This is one of a few wooden items that sits on my desk, ostensibly to perform a function (usually clamping surfaces being glued) but really to play with.
The agreeable aspects of this peg are:
The dry texture of the wood. The way the surface is smooth but almost threatens not to be. The peg is pale, still clean, vulnerable to tarnish.
The way the peg is slightly larger than usual pegs. It is more solid. It declares itself.
The way the spring holds the two parts together. Its asymmetry.
The open and closing action. This uncomplex action is sufficient to keep me occupied, idiotically, for minutes at a time, mainly with testing the pressure of the spring on my thumb.
Its unfussy, utterly practical, design.
I have a lot of issues with monuments and monumental sculpture. My main objection being to the way they impose meanings with so little equivocation, so crudely.
You can respond, saying that Oldenburg is playing with this, attempting to subvert the traditional subject narratives of public monuments., with their grand historical themes and cast of important characters. Nonetheless, however the argumentation, his work remains is a big object which viewers have no control over, and cannot ignore.
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What attracts me about this, and many of the buildings in its vicinity, is its uncompromising rectangularity. This accords so satisfactorily with the grid plan of the streets around it. Was it built by the military?
In addition, I like, despite the blank square practicality of it all, how lives led here have left their traces, mysteriously floating in the air.
The wretched, Tom Waitsian mood fascinates me. I`ve always been drawn to slummy, collapsing places.
In despair lies a story, and with a story comes a moral, or at least a punchline...never could stand that dog*
That green colour is very nice too.
*Tom Waits, Franks Wild Years, 1987
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These enchanting gems were bought in Beiramar mall at a stall near the bookshop. I bought them , furtively: they seemed such a wanton luxury, and I didn't permit myself to open the bag in the street but waited until I had made to my car thence all the way back to Trindade and up my stairs and through the door to open the bag and deliriously pop the sweetie into its rightful home...
And I can declare without equivocation that they are magnificent, their platonic geometry so pleasingly contradictory in the rounded wet cushioned cavern of the mouth. It's a huge pleasure to feel their edges soften, and the rough sugar surface melt into smooth salival syrup: intoxicating.
The sugar encrusting, so blatant, so bling, suggests the most decadent moments of the 1920s- very Gatsby- as are those wonderful Deco colours.
They are surely the most jewel-like of our sweets so far, and the most suggestive of mystical transportation.
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I sleep in this room. I've slept here now for two weeks. But I've yet to recall any dream.
Do you think the dreams you have are connected to the former inhabitants of the places in which you are sleeping?
Perhaps I do. The idea needn't be mystical. It could be that the changes they made to the place impart an atmosphere or make suggestions to your unconscious mind. So, for instance, the marks on a door, the wear on a floor or how a window has a tiny crack tell a story of how they lived, and this story might unconsciously influence you and your dreams.
When, for the first time, I entered this place with the estate agent I immediately felt a neutrality about it, as if there was nothing to be cleared away: a spiritual blandness, which would make it easy for me to own and occupy. i thought, I can live here. Other places had a density, history.
In previous lives, I wanted a sense of a past in the places I live. But now I seem to be in another phase and I want newness, lightness, ease. I feel this place, this new place is some how free from, or even bereft of, ghosts. I dream less than I used to.
Nowadays I want to die into sleep with no moment to think on the pillow. So I stay up and listen to music until I am certain to be tired. I listen to jazz and sometimes classical but nothing too pompous or neurotic. I often go for simple melancholy singers like Bryan Ferry or Nat King Cole.
I do nothing but listen, with low lighting.
I am very keen on experiencing single sense activities, so my concentration is as much as possible on one thing. Partly this idea is relates to avoiding wastefulness, and because of respect for the music. It seems wasteful to play music and not listen. Yes, I know that`s an eccentric, even foolish notion, but I can`t escape it. And partly, single sense listening is just about more complete immersion in the sounds.
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I like the black and white photographs of the barbered. The effect is rather punk: there is indeed a mohican in the top right corner. But I do wonder if the punk aesthetic is intentional. I rather doubt it. Punk and Florianopolis really don't combine. Punk is too engaged. Everything here is so laid back.
I haven`t been to this barber`s and I don`t know if I dare.
I passed a barber shop here which has just one chair, as if it should really be in a huge city like New York, beside a subway station, to serve hurried commuters.
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My coming to live here did not seem willed. It was more as if I were waved by a giant invisible hand, or pulled by a gigantic magnet.
Coming here to live was my Covid 19 thing: a response to the sense Covid 19 gave me that I 'd be in Brazil for the rest of my life, and should find a place of my own and settle my my differences with the country. It made me accept the idea of having a home- something which I had always resisted.
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This chair and table have been here for at least two weeks.
The last time I passed the chair had toppled over entirely but, perhaps as a drunk will carefully be returned to his seat by his drinking companions having fallen over, it has since been righted -so far as is possible given its strange, lopsided condition.
Exactly how two of the chair`s legs ended up shorter than the others is a puzzle. The sitter would have to be remarkably obese to achieve this, and skillful besides, given the how the two legs snapped to the same length.
Canasvieiras is full of things like this. I am not sure why. But as this is where I now live they are likely to feature here with some frequency.
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