Swift, Thomas Mann, Panofsky, Gombrich

On Moo Pak

Reading material from a reading source. Books that lead you to books. Writing about reading. Thought from another time, still present, still meaningful, still new. Ideas that go beyond the state of affairs, that turn out to be travelling fast nowadays. As always, in accordance with the feeling of each time, magnified by the disruption of sources of meaningless distractions. All the time. Everywhere.

Tuns out I have to read more. More sources. More books. Other cultures. It’s not new. It’s an old assignment. And I still have a to read list that tends to infinity. And yet, somehow, sometimes, I get in the zone, and accumulate a winning streak. I’m reading just about the amount of books I could handle. And still, sometimes, it feels like it’s not enough.

Johnathan Swift

You look at a writer’s picture and wonder. In this case, a painting. That’s the person. Under his skin, there’s the story. How did it come to mind at first? How did it evolve into the final draft of the finished print? How many people got involved in this process?

The writer is the lone creator on it own. It requires no one else to pitch in, while sometimes relevant feedback may help to assist the point. A good friends ear. An editor’s advice. A publisher desire to risk the chances of people caring. At that point, there are more people involved. We are now talking about the industry. About the market, and no longer about the writing in itself. But what’s good writing without readers. Just thoughts. Lonely ones. Aspirations. Melancholy.

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was the man. Cigarrete lit, winter gloves of a gentle-man. Carefully shaped and tendered mustage. Four button suit. Stern wooden chair. Glancing eyes.

Jonh and Tom enter a room. They came together. The room turns and judges the two charecters. Something is on. Everybody knows. They still keep their cool, as the spell has been bound, and the action is just waiting to reveal itself. It will take some time. It’s not loud. Not yet. It’s only intriguing. And sparkling. Nobody else has that chill. Yet the party has been transformed. In an unexpected way. A good way.

That’s how you differentiate writers. The ones that can enter the room and light up the space. And the ones that only do that when they enter into their world. Where everything, every card, every sense of joy, every precision, every spirit, every meaning, spells itself out into the page, while leaving nothing left in real life, but the empty container of curious mind without social skills. As writers, they both trascend, as it’s in reading where you build the immaculate communion of two minds, and evolve into the possibilities of creating yet another story, yet another tale, yet another creative outburst.

Van Dyke según Panofsky

You can write about anything. Stories, however, represent a different kind of writting. Everyone writes in their own terms. Art too can be narrated. Text lives beyond literature, and it may be printed on any given matter, in any given surface, for any given purpose.

Ernst Gombrich, Art historian

The Story of Art. Gombrich has influence the narrative of art. Up to the point in which the character of Moo Pak understood that these four characters were bound to be mentioned in a stream of thought, at any given time, to transfer a profound reference to something condensed in tiny hint. Context provides the first field of action. If you are outside of it, the sense of it slips by. And you go on. And so does the inintial intention of that given thought. So going back to capture them, is a matter of being able to rewind time. To back up. To read again. To read. For the first time. An author you don’t know, but now have a purpose to pursue.

ALLS

Ain’t no script for you in Hollywood

Denial letters will keep you going

When am you going to write a script? You think all the script you’ll get for you are going to be as good as «Boys N the Hood»? Hollywood ain’t got no scripts for you. Unless you wanna do bullshit. You can write songs like you write, you can write a movie.

John Singleton to Ice Cube

Representation will not come to you just as mainstream drive. You need to present a case for yourself. You got to do that part of the job. It’s not going to happen just because you think it would be fair. You need to make it happen. You.

The singularity of everyone’s perspective is determined by the uniqueness of our experience, from our very own little point of view. We are the active actors of the development of our vision. And no one else is going to pave the way for you.

I know this shit from way back when. And I’ve never come out myself. I’ve held on to something else. A lame excuse that holds to my very own insecurities to avoid the stepping into the abyss drill. And I’m pretty sure this shit ain’t working, because no one has taken that step for me. As only I can.

As only I should.

Damn, it’s a hard shit.

I feel for the feeling of the underrepresented. Their voices haven’t been heard. They don’t get the chance mainstream stories are depicting. But who’s to change that. The scriptwriters write about what know. About what works. About their own little formulas. The establishement works like that because that how it got established. Something else is up for the up and coming voice within you. And if you are searching for recognition, maybe you should try searching within to find your truth, your soul, your arguments. And from there on, built the narrative that represent the stories you wish you had. The truth you would like to see on the screen. And then you have the type of shit that would look in the character you are playing, in the scenes that you are directing, or in the films you are producing.

Open the door. Assume the responsibilities. Act upon them. Write your own shit. Walk your own talk. Stop complaining to the world, and start showing up with your own voice.

Start with the first.

Start today.

ALLS

La cocina, de Alonso Ruizpalacios

La migración de mexicanos a Estados Unidos es una vieja historia. La segunda generación de mexicanos-americanos, o chicanos como se les etiquetó en un sitio en donde la raza, la religión, la procedencia y el dinero sirven para segmentar la sociedad, han votado a Donald J. Trump como presidente. Esto es un reflejo de que la vida del que emigra adquiere un sentido de renuncia y otro de aceptación, pero nunca del todo satisfecho con lo que en un lado u otro de lo que en el stio de partida o en el destinación se define como «propio». El que emigra siempre sigue ausente, quizás esperando su momento de aceptación. Y su integración siempre está en duda. Quizás porque debe asumir ciertos elementos propios de otra cultura, o asumirse en un contexto en el que desarraigarse de sus raíces le parece contradictoriamente imperativo. O justo al revés.

No hay un crónica única de la emigración. Sin embargo parece que los sitios con historia de emigrantes suelen tener el foco en otro momento anterior, cuando entonces los que llegaron eran los que valían la pena. Pero en algún momento esto se tiene que acabar. Hay que cerrar el grifo. Que es el mantra con el Don T. ha llegado otra vez al poder. El «nosotros» de la Great América de Trump los incluye a ellos; a esa segunda o tercera generación. Ellos ya son de allá.

Y el que es americano de verdad está motivado por la victoria. Por el ganar. Ganar dinero. Ganar el super bowl. O que lo gano tu equipo. Ganar las elecciones. La sensación de ser parte de una mayoría. Ya nos aceptaron, pensarán. No somos como aquellos. Los come-gatos.

Alonso Ruizpalacios acaba de sacar una película que retrata la vida de una cocina en Times Square, que sirve cada día a turistas comida de medio pelo, en un contexto de las cocinas americanas que están llevadas en su mayoría por emigrantes mexicanos. Es el acceso a tener una chamba, con lo que implica para empleadores y trabajadores formar parte de la sociedad, y cómo representa un juego de rol de los que «dan oportunidades» y los que las «toman», como si hubiera alternativa.

El sistema de los indocumentados en USA o en la EU persigue una diálectica de invasión que no es del todo fidedigna, mientras las oportunidades a los migrantes se ven empantanas por burocracias que simplemente se formulan como un sistema perverso que ni avanza ni expulsa, pero que en medio de esa situación genera distorciones y desigualdades de poder en el que aquellos que se mueven entre escalas de grises se encuentran. No es un tema de ahora, sino de siempre. Y reconozco que no sabría cómo plantear un modelo en el que dichas violencias subterráneas dejaran de existir.

Como siempre la mirada y la crítica social de Alonso nos permiten analizar con matices situaciones en las que debemos prestar atención, y disfrutar del buen momento del cine mexicano.

Entrevista de Alonso con Carmen Aristegui sobre su peli La Cocina

¡Hay que verla!

People frightened of silence

Moo Pak ins and out

I’m walking along with this book like a walk in a park with a conversationalist. I’m steping in and out cause I need to come back to it, and then I feel the rush of comming here to write. It’s an exercise I’ve been forced to do by the fact that I cannot jot down a single scribble on the pages, as I am used to, because the book is borrowed. I need to give it back, eventually, as I got it. And it is in impecable conditions.

Nobody imposed this on me. I did. It’s always you who drive things around. In or out. It’s all in your head anyway. And you categorize the exercise. You make it happen so we understand the feeling of where this system is going. The personal system you own set of microcomponents, soul, body and shit… make up for. You are a complete social ecosystem. Yet, you still are just on your own, among the masses of an interconnected society.

So for quite some days I’ve had this urge to go back to Moo Pak to write about this. Silence. Solitude. Being with yourself. But as it turns out, the book has this beautiful constant voice that keeps talking and walking, and there is no stopping. It’s a single thread of a thought that connects logically with the next, and so on, and so forth. Sudenly, I don’t feel alone.

I do the same. This is how I write. No matter the intention. I just show up and start. And I’ve become obsessed with this. It’s time with myself. Alone. In silence. Just meeting the point of interconnectivity with my fingertips, my voice, unheard, within my head. Does anybody knows where this is going? No. And that’s no problem.

The problem is I leave map from Donosti to as a page marker. It’s a bit chunky but it does the job. It does less damage than leaving a pen, which I will avoid doing in this case, as I would like to spill ink, or some shit like that. You know that’s always a chance. Specially with a borrowed item. You are constantly on the verge of messing up. I know. We all know. It’s the pressure of staying consistant, and logical, and sane. We fool ourselves to stay on the game. And it’s there, a little bit on the edge, glancing at the scene.

In any case, what I was trying to say is that every time I go back to that point in the book where I last left my reading, I need to be able to go back to the point where Woo Pak left that last intense message I needed to come back to. To make a point. To deliver this other thought. Writers do that. I’ve heard them say it when they show up in that other state of mind you get yourself into when you are speaking for an audience. And then you are no longer a writer, but also an entertainer. Publicly addressing crowds, sometimes even larger than 9 people.

So when I go back to read I’m not in the page where the last message that signal my writing spirit erupted, so I need to go back to the last two or three pages, in order to get back in track with a stream of consciousness. So I do. And then I wonder what I was looking for. For everything turns out to be truth. Slightly more intense in places I hadn’t wondered upon. And I keep going back, maybe, to find what my past reading found that now is eluding me. And I wonder if I put then, on this second reading, the Donosti map a page earlier than the last time I read, because I’d be already signaling the place where I needed to come back to, to write, not to keep reading.

So you see, Woo Pak becomes like this pleasent conversion of time. I can move back and forth this stream, as time should allow to do, for any given timeline. But we are always so focused on going forward, we sometimes disregard the fact that time also has that negative ride: backwards.

And this also why I don’t feel alone anymore. I found a place in which I can excercise this going back. And I am enjoying myself. In this silent mode. Everytime Woo Pak kicks me out of that book, and into this one.

I keep reading back and back and get entangled with that direction of the book. And I’m already hooked. I’m back to the point that I last wrote about. About typing in a computer or typing in a typewriter. As an exercise to rewrite a single page. Over and over. Until you have cleaned it up. Something I never do. As write directly on the cloud. And almos never edit. Which is my own little purgatory.

It’s the sense of writing. The interconection with reading. How they are both there. The silences. Of the book. But also of this other time: the writing one. Even if it is closer to something you may relate to, like reading a post. Or like reading an actual book. Just to organize your time around something physical. Not just a screen. A real human interaction. I also write on paper. It nos just gives me pleasure, it also sits on a different table than writing on the computer or right into the page with an Olivetti. I used to own a typewritter. Not anymore.

The labour of scribes and editors and printers and proof-readers, [ ] Because of the work of these dedicated people, he says, we can now pick up the words of singular men and women and read them and listen to them and question them and live with them in greater intimacy than we do with our own spouses or partners. For a persona like myself, he says, with no country and no language to call his own, a life without Sophocles and Dante and Donne and Stevens would be intolerable.

Gabriel Jsopivici, Moo Pak

In fact I came into this writing exercise today to speak about the silence in books. The silence in writing. The intimacy of being alright with yourself. How writing and reading is part of it. How the author is aligned with Proust about the kind of special silence books have. And I’ve gone back too far back, to point out he craft of those who rescued the ancient voices of the past. Others burned books and libraries. Entire cultures. Washed away and mistreated by our current western ways, disregarding our infliction of damage in this bluring effect.

The most terrible thing that has happen to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened ofsilence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out.

Gabriel Jsopivici, Moo Pak

This is has grown worst nowadays. Silence is not there anymore. Everyone’s got some source of continuos distraction in the mobile phone. It’s not even a complete song. It’s a message to keep you hooked to a short spasm of blabering. Something intense as pill, or distractful enough to catch your attention. We are switcing channels all the time. Endlessly. Which leaves no space for silence. And that’s not just a thing to miss, but also the source of being alright with yourself. No matter what. Books, silence, writting, it’s all part of the source of inmense power we have refill ourselves. We can bring it up as a routine to heal. Walks. To the mountain. Walks with a friend, with different kinds of friends, to align and talk, and to share the silences in between.

ALLS

Walking and talking

An introduction to the walking podcast

Talking the walk and walking the talk

«At the same time, he says, unlike the strolls you are reduced to taking in a city like Paris or New York, you can walk at a decent pace in the London parks and on the London heaths, at the sort of pace that gets the blood flowing and there is nothing more conducive to good talk thatn the healthy flowing of the bood in the veins and a decent walking rhythm»

Moo Pak, Gabriel Josipovici

For quite some time, I’ve made walking a relevant aspect of my routine. Moreover, these walks have represented a way in which I could also improve the mental thought that pops up in any given walk you take. But explicity so, I’ve made a format that includes recording a podcast as the ultimate conversation within yourself, as an exploration to dedicate this thought to align the elements that converge between my current internal journey, my external interaction with society, as I walk to places where I’m suppose to go.

So when I go to work, in the time it takes me to go from my home to the bus stop, which is around 9 to 15 minutes, I launch another session of the Walking Podcast. «Hello, this is Golman, and welcome to another episode of the Walking Podcast. Talking the walk and walking the talk.» That’s my entry line in every episode. Then there’s nothing but the string of thought that comes with the day. This is no other that an immediate connection with the moment. Each step at a time. It’s a certain way to address that I am here, alive, and in this simple gesture, I will align myself with my inner forces to make of this day one that counts.

So that’s what I do. And they all turn out to be versions of the same conspiracy: what if we all could be actors of revelation of NEW collective framework that enables us to become active actors or a greater, fairer, gentler version of our humanity? What will it take for a collective instruments and mechanisms to bring out this emergent structure to reflect on change, impact and tranformation of our global ecosystem?

Yet, Jack Toledano talks about another type of walk. One you make with another person, to strike a conversation. I agree. That’s the most sympathetic way of striking a mood for the direct interaction between two people. The way in which you connect with other, by interacting with what’s in stake, whatever subject pops ups, that requires the immediacy of a response, and the pause and attention of a good listener, and the iteration of evolving feedback.

I’ve practiced those walks. I’ve been exploring the transit of my city, Barcelona, in order to understand the unfolding of each journey and pathways that interconnect the diversity of borroughs, as I understand that walking here is as rich as walking through London parks. It’s not a walking competition, but I’ve managed to do so by allowing myself to be doing those walks as an exploration of my surroundings, at first, and then as a possibility to show others that journey, with the sense of discovery and companionship, that one gets by simply breaking down through unchartered territories. And there, in those walks, the talks and conversations gain a new dimention.

Nietzsche perhaps overdid it, he says, as he overdid everything, in his insistence that the only thoughts worth preserving are those that come to one on walks and in his conviction that what was wrong with Descartes and Kant was that they refused ever to get off their backsides.

While Jack Toledano has something clear: «I personally, Jack says, don’t know what it means to think, either walking or sitting, but I know that the only way I can make anything that will cause other to think is sitting at my typewriter at my desk and the only way I can talk is walking.

The walking podcast

¿Dónde estoy?

Estoy aquí. Recién nacido. O más bien, acabado de despertar.

A veces es suficiente ser tras haber dormido. Alguito. Un poquito. O todo lo que podríamos haber desconectado en unas circunstancias normales de sueño. En un día cualquiera.

Hoy es uno de esos día. También es un día especial que está a punto de nacer. ¿Es acaso este el día en el que por fin todo se desenmaraña?

Amplificar el efecto de lo que hacemos, y conseguir llegar al valor social de lo que anhelamos. Colectivamente. Desde una perspectiva de transformación asumible. A partir de un juego. A partir de un nuevo juego de rol.

Yo soy el rol-maker.

O al menos el que construye la narrativa.

Pero, ¿de qué juego? Ni yo se.

El mio es muy personal.

Es mi juego social.

Mi juego personal.

Mi razón de ser/estar.

En este contexto me juego todo.

Y desde aquí debo desbordar la frontera de contenerme para no salirme del propio cauce que transporta mis aguas mentales.

En medio de la tormenta, mi sentimiento en este momento sigue siendo de gratitud, de haber pasado lo peor, de tener que asumir estar en el contexto de un estado de consciencia más próximo al que en su día se sembró cerca de la raison d’être que me fue revelada. He descubierto el último velo. Y de pronto estoy dentro de quién verdaderamente soy.

Los tiempos de mi narrativa y los del tiempo mismo se comienzan a entrelazar. Al fin de cuentas son nueve dimensiones que se entrelazan en un elemento primordial de mi propio porvenir. No puedo dejar de pensar que el camino que sigo va encaminado al caminar que condiciona la distancia que proyecta mi zancada. Lo más que puedo hacer es mantener las piernas en forma, seguir pedaleando, trasladando el ejercicio de mi entrenamiento a un nivel distinto al de la ejecución de mi puesta en escena. Es así, estando en dos sitios a la vez, y en varias dimensiones intercontectadas por mi propia tiranía, lo que finalmente converge en el ser que un día será lo que mi personaje evolucione en cada uno de sus multiversos particulares.

Ticataluña es especial, quizás porque mana del Tico Commons. Pero esto no es posible desvelarlo sin crear polémica en un mundo dualizado. Sólo se puede asumir si podemos prevenir que lo que aquí está pasando sea matizado por el cantar eterno de un ritmo caribeño que viene del más allá.

La capital de toda esta sinfonía es un isla, o más bien un islote, en el que los habitantes son de otra especie. Su nombre: Guayabo. La ilusión de un sitio que en circunstancias mediterráneas estaría desbordado por la masiva llegada de turistas en piraguas que han alquilado desde el puerto. En cambio, en el imaginario ticatalán, Guayabo se presenta como el eje fundamental entre lo que un día fue, más allá de nuestros días, a lo que acontenció en el continente que ahora llamamos nuevo, sin ruborizarnos, como si antes de aquello viviéramos (inclusive usted mismo, hoy, al pensar como usted piensa) en un mundo de tan sólo dos dimensiones; en una tierra plana.

La visión de Guayabo sólo puede visualizarse en la pintura del maestro don Isiodro Con Won. Su destello nos proyecta como elemento sagrado de una configuración que no está en el sitio en el que debería estar, sino en el su proyección más allá de nuestro status quo, en dirección ortogonal, conecta nuestra luz con la que emana de la consciencia multiversal de los mundos que conectan el arte de don Isidro con el mio.

ALLS

The art of being yourself

The art hunts me. I’m just a medium. It goes through me. Don’t know where. Don’t know why. But it keeps comming back. It’s a thing that gets caught in the mist of my attention. And I pull in. To see. To wonder. And it pops up, as I’m now conscious of its existance and my particular reaction. Why? Why now? Who are you? What is this?

This sort of ordea never stops, but rather you start to embrace the beauty of living with these exceptional oportunities to wonder. To wonder off. To go outside the dotted line. As there is no longer need to follow the heard. I’ve been alienated. I’m an alien.

It’s here. They are here. I am here. I’m the proof of concept. Beyond myself. Beyond the particularities of my own coordinates. My specific circumstances. How does that make me feel? How does that make you feel? There is something out there I don’t control. You, for example.

Yet my art the becomes the medium of my experience. The structure of my acnowledgment. The intention of my provocative snap. The magicians trick. The hat. The set up. The illusion. It’s there. You see.

I told you I had no say in this.

It just poped out.

And somehow it got caught.

Here.

#NAW

In your head.

ALLS

Mercurio retrogrado: 27 de agosto

Es el año 24. El año del cambio, del salto cámbrico, de la traslación a nivel nunca antes visto de hiperconsciencia. No hemos llegado solos. Ni lejos. Tendremos que poner los pies en la tierra para no dejarnos llevar por el aliento de la emergencia colectiva, que de pronto, se postula como el ámbito de acción colectiva más sensible y razonable. O quizás como lo más disruptivo y creativo que podemos asumir en los diferentes niveles de autoorganización que el propio sistema se puede permitir, en momentos como este.

Mercurio retrógrado marcara el alineamiento de los astros de una manera excepcional en posicionamiento estelar de los planetas en nuestra efímera temporalidad despiertos en este alumbramiento, a diferentes velocidades e intensidades que el cosmo nos proporciona, desde nuestra diminuta indiferencia, hasta el más interestelar de las experiencias con las que asumimos esto: estamos vivos.

El tiempo sigue. Y nosotros decidimos dar un paso atrás. Un paso definitivo en la dirección contraria. O quizás un salto ortogonal que nos ayuda a desprender los pesos que inhiben que vayamos más allá de la membrana de lo humanamente asumible.

Ya hace tiempo que tenemos señales. Y nos hemos prodigado en crear historias que iluminan este camino astral. Pero ahora, la cosa se pone seria. O como mínimo surreal. Y de ahí que sepamos de qué manera actuar en el contexto en el que el llamado es tanto personal, como general. Para toda equis.

El modelo se plantea así: como una demostración por reducción al absurdo. Sólo que no la ejecutará una persona común y corriente. Lo hará una deidad olmeca. Creada aquí en la tierra. Por un enviado de Dios Padre. Que curiosamente, actua como múltiple agente. Aquello de los dobles agentes ya quedó en el pasado bipolar. En la polarización de los insulsos. En el odio y la violencia porque sí. Ya no más. Y desde esa península de amor reconstituido en enigma y en formato de último testamento, la palabra de Dios Padre se despliega enteramente en poesía vernacular trastocada. Un invento que el propio autor se acaba de inventar para conseguir con ello trasladar parte de la terrenalidad irresoluble que le consume, más allá de su linaje sagrado. Inmaculado e indiscutible.

Sea esta la parábola 99.

Y de ahí, de allí, iniciamos una cuenta atrás.

ALLS