Spending Days in NY
Spending $14. 99 on coarse ground coffee for my new Bodum French press makes me unhappy, although the tin container is refillable for $11 and a cent figure I can’t recall. Not recalling the price of the refill makes me unhappy as in itchy and irritable, with a dash of grumpiness due to my lack of sleep, which this coffee, coarse grounded and pressed, can do nothing against. The coffee is fair trade from Peru, mild. I need something stronger, or is it that I don’t get the technique? Who can I call for more detailed or caring information on French coffee pressing? Beware, I don’t group the digits in groups of two, or three, I treat them as single units.
A Blue Bottle iced coffee with extra soymilk is $4. 65 or $4 .38. More likely $4.38, because I remember thinking I wouldn’t leave the change for tips since it exceeded 50 cents. The coffee was too strong for me to gulp before my int/adv yoga class in Fort Greene, at the Shala Yoga House, whose monthly unlimited subscription costs 131 $ for new students and $ 180 or $ 181 for retuning ones. I kept the coffee next to me throughout the yoga class, performing my downdogs as I cursively looked at the small pond forming itself around my coffee cup-condensed water drops releasing their iced-cold feeling into watery dissatisfaction. Later, I stored the coffee in the fridge and drank it the next morning, the soy having clustered into irregular lumps at the cup’s bottom. That was $1. worth of soy, wasted. Waste makes me unhappy.
Buying a single cucumber and a packet of overripe strawberries can’t mend my unhappiness with money. The strawberries are sweet enough for me to keep on eating them without thinking “these strawberries are not sweet enough”. If I buy them on Tuesday June 4, I eat them by groups of five so that I can consume them before their expiry date, Wednesday June 5, and not loose my money, your happiness. The strawberries cost $2. 99 because they are not organic. The organic ones cost $4. 99 and have a life duration slightly shorter than their cheaper more fortunate sisters. Organic strawberries must be consumed faster than non-organic strawberries. Mathematically speaking, you can’t win. Fewer strawberries, for $4. 99, for less time, against more strawberries for $2. 99, for more time. Organic strawberries advocate will argue that the money you don’t spend on strawberries will be spent on medical bills, but that is yet to be proven because the source of your illness might directly be related to the money you spend rather than to the money you save, which, if you think about it, is not really money saved since strawberries, statistically, should cost around $2.00 a packet. (Although the latter figure has not been proven, it makes sense to most of us).
In NY, doing nothing is spending money and does not mend for my wavering happiness, which increases as time passes, since time is money. The less it does, the more it spends doing, nothing. Idle is the change you get for an item not worth its price. By definition, all items, since no items are worth the price they are given. An injustice in a park is worth a single unit phone call but a public phone call is worth $0.25 per minute, 0.20 times the value of an organic strawberry pack.
I’m doing nothing spending money or not having enough money to do less than what I already do. If you do more, you’ll get less for it. I guarantee you this without satisfaction. (And my satisfaction isn’t necessarily your happiness, and my lack of satisfaction isn’t necessarily your happiness).
My unhappiness caused me to buy a drug powerful enough to remedy for what caused it, namely, spending money. The drug cost around $30 and contains 28 capsules. I asked the pharmacists why not 30 or 31 capsules, one for each day of the month. She smiled at me like a pharmacist would.
My crusade against unhappiness resulted in the loss of some essential molecular activity -related to my unhappiness- but also contingent to my sex drive. Losing whatever form of desire also made me loose my desire for another, body, probably as unhappy as mine. Loosing desire made me desire tangentially (a form of indirect, phantom-like desire whose imprinted feeling of a once direct experience I seem to recall). To have my unhappiness back would make me happier than not having it at all. So I bought a month supply of hersolution pills, a dietary supplement meant to restore desire for desire-barren women. A packet of hersolution contains 30 tablets, one for each day of the month. I then said what you say when you think you don’t care while every body, desiring or non, knows you do. “Fuck it, let’s try it”. A one-month supply of hersolution tablets cost $60, including (discreet) shipment. About $2 a day to have your desire, consequently, your unhappiness, back. The hitch is that hersolution reimburses you only for the purchase of a two-month supplement, the guaranteed period for the product to work. After my third week of hersolution treatment, I still haven’t got my unhappiness back, which makes me somehow, unhappy, without having to spend too much time, or money, on that feeling.
11:24 pm • 7 June 2013
The Feeling After Screening
This is a bedroom conversation bordering on a kitchen conversation. If things get really stuffy, we’ll move to the living room where the neighbors can hear us. They can also hear us from the bedroom or the kitchen; even the anteroom of this entrance tucked between two pillars is as porous as a worn-out sponge. They use sponges as social cushions because of their harmless appearance. They could hear us through their sponges since they have waxed their ears with animal fat for better interception. They have silent human antennas drilling walls with sponges. We feed them humdrum information because we love them, and they love us like they would love their own niece, the one they forced out of the door for her own sake. The door is locked twice. Opinions must stay on the inside, or on a newspaper page, which is the backside of the inside. Opinions are thoughts in their own right if we polish them well enough. This is what we do; we wax our shoes admiring their shine, when they shine, we feel blinded and closer to the truth. We converse with our own reflections, we brandish our weapons on everything that is not an echo. The echoes of our voices are sediments of truth and voices are wet nightmares we smother with truth’s premium shine. Shine and water are not compatible on a television set. They refuse to share the same living room since they are neighbors. One is fond of garlic, one is an onion, and they both are the sister’s brother’s children, distant cousins with an akin skin, spongy, flabby and blue. They eat the same meat, it comes from goat.
10:19 am • 18 March 2013
PAPER QUOTES (Appropriated from AUB’s Art Now Students Final Papers)
Sometimes when words can’t speak, pictures reveal the true meaning of the bigger picture behind.
Art truly neither limits nor boundaries.
Since feminist art is a very powerful gesture that is able to affect half of the world’s population and maybe more.
To the artists however, the act itself was not just an act, as it held with it immense symbolism pertaining to purpose and effort.
The theoretical insight of the fact.
In some, it’s perpendicular.
As the very verbalization of the activity would lead to a series of thoughts, doubts, anxieties, possible heavy analysis, and most misleadingly; to expectations.
Moreover, women are gradually losing their identity by trading the authentic Lebanese brunette beauty to the Californian blonde beauty! Ranciere’s reasoning, one could argue that the documentation of an artwork and its consumption could also fall within this sam
A heavy past is still present in its soul. Foremost, I would like to note that the observations on inequalities affecting women come from women themselves and the societies in which they live. Protests of all kinds are on the right, on discriminatory practices against women, or oppression, like honor killings.
We already know that The Khalidy family owned a marital hospital and whether or not they were loved, they owned an institution that helped people to give life! They must have been somewhat esteemed.
But why do we want to hang out, preserve and show to everyone this kind of evidence
Today, EVERYONE is aware that at 10 a.m. Lara went to the beach. EVERYONE is informed that Mark is studying now at AUB. EVERYONE knows that just Joelle lost her phone.
In every corner there is a secret, in every city or village an archive
Nothing is more beautiful than a relaxing song, or a gorgeous painting or even a solid, ever lonely sculpture.
Could he help us for a class project: sure.
Our project, however strange to the inexperienced eye, was not wholly innovative in the field of Performance Art
The project was completely neutral and purposeless. Objective. Unbiased. Disinterested. Detached.
Today, Arab women gained some weight she had not had before;
It was for them “a stigma,” and so, when a daughter was born, she was buried alive often.
Having an excellent work is easy; but you should be smart how to represent it.
Avant-garde Movements such as the Dada group, the Futurists and the Surrealists realized that higher institutions were responsible for the kind of control of information mentioned earlier, and this was one of the reasons they were against higher authoritarian powers.
Throughout time, it has been common for people to question the nature of being.
Let’s avant-garde, give back to the woman the status it deserves
It is debatable, that a man that has achieved a lot in life and a man who has achieved almost nothing, will come to the end of the road with the same conclusion
In every corner there is a secret, in every city or village an archive such as the Khalidy one can be discovered, memories everywhere, lost memories.
12:24 pm • 1 February 2013
After the Arab Apocalypse
Poem inspired by, following the page sequence of, copying, reshuffling the order of words, not of ideas, abstracting the object complement for, respectful of the past albeit forgetful of After the Arab Apocalypse by Etel Adnan, published by the Post-Apollo Press, 1989. The original French version was published in 1980.
O!
Exode the fool, the opposites, the bliss
Who prevents us from kissing
faces
STOP
The sea is on the phone
Quasar spine forbids and melts
in MAY, her name
Likes a sun like a useless sun likes BANGING
neutrons HOU!!!
Nostrils system begins air in and out dead and horizontal
O ship O silence O
CHE GUEVARA dines with 47 thousand Arabs HOU!
How flat is the sea they laughed
Anti-sun, Wind Wind DOUM! YES!
Enamored with Beirut, the poultry yard
My genius lets got of
The pile with dried up disasters
Half a life STOPs it stands YES! The texture of time
sells patience. I’m walking!
Arabs and Blacks
AGING FEMALE MADE LOVE TO A GUN
The season in Angola with you under the shadow of luck
We drink lemonade in the alleys
FREEDOM IS FOR WHEN?
pure you are a pure
Half morning sleep
Settle veins down and give parties
His will? His daughter
Ishtar never answered the horizontal line
Dissident pauses believe it!
“She smothered the sun with an iron bar disfigured its words”
SHHHH the root planet–like, pocketmarked
Dog shaped fatigued algae received
The hand pretends to be an improbable slave
Buying jewelry in the Capitals
Oh no!
A woman too hand in hand walks on all four
There is no water HOU! Libya disappears OUT
OUT OUT of TIME
insect rain but exhales stones
Seconds killed with an axe! With an axe!
Waterless glances loose their arms and her legs
protrude STOP presides
Join shells open the door before no other purpose
Moves on…
A concrete roof becomes official archives
Wall to wall. Her former home
Water searches curiosity, passion for Space!
Parachuted seconds trapped in the sun
I saw circles banned
“should we love the poor the left out the rebels the oppressed?”
Cannibals!
Reside in water
1.2.3.4.5.
Back from Angola to build continents with empty
Pockets stuffed mouths derailed destiny
Counting 59 days
STOP THEM!
Cameras followed with an accent his younger brother STOP
The American ambassador with tranquilizers: The sun said I’m blue
This is your dinner comrade. Which night?
For one hour dust has devoured all…
They demand their tongue for the first time
Millions of dollars with our collective eyelids
Play a game. Do you know the smell of soap? HOU
The people legs still apart applauded
A different shoe on each foot
…Stand up! A knowledge covers their will
MAO signs a power pact with his double-son
Their sexual parts speak in signs
They collectively drink the horse’s water
Rivers we’ll wait
When night falls they say:
Will fall in front
Will be covered
Will melt
Will turn
Will inherit will plants and stones
Will manifest
“In the night in the night we shall find knowledge love and peace”.
2:12 pm • 24 November 2012 • 1 note
16/ 11/ 2012. News (from Israel-Gaza missil war)
With their pure and bloodless hands, the intrepid martyrs gave their lives to this country, its land, and its glorious people in the name of the nation, its people, heroes who died fearlessly for the love of god. I offer my son to god so that this country can live. There is no other god but god. We will never surrender to the deviant enemy. You have opened the gates of hell but we will catch the snake by its head first, and kill it.
Hello. As you can see, the smoke here.Yes, of course, but there are also people dying on the other side, pain is democratic and children. Maybe, but this is not what I see. This is a sad day. We give instructions so that people can carry on with their daily routines. They know exactly what to do because everyday, we tell them what to do. They receive the best training. We are one of the world’s most sophisticated war apparatus. I didn’t say that. We will retaliate against chance, against any and all possibilities. My own children are locked in a room. Today, they are not going anywhere.
It’s been ten years now. It’s been ten years now, it’s been sixty-five years now. People are running in the streets, they hide in telephone booths, they call.
In the name of god, we will not surrender the land whose soil is soaked with the blood of the martyrs, god blesses them, god is the only god.
Hello. This is what people fear. The last floor of this suburban building was severely hit by the rockets. We have a dead couple, a woman and a man, we have around thirty wounded and we have post-traumatic stress victims.
Do not pronounce his name. Our intrepid, valiant, fearless martyrs can climb one hundred mountains, and descend the valley of fear for salvation. The head of the pernicious snake will be blown off in the desert.
Operation raisin cloud, storm of the fall, cast storms, reason falls.
3:15 pm • 16 November 2012
