Sunset and sunrise times in my room are the best. 

Yesterday I went with Helena to her riding lesson and afterwards we sat in a sunny parking lot in the middle of nowhere (Hamilton) where she smoked two cigarettes in a row, despite the asthma, while I second-hand inhaled and walked around picking wild-flowers. The flowers are on my dresser now. They're so beautiful I can't even deal! We got coffees and a rice krispie square with marshmallows to share. I listened to her talk about the future and it made me feel a whole lot better about not wanting to commit to a boring, time consuming, possibly dead end job. Plus did you know that if you're under thirty four you can go to the symphony for only fourteen dollars?! What am I doing with my life.

Anyway I'm terrified of horses, they're impulsive monsters with big teeth and seeing Helena handling hers was mind blowing, as if she feels they're equal in size, she pushed it around and cleaned its shoes and kissed it on its face, and all the while he pretty much made googly eyes at her and complied. I loved it. Then I got all brave and kissed it too. Then another horse snapped his teeth at me and I almost cried! Bastard. 

Did you hear that the facebook stock failed? There was even a shirt made for the occasion (HERE). Poor little Mark Zuckerberg. Also there's a dude in Montreal who cut up his boyfriend's body and mailed a severed foot to the cons and a hand to the liberals, I hope they tell us what the NDP gets. 

I was so desperate to read Hunger by Knut Hamsun I downloaded it. I'm going to destroy my eyes over my book lust. See you later, here are two songs from Toronto for you! Bye

Waiting waiting at 6386

All of my recent memorable dreams have been about waiting. It's very telling because I'm probably the most impatient person I know. Usually in my dream I abandon the object of my desire (a train, nachos I ordered that aren't coming, etc..) and I'm not sure whether this is good or bad. I don't know if it means I need to become better at waiting or maybe I should just give up, let the nachos come to me when they're ready and move on to less pressing issues in the meantime.

It's almost forty degrees out, my brain is boiling so much I'm having epiphanies. Things I'm looking forward to: a nice cold day tomorrow, getting a new work desk, finishing a small painting and taking photographs of horses. I want it to rain so so badly. Please.

Here's a little song for you, bye!

Have been listening to that record up there on repeat for two days, feeling good. The sun's like magic I only want to smile always even when I hear bad news.

Kept having weird flashbacks yesterday. We used to fight sometimes when we were drunk, like vicious, bad fights where one of us would stop and throw their bike across the road in anger on the way home, then pee in the bush and keep fighting and yelling and the more sleepy we get the less aggressive our voices become. Then you wake up in the morning, horrified, hold each other so tight you could break bones, reassure that it was nothing, because you're so in love and you want it to be nothing and "imagine if we ever break up?!" - shudder - and then it's two years later and you're broken up and somehow it feels pretty normal. That scenario makes me understand the concept of time a bit better but man, people are complex.

A close friend told me that her understanding of relationships is less like "forever" and more a "five year contract" and that in five years you can talk honestly and reassess whether you're still interested in the same goals, with the same person, are you even the same person? I think that makes sense to me, a lot. What do you think?

Unfortunately you can only see the breaking point of a relationship later on, when it's too late to fix it.


It was May 2010 in Montreal. My arms are too translucent to make an appearance.

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I gave a little talk at Trampoline Hall last week. Thank you for coming.

My hands were shaking because I was so nervous but then after like three minutes I really got into it so whatever. It always gets better and funnier once you start. Here are some excerpts. My talk was titled "I TOLD U I WAS HARDCORE". 

I got really interested in "live" online deaths in 2003 when I first read about Brandon Vedas. Both Vedas and I used to frequent IRC chat rooms in the early 2000s. In the year 2000 I immigrated to Canada with my family and up until that point IRC chats were more or less my only real window into an English speaking world. That and having a bunch of pen pals from different countries, pen pals who just like me lived in shitty small towns where nothing ever happened. Vedas was a computer enthusiast, a recreational drug user and a member of the Shroomery.org website - which is an online community that helps spread accurate information about magic mushrooms. He went online by the name “ripper”. Just so you know, my IRC chat name was "ninjababe". It was given to me by my little brother, also a computer enthusiast and a hacker. Anyway, one night Vedas logged into an IRC channel and announced that he “got a grip of drugs”. He turned on his webcam and invited people to watch him consume the drugs. Now this is 2003 and for me webcams were still kind of a novelty and probably for other people too. I feel like in the early 2000s a lot of people, and specifically women, were making money online by letting other people watch them live their lives. I found all that really boring because 90% of the time it just meant watching a messy bed or their cat grooming itself. You had to pay for the really sexy stuff but I wasn’t that desperate yet. So the idea of a dude getting shitfaced on a pile of drugs seemed kind of appealing. The situation escalated very quickly with Vedas becoming belligerent and aggressive as the crowd egged him on to take more and more pills. They said stuff like “eat more! That’s not much! I eat that every morning! PUSSY. ” Over the course of a one hour chat Vedas consumed large portions of mushrooms, clonazepam, methadone, vicodin and some other pills I’m not familiar with. His last coherent words were “I told u I was hardcore, fuck you pussys you are so fucking stupid”. When he disappeared from the chat his friends argued over whether or not they should call the police to make sure he doesn’t overdose but finally decided against it. His mom found his dead body in bed the next afternoon. She thought he was sleeping in. Some of the drugs he consumed the night before were from his mother’s medicine cabinet.

As soon as I read that story I searched for the chat log online. When I finally found one it sounded so pathetic that I had to find a picture of his face to match the profile. I found two different pictures of him online: one of a smiling young boy posing with his girlfriend and another of a cool dude with slicked back hair and frosted tips, wearing sunglasses in a dark room and gazing indifferently into the computer screen. That’s probably the picture he used for his IRC profile. Multiple memorial blogs and websites were started for Vedas after his death, ones that are still visited by friends and family to this day.

That’s the kind of stuff I obsess over. There are lots more stories like that. There are entire websites dedicated to cataloguing people’s online presences after their death and I visit all of them, weekly. Suicides make up only about 20% of those deaths. The rest are car accidents, illness, murder and my favourite – freak accidents. I’m not really interested in the deaths of terminal patients. It’s the element of surprise that attracts me most. Most of my “favourite” freak accidents involve teenagers. There was one of a boy whose latest blog entry was an excited invitation to the party he was throwing at his house that night. Judging from the comments on his last post it seems that he died in his bed that night, choking on his own vomit. If it were someone I knew I would be mortified and devastated. But somehow the distance between us made it funny to me. It’s like a joke except it really happened to someone, in some parallel universe. Then the story of three drunk eighteen year olds from a rural town in the Midwest. They decided to go party in an underwater cave where young kids hung out and drank. Somewhere in the tight underwater passage one of them panicked and caused all three of them to drown. The most terrifying one for me was the one of the stoner couple who offered a random man a ride in their car while they were shopping for chips and candy at the seven eleven at 5am. The man got into the car, shot them both in the head and stepped out, allowing the car to roll downhill until it gently crashed into a lamppost. The girl lived to tell the story. Maybe the reason these stories seem funny to me is because they’re so over the top brutal it’s like it could never happen in real life. When I told my roommate Val about my obsession she said that in German there’s a word for it – it’s “Schadenfreude” – which means taking pleasure  in someone else’s misery. And even though there is no English word for Schadenfreude, there are all kinds of different descriptions of it in other cultures. For example something called a “Roman Holiday”, which is defined as “enjoyment or satisfaction derived from observing the suffering of others” and is based on gladiators killing each other for the entertainment of ancient Romans. The term suggests debauchery and disorder in addition to sadistic enjoyment. Another expression is "morose delectation", which comes from “delectatio morosa" in Latin and means "the habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts". The medieval church said that morose delectation was a sin. And even tho I don’t exactly have a self-congratulatory drink every time I read about a hand-gliding accident I definitely get something out of it and that is really disturbing to me, and it has nothing to do with the church. I don't just seek out blogs of deceased people. I google their names and look at their pictures and facebook profiles, I read their obituaries,  articles about them in the local papers, I read between the lines of their friends' and lovers' sad comments. Sometimes I just need to know why and how they died. And then I move on. 

Some quick personal history so that you don't think I'm a creep.

I grew up in a secular non traditional Jewish family in Israel which means two things: that ever since I was a child the holocaust was rammed down my throat at any given chance, which wasn't so good for someone like me. I was a morbid kid probably because I wanted to appear tougher to other kids. When I was a child at some point I only read books about the holocaust and second world war. I thought I was smart and that I was doing important “research” on the Nazis. I listened to holocaust survivors with scars on their heads and numbers on their arms tell the same story over and over and imagined how they must have felt during the war. I was curious. The other thing about growing up in Israel is that you are basically living in a war zone. People die constantly and though I rarely got to witness their deaths I always knew that they were there. This is something I never mention in conversation with my friends here in Canada because even to me it seems so severe and outlandish. Acceptance and awareness of death played such major roles in my upbringing that these days when death is such a distant occurrence I am drawn to it more than ever before. I’m drawn to the intimacy of it - even though in my case that intimacy is fabricated. I used to be embarrassed of it but now I’m just kind of ok with it.

While I was preparing for this talk I read an interesting essay about death and the internet. The main point that seemed important was that “death reveals the importance of intersubjectivity in the technical construction of subject and author” which means that I probably shouldn’t feel that bad about myself for collecting blogs of dead strangers. Because it’s the kind of power dynamic that internet publishing is based on. That entire Jackass television series was based on it too and about a million books, as well as boxing, wrestling, bullfighting, and google image searching tsunami victims. One of the most common examples of Schadenfreude is when we see someone slip on a banana peel or get pied and we laugh even though they might be hurt. In a perverse way it helps diminish our insecurities because we’re not the ones getting the pie in the face. Schadenfreude is an automatic reaction back from a primitive time of natural selection where being able to laugh at someone’s misfortune was a demonstration of power. Now we consider if ugly behaviour, even though most of us engage in it. Maybe the reason why there is no equivalent of Schadenfreude in the English language is because of the cultural differences. In our culture it’s so shameful to pry or take pleasure in another person's misfortune that there is just no word for it. Unfortunately this also means that we are often too repressed to talk about death or its consequences. 

ALRIGHT ENOUGH ABOUT DYING

I watched Girls and it really freaked me out. The same way that shitty Portlandia show did. I think these feelings are in self defense, especially with Girls. Every moment I feel like "I DO THAT TOO EW WHAT HOW DO THEY KNOW?!" and then I'm suddenly self conscious. I guess that's what market research is for. We're not that unique. 


Bye friends enjoy the sun.

I spend way too much time being aware of the human drama especially when it comes to romantic relationships. In the past I used to think (naively) that that kind of drama, the humiliating stuff I gossip about or try to quietly go through myself, is so characteristic of now - "now" being the past few decades. You know, emancipated women, sex always on TV and so on. But it had always existed and I love reading about it. It comforts me to know that people have always cheated, lied, left their partners for others or simply vanished. Maybe it's not so much immoral behaviour but just normal human dynamic? When two people are unhappy all kinds of uncomfortable things can happen but it doesn't mean that only one of them is in the right.

Houellebecq ended his latest book with the sentence "The triumph of vegetation is total" - it  killed me because it tied together the previous three hundred pages so well it's almost like he was making fun of me all along. He mocks the predictability of one's artistic process and impulse by carefully describing a full cycle of personal creation ending exactly where it began - with drawings of flowers and nature. Whatever maybe it doesn't make sense to you but I don't want to give away all the details and you should just read it yourself. It certainly isn't as sexy as his other novels but when I read his description of flower copulation a week ago on the bus it gave me a serious boner?! The fact that this time it's flowers and not a threesome with a Cuban maid in a seaside hotel room that provoked the same reaction makes it even more remarkable. 

Fuck, words. Did you know that my most common google-search item is "define______". As in the dictionary. I also ask grammar questions on language forums. English, I am still learning you.

Speaking of human drama - here's a sad little story for you where a full cycle makes an appearance:

Lucian Freud in his studio

"In 1952 Freud began an affair with Guinness beer heiress and writer Lady Caroline Blackwood. They married in 1953 and divorced in 1959. She is said to have been the only woman who truly broke his heart. After their divorce, his friends noticed a change in him; he began drinking heavily and getting into fights. Francis Bacon became concerned that he was suicidal. In 1970 Blackwood began a relationship with the manic-depressive poet Robert Lowell. Their chaotic, emotionally harrowing times together led to a sequence of poems collected in Lowell's book, The Dolphin, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Blackwood's anxieties, alcohol-related illnesses, and late-night tirades exacerbated his mental condition until he made a final, traumatizing break with her in 1977. Lowell died in the back seat of a New York cab on his way to reunite with his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, clutching in his hands one of Freud’s portraits of Blackwood." 

(that was stolen more or less from Clint Roenisch's post from a week or so ago, I'm too lazy to write my own). 

Lucian Freud

Caroline Blackwood

LF and CB

Robert Lowell

RL and CB

"Surprisingly" it was Blackwood who spent her life in sickness and as an alcoholic and eventually died of cancer at 64. Freud with his big unforgettable heartbreak lived to be 88 and died only last summer. Here are some beautiful paintings he made of her. I've been listening to Nirvana and old house music all day. And now it's night time - time for a nice relaxing 10k run, good bye friends!!!

STRETCHED OUT DARK FOCUS FACE WITH BROKEN FINGERS

Yesterday I came to the conclusion that all art-making is autobiographical and probably 70%+ ego. Or at least the kind of art I am drawn to is. It gave me relief because I've been terrified of starting a new project. All my ideas are only fragments, incomplete, but now it makes total sense because they're reflections of my experience, right? I understand how graphs and documents on gallery walls serve a purpose but they often bore me to sleep. When I look at someone's work I want to understand something about them or where they come from. I don't really need a quick sociology lesson. Not when it's rammed down my throat every day on facebook. 

Zeesy and I had a great little talk this morning about the pressure to create something that fits a "criteria" and how exhausting and pointless it can be. Yeah OK, I am interested in everything, always, but it's also intensely satisfying to make work about my own life. The truth is, our family is of a very limited size and history, which is why I will always have the tendency to look inward. Anyway!

The May Day march in Toronto yesterday was disappointing - too many hula hoops and tambourines. I detest the whole "WE JUST WANT TO HANG OUT IN THE PARK AFTER DARK WITH OUR TENTS AND OUR GUITARS, PEAAAAACEE" garbage. What purpose does it serve? Yeah, you really showed the cops with your bongo skills. 

Too much coffee gives me neg! Some good stuff: we are going to get firearm licenses at the York Region Firearms Academy and that sounds super exciting. Their logo is a woman wearing a bonnet and carrying a rifle, I love that. Speaking of guns, check out this shooting range target (CLICK) - holy eff is that even real?! 

I've been obsessively grooming my plants and watching them closely every day like they're my kids (maybe it's time to have kids). The plants all lined up across from my desk and make me happy, I seriously stand in front of them and smile for like ten minutes before I even sit down to work.

Here's this morning's song on repeat. Also, Nirvana's Incesticide. And shit, the proper amount of sun and coffee gives me enough motivation for ten people. See you later!

I'm already 2/3 of the way through The Map and the Territory and there are two notable passages: the one that is too long to quote about Charles Fourier, the organization of production and the political development of the William Morris company, and the one that I reread five times, that blew my mind - this one:

"...Olga was nice, she was nice and loving, Olga loved him, he repeated to himself with a growing sadness as he also realized that nothing would ever happen between them again; life sometimes offers you a chance, he thought, but when you are too cowardly or too indecisive to seize it life takes the cards away; there is a moment for doing things and entering a possible happiness, and this moment lasts a few days, sometimes a few weeks or even a few months, but it happens once and one time only, and if you want to return to it later it’s quite simply impossible. There’s no more place for enthusiasm, belief, and faith, and there remains just gentle resignation, a sad and reciprocal pity, the useless but correct sensation that something could have happened, that you just simply showed yourself unworthy of this gift you had been offered."

Houellebecq is an asshole, which makes this book such a pleasure to read because it's soft in all the right places. Kind of like when you bump into the school bully in the bathroom and they cry in your arms cause their dad locks them up in the basement every night and even though they revert back to bully after your encounter, suddenly you're all unguarded and feel like you want to be there for them. Is that weird? Sorry for the awful analogy. Anyway!


That passage sounds depressing but I love it so much! I often feel like a jerk too. And even though I know I probably am not one I find solace in the idea that even jerks have feelings and depth and aspirations beyond the immediate satisfaction - all that and whatever else it takes to create a "well rounded" personality.


I'm going to talk at Trampoline Hall next Monday, May 7th, come heckle me. Trampoline Hall is a lecture series. It's sunny and beautiful and I'm happy to be back in Toronto, someone come take pictures with me this week! 


Here's a song. Bye!

My favourite phallic objects left to right: pig's tooth, sea urchin, Uzi bullet, Galil bullet. The last two are live bullets stolen from the IDF that I somehow crossed the border with. A Galil is a Kalashnikov-type rifle. The pig's tooth comes from an oven roasted pig's head we consumed at a garden dinner party and the sea urchin was a present from my friend Nikki.

GOALS

Sooooooo apparently the reason why I have in my possession notebooks filled with ideas that never left the page is because when you talk endlessly about your goals and get feedback from others your mind is being tricked into thinking that you've actually made progress even though you haven't even started. It's called "substitution". Wera Mahler said that when it's acknowledged by others it feels real in the mind. I remember on so many occasions saying - I think about it all the time and it feels like I've already made it so there is no satisfaction in actually producing it. I have to learn to shut up.

Rainy day.

Birth-stones, found crystals and pyrite presents. I'm going to get bankrupt over rocks. 

I've been thinking a lot about two things: women in love and empathy. Those are two separate thoughts BTW. When I was ten I stole a cassette tape from my best friend's dad's collection. It was a really shitty mix-tape - adult oriented - Patricia Kaas, Barbara Streisand and Chris de Burgh and there was that one song by Vanessa Paradis "Joe le taxi". Remember that song?! Pedophile heaven. Anyway somehow at the time I refused to align myself with Paradis even though she was way closer in age to me than all the dinosaurs on that tape. I think the reason for that was because at that point in my life I was desperately trying to appear more mature, I felt as if maturity was a secret, something to be proud of. I listened to that song "Woman in Love" by Streisand and it was epic, almost heroic, and I imagined that love - adult love - was kind of like that. In my mind I created this "adult" version of everything I was already aware of at the time: knowledge, sex and relationships and the adult version seemed so ordered and  so appealing that I wanted the transition to take place already. I hate waiting.

The first time I was in love was not a good experience mostly because I've come to realize that there is no order or heroism and the song was long gone from my head. Being in love was and is kind of ugly and scary until you figure things out, IF you figure them out. Evidently, I would rather feel scared than feel nothing at all because I always fall in love willingly and without restraint. Being in love is the best even when it's the worst. It's like a family trip you suffer through but then look back at fondly when you're like thirty and "too old" for family trips. The worst thing that could happen in a relationship is when nothing happens so as long as you're kept on your toes every once in a while you're probably doing alright.

A few weeks ago I went to photograph a friend and in the car on the way there she told me about her new relationship. Her face was calm but not bored, almost in a trance, and I liked that so much. It's like her face reiterated the words and not in a fake way like people usually do when they force smiles but like it knew she was right. 

I'm having the nicest day, don't let the tone fool you! I'm just thinking. Empathy later, I'm going to the gym. Bye friends, please listen to this song.

That's one of my birthstones - Opal. So iridescent! Where do I find one? It's also the pattern and colour of my most favourite dress that I never wear because the zipper is broken.

Every day there comes a moment when I give up coffee for water or ginger tea. That moment is important to note because if I don't make the switch the coffee usually produces unpredictable results. Like a panic attack or an argument or a string of emails I later feel slightly ashamed of.

Two springs ago in Montreal I sat on our back yard porch and admired the lilacs while drinking coffees alone and imagined that I could never be happier anywhere else. Then I moved to the island where on a small stone pier with friends and wine at sunset I thought that there was no other place more special. These days I slowly coast on my bike down Augusta and feel like I don't ever want to leave this neighbourhood. I love my house and my roommates and when I sit on the roof at night the city looks so enormous and I can see where the market begins and ends. I can be happy anywhere.

My friend Julia writes a food column for Vice and it's one of my favourite things to read lately, specifically her post about the Niagra Falls (please read it HERE), specifically the part where she lays in bed with her lover with the falls right outside their open windows wondering why we need the casino and the strip bars, and why experiencing the falls isn't enough on its own anymore. Wait I don't think they're in bed I may have made that up. A while ago I listened to a radio show about Annie Edson Taylor, the woman who took a ride down the falls in an oak barrel in 1901 expecting some sort of a financial gain and possibly fame out of the experience, and later dying in poverty and on her own anyway. Desperate people often take desperate measures to ensure their survival but the sad thing about desperate acts and grand gestures is that they are so obvious to everyone and usually backfire. I have to remember that because I tend to be fond of that "technique".

So much has happened in the past few weeks. Mostly eating lots of tacos and having adventures in the sun. It was too overwhelming to write about, but I'll try soon. I'm still eating tacos and having the nicest day - like every day in the past month - maybe that is why the words aren't coming out properly.

Tonight my friends Sari and Romy will play music at the ROM (HERE), complete with a light show, and then Keren Cytter's "I Eat Pickles At Your Funeral" performance at the Al Green Theatre (HERE). Maybe I'll see you there?

In other news: I've listened to this song fifty times today. It's a good song to listen to if you're feeling heartbroken, which I'm not, but I imagine that if I was it would make me feel better. I hope you're all enjoying spring too! Bye friends.

SUMMER IN MARCH

We went to Don's on Saturday, for one day/overnight only, but it was perfect. Don lives HERE.


Mid sentence!


Let's walk.


I stopped to pee in the middle of this field and counted at least 6 fat worms in the ground while I was crouching. Fertile!!!!


Jiva.


Hello!


There was a tree in the forest that didn't shed its leaves! They were bleached white.


Jiva!


Trying to climb the cage in the forest.


I think it's a sex cage?!


There's maple syrup cooking in that cauldron up there.


That metal thing on the left with the fire underneath is a hot tub. At night we jumped out of the tub and into the pond. It was icy.


But also very relaxing.


Drunk on prosecco by mid-day, obvs..


A beaver made this sculpture!


It's like a tiny evil city from a sci-fi movie. And my shadow!


Don's nice chandelier. That last picture was taken by Jessie Curell! Good bye!