brooklynometry

ultramarine

2009-12-28T10:11:00.004-05:00

Upon the face of the deep

2009-12-25T16:37:00.003-05:00

Frozen Hyperbole

2009-12-24T22:49:00.003-05:00

"That winter, men's words froze in front of their mouths and hung stiff in the air. Brimstone Bill, who was a great talker, was frozen in by a solid wall of words all turned to ice. Paul had to chip the ice from around Bill's shoulders, tie a rope to him, and have Babe pull him out." –Paul Bunyan, retold by Adrien Stoutenberg

Thanks for tolerating the Tall Tale interlude. Greetings from Rhode Island and Merry Christmas!

blanks

2009-12-24T10:19:00.009-05:00

Leaving the house yesterday morning I wondered about the set of keys I'd lost weeks ago, the set that contained the best cut of our house key, the one I wanted copied to make a key for the pet sitter. Funny to find the lost set while leaving the school, right there tacked to the bulletin board. I must have passed by the same spot at least 10 times before realizing that those were actually my keys. I always assumed they belonged to someone else. Profound stupidity or miracle or both?

Walking down 8th Ave in the afterglow of this strange good fortune I heard odd squawking and looked up to see parrots, the shock of green naked in the cold air. I wanted to follow them to the carnival.

Prospect Park, Dec. 20

2009-12-23T16:01:00.002-05:00

Rededication

2009-12-22T16:22:00.008-05:00

Among the strange things I noticed today, the menorah at Key Food frozen in time, still marking the 7th day of Hanukkah, and while I waited to cross 15th St a car topped with a menorah made of pvc tubing drove by, and this menorah marked the 7th day of Hanukkah as well. So back to the 7th day then. I'm glad, because Hanukkah ended too fast. I know, its not an "important" Jewish holiday, I know, this miracle has been debunked, the stunning event was not the miracle of self-multiplying oil but the fact that the Maccabees were able to rehabilitate their temple so quickly after it had been sacked. The celebration consecrates the act of rededication, an act of will, an act that can happen anywhere at any moment inside anyone's skull when one makes it a temple, when one dedicates being to the unseeable and unsayable, to the infinite mystery occurring symbolically in the nothingness of the void that hangs between the tips of angel's wings. But we can spice it up with fire.

One night we watched the candles burn for a long time to try to hear any stories they might tell. One flame burned astonishingly tall, twice as high as the others, and seemed to split its tip into three sections so that it resembled a little spirit dancing as it reached its arms up to heaven. It did that dance for a very long time, surprising us with its growing height again and again, with this brave display of the will for transcendence. The little flame danced a remarkable performance, I have to give it its due.

double mary

2009-12-22T12:05:00.001-05:00

full tilt

2009-12-21T21:08:00.006-05:00

The light that entered the camera left the exploding strata of the hydrogen giant only 8 and a half minutes before the shutter opened to recieve it.

porkmanteau

2009-12-21T09:57:00.009-05:00

There's plenty of practical things I need to do now but I'm caught pondering the graphic that accompanies the discussion of the 2009 buzzword 'aporkalypse.' Is that really a Sri Yantra on that plate beneath the pig? Is someone going to get offended? Where did that image come from? Will this aggregate's appearance at the top of the Week in Review augment or detriment the mandala's reputed ability to rake in cash, allaying the Grey Lady's financial troubles?

To accompany the pigmanteau, a tiger-pig I was compelled to make yesterday posing in front of the Eye of Providence. To lead me to think about the transmutation of material desire into works of imagination, I guess. Dream guiding dream. Pigs fly!

Gratuitous pancake bearing crescent moon burner branding. To keep the piglets warm.

brooklyn alluvion

2009-12-20T08:57:00.003-05:00

Soft Loves Spikey

2009-12-19T12:19:00.004-05:00

8th Ave Hawk

2009-12-19T09:06:00.010-05:00

I noticed the hawk because of the loud cry that sounded like a squeaky door being opened one way only, the same sound being made by the door to the armory that it was perched in front of. Perhaps the door had called it there. My friend and cohort K believes that to humans, angels might look like flocks of birds, an idea that happily escaped the suppression of my literal mind and sunk deep to the core, every flock's passing, a laying on of hands. And as wild and brutal as this raptor is, its proximity created the sense of having witnessed and been blessed by the perigee of a heavenly body. The mercy of the beauty doesn't come without the wildness, and in its presence it already feels as if those claws have instantly seized my sense of the banality and decrepitude of life and savagely shredded until all I can see is the latticed luminosity of the hills and the stones and trees and all the slow and fast work of nature.

calligraphy and blow torch

2009-12-18T09:54:00.006-05:00

Spectral tangine; several people report sightings of the ghost dog in the house lately. I haven't seen it for over 8 years. Woof, Boo! If I've been stepping in ectoplasmic dog crap all these years, it certainly hasn't befouled my boots.

Around Carroll

2009-12-17T17:42:00.006-05:00

My lens has been scratched for a while now, a piece of beach sand got in the closing mechanism I think and scratched it repeatedly. So now I always get a little extra something when I shoot into the light. Too bad it's nothing supernatural.

The trees at top are either Pagoda (Chinese Scholar's Tree) or Eve's Necklace. I still haven't managed to discover the difference between them. Excellent names, either way.

On Hapless Humanity

2009-12-17T12:48:00.020-05:00

Daniel Meeter lights a fire of love in this post. Burn it again, while self-righteous people rip each other to shreds about how to save the world. We're going down with this ship, even while we're obliged to try to save it, the question is, will we go down with contempt or affection and generosity? We cannot escape the insecurity and vulnerability that are our best and worst aspects even as people butcher each other emotionally or physically for impossible resolutions to suffering and unattainable epistemological certitude. I would love to see the pastor's fire of acceptance for miserable, disastrous humanity spread and engulf even the anger that so many of us feel towards each other and ourselves for being a part of sinking this ship. I've only seen a similar fire in the writings of Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron.

Maybe it has something to do with ideas that surface in the following passage from Walter Otto's Dionysus.

He who begets something which is alive must dive down into the primeval depths in which the forces of life dwell. And when he rises to the surface, there is a gleam of madness in his eyes because in those depths death lives cheek by jowl with life. The primal mystery is itself mad–the matrix of the duality, the unity of the disunity, ..The more alive this life becomes, the nearer death draws, until the supreme moment when something new is created–when death and life meet in an embrace of mad ecstasy. The rapture and terror of life are so profound because they are intoxicated with death. As often as life engenders itself anew the wall which separates it from death is momentarily destroyed...Life which has become sterile totters to meet its end, but love and death have welcomed and clung to one another passionately from the beginning.

Did you Ear?

2009-12-17T10:32:00.014-05:00

Just when I was really starting to dread the onslaught of the same old tedious Christmas carols I realized I'd been sitting on the answer for about a month, In the form of Do you Ear What I Ear, a Christmas compilation from Ear Farm and Let 'em In Studios. So far my favorites are "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear," a cover by Goes Cube that completely grants the pathos of Edmund H. Sears moving lyrics a proportional treatment; "Welcome Christmas" by Mancino, still a steroidal prescription for any Grinch's heart. Fah who foraze, baby! My tenderness for the sweet stateliness of the Tom Tom Clubs "Il Est Né" encourages me to find the best in another round of creed sanctioned resource and soul exploiting fulfill-my-every-desire consumerism. Best of all is the fact that Ear Farms is donating 100% of the proceeds from the recording to a very promising charity, The Association to Benefit Children. HELL YEAH! Rock on Mike and Matt, these tidings of joy are welcome indeed.

If you are interested in further details, here's the press release:

It's here! After a slight delay, EAR FARM and Let 'Em In Studios are thrilled to announce the release of Do you EAR what I EAR?, a holiday album for the Association to Benefit Children, available NOW as a digital download exclusively on EAR FARM's Store Page for a suggested minimum donation of $5.00.

Do you EAR what I EAR? features original and classic holiday songs from Tom Tom Club, Asobi Seksu, Sean Bones, Sharon Van Etten, and many more, and all of the proceeds will go directly to the Association to Benefit Children, an outstanding New York-based service dedicated to permanently break the cycles of abuse, neglect, sickness and homelessness among disadvantaged children and their families. Awarded a four-star rating by Charity Navigator, ABC carries out this mission through a series of compassionate, sustainable, comprehensive and integrated services. They are a charity near and dear to our heart, and we’re grateful to have rounded up such a vast array of exceptional people to help them out in a season that’s all about giving back.

The album has already received advance praise from Pitchfork, The L Magazine, Consequence of Sound, and more, and we're delighted to finally share the result of nearly four months of inspired collaboration and efforts with everyone.

response to recent events

2009-12-17T09:13:00.000-05:00

Coppers

2009-12-17T09:07:00.004-05:00

A harvest of pennies awaiting pickup in the school office, an anxious canine awaiting her master's return. I place myself among these on the basis that a boy in my daughter's class has taken to calling me "Ginger" whenever he seems me. His parents seemed concerned about his transgression, but I could find no offense in it.

Wheat Field with Cypress Trees

2009-12-15T16:59:00.013-05:00

I found a Van Gogh poster in front of The Montauk yesterday and laid claim to it, which meant having to climb over the old iron fence while choreographed by the building's super. The poster was one of those things I felt I saw before actually seeing it, maybe because Van Gogh quotes kept turning up all day. For instance, I must have read somewhere that for the artist there were 8 kinds of white, but I felt like I dreamed it.

Before now I never considered that Van Gogh painted sound, silent sound, his landscapes ring like gong hits. Perhaps when he cut off his ear the silent sound had gotten too loud, or perhaps he meant to loan his ear to someone who badly needed to hear the ecstatic tremoring of all things.

Because of an innocent oversight on my part my son was upset while we walked home from school, carrying the Wheat Field with Cypress Trees. Somehow the idea of silent sound inflating all things managed to keep my internal organs, and perhaps my brain, from being overly flattened by resentment and hopelessness, as is often the case, and his sorrow and anger, once dispersed, was totally and completely gone and replaced by an unusual calm and sweetness. Perhaps we'll hang the Wheat Field in his room, and hang Van Gogh's eye on my ear.

Exiled Thoughts

2009-12-15T08:48:00.013-05:00

Yesterday I learned a new song, "Die Gedanken Zindt Frei," (Our Thoughts Are Free) at a temple Chanukah gathering. It grew on me, and I always feel super cool whenever I learn any Yiddish. The woman who taught the children the song demonstrated the freedom of thought by highlighting the enclosure of the skull, going around to children, pretending to unzip their skulls and read their thoughts, then condemn what she found in there. I enjoyed her presentation, she proved once again that when someone's creative or discursive impulse veers towards bodily imagery depth and discovering are greatly enhanced. Discursive references to the body reunite mind and body, which far too easily wander apart. The rediscovery of the body is a rather hilarious thing, I've often felt surprised and relieved to find it still there, to rediscover the vestibular intimacy of the body itself and consciously appreciate its role in shielding, to some degree, one's autonomy from the various kinds of bloody power games people have played throughout history.

I was quietly free to think to myself that in fact our thoughts are not free, completely. There are thoughts which many dare not think, thoughts exiled beyond the edges of the domain of tolerable ideas. There are thoughts imprisoned in the realm of the unthinkable. Can you believe, there are thoughts a blogger might not even write on her blog! But unlike the heretics killed throughout history, these thoughts and ideas cannot and will not go away. They must be reckoned with.

beached

2009-12-14T13:36:00.010-05:00

A little reverie inspired by this leaf curling towards the sun in Prospect Park Saturday morning; it makes me wonder what kind of excitement the beaching of a whale must have caused in a community when times were hard and fuel scarce. What a miracle beyond all expectations the carcass must have been, what an incredible gift from the sea for the hungry and desperate living along a coast in winter. Warmth, fuel, food, tools, incandescence in flesh, all the more astonishing for having been given, not taken.

Recurring Dreams

2009-12-14T08:57:00.025-05:00

My awareness of this motif, a slender needle with an object tethered to it, first emerged from my desire to take a photo of an antenna on 9th st while an airplane flew past, then appeared again in the paintings in an office in Park Slope, images that portrayed some kind of installation in a tundra, polar poles with small white objects tethered to them, then culminated in a mention of the soul tethered to the body in the paper Nicola read last Saturday. Another image that keeps turning up lately, a woman with a gun in her hand. I prefer not to think about this recurrence very much, it alarms me, but I'm beginning to read her as the sign of an important and significant ending, an ending that grants freedom from a dance that was lovely and welcoming but involved certain constraints.

From another perspective one might say that the angel of death, gun in hand turning to airplane, is the avenue of the soul's freedom from bodily bindings, but what I'm interested in is the sun-like gravity of the central, and the way the tethered object, while flying in its orbit, might actually have some experience of freedom not at odds with the gravity that constrains its orbit. For me, the body is not a hindrance, a corrupting pestilence as it was for the anti-material early gnostics and many others, but a temple, along the lines of what Milarepa called a tutelary Deity. The pole our dreams are tethered to. What is much more dangerously corruptible is the zombie-like reacting seen when a dreamer is unaware of her dreaming. If I could ask the angel of death to take anything from me, it would be whatever contorted externality or hyperfocus obscures the dreaming in the first place.

Another recurrence, the word sovereign. I admit I haven't thought about its definition much, but I read it defined as "living law" in one place. From a Taoist perspective it could be said that what is truly sovereign is pushed to the margins by the will to power fueled by insecurity. I'm rereading Arnold Mindell's Dreaming While Awake these days, and enjoying his observations about "not doing." I don't think anyone could better explain to me the way of engaging the Tao, the constantly emerging dream, and not only that, he is SO NICE. Canadian?

Also there's the motif of the focus shifted to the peripheral as most beautifully symbolized by an eclipse, a will to turn to what glows in the margins of consciousness, to see what's actually there, that subtle pulse that so easily recedes to the boundary of awareness in these days when reason, rationality and performance are worshiped above all things, obscuring lucidity regarding the sentient ground of being. Living a false life distracted by illusions of power it's possible to feel too much responsibility, and for the wrong things. I too easily forget that I don't create this dream I'm having or the objects within it, it just happens, and if I don't obscure it, I follow it. There's no choice about it, there's no work to do, life can become effortless commentary in The Book of the World, a book that is both subjective and true.

This is probably a mish-mash no one should read, an experiment in dreaming aloud that allowed me some clarification but some would no doubt view as self-indulgent. But it's my observation that those who go around claiming others are self-indulgent might need to indulge themselves far more than they do.

Gravesend

2009-12-13T14:46:00.009-05:00

The gothic romance implicit in the name Gravesend and that of its founder, Lady Moody, seems to beckon exploitation. A little about the Lady forced to Brooklyn because of her taste for religious freedom follows via the Park's Department Website. I didn't see the triangle that memorializes her last night, instead I saw too many of the so-called Christmas decorations that get stupider every year and bring out the tyrant in me. Those super-sized inflatable Santas, snowmen and snowglobes people buy these days, do they really add anything?

Lady Deborah Moody (ca.1583-1659), a wealthy, Protestant widow, left England for America in 1639, and in 1645, settled in Brooklyn. She founded the town of Gravesend, naming it after her hometown in the Old World. Lady Moody became the first woman in the New World to receive a land patent, to write the first town charter in English in New Netherland, and to established one of the first towns with a square block plan in the New World. Furthermore, Gravesend’s policy of religious freedom set it apart from most colonial settlements.

Happy Dia de Guadalupe

2009-12-12T11:53:00.001-05:00

morning prospects

2009-12-12T10:41:00.003-05:00