(from a conversation with Kevin, Phoebe , Nikki and the city in general)
Tired ot Tourists
I am now wary of the idea of the Tourist and fear the traps of being a dilettante. Smooth experiences reinforcing the beliefs that maybe Belize is about the sand and the ocean, the NY is about the Grid and LA is about sprawl. All boringly true.
What is a tourist and what is its opposite? I propose a tourist is one who experiences an expectation. A vision of the world that is already stale with repetition and stinks of boredom.
"Have you been to [insert it reference] in [insert vogue location]?"
"You haven't? its fabulous. The [insert it-dish] is to-die-for."
Conversations scripted by Zagat and Yelp and the Lonely Planet and gobbled up and chewed on and spat out. An experience structured by someone elses and filled with empty synonyms, propped to life with other actors who smile sparkle and dazzle. I smell the smoke but see no fire.
How to Be A Ghost
How you draw the world is how you see it. How you see it structures how you experience it. When all the buildings and clothes and programs and ideas in the world look the same, feel the same, work the same, doesn't this mean.... everyone lives the same life? How boring. When all the experiences collapse into each other,
Progress is a violent lie.
A ghost is a spectre from another world. An inconsumable, drifting mystery. Through the ghost one views alternative snippets: a different posture, a different conversation, a different reality.
Ghosts are perspectival tools.
Through ghosts, we understand lies so we can construct new ones. Self-conscious lies, freed to construct its own responsibilities and agenda and understands the boundaries of its agency.
These boundaries oscillate between free horizons and the understanding that maybe all we do is construct material worlds and structural skeletons.
Lie Alone
Ghosts are alone in a crowded world. It is a personal journey to offer up a different world: one must live it before one can share it. One must dream it with the freedom of an artist but record it with the precision scientist.
Beauty is a premonition of another world.
An Atmosphere is when you gently circle this world, a faint inkling of how it feels and might be.
I construct beauty and atmosphere through words, pictures and colours. A simple 2-dimensional representation of a desire.
An atmosphere can be built up into a collage, found objects cobbled together to try and build a spatial scaffold. At this point, textual words must be forgotten, and the material becomes a language. A silent conversation through the hands.
Trust the process, it can later be reverse engineered. Trust the gut.
Machined Insecurities (Landmines to Ponder)
Too much consumption too little production, I said 2 years ago. Too much too much, too little of the little.
Too much of my ranting too, might I add.
But I fear I am driven more by anger and frustration and less by passion and desire. I oscillate between the two and I despair when I realize my misplaced anxieties. Keep calm and carry on, give yourself goals, or in the absence, give yourself boundaries. Respect them.
Today a visit to the ITP left me slightly jaded. A ton of energy and bravado, but headless soldiers marching on in footprints they aren't aware of. More and more, I think the point of a graduate program is not what you learn, but who you learn from. Knowledge is malleable and easily transferred and absorbed. Experience less so.
When I am dead, I would like to send my family (this includes non-blood brothers) on adventures to open their minds. To John, bring my ashes to Los Angeles and scatter it into the ocean. You will stay there for a week and everyday bring a new stranger to the coast and tell him a story.
To Kevin,
I despise the comfortable familiarity enjoyed with friends. I despise that I enjoy it, and I fear that I cannot not enjoy it. Sadly I am sometimes human.
On my death marker it will read:
"Finally Human."
Ghost
. Kool-
-Spend a few months in Belize
-Visit a Monastary
-If dead, send friends on adventure
- MORPHOSIS