¨The thing about writing now is there isn't shit worth writing about anymore. Even for a journalist. Sure there are bombs exploding everywhere and cars crashing into things but to write about it is to be in denial that the world is shit and so are people, then you just give it worth. Just be fucking glad you have all of your limbs.¨
This was a conversation I knew I shouldnt be having in case it went somewhere weird as most political conversations do with strangers but I was kind of lonley and glad to have somebody younger to speak English with who also listened to the cure. So, I figured, over tall cans and smokes, I might as well humor the arguement and give it a lazy 85° weather kind of go.
¨Shit well.. I dunno,¨I began to answer, ¨I write because I have to I guess. I like documenting things. I think it's important to write about the world and where it's going. Besides I started writing when I was super Young. I'd write weird short stories about celebrities or cartoons on t.v. and like, bizzare comics when I got an idea of what sex was. ¨
¨Hah! That is bizarre.¨
¨Yeah. Then it became a thing of necessity. I thought about death a lot eventually and I had to write about it to make sense of it in diaries I had.
¨Bon, voila! My point there, you wrote about shit and death. Cowardly death at that, what did you know? You were only a little girl! Hell, not even God's shit is worth writing about.¨
¨Which is technically, what? The world and his people, right?¨
My beer was getting warm and my stomach wasnt satisfied with the part of baguette I had, but again his good looks and well enough company kept me in this weird conversation. He claimed to be from Paris but I was skeptical because it is July and he should be on a beach somewhere in the South, according to what many have told me about Parisians. His misery had me humbled, though, in my pursuit of inspiration. It's not everyday you meet a real nihlist anyway.
¨Ëxactly! ¨
Ï think I write because I'm an artist.¨ I said.
In that moment I realized how buzzed I was in the heat.
¨Ha! Well what you sound like now is a stupid existensialist. Besides, what makes you an artist? Do you make money?¨
¨¨No.¨
Äre you good?¨
¨Not particularly. A little, yeah. Not classically, but as my friend said, I make a 'valiant effort'¨.
¨Shit I say. It's all shit. There are too many of these so called artists around to make any of it important. They're all fucking Coca-Cola ads and shitty pop album covers.¨
¨Yeah that might be a little true.¨
¨I could take the biggest fucking planet sized shit right in the middle of fucking Invalides and still it wouldn't- Actually no I take that back entirely. That would absolutely be worth writing about! Could you imagine? HAH HAH HAH!¨
His laugh sounded like several painful grunts, loud and sharp.
¨There you have it then. You proved yourself wrong.¨ I argued.
¨Non, madamemoiselle, I am never wrong.¨
¨Shit there's my bus. I'll catch you around maybe.¨
¨Oui, peut ètre.¨
I sprung up from the curb, slightly disturbed, and jumped on a random bus that had stopped across the street. I had no idea where it was going.
I didn't care.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Monday, July 14, 2014
The universe - How?
¨And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?¨
Today is Bastille Day. My aunt and I went to the Eiffel Tower Plaza to watch the most impressive fireworks show I've seen next to the time I ate mushrooms on the Fourth of July on the beach at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. La Toure Eiffel suggests the the tower is a woman and tonight, even in her steel stillness, she danced in colors, lights, and fire to the sound of opera, symphony, and at least a million people. And then, if it couldn't be anymore beautiful, a shooting star lit up behind the explosions.
Last night I met a bartender whose family is from the town that my family is from in Guatemala. The village is tiny. I smelled terribly of tobacco and smoke but she liked me well enough to give me free drinks and refuse my tips. Tre belle.
What strange part of human engineering did the universe mistaken to have given us minds that miss other minds? Im surrounded by decrepid monsters of beautiful buildings that don't themselves have minds at all but instill both depth and intimidation on my drunken strolls about Paris. Perhaps that is where ghosts come in. Walls catch light of prefuse moments in time and trap them there to reoccur continually in odd forms. Do those haunted walls miss somebody?
I've been reading Mark Gonzales' book ¨Boken Poems¨. One of the first stories is about how he was grounded by his parents once and his homies called from a party to brag about how some chicks invited them to a party and the World dudes were there. The next day he goes out skating and runs into the same dudes who ask him to do a trick for them. His breaks his foot doing so and is told he wouldn't be able to skate anymore. Crock'a shit that was right?
I've had three people insist that I let them borrow it. I hope they enjoy the chapter called ¨Poetry is for Pussies¨ but for sure not until I am finished with the book. One of my friends didn't even know that he wrote at all.
Anyways, I took the book from Everyday. I was there a few weeks back when I noticed the book in the bathroom. I always knew the book was there by the colors but never by the image on the cover, not particularly striking me at all. I began to read it but stopped to watch Spacely get caught up by the boys who wrote him off a ticket for skating (fucking rat bastards) so I left the book and swore to return simply to keep reading. It only came to one more visit to the shop right before I left and I decided that I couldn't continue without its influence- so I took it with me to Paris. I know, I know, fucked BUT IT GETS OK becaaause...
All right, so I had the book in my bag when I met up with this most certainly pleasant skater and artist Corrine or as everyone calls her Coco. I told her about the book and even showed it to her. She took a picture of it and posted it. Leaving the subject we then continued to drink at this punk bar called UFO bar and counted the shots the bartender was taking. By the end of the night we calculated that she must have had at least 15 by the time we left, leaving our certain number at 10 to use the bathroom and watch the world cup match. We got smashed with her friends while things got very German out as people paraded the streets. We left the bar and walked by the canal where I met this group of babes I'm setting up a shoot with. We stayed at her friends apartment by the canal. In the morning we woke up all in party scum like good fashion- still drunk, fully clothed, me passed out in some weird side room with just my belt off? Fuck, so we stumbled out, went to my aunts where my tia bought us helluv pastries and made us a good coffee set in her studio. We talked about the book again and how I'd be sure to finish it as quickly as possible to let her borrow it. Coco flipped through it a minute, then again switching subjects, and in a couple hours shes was off to the train to go back to her house in the 11th.
Normal right?
After a failed attempt of visiting a cemetery outside of paris and an interesting pass through Paris' Chinatown district (so good) I arrive back at the studio to a message from Coco in a screen that was
all ready up...
COCO: Guess who I felt into in the metro (she meant fell.. so cute..)
I imagined perhaps a mutual friend or someone we were with the night before.
I click her page and lo and fucking behold...
SHE POSTED A PICTURE OF MARK MOTHER FUCKING GONZALES AT A PARIS METRO STATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LIKE......... REALLY?????
Fucking A... What seemingly impossible beauties this world is capable of. Endless floral possibilites.
When I went to explain to my aunt the gravity of gravity and that of the moment, I pulled out the book and looked at the cover much more closely.
Pictured is a hot pair of lips and below it a frame of an Airfrance airplane. I flew airfrance straight to Paris from San Francisco.
I had never even noticed it before.
*******
I have always loved that sentence...
Endless floral possibilities.
Endless floral possibilities.
Endless floral possibilities.
Today is Bastille Day. My aunt and I went to the Eiffel Tower Plaza to watch the most impressive fireworks show I've seen next to the time I ate mushrooms on the Fourth of July on the beach at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. La Toure Eiffel suggests the the tower is a woman and tonight, even in her steel stillness, she danced in colors, lights, and fire to the sound of opera, symphony, and at least a million people. And then, if it couldn't be anymore beautiful, a shooting star lit up behind the explosions.
Last night I met a bartender whose family is from the town that my family is from in Guatemala. The village is tiny. I smelled terribly of tobacco and smoke but she liked me well enough to give me free drinks and refuse my tips. Tre belle.
What strange part of human engineering did the universe mistaken to have given us minds that miss other minds? Im surrounded by decrepid monsters of beautiful buildings that don't themselves have minds at all but instill both depth and intimidation on my drunken strolls about Paris. Perhaps that is where ghosts come in. Walls catch light of prefuse moments in time and trap them there to reoccur continually in odd forms. Do those haunted walls miss somebody?
I've been reading Mark Gonzales' book ¨Boken Poems¨. One of the first stories is about how he was grounded by his parents once and his homies called from a party to brag about how some chicks invited them to a party and the World dudes were there. The next day he goes out skating and runs into the same dudes who ask him to do a trick for them. His breaks his foot doing so and is told he wouldn't be able to skate anymore. Crock'a shit that was right?
I've had three people insist that I let them borrow it. I hope they enjoy the chapter called ¨Poetry is for Pussies¨ but for sure not until I am finished with the book. One of my friends didn't even know that he wrote at all.
Anyways, I took the book from Everyday. I was there a few weeks back when I noticed the book in the bathroom. I always knew the book was there by the colors but never by the image on the cover, not particularly striking me at all. I began to read it but stopped to watch Spacely get caught up by the boys who wrote him off a ticket for skating (fucking rat bastards) so I left the book and swore to return simply to keep reading. It only came to one more visit to the shop right before I left and I decided that I couldn't continue without its influence- so I took it with me to Paris. I know, I know, fucked BUT IT GETS OK becaaause...
All right, so I had the book in my bag when I met up with this most certainly pleasant skater and artist Corrine or as everyone calls her Coco. I told her about the book and even showed it to her. She took a picture of it and posted it. Leaving the subject we then continued to drink at this punk bar called UFO bar and counted the shots the bartender was taking. By the end of the night we calculated that she must have had at least 15 by the time we left, leaving our certain number at 10 to use the bathroom and watch the world cup match. We got smashed with her friends while things got very German out as people paraded the streets. We left the bar and walked by the canal where I met this group of babes I'm setting up a shoot with. We stayed at her friends apartment by the canal. In the morning we woke up all in party scum like good fashion- still drunk, fully clothed, me passed out in some weird side room with just my belt off? Fuck, so we stumbled out, went to my aunts where my tia bought us helluv pastries and made us a good coffee set in her studio. We talked about the book again and how I'd be sure to finish it as quickly as possible to let her borrow it. Coco flipped through it a minute, then again switching subjects, and in a couple hours shes was off to the train to go back to her house in the 11th.
Normal right?
After a failed attempt of visiting a cemetery outside of paris and an interesting pass through Paris' Chinatown district (so good) I arrive back at the studio to a message from Coco in a screen that was
all ready up...
COCO: Guess who I felt into in the metro (she meant fell.. so cute..)
I imagined perhaps a mutual friend or someone we were with the night before.
I click her page and lo and fucking behold...
SHE POSTED A PICTURE OF MARK MOTHER FUCKING GONZALES AT A PARIS METRO STATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LIKE......... REALLY?????
Fucking A... What seemingly impossible beauties this world is capable of. Endless floral possibilites.
When I went to explain to my aunt the gravity of gravity and that of the moment, I pulled out the book and looked at the cover much more closely.
Pictured is a hot pair of lips and below it a frame of an Airfrance airplane. I flew airfrance straight to Paris from San Francisco.
I had never even noticed it before.
*******
I have always loved that sentence...
Endless floral possibilities.
Endless floral possibilities.
Endless floral possibilities.
Sunday, July 13, 2014
Everything in Paris is goth or too expensive if you want it to be
People said it to me many times back home- ¨Parisians are ass holes and they're very rude. They won't give a shit about you.¨
Thank goodness.
I am so ready and very excited for it. There is a passive aggressiveness that has evolved into something so thick in San Francisco that it was literally driving me insane, amongst various other factors of course . Not that I wasn't overly an ass hole this year, definitely drunk and owing many apologies I felt lazy towards eventually. Still I haven't figured out a way to properly apologize for being psychotic without seeming trite and as if I'm trying to dismiss full responsibility.
At the very least, aside from being an embarrassment to myself, I left the city semi-content and with a printed, published magazine feature for amazing BelleSF, a pending magazine release for Lump Sum, and several hundred dollars.
C'est la vie or whatever the fuck.
Also, I found five euros at SFO during the TSA violations and I drank a lot of wine in first class.
So far in one day the city has been only good to me and I have all ready tried five different kinds of wine. Something to say of people who speak french is they all seem to have the most beautiful lips. The buildings here are old with intricate french framework. You can most certainly tell which buildings were founded recently but they at least take inspiration from a very classic look.
It's raining hard and I have a friendly girls date at some punk bar in the 11th at six'o'clock.
For some reason also, I have been very nervous. Not about the friend date, just about my position in general.
I start a lot of things I can't finish. Comics, paintings, silly business ideas, fights, proposed articles, all of it. Namely because I start new things everyday and I have the attention span of a three-year-old. That I've maintained a room at the 5shop for three years now, only once coming close to burning it down, is an absolute shock to me, as is any complete piece of writing or illustration. This year I had every intention to write out three articles and completing, sharing, and perhaps even publishing one. I started them all, the one about the police brutality case no one wanted to talk about that occured at City College of San Francisco in which several students were injured by SFPD, one about the discrimination case that may or may not have occured at a restaurant on 25th and Bryant that some people talked about, and one about how my mother is the strongest person I know having saved an immigrant from coyote bandits on a last minute emergency trip to LA and a very seedy hotel in Las Palmas- but never finished. The story I would like published is that of my mother's. I noted most of the détails mentally as she told me about what had happened the weekend before in LA while on a trip to northern california; when she rented a car and offered to give me a ride to a valley i won't disclose the name for. That happened in 2011. I'm waiting to interview her again so I can record it. I named the article ¨The Trail of Skulls¨.
My great aunt Maria is wonderful. This is her story of coming to France.
It was 1975 and everyone was making the dash to the states from then and also now politicqlly tulmultous and civally dangerous Guatemala, mostly through illegal coyote routes through the mountains. Coyotes are people who are paid to bring immigrants to the states from central america. The practice is illicit and dangerous. Many people die along the trails or are kidnapped and held for ransom. My grandmother and my aunt's friends had either made it to the states or were well on their way but Maria was very afraid. She had heard of the terrible conditions like going through whole miles of dark tunnels filled with shit and cat sized rats and having to sleep in them. Women were often violated or sold off. Despite the increasing turmoil and political unrest in Guatemala, Maria struggled to come to grips with what the journey to the US would entail. She finalized her decision to seek other means after one of her girlfriends phoned her to let her know that she had made it, but not before being raped by four men, kidnapped, had everything stolen, being brought back to Mexico, and having to find the means to again pay for another coyote to help her in again. After that call my aunt picked up a newspaper and began to look through the classified. That evening she read a wanted ad for a cook for the Guatemalan ambassador in Paris. Although it was five in the evening and the paper was let out at six in the morning, she went to the office to try to see if no one had applied yet. When she arrived the applications list was three pages long. Although discourged for the day, she sat in the office looking through the paper for more ads. While reading a manager walked out and asked her to step Inside and fufill the application anyway. While applying my aunt told me she made a joke and made the manager bust up laughing. The joke isn't coming to me now but the manager was so pleased by it that she ripped up her applications list and told my aunt that she seemed very sweet and likable. She gave her the job on the spot. The only problem was that my aunt could not bring her 13 year old daughter with her. My aunt insisted on the position, put her daughter, my cousin, Ariselli in boarding school for the next four years and was flown to Paris the following month. Her daughter later joined her in Paris. My aunt worked closely with the ambassador for many years but later took a job cooking for a french princess after the ambassador moved to back to Guatemala. She stayed friends with the ambassador until her death and is still in touch with her family. Of the whole experience she says she is most glad that she had hope that day and ever since she has not had to ask help of anyone for anything.
She now happily maintains a studio four blocks from the Eiffel Tower, where I am living currently, and has a two year old terrier named Elliot.
She drinks damned good wine, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWdhSccWd3A
Thank goodness.
I am so ready and very excited for it. There is a passive aggressiveness that has evolved into something so thick in San Francisco that it was literally driving me insane, amongst various other factors of course . Not that I wasn't overly an ass hole this year, definitely drunk and owing many apologies I felt lazy towards eventually. Still I haven't figured out a way to properly apologize for being psychotic without seeming trite and as if I'm trying to dismiss full responsibility.
At the very least, aside from being an embarrassment to myself, I left the city semi-content and with a printed, published magazine feature for amazing BelleSF, a pending magazine release for Lump Sum, and several hundred dollars.
C'est la vie or whatever the fuck.
Also, I found five euros at SFO during the TSA violations and I drank a lot of wine in first class.
So far in one day the city has been only good to me and I have all ready tried five different kinds of wine. Something to say of people who speak french is they all seem to have the most beautiful lips. The buildings here are old with intricate french framework. You can most certainly tell which buildings were founded recently but they at least take inspiration from a very classic look.
It's raining hard and I have a friendly girls date at some punk bar in the 11th at six'o'clock.
For some reason also, I have been very nervous. Not about the friend date, just about my position in general.
I start a lot of things I can't finish. Comics, paintings, silly business ideas, fights, proposed articles, all of it. Namely because I start new things everyday and I have the attention span of a three-year-old. That I've maintained a room at the 5shop for three years now, only once coming close to burning it down, is an absolute shock to me, as is any complete piece of writing or illustration. This year I had every intention to write out three articles and completing, sharing, and perhaps even publishing one. I started them all, the one about the police brutality case no one wanted to talk about that occured at City College of San Francisco in which several students were injured by SFPD, one about the discrimination case that may or may not have occured at a restaurant on 25th and Bryant that some people talked about, and one about how my mother is the strongest person I know having saved an immigrant from coyote bandits on a last minute emergency trip to LA and a very seedy hotel in Las Palmas- but never finished. The story I would like published is that of my mother's. I noted most of the détails mentally as she told me about what had happened the weekend before in LA while on a trip to northern california; when she rented a car and offered to give me a ride to a valley i won't disclose the name for. That happened in 2011. I'm waiting to interview her again so I can record it. I named the article ¨The Trail of Skulls¨.
My great aunt Maria is wonderful. This is her story of coming to France.
It was 1975 and everyone was making the dash to the states from then and also now politicqlly tulmultous and civally dangerous Guatemala, mostly through illegal coyote routes through the mountains. Coyotes are people who are paid to bring immigrants to the states from central america. The practice is illicit and dangerous. Many people die along the trails or are kidnapped and held for ransom. My grandmother and my aunt's friends had either made it to the states or were well on their way but Maria was very afraid. She had heard of the terrible conditions like going through whole miles of dark tunnels filled with shit and cat sized rats and having to sleep in them. Women were often violated or sold off. Despite the increasing turmoil and political unrest in Guatemala, Maria struggled to come to grips with what the journey to the US would entail. She finalized her decision to seek other means after one of her girlfriends phoned her to let her know that she had made it, but not before being raped by four men, kidnapped, had everything stolen, being brought back to Mexico, and having to find the means to again pay for another coyote to help her in again. After that call my aunt picked up a newspaper and began to look through the classified. That evening she read a wanted ad for a cook for the Guatemalan ambassador in Paris. Although it was five in the evening and the paper was let out at six in the morning, she went to the office to try to see if no one had applied yet. When she arrived the applications list was three pages long. Although discourged for the day, she sat in the office looking through the paper for more ads. While reading a manager walked out and asked her to step Inside and fufill the application anyway. While applying my aunt told me she made a joke and made the manager bust up laughing. The joke isn't coming to me now but the manager was so pleased by it that she ripped up her applications list and told my aunt that she seemed very sweet and likable. She gave her the job on the spot. The only problem was that my aunt could not bring her 13 year old daughter with her. My aunt insisted on the position, put her daughter, my cousin, Ariselli in boarding school for the next four years and was flown to Paris the following month. Her daughter later joined her in Paris. My aunt worked closely with the ambassador for many years but later took a job cooking for a french princess after the ambassador moved to back to Guatemala. She stayed friends with the ambassador until her death and is still in touch with her family. Of the whole experience she says she is most glad that she had hope that day and ever since she has not had to ask help of anyone for anything.
She now happily maintains a studio four blocks from the Eiffel Tower, where I am living currently, and has a two year old terrier named Elliot.
She drinks damned good wine, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWdhSccWd3A
Monday, July 7, 2014
Sleep by Haruki Murakami
"I am both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake."
http://www.mylostwords.blogspot.com/2009/01/haruki-murakami-sleep.html?m=1
http://www.mylostwords.blogspot.com/2009/01/haruki-murakami-sleep.html?m=1
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