[ pics, never mind please ]

PERSONAL REFLECTION ON BRIGHTON'S PROJECT

On this blog, I tried to convey a sense of what my "living" has been during the realization of this project on Brighton. Luckily or unfortunately, since I was appointed as copywriter for the WikiProject, I wrote everything nice which came up to my mind directly on the wiki instead of writing it here. Please consider those lyrics as part of my understanding and feeling of the project (all the written parts - a part from "the clicks" page, are written by me). In case you didn't, have a look at our phantomatic project:

http://lccp0801.pbwiki.com/THE+PROJECT

However, in this posting I want to include my personal reflection on the whole process, from start to end.

Well, I could say I learnt what psychogeography is, and some very useful digital skills. I discovered I am able to spend 3 hours on a layout, add a comma. Then spend another 3 hours and a half in the afternoon and take it off. I would have never said I enjoy working with a computer so much. I am seriously considering of going towards this direction after my undergraduate studies (but I think it's too late.. I have a wonderful friend which studies Computer Sciences and struggles with calculus and matrix all day long: he makes me bite the dust. And think maybe it's better if I keep reading Heidegger and Schopenhauer).

But saying just this would be a platitude. I think I learnt more than that: which were the obstacles? First of all, the most difficult thing of all has been for me the team-working part. I am not used to work in groups and usually hate it as much as the other members hate to be in group with me: I am too stubborn, too focused on my own perception of things and my ideas and tastes. Sometimes I think I tend to be arrogant. During this course I learnt to be more flexible. And well, re-reading the last 2 sentences I just discovered I also learnt to be a little auto-critic. Nice! :)

What worked well? I could say that everything worked well, a part some misunderstandings caused by practical disorganisation. We also managed to finish the construction of the website one week in advance. The only thing we could improve next time is the task-assignment. We should be more focused on which our specific responsabilities are but... what should I say? (At least this way I was able to decide most of the things just according to my taste, and enjoyed it, hoping the other members of the group haven't dreamt of smothering me during the night too much).

I liked creating a wiki a lot: it means, in fact, "exposing" oneself to the immense world which is Internet. I never did it before, and I think I will start keeping my personal blog even after the completion of this course.

Going to Brighton has been the right thing. I didn't pay attention to a lot of facts and figures, I know, but concentrated on his spirit on purpose. So, I took a map and drew on it the journey my heart and my head made, while my feet where walking around the city. Cause I know you don't really care about the foot, do you.

Unless you are fetish, of course.

I really hope you enjoy our project as much as we did.
Click on the map to enlarge it.

הסופ

Thank you.

Elena

Behindologisms

Yes. I proudly filled in another page of my personal World Guinness Records book today.

Page 4.
Between George W. Bush (which is officially appointed as The man with the-most-similar-gaze-to-a-pigeon-I-have-ever-seen-in-my-life Of The World, and the Pakistan obese guy who owns the 24h shop on the corner of my street, which proudly owns the record for the most goldbejewelled-human-hand-which-doesn't-belong-to-Medjugorje's-Holy-Mary of the World:

I saw The Man with the Weirdest Eyebrows of the Solar System. They curled up on their own in the middle!!

Nevermind.

I would have rather played doctor with Edward Scissorhands than going home with this cold outside, but..here I am. The only thought I still have to write an essay on The American Imaginary of Native Americans is fucking me over. (I guess I could have said this in a more elegant way)

Can I do it on Pocahontas? Why a whole exam on Americanisms?

Maybe I just have a distorted perception of the States.

These years may have been an exception. After almost a decade of the-man-with-the-most-similar-gaze-to-a-pigeon-of-the-world leadership we finally came to a turning point: Obama and McCain.

Come on, who would you have expected to win? I was thrilled.

On one side him. Beautiful, charming, smiling, clever, whatever. And tanned. Love at first sight.

And on the other a drooly old chap who was campaigning with a If I win then good, if I don't I'll go back home to smoke some weasels out written on his forehead.

But Supernigga won. I look at him and feel some hope. Can't help it. I look at his charismatic perfection and think about a sort of Supernigga messiah. Save us all, please. Tell me that we can.

He won America, the country of obese and madmen, CSI and Paris Hilton.

He won the country which can still be that America. The one I can't remember.

He won the world, for now.

What should I say? Maybe because I am a pessimist, a nihilist. Maybe because I love Karl Kraus so much and I am a fucking Behindolog. But while everybody enjoys I shiver. And think about thinking, and who will save the world next time.

We have too many expectations. After all he's just a man. After all, Montaigne was right.

Even on the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our ass.

2.09. Goodnight folks.

I'm writing this here just because i need to copy some html stuff but it belongs in fact to our wiki.
So never mind.


A poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
filled with banality and booze,filled with rain and thunder and periods of
drought, a poem is a city at war,
a poem is a city asking a clock why,
a poem is a city burning,a poem is a city under guns
its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,
a poem is a city where God rides naked
through the streets like Lady Godiva,
where dogs bark at night, and chase away
the flag; a poem is a city of poets,
most of them quite similar
and envious and bitter…
a poem is this city now,
50 miles from nowhere,
9:09 in the morning,
the taste of liquor and cigarettes,
no police, no lovers, walking the streets,
this poem, this city, closing its doors,
barricaded, almost empty,
mournful without tears, aging without pity,
the hardrock mountains,
the ocean like a lavender flame,
a moon destitute of greatness,
a small music from broken windows…

a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,
a poem is the world…

and now I stick this under glass
for the mad editor’s scrutiny,
the night is elsewhere
and faint gray ladies stand in line,
dog follows dog to estuary,
the trumpets bring on gallows
as small men rant at things
they cannot do.

Idle Post

I am fainting on the keyboard. It's 3.14. Can't take it anymore for today.
I am trying to do as much as I can to make this project BEAUTIFUL. Yes, beautiful, first of all.
Just had a look around and think it is. I edited the layout of all the pages, changed fonts, colours, tabs, contents, wrote new things and edited old ones. It took me a lot.. You don't really realize how time passes when you are in front of a computer! It just flies away.
I love our project, I love our group and I love its members. However, I just noticed something that frustrates me a little: other's frustration, basically. Arisen from lack of communication, as long as I came to understood. I will never ever criticise somebody's else personal feelings. As Voltaire said, "I don't agree with what you say, but I would die for you to say it".
It is just that, before getting frustrated because of lack of communication, (which probably has occured and I am the first one to apologize in case I made any mistake), I would have a quick look at the Wikiproject chronology page. Who did what. Nothing more to say.
I hate myself when I become polemic because there's no need to.
We are a very productive group, prefectly balancing the Apollineum and Dionisiac.
The Clicks will rock this digital media class. :)
Tomorrow I'll manage to finish the writing for the whole project. If somebody dares scoulding me cause I didn't finish it all yet I warn: I'll bite. Just cause I probably would have if each.....
Goodnight! Or goodmorning I should say....:P

Mysteries

Voilà!
My computer gets emotional sometimes. Now he (..yes, I assume the computer is definitely male and the printer definitely female) categorically refuses to upload the Brighton photo and the last sentence I wrote on our ProjectWiki frontpage.

Why? He probably doesn't like them.
They are there (cause when i try to edit they ARE SO THERE), but as soon as I visualize the page back....they disappear. I'll record the whole process and send a videotape to X-files. Together with an other one of me putting carefully two pink socks in the washing machine (one per hand), programming it, waiting for it to finish, and duly pulling out a single pink sock.

The other one? Nowhere. Disappeared. Literally. The washing machine must devour them. They probably just tear the very fabric of space and time and end up in another parallel dimension. Together with my Brighton picture, I guess.

And oh, my low-carb diet intentions.

Anyway. I still don't feel completely Ok. I am a little dizzy, but I guess it's just another Essaystress symptom. It's spreading the world like fire, you know.
I need. To. Focus. On. The project. So this time, I swear, I will procrastinate later.
I want to try to be poetic, but am afraid of forgetting facts and figures. It has always been my Achilles' heel.. I'll to go to Uni, have a tutorial for the music essay with Prof. Adrian..and then come back, try to convince my pc those pics ain't this bad in the end, and write. Write this mess I have in my head down. A sort of Joycean Stream of Consciousness. Or in this particular case Uncosciousness, I'd say.

See you later.
(Oh dear heaven..who am I talking to?!)

The White Rabbit

The flu is not getting any better, but I'll manage to survive.. Afterall I'll live forever.
Or at least I'll die trying.

Tonight I already risk to get an overdose from that funny German medicine my cousin brought from the dark heart of Switzerland with love. I had never heard of it before, but it supposed to be working properly.

I mean, the blue tiny winged pig here next to me just told me it shouldn't have any side effect. So let's wait.

In the meantime I'll work on the pictures a bit, reorganize them, eventually edit them, create a hidden story within them. I will have to think think think..in order to write write write.
The project waits.
I told you I would have made the pink notebook bleed ink.

Errata Corrige folks, it's me the only thing bleeding here, while I write.

Stop looking at the words. Everybody does. Look the blank space between them. Read that silence. I swear it takes your breath away.
But the project waits.

ps..I feel funny. The blue pig flew away and now i just see.. I just hear.. Oh, I'm sorry. I have got to follow the white rabbit.
Join in

Progressing!

Finally I am back.
It's not that we didn't do anything for our project, but I just couldn't find the time to sum it up in a decent way here on the blog. Forgive me.
The Clicks met up yesterday afternoon at my place, and sitting around a table decided everything we are going to do about this project. The overall concept, the ideas, the tasks, the material to be used, the words to be written, the mood to be conveyed. It's all here, in a tiny kitsch pink notebook next to my messy laptop.
We did a good job, still it's not over.
In fact, here it comes the tough part. It's not easy to focus on a project efficiently when you have to prepare 2 other exams on completely different topics at the same time. We will have to work as a team, a real team, even more than what we are doing now, trying not to arise unuseful tensions between us because of the stress, the pressure and the rent payment.
We will manage to do this, and we will manage to do this in the best of the possible ways. Right?
Tomorrow we will carry it on and refine it. Step by step, from today onwards, I'll write here each single progress we'll make. Anna will give me the pictures' cd tomorrow.
Soon, I'll start developing my personal view and subjective approach to the project too. No anticipations yet. The kitsch pink notebook shuts up and smiles, hiding my sketches and thoughts in its Dry Paper Heart.
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a permanent work in progress.
I'll make it bleed ink.

The Arteries.

"Those who find any difference between spirit and body have neither.”
O.W.


Psychogeography.

Please, keep it away from the reach of children. Only the name could provoke severe mental traumas.
But when you finally manage to write and pronounce it...it doesn't sound this bad.

Psychogeography is the imperfect science who investigates the relationships between the beings and the places they live in. But this is a cold, emotions-free definition. I don't like it. Psychogeogrtaphy is much more than that. It is the imperfect science (may this oximoron be blessed) which investigates the relations between the body and the space around it, the soul and the landscapes, the eyes and what the eyes see. The relations between the mind, and the places the mind thinks of. In a simple way, the connection between the inside and the outside.

We, as human being, tend to project ourselves everywhere.

Think about it and look around: from a socket to a house façade.. don't they always resemble a human face? With the two windows as eyes and the front door as a mouth..

And think about a city: hasn't it got a heart, a brain, lungs.. arteries untying all around it?

Let me explain. Look at it from above.

It's night, and the entire town has become a sort of mechanical galaxy, a concentration of electric supernovas and skycrapers.

Now, only now, you can see the blood slide and flow in those veins: it's us. Us in our cars, with their red lights on. Arteries, literally. Running everywhere in a calm disorder. Keeping the city alive.

Our heartbeats, together, like a drum chorus, create a weird silent symphony.

It may be the music God dances on when nobody's looking at him.

This is psychogeography.

The rotting beauty

.שלום
The Clicks went to Brighton on thursday.
Weird, weird place. Starting from its name. It sounds like a unkept promise: Brighton.
Bright? Not at all.
I've always felt the same about it. Brighton looks like a sad, beautiful, lonely woman. No longer young, no longer loved, the wrinkles ploughing her face like a curse while she watches the sea silently. But in some way she's still proud, still she keeps her ancient elegance. Can you see it?
There's still a light somewhere in her big eyes. It burns just for a second and disappears, again.
No way. You'll never know what she was thinking about. (..Maybe the Old Times? But which ones, lady? Have you ever been happy?). She'll never say. Just smiles, like one who smiles with his own sadness.

Look at the sky! It rains and the sun shines.
No, you don't really expect a sea-place to be like this. We got used to carribbean-like landscapes, vomiting sunrays and happiness all around.
When one thinks about the sea, doesn't think of Brighton. Of its cold water. Its fury.
This is a real sea though. Roaring, and angry. Immense. Ugly and bitter.
But awfully,
awfully alive.

So true.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants. The other is getting it.

(O. Wilde)



I have not become a cynic. I still do happen to believe love is mainly about pushing chocolate covered candies and, in some cultures, you know, a chicken.
We can't resist the temptation of dividing the world into categories and sub-categories, or am I wrong, mr Kant?
Today, let me divide it in Who doesn't know what he wants and Who thinks he knows what he wants. In fact, the big difference between the Greek and the Christian sense of tragedy is that, if on the one hand the greeks lived in a guilt-free hedonistic world with a continuous feeling of imminent catastrophe (any myth could be a good example), on the other the christians live in permanent guilt-sense tragedy with a continuous feeling of imminent salvation. Hello, Nietzsche.
Anyway, I guess my personal mood ain't psychogeographically interesting, unless I psychogeographicanalyse my brain.
So let me explain. You know what I'd like to do? Make a psychogeography of time. A geography of time. Mixing the two a-priori categories: space, and time.

Now I gotta go and discuss with the other members of the group our project on Brighton. May not be the spacial analysis of time, but it's a good start anyway.
I didn't re-read what I've written.
My apologies.

The Treasure

Guess what? It's raining. Unusual, I'd say.
Dear London, what a nice welcome back! Thank you! In the end I love you anyway.. Just odi et amo. Why? Nescio, sed sentio, et excrucior.

And now you probably expect me to present myself. I'd love to, trust me. But I don't know me, so I don't see how the hell am I supposed to inform you.
Being yourself is easy. Becoming yourself is not. I guess this is what we have to do. It doesn't mean to pick up an identity from the Postmodernismarket, choose a soul and change it as we change socks according to the weather.
Oh, please, I don't wanna be a blank pastiche. Not today.

Rabbi Eisik, son of Rabbi Jekel, lived in Cracow. One night, he dreamt there was a treasure buried near a bridge in Prague. He ignored the dream (it was, after all, only a dream), but when had had it for two more nights, he decided to walk the long way to Prague. When he got there, there was the bridge, just as he had dreamt it! Unfortunately, there was one small difference: the bridge was guarded by a soldier. Eisik sit there patiently, but the guard was around night and day. On the third day, the captain of the guards became curious and asked that strange old man if he was waiting for someone and why he was sitting there all the time. Eisik told the story of the dream, and the captain laughed. “A dream!” he said. “Who can believe in dreams? For instance, I have had a dream for three nights, that there is a treasure buried by the stove in the home of Eisik, son of Jekel, in Cracow. But do you see me going to Cracow to dig for it, where half of the people are called Eisik, and the other half Jekel? Ahahah you fool! No, I stay here, where I am supposed to be.
The old Eisik thanked him, and took the long way home again. He dug by his stove, and...
:)


Let's take this journey.
Enjoy.