Gesamtkunstwerk

i think i'm halfway there with the miracle. this could actually work. although it rings bells about the last time i was in this shitcased... shit, when i thought up a best idea in the shower, right before the final appointment with the lecturer. (lego & logic - how Do u convey 'logic' in a poster?) this time i propelled off with some chatting with good ol' kevin - who was stressing out over animation projects, and straight off gave me animation execution ideas.

which wasn't such a bad thing, actually. have 3 abstract tvcs now, from within an overly-abstracted mind last night. they may be nonsense, but i was once told "illegitimus non carborundum"! animation was the key, the missing link, the... invisible staircase. then i compared it to my earlier predicament and realised i didn't need a key back then.

hate to think it's luck.

the lesson is, u need to talk to people to get ideas. genuine expert help is good, but even general small talk helps. to be creative u need every insight, every possibility, every outlet (for future reference, i cannot live alone. it's social suicide.) so the ingredients for a miracle are: simple message, abstracted mind ready to apply and some spice. translates to simple objective, broad-open and obssessive (in most cases, fatigued) mind, and the spice... is the little, elusive omnivariable that brings it all together, kicks it in.

hahah! what bullshit. documents?

is what i'll learn before turning 20. hmm, that's 5 days.

i've learnt to ignore my birthdays, used to the annual shitarsed time of the year, from school and 1st day of pmr and spm too, till uni now when it's still the final crap 1-2 weeks of the semester. so i treat it more a birthmonth. ...which is actually, a lame excuse for extending a 20-years-old deadline. wtf am i doing?

anyway, have totally fucked myself into deep shit. having 2 weeks empty for 2 projects make a double-edged sword. all the doubles cut u both ways. good thing is i can focus, bad thing is i won't. client based meetings today and there's zilch from me... will have to work some magic. a fortnight into <7 hours, and no sleep yet. for kiwi shoe polish, wtFuck!!

meanwhile, in writing part 1 of photoshop project, i find if u do a google for artist hannah hoch, look for a german site, click on translate to get a funny and quite unceremonious treatment of her name. and go here to see detailed theories concerning the dada art movement and www sitemaps, with pictorial patterns, concluding that "the web is a thoroughly dada situation." even a uni of washington paper can be utterly inane. but u can't compare others' faults to rate your own achievements.

so i want, in 5 days - 6 ads over 4 media - which is essentially 2 months of work, and an explosive presentation, due in 7 days. 3rd nov. and part 2 of photoshop project, not started as of yet, on the 5th. :/

before 20: art of engineered miracles.

[right now it's Windy like MMAADDD, the rain's whipping past horizontally!!! the door's rattling every few seconds, the tree outside keeps slapping my window. i hope it stands it. the current wind observations are 17 kmh with gust of 30 kmh.]

in the apartment block opposite mine, there lives a woman. located slightly higher than me, i usually see her in mid-morning, sitting at her comp, in a white or pink bathrobe alternately. cy and andrew can testify to this, they've seen her. this evening i was reading hadji murat (go read, btw - tolstoy's last and most-heavily-drafted work) when i chanced to glance up. andshewasnaked!!!

!!!

if u have to be all technical like andrew and wl... topless. fine. topless or starkers i can't tell anyway, but her breasts were definitely exposed. i saw her back at first ("is she Naked???") and she turned ("gasp!"). she sat down, out of sight, and i tried to get back to my book. she got up and i dropped it. she went into the kitchen, moving rather quickly from fridge to stove, presumably, to the sink by the window, forcing her to wash up facing me directly. at one point she stopped and must've even looked straight at me, but consider: 200 metres, 2 layers of glass, and evening sunlight - much was obscured for the both of us. immobile, i could've passed off as furniture. albeit one with a suspiciously human outline.

it is one thing to hear about it and quite another to do it. u've no idea what a voyeur is till u Are one yourself; my hands were sweaty, heart beating fast. it's just... natural, and i don't mean voyeur in the sexual sense, either. i wasn't new to naked women, but ah - naked women oblivious to me! i was totally confident i was invisible, but - there's always the unspoken "and yet..." and at this point i must confess, i'm a semi-nudist myself (one of the liberties of living alone); i didn't care if others looked through my windows at me in the nude - yet here was one instant reversed and i'm overreacting.

so i sat transfixed as she made her dinner/snack/whatever. can't be helped, it was just new, interesting. i turned my paradoxes over in my head, making it More interesting; contemplating both visually and mentally. and throughout, with "she'snakedshe'snakedshe'snaked!" running through my mind. she went back to the living room, to watch tv i guess, judging from the reflected light shimmering on the wall. i can't actually see her tv. i tried to read, but it was too dark.

a few more fleeting glimpses, then she went into what i surmise is the bedroom. my thoughts have yielded no answers. i switch the light on and carry on with hadji murat.

when she re-emerges, the white robe is back in place.

there's this guy they call staph, a powerful, parasitic alien. he roams the land of cutanea, building biological mines. they resemble unseemly domes protruding from the land itself. called an abscess, they poison the land. he has set up a few spots all over.

as of late, staph has figured out even more powerful ploys by establishing his mines after burrowing deep. reaching the nether realms of subcutanea, he targets areas with more natural growth, corrupting their roots, mutating them into what's termed a furuncle. unnoticed, he has established a few more of these, clustered together. we have no reports indicating the timeframe of these processes.

ever ambitious, he has now combined these into a huge base with several pollution ducts. the extent of the damage is that it juts out massively on cutanea itself, although most activities take place underground. the earlier domes are replaced by an expanding crater, with the subtle-to-ridged walls indicating progress under construction. or should we say, destruction.

now the serious issue here, is that the land of cutanea... moves. it is living tissue and organ complete with pain receptors, and has to move regularly. all this mining business hurts, physically hurts. the underground elemental armies have retaliated but many of our luekocyte elite army have perished, and staph makes mockery by heaping them in his crater, forming a mass grave central to the unholy structure, till cutanea itself balloons out. now it's bubble meshed into crater, and the walls are still thickening, spreading outwards, inexorably.

the surface is reddened with blooming black, looking malign. it is a new stage of his evolution which he calls carbuncle - after a form of carbon found in rubies - and is therefore a lousy joker. staph. i've known him for quite a while, and u may have as well, without knowing it. the lesser abscesses, in their infantile stages, are more common, known as acne vulgaris. other mutations of these are cysts, boils and cutaneous anthrax.

staphylococcus aureus. as of now, one hell of a pain in the neck.

- each reading the morning papers, the little girl observed. huddled in a corner, she felt it getting colder. wind rushed through the platform, pushed by the mechanical worms tunneling their concrete catacombs, heralding their arrival. she loved hearing the roar of air, of engines, and footsteps and basically, movement. six newspapers peeled and crackled and flapped.

marco aloysius grunted in annoyance. for the thirty-eighth time this morning he was wishing he was younger. oh yes, he counted. a subtle sign that he had too much time on his hands, now he was too old for any good. the needle ache in his hip only added to his gloomy countenance as he hobbled from the bench. he was sure it was all in the mind, but every time a wind blew he felt mild but concentrated rheumatism attacks. very disconcerting business.

a long, wiggly roach emerged from a groove in the floor tiles. not stopping, it slithered half an inch to attach onto a stiletto, was instantly airborne, carried through into the train, and settled down. he scuttled from his hitched hike into the shadows. was that a chance trip, who'll know? the air tasted different to the roach. it smelt manufactured, inorganic, yet with a pungent apple scent; new, clean, sanitized. no-no! whoops, turn off!

"What an Eyesore! totally unseeming. never bothered with your hair or shoes, and his trousers trailing under his shoes! disgraceful. if u were my son u would be quartered, sir. yes, utter shame." oblivious, the lad pointed his sleepy gaze toward an attractive brunette, his legs cushioned by the entire length of the elder/disabled row of seats. some unidentified muck had dribbled down his shoes and stained his extra-long jeans.

"could i have some space? and some quiet?"
no answer.

in a deft yank the phones were out the bastard's ears, and he was cringing into his ear in pain and subsequently, in graphic submission to elder authority. "Space. and Quiet." a man of few words, marco aloysius made concise points. the delinquent mumbled his apologies profusely, incoherently, and proceeded to put maximum distance between himself and the old psycho...

who apparently found the seats not to his liking and was sitting elsewhere. the girl grinned. eliza had plonked herself next to her boyfriend (eleven years old, met daily on the way to different schools) to talk the same books, daydreams and wild story ideas and laugh at nothing together, just like every other day. chatting him up the fifteen trainride minutes every morning and afternoon, she felt happy and accepted and loved, and the days seemed never to end.

how wrong.

(edited.)

martyn sat with his head in the clouds, in the sci-fi novels he had been reading so voraciously of late. he stared out the window. spring sunshine stared rudely back. trains thundered past like sleek mechanical worms. up ahead the rod laver arena loomed, like an offset organic hive, an apt monument to the transformation in his eye. he saw the city, brilliant within its reflected light, and the stygian train tracks that snaked in, feeding human sacrifice.

opposite, a woman in her 30's eyed him oddly, her face never shifting from her book. she loved people-watching; on her way to work, over a cuppacino (yes, she spelt it like that), and especially while pretending to read, and over anything - crime novels, feminist history novels, the herald sun, people magazine. her name card reads jean russell, senior designer. her job, not that she was good at it, was making movie props.

five seats behind sat virginie, also in her 30's. a helpful soul, she had been working in volunteer societies for a decade, had seen blood, tears, and human decay and yes, human excellence. tired and happy, she was taking a 2 week holiday which she would spend in melbourne with an indian girl she helped deliver from slavery. she was new, had no mobile phone and only some instructions, and thus adrift like a log at sea. everything looked foreign (not to mention expensive), the interior gray; and outside: the buildings looked plastic, the trees scrawny. she gazed down the length of the carriage.

at the far end sat a teenager, unshaven, in a grubby pullover and bright beanie, headphones blaring way louder than necessary. the sex last night wasn't all that good, and there was none this morning. the missus's mood didn't improve either. tate shifted his half-lidded eyes, silently daring Anyone at all to protest his cacophonous broadcast. Whazzamadter? ya don't like muh Music? Shut yo fuk'n ears, then. he'd always try to be rude, but basic decency always switched him carriages at the next stop.

standing near the doors, leaning on the post, was a young executive. thisIstheDay. theywillbesoo blown. iWillmakeit. he was standing because he was too nervous to sit, and jumping back and forth counting his chickens and preparing his speech. the nondescript scribbled 'meeting with board at 11am' on his planner was in fact, the potential weight that will catapult him to the pinnacle of the lofty corporate echelons. today, one of us will change history.

how right.

shall i take opium or not? it is useless to put on a carefree air, dear poet. i will take it if my work wants me to... and if Opium wants me to."

- so wrote jean cocteau in rehab. the shit u do for Art, eh? now, in sudden unexplained curiosity i'd gone and dug up info about cocteau. why cocteau not debussy? after all i play some debussy. i play reverie from instinct, no longer from memory; i loved golliwog's cake walk. but it was the viewing of la belle et la bette - in steve's foundation class, 2002 - that was when i first heard of cocteau... and film, although b&w, Is more modern than impressionist piano.

now if u're still not with me, these are the last two fellas - uh, grand masters - of the priory of sion according to dan brown. jean cocteau was last on the list and that was what sparked my inquisitive side... what the hell happened after him? who found this list? why would i be reading about a 900 yo top secret body, in a fiction novel at that, if it was that top secret? how many people bothered to do some research?

the priory of sion is the product of one man's fecund creativity, pierre plantard de saint-clair, with the help of one other guy... don't remember his name. a hoax exposed back in the 80's. so much for brown's "impeccable research". it makes sense too, i don't think opium addicts merit much in the way of grand masters. and there's also talk of plagiarism... da vinci code, of a book called daughter of god. but da vinci code is still good reading, if u turn a blind eye to occasional criminal, sinful grammar mistakes. but hey, everyone loves a conspiracy. i'm human; that's why i'm still buying angels and demons. =)

moving on. i tell justin it's a typical break, since i'm starting my h/w on sunday morning. he says, hahaha. while researching wonka nerds, i came across an... ... article. if u note the lack of adjectives, it's becoz words failed me. i fervently wished i wrote it - it's the perfect rationale for my endeavour to sell Chaos. that site is a shrine for anti-bush sentiments, and some damn good creative writing. like this one, let me quote: "with great power comes great responsibility, and more often than not, great responsibility means great restraint."

resisting temptation is part of responsibility, which is where restraint comes in. it Is obvious that spiderman is an allegory of the teen-to-adult transition, where stan the man's message is clear: "u'd damn well better tread the right path, and know: that duty outweighs play." but interestingly, there is much more than that... this article makes it look like a metaphor for a chapter from a psych textbook. did u know it involved patricide?

and is also a political lesson?

fairy tales are more than true: not because
they tell us that dragons exist, but because
they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
- g. k. chesterton

just finished neil gaiman's Coraline tonight. it's a novella, easily consumed in 2 hours, a breezy fairytale, and infinitely dark. true to gaiman tradition there's this quote at the beginning (there was a poem in Stardust, which i could kick myself for not writing down.)

i'm blogging just for the sake of putting something up? that's sad. a week's break with no creative output: a macabre pathos (ogilvy, 1983). and hahah no, it wasn't the prolonged slack he was refering to either... it was claude hopkins' dedication to advertising. reads the last line of his autobiography, "the happiest are those who live closest to nature, an essential to advertising success."

don't make your job your life, folks.

for great achievements from the younger side of 20... does this count?



i hope i'm kidding.