Pilachi_Sketch [ BLOG ]

There is something that I have been thinking about since last weekend, when I watched the movie “Blood Diamond;” it is a simple thought, which to most of you, if any, may come as a surprise: it, as a thought, is neither deprecating nor entirely self involved.

well, maybe. [feign inDecisive language].

I thought about it again tonight while watching the Freedom Writers Diary… and it is about finding your way to make your own story and narrate it in whichever way makes the most sense to you… like that sesame street song I remember from Mona Commons circa 5 years of age.

“Sing, sing a song, sing it loud… no matter if it’s not good enough, for any one else to hear, sing, sing a song… to last the whole night long.” Read more

To determine whether I am one for mello-drama depends entirely on who you are asking. Having just watched my first episode of Smallville in as many years as it has been on air, proves my disdain for circumambulatory storylines about conflicted emotions in a super gifted individual. Oh wait… that also depends on who you are asking. Read more

I would remember the look on my face as I received my first bicycle. Both times.

That did not work out quite as I imagined. You see… I had the thought about comparing the memories of receiving a bicycle at age 5 and at age 10 and thinking about how each occurence changed my life.

The sentence then seemed to be better if it imitated Marques’ first sentence for 100 years of solitude: which was written in three tenses. Needless to say, I am no Marques.

It is also funny to realize that only one “s” separates needles and needless.

Meaning, wrapped up in a single letter.

Morphology. The shift that takes place when one simple letter in a sequence shifts. Which if the f was an r… would read… shirts.

A sequence shirts… a requience… no, that really is not a word.

What about improvisation, is it really significant?

How do you find ideas without looking for them; and if you looked for them, would they really be innovative? We look for ideas in places that are familiar, along channels that we already know. So how do you find anything new if you already thought about it.

Dont think. Dont look. just go see.

Punctuate.

Silent Distractions was written while listenning in part to Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” and trying to focus on not thinking about the words as they flew from my fingertips onto the keyboard with rapid fire progression.

This is a regular exercise on this blog: trying to write as quickly as possible without thinking about the words that form the sequences of the sentences; while also distracting the thought processes by staring at the letters on the keyboard as they are pounded by the fingers.

I went to typing school in the summer while I was 13 or so; so there is really no need to look at the keys… the looking just keeps the words abstract and disconnected from their actual appearance in the sentences being formed on the screen.
It is funny that the QWERTY keyboard was developed in an effort to slow down the potential rates at which people typed. Useless fact. Fact nonetheless.

One of my earliest memories of my mother was litening to her type. I would visit her at the Jamaica Information Service (JIS): a government agency, wherein she was a journalist. When her fingers hit the keys of a typewritter, it was comparable with large bolbous globules of rain punding the frail surface of a corrugated zinc roof. It was as frightening as, I would imagine, a machine gun turret would be to an oncoming recipient of the impartial bullets.

ddddddddddrt. dddddddrt. ddddddddrt. puncutated by carriage returns on her typewriter.

Before she died, my mother wrote me a letter by hand. She said in the letter that she would stop writing, because she laughed so much about an email story I sent her about first impressions of Ghana — “the Gold Rush Tangerines”– she said that she was happy that I have taken up where she left off. That was a little less than a month before she died.

So “don’t puzzle it” as Bounty Killer [the artiste] is known to say. I am writing because it is my companion, in the quiet moments that remain, in lieu of punctuated carriage returns.

The beauty of unpunctuated perfection is that there is no stopping. Go.

Nor is there any real reason to subscribe to the linguistic cunning of natural English dictum.

Dyslexia is an unkind word for the dyslexic:

just as the word “stutter” is unkind to the cunning linguist with a penchant for performances in stacatto.

politically correct is a construct. [wrong]

It is a free for all… a takeover of “seeping insanity.”

Incredulity disguised as intelligent banter is always, more often than not, never understood.

If any of these sentences made any sense at all, you probably would not get it.

So have a little fun.

It is just what we need.

It is funny trying to write while the musings of an acapella song distracts your inner monologue. Shut up. These are my thoughts… you don’t care a bit.

There is room for that word I keep forgetting… improvisation.

that is it.

“If gravity let us go, we would all go flying”- Bic Runga

I cant get that song out of my head. Everytime I sit down, I hear the refrain and the lilting sound of her every word. I like that word “lilting;” have no idea what it means, but I like it.

Most of the words I write, I have no idea what they mean… they are included because phonetically, they just seem to fit. Then, when I look them up, they change the meanings of the sentences in such interesting ways, that I often just leave them as they are.

“Drifting lightly… across the living room” - Bic Runga

I really like the music of Bic Runga. Not so much her new stuff, as about three songs on her original album… the one that has not seen light of day in the US in 10 years, even with her successes on the Lilith Fair tours. This is not about Bic Runga though.

This is about… the letter M.

It is not really about the letter M either; it is about the freedom to write that this is about the letter M, without having to provide painful explanations about efficacy or cognitive reasoning. Why M? Why not?

M brought us such hits as… Marshmellows… which seemed better at my original typos… marchmellow and marshmellot

Is an overly enthusiastic marshmellow or a connoisseur thereof… a marshmellot? Is marchmellow, a gentle hue that a decorator will pick out from color swatches for you swank New England Apartment… or is it better reserved for the drawing room in the Hamptons?

Nah man… spoken in a truely malignant high of a meloncoly addiction…. the marchmellow is a state of mind, it is a place where you don’t feel the exam stresses hitting yet, and you just got over February, in the dead of winter cold, and the overly commercial snog-fest… Valentine’s Manolo day.

[ Have I ever told you how much I abhor product placement ]

Manolo… also brought to you by the letter M, and given to the lady in the red dress. Who, if I drove a maserati [ brought to you, for a lot of M, by the letter M...] would no longer be in dis-dress. All her worries would be assuaged by another letter… M…

Word.

Every moment living in this house, I am reminded of my mother’s death last year at the end of July. Every day has been a constant reminder because so few things in this house work. Why should this remind me of my mother?

It is the darkness. It is the unending darkness of scheduled load-shedding. It reminds me of getting the news of my mother’s passing, while sleeping on the floor during the period of darkness that overshadowed the experience of this house and this country; in a period that felt as if it would never end.

Well, It just did. Read more

Every so often… or rather, more often than not, I have a very strong instinct that I can neither explain nor ignore. Tonight, I am compelled to write about the inadequacies of the North American Judicial System: specifically, the state of affairs in the Penal system in New York.

Did I mention that I am not one to get on soap boxes?

A few years ago, as an urban design studio project at Pratt, a group of students was asked to design, or rather redesign proposals, for an existing jail on Atlantic Avenue in the heart of Brooklyn.

For those who are vaguely familiar, or even less interested… the jail is situated at the ‘gateway’ of Brooklyn, in the heart of Atlantic Avenue — which is probably the main drag — in a very rapidly gentrifying section of Brooklyn. Most notably in this area, Forrest City Rattner has commissioned the world’s greatest architect [depending on who you ask] to contribute a design to a mammoth urban intervention at the Atlantic Rail Yards. That architect, by the way, is Frank Gehry.

This all takes place, a few city blocks from the 50 year old modernist jail, in the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge. Read more

Goodmorning. Goodnight. is the first attempt at ordering thoughts using — an untrained interpretation of — the Japanese art of Hai-ku.

The blog entry was originally written as two or three sentences, and felt complete; a process that could otherwise spew for pages on end.

Upon writing the first few sentences, the thought of Hai-ku came to mind [ as cheesy and as overdone as this literary from has become. ]

Having never tried haiku: after about 15 seconds of research, the editing process began.

Seventeen (17) syllables arranged in three lines of five, seven and five respectively, became the framework for the “unrhymed narrative.” Read more

Somewhere on the way,

she learnt to fill empty space

with only charcoal;

*****

and the nothingness,

with no more than empty words;

neither slab nor slate.

*****

Searching for answers,

she stumbled through the darkness,

unaware of dawn.