Month: June 2008

situationist comedy

Karriere is a fairly new Copenhagen bar completely designed by over 30 artists, (Robert Stadler, Douglas Gordon, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Olafur Eliasson, etc.), who worked on everything from the name to the interior.

Most interestingly, the cost of certain drinks at the Karriere Bar have been reworked into an installation piece by Kenneth Balfelt, who conceived of a price policy that experiments with perceived social structures. The new prices are determined by how you display yourself and it’s the waiters and bartenders who decide if someone qualifies.

Some examples: Activist and hippie types pay extra for organic soda, unless they’re homeless, in which case they get a discount on cafe cortado, yuppies pay extra for beer, and gay couples who french kiss get a discount on apfelschorle.

There’s many of various discounts, and for all sorts of things, speaking danish when you’re obviously foreign, being a multiracial table, etc., hardly any which seem politically correct, but all of which might prove interesting to interact with. I imagine friends gathering in groups, trying to work out how many discounts they can snag in one go.

cleaning out the closets

I started writing a book this week. “This book begins and ends with a birthday, twenty five years after my story started.” The internet at work was down, leaving me with nothing productive to do except open Word and begin to write. Two hours later, I had twenty five pages and the beginning of an out-line. I don’t know if it’s a good idea, what I’m doing, or if I will finish it, or anything, but I’ve started one.

It’s not the autobiography people have been asking me to write, full of oddball miniature adventures, names changed and details blurred to protect almost everyone involved, but the story of my parents, my dangerous childhood, and how it relates to me now.

As many of you know, my sociopath father, (who I generally tell people is dead), has been sending me letters since I sent him a hello on my birthday last year. He writes a minimum of once a day, though I never reply and rarely read anything. The more he writes, the more ingrown the stories become, the more pathological, until the only way to understand the later letters is to start at the beginning, to see where certain codes began. Now that an entire year has passed, there’s hundreds of replies to my one small note, poisonous, hateful, and full of self aggrandizing lies, that I haven’t even looked at. They’re just sitting there, taking up server space somewhere in the states, not quite ignored, but dormant.

As a body of work, it reminds me most of case studies I’ve read about violent obsessives who paper their walls with scribbles about jesus. The tone is similar, but with my mother and I featured in place of religious figures. My intention is to use his letters as material, as something to respond to. “Find inspiration where you can.” I’m not sure what else there is to do, (perhaps I can donate it to a psychological institution?), I don’t like his bright confusion speaking to an empty room. It feels like I’m neglecting a chore, an old bit of furniture that needs to be painted.

getting everything down to six boxes

via neat-o-rama:

Dave Bruno looked around his San Diego home one summer and realized just how much of his family’s belongings were cluttering their lives. So he decided to do something about it, in a project he called The 100 Thing Challenge:

By my thirty-seventh birthday on November 12, 2008 I will have only 100 personal items. I will live for at least one year (God willing) maintaining an inventory of only 100 personal things. This challenge will help me “put stuff in its place” and also explore my belief that “stuff can be good when it serves a purpose greater than possession alone.”

Lisa McLaughlin of TIME Magazine covered this story:

Excess consumption is practically an American religion. But as anyone with a filled-to-the-gills closet knows, the things we accumulate can become oppressive. With all this stuff piling up and never quite getting put away, we’re no longer huddled masses yearning to breathe free; we’re huddled masses yearning to free up space on a countertop. Which is why people are so intrigued by the 100 Thing Challenge, a grass-roots movement in which otherwise seemingly normal folks are pledging to whittle down their possessions to a mere 100 items. […]

“It comes down to the products vs. the promise,” says organizational consultant Peter Walsh, who characterizes himself as part contractor, part therapist. “It’s not necessarily about the new pots and pans but the idea of the cozy family meals that they will provide. People are finding that their homes are full of stuff, but their lives are littered with unfulfilled promises.”

Dave’s progress blog, guynameddave.

welcome to global warming. it isn’t what you think it is

Apple Store Paris set to open under Louvre Pyramid.

For a moment of amusement, I went and took a look at the yahoo-search referral terms that led people to my Flickr. In order, the top thirty are were: postsecret, cute puppies, maine coon cat, topless, oralsex, tiara tattoos, apartments, oldboy, alien animals, lesbianism, opus bloom county, gamelan, goths, animated club gif, cannibalism, sex oral, cute puppies wallpaper, maple leaf tattoo, dionysius god, pussy licking, steven meisal photography, blind eyes, beetle plate, tattoo koi, kris millering, columbia sailboat, lung, licking pussy, ferret, and topless girls.

Now we know. Go team internet.

I want to take a day soon where all I do is take pictures. Where I get up, shove furniture out of the way, do ridiculous things with random objects, cover the floor in newspaper, pin sheets to my ceiling, and treat my apartment like a set. I haven’t done it in a long time, though really, we haven’t had the greatest weather lately either. It’s like winter just never got the hint to sod off. If I owned even one light, it wouldn’t matter, I could just set it up and call it the races, but serious as rain, I’m stuck waiting for sunlight in a city where the cloud cover is so thick that two in the afternoon looks like dusk. And the cold! All of the local pundits have dubbed this month Junuary, as if it’s sort of cute that our seasons have shifted by a solid three months.

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