Kevin Cyr featured on zeitgeistudios.com

I can relate to this after living out of the back of my Subaru station wagon all summer while traveling to bike races. This, to me, seems like luxury. In 2011, I'm going "big"...

Architect Selgas Cano featured on zeitgeistudios.com

I would work in an office like this one in Spain...

Tiny PBS Documentary on the Tiny House Movement

I've been writing longhand in my journal and it feels so good to flow into true penmanship again. It's a little more visceral than typing up a blog. Reading my journal from 1999 made me want to try physically writing again. I converted a few of those entries from 1999 into this blog last month but decided to save that entry as a draft. Basically that period of my youth is uncomfortably strange and unusual to me now. Despite its tumult, the diary documenting that time period was really quite beautiful. If only for the depiction it provided. Things I had completely forgotten, and it took me right there, to that very moment reliving it, or watching it from a distance. That's the beauty of an actual diary. I think the direction of thought is better documented that way, at least for myself and for the time being. Maybe it's because I know it's completely private. The act of writing, when we don't have to feel guarded in any way and the words become more effortless. They are complete thoughts, uninterrupted by judgement. Maybe I'll submit some entries from my current written journal into this blog. As for tonight, I'm once again super late in going to bed. I have a job interview tomorrow and I need to get some sleep, but I'm nervous, well just a little. On the other hand there's something that cycling has taught me... I know I can step up to the occasion when the pressure is on. It's interesting how riding a bicycle can be applied to life in so many little ways.

Here's an old Squarepusher track. I used to love when Dave played this one. We all lived on St. Paul Avenue in uptown Dallas and listened to great music, and created all kinds of art. I was a bike messenger then and life was different. I remember I would come home for lunch just to watch The Kids In The Hall with Matt. It wasn't long until I fell in love with the idea of bike racing. Anyway, this is odd and quarky track and for the most part unknown, but I love it.

Yokoo: Words to live by

"Weathered Stone" by Aphex Twin, I listened to it over and over on the Greyhound bus when I moved to Texas. I looked out the window all the way from Chicago. I remember I wore tan corduroys and a black top. There was a lot of gold september sunshine. I had an empty stomach for days and days and had just turned 19. Such a dream ago. Right now I'm up late listening and baking a cassoulet. I'm in love with the entire Selected Ambient Works Vol. II album.
Also the track "Rhubarb" , "Metal Grating", and "Corrugated Tubing" are all just as intense.

Lying there in a tall painted room, hot like baking cookies in August.
So still that I've forgotten what quiet feels like.
So still that my body is no longer an instrument of touch, but instead a conduit, a translation of cadence and whirl into tactile output.
So still that my chest falls open like a sleeping child's fingers, uncurling.
My heart is beating like a couple's joined hands swinging as they walk down the street.
The bicycles going around the track so fast they catch my breath.
I'm so happy I could die.
A bell rings and the dark gold sound is like sunlight in the leaves and it ripples through my body like a stone thrown into a pond. I'm simultaneously all consciousness, released from the shackles of the body, and all physical, sense and perception washing up my spine like a bucket of bloodwarm white chocolate.

Hands off the bars of my bike and it's twilight. The stoplights are like stars, if stars were made of cherries, yelling "go!" into my eyes.
Tan wind on my skin like pond water.
Around and in and out of well-banked curves I'm wheeling, twisting, a sparrow at a dance party.


I wish I could cast a spell. "Watch this," I'd whisper as I ride up the bank into the low, late, yellow moon.

Feel the slow soft love of being alive with me, like falling asleep while I watch you, smiling.

ראש השנה

L'shannah Tovah!

Today I wanted to stay in and write. I wanted to find a used slide projector and make a show on our wall of other people's vacations. Today I wanted to document it all; the taste of anise, the sounds of stepping on leaves, the sound of the hub on my favorite wheels, the way light creates stars in the creases of a strawberry candy wrapper, the ribbons of a balloon wrapped around an antenna, the shush and rattle of the wind in the trees, the sounds of bicycles as they travel in packs, the way expensive shoes sound on the pavement, stepping the time away moment by moment, the way our sight wraps itself around each object, softly and carefully, like a cotton towel after a cool swim.


This life is an engagement ring, it's the touch of your lips against a warm forehead.

This is it,

a heart beating.

Still the body resting into a blue corner, pressing a toe against the crack in the wooden floor.

Ink dots dripping onto fresh paper like pores of skin. Listen, it crackles as it spreads.


The ceiling is above and the floor is below and the walls are four sides of boundary, it's a space.

What will you fill it with?

Two minutes or twenty thousand miles?

A fragrance of pears?

The nape of a neck?

Gauntlet Hair

GAUNTLET HAIR - I WAS THINKING from ( . )( . ) on Vimeo.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

I don't know why but when I return home from long races I sometimes tend to feel blue. When I drove into Texas a few hours ago, I felt the heat change against the windows and the Texas sun set in. I started to unload the car and felt all woozy and dizzy inside. I felt worried, worried in so many ways... Worried about the bad dreams I had last night, worried that maybe I said or did something wrong, worried that I could have offended others. Worried about so many things all at the same time. Maybe I'm just tired or overstimulated because I have nothing to feel sad about today. I set my goals and I completed them, I'm home. Why is that not enough? The aftermath of weeks of hard racing enumerate themselves through ecstatic highs, elation of good results, interviews and celebrations. Why is it met with the contrasting lows? is it the natural balance of life? All of it makes for ups-and-downs that tend to follow a long batch of intense efforts as we strive so passionately for achievement. Maybe as highly competitive individuals we push ourselves so gruelingly to surpass our boundries that it depletes our stores of serotonin; the very shred of our comfort. It does stand to reason. After a great bunch of races, why on earth would anyone feel depressed?
Maybe the sum total of racing is greater than its parts on the course, or where ever it is that achievement is sought. It goes on and on after the finish. The journey doesn't end there, it's only just begun.

Tired, glazed eyes separate me from everything. Odd camera effects pushing everything into the distance & feelings of disconnect.
Flyaway

pink pink pink pink pink

I wrote a long entry, but then I erased it to feel the power of making something irrevocably disappear.

Last night I dreamed of kissing.

I'm reading Henry Miller again.

I am lonely.

Sun-thick & Lolling

Strange how summer happens so fast. The air is gray and sharp one day, sun-thick and lolling the next. The flowers are each events. They're drops of food-coloring, twisting knots in the crevices between cool rocks. Throughout the seasons the temperature doesn't actually change. In the wintertime there are blankets and warmers and overheated restaurants. In the summer its shaved ice and bare feet, skirts and lying in the shade. Sometimes I slip into an apartment building's swimming pool late at night to swim. I submerge myself quietly in its corners. Nobody ever notices.

When I was little, there was a old, sparse fir tree in the park next to our house. One of its lowest branches was sturdy enough to sit on. I used to climb it, my nimble eleven year old body easily borne by the branches. I climbed up quite far and would look over my house and then descend. One day I decided to climb as high as I possibly could, I got almost all the way to the top, my head level with the other tree's, peaks and branches. Displaced blackbirds flew around, I could see into the neighbor's backyards. The trunk of the tree was so slender at the top that I could feel it sway slightly back and forth. The air felt lighter and cooler, I felt older. When I looked down, I didn't know how I could ever return, I felt hidden and nested. There was a green hush over everything. I loved climbing trees.

Lemon yogurt cake and espresso.

Yellow sunshine and toasted earthiness.

The sky was reddish purple at school today, like the color of my fresh bruise.

There were plums dripping as clouds, rich ambient light making everything surreal.

The sky was this color because of the vortex surrounding this university, blooming with clouds in the sky gusting up into the air.

I'll draw up a hot bath tonight... one arm out the window, my fingers steam and drip, evaporating into the night.

Drawing 11

Somedays I watch the crowds flickering, perched safely from my rest, wrapped in cotton and protected from the world. Somedays I look down from an ariel view, in the crispy prickle of the unconscious. Somedays I watch the wind. Somedays the pulse quickens, the coffee fills the brim, the wine spills onto the table. In the evenings the bathtub water pours onto the tile. Maybe I'm too mesmerized to care, too tempered to seep out of, I talk with a boy talking in his sleep.

Sometimes I manage strong and majestic, other times I make my grandmother's yellow cake at midnight to feel her company through the wafting cinnamon. Sometimes I tell you it will be ok. Somedays, will you tell me?

The city sleeps and I think of love. Listening to the Magnetic Fields. Pushing away lust. Joyful, simple, pleasant. Lips swollen from kissing. Pull my hair please. I feel a rush wash over me. Inquisitively. Want. love.

I have found newness and it will never be kissed.

Bask yourself in goodness.

I'm still a night girl, but I also wake up with the sun. It slants the bricks on the neighbor's chimney peachgold, and plays blind shaped shadows on my bare, white walls. It stares carefully through gaps in the tree leaves. It rests, carronade by tangerine and lavender, in the thin early fog. The cicadas and aren't up yet, and the birds still sing into their sleeping feathers. In the night, sound seems to be muffled, and the dark closes around you like a pink cashmere blanket. To be awake is to be alone, at odds with other people. You can almost hear their dreams, drifting like perfume in the quiet air. But the morning is expansive and crisp, like the taste of pineapple