28.2.09

the moon is eleven percent full.
it is twenty one days until spring equinox.

for the last 12 months i have been living in a perpetual reoccurence of autumn and winter
and really looking forward to the movements of spring and sunnier days. oh yes.
"Early one morning in Moominvalley Snufkin woke up in his tent with the feeling that autumn had come and that it was time to break camp. Breaking camp in this way comes with a hop, skip and a jump! All of a sudden everything is different, and if you’re going to move on you’re careful to make use of every single minute, you pull up your tent pegs and douse the fire quickly before anyone can stop you or start asking questions, you start running, pulling on your rucksack as you go, and finally you’re on your way and suddenly quite calm, like a solitary tree with every single leaf completely still. Your campsite is an empty rectangle of bleached grass. Later in the morning your friends wake up and say: he’s gone away, autumn’s coming."
Tamara just sent me this excerpt from tove jansson's book "Moominvalley in November" and i liked it very much.
my sternum is leaking. there is a stain on the front of my jumper.

27.2.09

he poured sugar into the glass not looking at the glass and the wind blew the sugar over the table and the sugar blew over the table from the wind and the sun shone through the sugar.

my digital contribution to oliviers pot luck dinner party.

the archives of rice cakes:
this one features avocado and homemade pumpkin
and onion chutney i made in marseille.

Having an actual human body and being a part of the world would be the primary influence as it forms all perception, experience and therefore action & beingness. Knowledge to absorb, consider and refine what it is to be in this place is ongoing and constantly inspiring. .. Spacious sounds that exist in the mundane and every day ripple through the ears making music of sorts: bird song, car thrum, human working, ocean vast tidal pull (when one has great opportunity to be near the ocean!), silence is a big inspiration.
Emma Bathgate speaking about influences in her singing

26.2.09

25.2.09

gem, rock, earth, air bird.
We did a really great breathing exercise today in butoh.
Lying on the ground focusing on breathing fully with the diaphram,

and once that was working well
,
we had to breath into our legs
and out our heels.

Breathing in raising a knee to your chest, bringing your leg out to the side,
opening the pelvis.
Breathing out flexing the ankle, heel leading, and stretching your leg back into position.
Breathing out through the bottom of your foot.
Continuing with the other leg. continuously.
i found it quite profound.
(the aim is) to be awake in every cell.

i am challenged to take up my own inherent state of self sufficiency. All i need, truly is, within. And within I must not so much go, but that within I first must be. As the next word comes forward, as the next direction becomes available, again space collapses, time becomes irrelevant... in the moment, as I honour whom i truly am...[this] honours all those around me.
Adam Davis

24.2.09




In a hill on the weekend I did a photoshoot with Naomi Jean O'Sullivan, infamous percussionist extraordinaire who among many other things performs as part of the groups Shima and La Force Molle. It was a flurry of composition, instruments sounding in the wind and a thousand photographs as the light was fading.

23.2.09

listening to moondog,
quiet and tired but ears wide open and awake

slipping fingers, and random shutter.
i found these photographs,
taken between consciously composed shots.
bearing reminiscence to
ultrasounds.
maybe not from the sources
you've poured yours into
maybe not from the directions
you are staring at
twist your head around
it's all around you
all is full of love
all around you
bjork
'walk with the space camel'
while i was in marseille i went to a harmonic singing class and a body percussion session with a choir, learnt about stop motion animation, found many good bookshops and nices places with cups of tea, cooked a lot of dishes with many different kinds of cabbage and had some really good formative and motional conversations.

22.2.09

20.2.09

19.2.09


experimenting with rudimentarily adding colour to my drawings digitally.
it will be exciting when i figure out how to animate this kind of thing.

just messing around with a texta on some beautiful plates Cisou found at a flea market. this might go somewhere. we talked about gluing them to a wall with tea cups, also, glued on, and some paste up drawings of old ladies seen from above. yes, such a good idea.

18.2.09


rice cakes in the afternoon



text because it is necessary and feels good even if it lacks poignancy and adjectives.

17.2.09

and in a breath i fell in love with everyone in the fruit shop.
i didnt even know their names but we all smiled and i bid them au revoir and
continued walking down the street with missing sidewalks, plastic bag of vegetables in hand.
and somehow that night i managed to make the most incredible tasting dinner.
like it was so good that several times in the meal, everyone stopped eating just to savour and really appreciate how good it was.
I walked and walked
uphill
out of the city at sunset

listening to an old bob dylan record in my head,
I walked and walked until the feeling in my chest freed itself,
I walked until I felt like it was time to retrace
the line of my
movement.

I sat down in the park and ate the sandwhich that i’d bought.
It tasted very good. Then something happened, something difficult to describe.
Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I know,
a feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I’d never known before,
or had always been waiting for, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it was something I’d forgotten or something I’ve been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness because I felt alive. Yes, alive. That was the moment I fell in love with Paris. And I felt Paris fall in love with me.
text from the film Paris Je T’aime

15.2.09


some prototypes and experiments im working on

14.2.09

I spent the whole afternoon in a bookstore, my eyes and hands racing, as I tried to read everything but in a meticulous and thorough manner. I came back to things that I liked time and again to read and absorb further. There were many hand constructed limited edition print press screen-printed hand bound books. Eventually I left and when I left, I realised that I had always been dreaming of finding bookshops like that one.

13.2.09


I found this awesome typography pasted up on the street.

virtual |ˈvər ch oōəl|
• Physics denoting particles or interactions with extremely short lifetimes and (owing to the uncertainty principle) indefinitely great energies, postulated as intermediates in some processes.

This week Ive been learning how to make stop motion animations with Tayeb (ms poivron vs ms ciel).
Here are some production shots from Camille's amazing short film involving a galloping horse (aided by suspension) and storm clouds (seen hanging). I was just an onlooker, ingesting inspiration.
this morning as i was waking up i was cooking in my head, which is very normal and happens most days, but today i was cooking in a incomprehensible manner with non-descript ingredients, well they werent exactly non-descript but i was completely non-commital and couldnt decide exactly what i was using in my cooking and some ingredients were starting as one thing and then changing part the way through into something else. and so the dishes didnt really come together and i had no clear ideas for cooking anything in particular.
and so i didnt eat breakfast and then eventually cooked something in the afternoon. and when i started cooking i had no idea and improvised my whole way through the cooking process. ending with things that i wouldnt have thought about had i been thinking. whole ideas built themselves up around nothing, and then one ingredient and then another and eventually there were a few little bowls of things. that came together in some way but not through consciousness of composition or pre-conceptualising, but from travelling spoon (or knife) first in the kitchen.
a large percentage of today has been in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning up the dishes from cooking. currently i have a cake in the oven and i think it is possibly the strangest cake i have ever made. im not sure if it will work.

11.2.09

photograph with words: feather boas, old books and plastic roses, love letters written and delivered with hired theatrics. a small wire birdcage, bags overflowing with vegetables and the sun is shining, the sun is shining.

a man with amazing mustard coloured overalls on has an actual real pot of hot soup inside his backpack. inspiration.
thinking about photography part #770: how to know when photography is useful.
sometimes the logistics prohibit photos from being taken and often too many photos are taken that need not to be. i often have a strong desire to photograph a moment that is very beautiful or poetic or strange or geometrical, and it can be hard to let go of the desire if it is unfulfilled.
at the same time an overwhelmingly large quantity of photos that i take are never again looked at, and the entire purpose of the photograph is in the process of connecting myself somehow with what is going on, allowing my focus to settle. Or if a moment is too fast to look at it properly, a photo lets me hold onto the fleeting longer, and somehow piece together my memories that never really existed.
So the question is: how to exist in a moment when you cant photograph it?
To let it really sink in, for all of you to be present in the full sensual experience of it and not document it, but to breathe it in and let it go.