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You Are My Sunshine

Next January, it'll be my thirteenth semester at UC Berkeley and my thirty-first semester attending public school. Sort of sick and pretty privileged.

And it's the third time an occupation has occurred since I started. Although I've got no hopes of being an occupier, I do hope some of us can slip away and be builders of places for people to occupy and tear apart upon their will. In a way, UC Berkeley has been successful in inspiring folks to do this, just that the idea of the place is very big, heavy and pretty hard to crack in one go. 

The folk song, You Are My Sunshine, perpendicular to the UC's motto, Fiat Lux:

The other night, as I lay sleepin'
Dreamed I held you in my arms
When I awoke dar, I was mistaken'
An' I hung my head an' cried

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You'll never know dear, how much I love you
Please don't take my sunshine away

I'll always love you an' make you happy
If you will only say th same
But if you leave me for another
You'll regret it all some day

You told me once't dear, you really loved me
An' no one else could come between
But now you left me for another
You have scattered all my dreams

Villa Prima Facie

PAMPHLET Villa Prima Facie by Lars Lerup, 1978

Checked the 'free pile' at the library today and picked up a sweet thing - a pamphlet about walls. It begins with a quote about blackberries:

On typographical bushes constituted by the poem along a road which leads neither beyond things nor to the spirit, certain fruits are formed by an agglomeration of spheres filled by a drop of ink. 

- Francis Ponge

What does it mean?! 

the power of story

STORY Come Hell or High Water directed by Leah Mahan

A story tonight, notes: the power of storytelling as a conveyance of language that continues to move and connect, the necessity for counter narrative, the blessing of strong relationships, being forever placed within the context of history, constantly rolling. 

Dis-ease of being busy

COLUMN The Disease of Being Busy by Omid Safi

How exactly are we supposed to examine the dark corners of our soul when we are so busy? 

Staying up until 2 in the morning to meet a deadline: desperately gluing little pieces of printed paper to collage an image of Florence Nightingale with her dress, a candle, and a cutout of my face (?) to accompany a biographical report I'd written for submission to the LA County Fair. 18 years later, I am cutting and pasting tedious bits of paper together into the dark hours of the night making god knows what, something to do with psychogeography (?) and sea level rise. It is my habit that I love. When the doing becomes something for the sake of doing though, it dies a little. Maybe this is what dying a little inside means, when the heart and soul are lost. I forget that I'm alive, buried under an epic pile of tasks, so I have to remember why I am doing something, why it might be worth the hours of my life gluing, writing, sitting, that I will never get back. Then it's not about being busy and it becomes easier. It is hopefully a way in, to examine those wonderful dark corners that don't exist anywhere else.

Sea Ranch

TRIP to Sea Ranch

This weekend, I was privileged enough to take a trip to Sea Ranch, a place very far away from here:

My first time here. Windows open straight to the sea, a sliding door that takes you to exactly where you are, fresh caught fish and slow hunted mushrooms. Time set sitting in the comfortable window nook and sipping on tea. It's me and the sea, and studio matters, but it also doesn't. 

Friends at the beach

Introduction

INTRODUCTION The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, 1961

I've just started to read this book.

Excerpt: "Handsome is as handsome does. All that glitters is not gold... There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served."

Plus, Cedric Price's, City As An Egg:

Points of Reference

DOWNTOWN Petaluma

1) June 2006, Eva Joan being launched from the Landing Way Depot
2) March 2013, a guy producing a local feature on downtown

manifesto

MANIFESTO by Agnes Denes in 1969 via Radical Nature (2009) from Barbican Art Gallery

For some reason,  I'm becoming obsessed with material from the 1960s. Here is Agnes Dene's Manifesto from 1969 to loosen it up:

working with a paradox
defining the elusive
visualizing the invisible
communicating the incommunicable
not accepting the limitations society has accepted
seeing in new ways
living for a fraction of a second and penetrating light years
using intellect and instinct to achieve intuition
achieving total self-consciousness and self-awareness
being creatively obsessive
questioning, reasoning, analysing, dissection and re-examining
understanding the finitude of human existence and still striving to create
beauty and provocative reasoning
finding new concepts, recognising new patterns
desiring to know the importance or significance of existence
seeing reality and still being able to dream
persisting in the eternal search


And to pair it with Thích Nhất Hạnh's words, "love is understanding."