the alchemy of spam

a wonderful flickr photoset of spam one-liners turned into art.


bb you are so the best.

'A great Parcel of Earth is every Year carried into the Sea.'

andrea's parcel journal is wonderful. the first two are out and are satisfying to take the strings off and unfold the brown paper..

in andrea's words:

'PARCEL is a non-profit online journal that publishes innovative poetry, prose, artwork, essays, and reviews. Long poems, collaborations and works from a series are especially welcome. Featured visual artists will be solicited until further notice, though feel free to send queries. Chapbook submissions will be solicited from past journal contributors only. '

here is a poem from parcel 2 by mark cunningham:

[Specimen]

I was going to tell her I never wanted to lose her, but then I lost my train of thought. If you have to go back inside three times to make sure the coffee maker is unplugged, you've forgotten something else. I tried to explain to him that it wasn't ambient if he paid attention to it, but he wouldn't listen. We exhausted all the senses: he touched his eyes and ears, I said, "What?" and he sniffed and walked away.

perfume: the story of a murderer

i cannot shake the riotous perfume of this movie. the chords it played in me are still ringing high and low. it is the most beautiful movie about a serial killer as i think there could ever be. it makes me think of a line from another movie, one from the thirties or forties but i can't remember its name, in which someone says "crime is just a left handed form of human endeavor."

the main character's single-minded desire to preserve scent is really only his quest to capture the fleetingness of beauty in life. born into a loveless existence of squalor, his sense of smell is the only part of him that seems capable of developing to maturity. in other aspects he remains stunted; his movements and expressions take on a feral quality. scent for him is the only form of higher beauty to which he can aspire, as it is given without any exchange of consent. in all other ways he is locked out of the world of exchange between human beings. his uncanny ability to identify and orchestrate scents into inebriating harmonies is precluded by the fact that he has no identifying smell of his own, no sense of a familiar origin. the source of his primary strength lies in his most profound lack, which his strength cannot correct.

isn't it within this tension, between what we have and what we are missing, that all of us must make our alchemy?

"everything has a purpose from which it must be freed" ~dean young

ORIGINAL IMAGES HERE: 1. SANAA, 2. Moth on Light, 3. Untitled, 4. elk

a finely tuned inner world

well, the joseph cornell exhibit at SF MOMA was as inspiring and evocative as i could have hoped. i floated through the gallery rather than walked, increasingly intoxicated by each piece. i saw the real constructions behind the representations i had seen in books, and i met new works of which i hadn't been aware existed. i made my little contacts with a kindred soul. i felt resentful that photographs were forbidden. then, when one of the guards saw me writing in my notebook with a pen, she made me put it away and gave me one of those eraserless half pencils they always give you to fill out forms with. i hate writing with those pencils. they are the stingiest of writing instruments.

one of the works of cornell that i had never seen or heard of was a compilation of his "Goop Joe's Poultry Pages," a charming series of collaged newsletters that he constructed and sent during the early thirties to his sister who had a poultry farm. follow the link to see more of them. the one to the left concerns a watermelon-eating contest. included are "quotes" invented by cornell from the alleged participants. this from the first prize winner, mr p. warts montgomery bildge: "of course there seems to be a lot of glory and tinsel fame connected with winning a watermelon contest, folks, but when i think of the hours my wife will spend with the vacuum cleaner getting the seeds out of my ears, i cannot help but say like the prophet of old; "all is vanity."

compelling and sensuous

'The Double Life of Veronique' cast a deep spell on me. The world of that film is a world like the one i would live in if i could choose a world.

i was also fascinated by the supplemental documentary of the making of the film, in which kieslowski discusses the impetus behind the making of it. i found myself hanging onto his every word. i was specifically taken by what he said regarding documentary as a genre. apparently he started out wanting to make documentaries. but then he realized there were too many areas of life that a documentary couldn't, and shouldn't, cover about human intimacy and the way things are. he said: "you can't take the camera into people's bedrooms while they're making love, because to make love they have to be alone without the camera... to film people's innermost thoughts and emotions that they show to no one, to film that i need an actor, glycerin tears, and a fake death. everything has to be fake to look real onscreen. thanks to all these fake things i can breathe life into my story. it's more interesting in real life but you should never film those things in real life. that's why i don't make documentaries anymore."

i have had that feeling of wanting to photograph someone, freeze the moment of them being in the moment, standing a certain way against the light, holding a certain gesture, portraying some compelling emotion, and then shying away from actually taking the picture because it seemed as if i would be intruding upon the intimacy of that moment that was his or hers, and not mine. kieslowski addresses this in his film and in his explanations about the film's meaning for him. we have to live "carefully and attentively," he says, because we never know how our slightest action may affect the lives of others. this is a sense i have also had, of the minutest ripples that could send me off my axis if they converged in some specific way, of the havoc i obliviously wreak, the chain reactions of which i am a domino. how many strangers' memories am i in? how many people's vacation pictures feature the back of my head? this movie will make you think about these things, and make you wonder if you don't also have your own double, living a parallel life to yours, providing you with a vague and elusive sense of equilibrium that, if you tried to articulate, would come out sounding clunky and trivial.

"I'm not trying to be sexy. It's just my way of expressing myself when I move around." ~elvis presley

the sweetest two trick or treaters this side of tennessee.