Cacao supply, children...

"Childhood is both a construct and a luxury good, available only to children of adults who earn sufficient livelihoods for their families as a whole." Read more.

How My Family is and How to be more successful in 2 paragraphs or so, for Angela Nardiello

First of all, I had a great nap today. It was dreamy... so nice. I woke up to soup on the table.

You ask, I tell. Dancing is like art and dancing is an art and dancing is art but not if you're smoking and drinking on a Saturday night for just so. Drunk art isn't art, fuck that. But it can be. Don't let me be the arbiter on this one. What I do really know is this: If you like it, if it feels good, and it feels right, adopt a corporate catch phrase and just do it. Ahem, My family is so beautiful. I hung out today with mum and dad and my sister, Urszula, and her exceptionally wonderful son, my nephew, Tyrus. Tyrus has deep blue eyes from my father, I think. His brown hair is light brown, a glowing dark blonde, nothing dirty about it. He is deeply interested in all things with big wheels and painted yellow: diggers, excavators, trucks; his favourite are cranes. I credit his preference to his exceeding intelligence because he obviously has an affinity for ideas beyond brute force. He seems to understand lifting, as the surpassing of this primordial law that makes even flesh fall, and stretching towards the heaven is one step from flying and one stair step from being angelic. He doesn't pronounce the R in crane very well and when he sees one (and he sees many because Toronto is constantly under construction) he yells out KWAYNE! You can't help but smile at his budding wit when he points at the cranes and says "I wanna see dat!" He's a great joy to play with. I tease him a lot about what is his and what isn't, to his mother's dismay, but he laughs when I do it and I like it and oh, you'd love him Angela, you would, because he's so easy to fall in love with.

The second part of this much delayed response addresses your second question:

1. Read "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Louis Borges and from it...
2. Decide that you can't know everything and focus on what success is for you and let it be your new modus operandi. Obsess on it. And then realize that...
3. You have this thing inside you called "joy". Bring it to any table you may have the pleasure pulling up a chair to, resting your elbows upon, tapping your finger tips on, eating food from, dancing on top of and let joy unfold it's warm magic... voila.

I hope that helps.

I'm happy to have the chance to share this with you, you've asked great questions. I would have loved to share this with you over brunch. I miss you lots and lots, send me your mailing address, okay? Until then, I am

yours affectionately,
tonik

I hope you're well. I miss you. Lots and lots. Love, tonik

Tino Sehgal

I could write a whole thesis paper on Tino Sehgal but it's better to let him talk about it.

Image: ICA

I'm too sad to tell you

Toronto

keyword: grey. toronto is waaaaaay ____. ____ pale and ashy but the most beautiful ____ you can imagine. ____. i drove out to my parents house today and the route out to their place in the burbs takes us along a highway through what's known as the Don valley. the valley is ____... ____ and peppered brown with last years leaves. ____, and still, with a coat of this winter's relentless snow. the once-in-a-while willow trees provide a bit of color as their weeping branches and their tiny buds glow a yellow that seems almost neon amidst the, you got it, ____. 3 of my mum's crocuses broke their brilliant purple through the ____ ground. i wake up recently wondering if there is still snow to be witnessed. i wake up and the window over my head usually exposes a blue sky above; later in the afternoon it usually goes ____ but if it doesn't it's brilliantly sunny like today. i then look out over the ____ roads, the ____ sidewalks as they compliment the ____ish brown lawns and the nearly budding but still bald trees. snow. almost no sign of spring snow. snow, white sometimes, and sometimes ____ and snow aged to ice over the months near the sides of the roads, ice that has picked up dirt from the vehicles, absorbed the filth from the traffic, melted from salting, melted together with sand, ice that was once white, has now in places gone black. it's beguiling but you can revel in it, if you know how to look at it, touch it. it's so ____, beautiful. it's not april yet, but sometimes it snows in april. i wonder if you know that song?

Everything around me.

Geoff McFetridge has made some new wallpaper I learned, and then I bumped into a place in California that makes an amazingly beautiful selection of fine wallpapers available.

New Book

RCMP, 2008

Complete info here.

Buy it here.

overhead haiku

the sky super blue
two upon the crucifix
the flock squacks above

It's rather gray...

I'd love to go to NYC today and be tickled by a visit to a great show at the MOMA. The NY Times has a great article about all it's hues and tones and MOMA's website has all the works to see online... And if that's not your bag of tea, then this just might be... a spoonful of honey.

Image: Purl Bee

What do you do?

I wake up and
I hope that I'll get
the chance to
go to sleep
tonight.

How do you do?

Musings

Hans Ulrich Obrist with Stefano Boeri and Barbara Vanderlinden describe today's citizenship in terms of "bands of perception" - "less about belonging to a single and fixed geography but more about constructing a personal collage inflected by the various place one travers, travels to, lives in, emigrates to" etc. -- I had a conversation last weekend with Tejpal Ajji and he was telling me about his research about airport cities, outside major cities, like Heathrow, Queens, and Malton (which happens to be Tejpal's city of residence) + a conversation with Will Kwan led us into speculating about sharing a studio in Berlin or New York in the future, an outpost for our careers. I started to think about outposts and hubs and extensions this week. Sometime during the week i've been hypothesizing about the idea of a "Little Canada" --- I wonder how that could transpire in the fabric of a city like Berlin or Beijing, for instance; in Toronto we have China town, Korea town, Little Italy, Little India et al. and I'm thinking it would be interesting (and fun) to flip the idea back around and let immigrant culture come full circle - I bet there's a word for it... but what do you call an immigrant who goes back to where the hell he came from?

My father, who travels much between Canada and Poland has recently lamented to me about the migration of Polish, and now EU, citizens out of Poland to try and earn better money; many have ended up in England, Ireland, Germany etc + he says that the country has "lost" about 5 million inhabitants. I ask him if that's bad, and he says that it is, of course it is. And when I ask: How do you know? We both smile.

Image: Yesterday's Queen Street W. fire.

Johnny Chung Lee's paint balloon slingshot etc.

Johnny Chung Lee is a renaissance man. Nevermind the slingshot linked up above but also check out what he's doing with the wii remote and his other projects. I wish more people were like Johnny Chung Lee, embraced their awesome nerd powers and put it good use. I'm inspired.

overhead haiku

those three quarters
of your face gleaming, moon: white
milk clouds cover you.

Make Shows

""When I lived in Vancouver, I had nothing, I made shows in my apartment. You can make a show in your shoe if you want. Shows can happen anywhere: it can happen on the telephone, it can happen in your computer, it can happen anywhere. It's, just like, a force of your imagination willing to take place. So I just say: make exhibitions. Get them out there. However, what it is, whatever technology you need, you know? Make them in the back of that truck over there, I don't care, doyouknowhatimean? Make shows." – Kitty Scott

Reading Rainbow vs Run DMC

Gotta love Jordi with his skinny tie and matching jacket too. Wow!

Say No Go

I love the yellow neon in the back.




and i can't embed this one, but it's the best one.

Stardate Feb 7, 08

A couple weeks ago my friend told me that about weather engineering in China. I thought it was amazing. In a whole other China factoid, China is now planet Earth's third largest Art market behind leaders US & UK. The above video has nothing to do with China but it is awesome, even if you're not big time into electronic music like I'm not. Laura told me about it.

morning haiku

the hum of a fan,
the new sun beaming, my tongue
tastes last night's ice cream.

what's that? haiku

moving, cleaning up;
her letter from long ago...
a tarnished hint.