.
So hush little inner child,
don’t you cry.
One of these late mornings / afternoons,
you’re going to rise up and fall back down.
Then you’ll puke all over yourself,
and hope to die
But til that late morning / afternoon
There’s nothing that urgently wants to harm you,
Although daddy and momma might hire a spy.
Wintertime,
and the weather is comparatively easy.
Money’s tight,
and your friends are getting high.
Your daddy’s not rich,
although mom looks good for her age.
So hush little inner child,
don’t you cry.
And to round things off:
* Poor, poor girl. Is it just me or do the terms “bukkake” and “Tub girl” spring to mind?
* Smokey the bear-like artist.
* For some reason, people think that these pictures won’t end up online somehow. Only one way to teach them to behave. Teach them good. It’s turning ever so slightly into that Monty Python skit “blackmail”.
* Tes, this is yet again my cup of coffee. Right now, somewhere, someone, is having more fun than I.
* I created an account on Second life the other day, but the computer that I’m on is so slow that I experience everything as a set of stills. If anyone would try to strike up a conversation with me, I would behave as the total newbie that I am and not be able to answer (most likely cause the lag would be punching the shit out of the computer).
1000 DJs is a group of people at my old school that are throwing parties. Last Saturday there was an exhibition, then there was a party, and then there was an exhibition about the party (“1000 DJs, the fuckup”).
In order of appearance:
* Rainbow. The leprechaun was mugged & his gold spend on crack.
* Lovisa from STHLM doing a move.
* Making this curl took Miranda 40 minutes. Well worth it i say.
* Making this body-tag took less than 1 minute. Inflated sense of “party” might be worth it.
* Now you see it, now you don’t!
* After the destruction derby, there are words exchanged regarding the artistic value of said derby, vis-a-vi the planned two-day duration of the show
* Privacy is hard to come by, but some people are not even trying. Ah, the decadence of frolicking art students.
If there are any concerns regarding the quality of the images and so forth, I’m doing this on a windows machine for the first time, and even though Picasa has some neat features, I’m not as used to it as i am to iPhoto. Plus I’m hung over from the fuckup-party yesterday.
Oh, and later today i’m going co-carting with work and a rival company. Free food, although I suspect that they will feed me pasta and taunt me and slap me with meat.
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?
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.
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,
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.
