The painting at the left is an example of an irrepressible tendency I have to overdo things to the point of annihilating them.

I remember a very  dark (typical Scandinavian) February morning back in 2007 when I bought for the first time a “large” canvas (of 73 centimeters length). It was this particular canvas. The “acquisition” was provoking and intimidating. When I touched it with the brush, I panicked. How was I going to bring to life a huge, white surface that seemed to laugh at my timid painting skills? I spent a whole day looking at it, drawing chaotic lines on its crust , trying to tone it down, invade its void, break its will. The very first outcome was regarded – at that time, considering the lack of experience and exercise – as impressive. But I knew I didn’t do much. I simply turned it into an imager of who I was: confusion, infantile determination, some sparkles, artistic intuition, and  a dramatic lack of technique. These were the decisive touches.

Half a year later, I’ve redone it in a moment of irreverence towards my unskillful past. The outcome was catastrophic. I’ve gained no wisdom and no skills: I was worse, because I thought I was better.

One year later, I’ve redone it one more time simply because I didn’t care about the outcome. I cared not for consequences, it made no difference whether consideration was given to the original idea of three figures carrying intriguing messages in their facial expressions, or to the color palette involving my new “signature yellow”. The result seemed, for a moment, satisfying. The canvas matched my “yellow contours period” which I thought it was enough.

Enough was enough, till yesterday. While looking for some book in a dark corner of the  living room, I stumbled upon this canvas and what I’ve done to it over the last two years suddenly felt intolerable. I panicked, I anguished and I triumphed so many times over this linen, no wonder it looked so tortured, so confusing, so unfinished, so corrupted and inexpressive. I’ve decided to deal with it once for all.

This was a canvas with a history, both emotional and professional.  Yesterday morning, it suddenly felt small  when compared with the ones I got used to work on lately.  It felt heavy, yet minor,   it was so “full” of myself – nothing but a deforming, yet accurate mirror of who I was under the latest years. While putting it on the easel, I was nervous. But there was no way back. I decided to remain faithful to its basic significance by “glossing” over the truth of its primary meaning, and by wiping out the details. I tried to rethink its stake, not to disguise it.

If the outcome is good, I could not tell. The only thing that matters is my (finally!) staying true to my “artistic” past, my putting an end to all those justificatory attempts meant to excuse my errors and my being a beginner or worse, my being an “impostor”.

We often overdo certain things because we feel guilty; we want to divert attention from other things that  were poorly done. No perfectionist has genuine reasons for being so. All perfectionists  are culpable. They don’t want perfect results, they want perfect excuses in case they’d fail.  They make a sort of a priori penitence, so that they could go on thinking high of themselves even if the result is a disaster.

Therefore, overdoing something could be a lethal weapon. Your superhuman efforts cast a shadow over the very object of your superhuman effort. No object deserves to be treated with so much blind commitment – which is but a blend of vainity, guilt, selfishness and disregard of the very nature of that object. The best example: spoiling a child (yes, this is “overdoing” your parental role!) No other “method” of raising kids is more harmful to them and more rewarding to you. I “spoiled” this canvas for too long. Yesterday was a time of awareness. We look into each other’s “eyes” and agreed upon an outcome. Maybe it’s not the most flattering one, but it’s for sure the truest way to relate to what I was, to what I am, and to what I’ll never be.

We have to console ourselves with the fact that we can’t raise, take up our bed, and walk without 1. asking for it, and 2. being asked to. And no one asked for it. Or asked us to.

It feels a little tragic to be doomed to bedrest, paralized by all-overs and anxiety. And it feels a little funny to be unable to raise because no one proposes “the problem of raising”.  It’s the little tragicomedy of our little sick world that can’t stand up because no one said “stand up!”. OK, someone did say it eons ago, but that was then. And back then, people needed help and they knew it. Now it’s different.  No one knows what one needs.  Is it the help that we need? Or is it the power to help others? Or is it both? Or none?

One thing is sure: we have a “help canon” today. Like, you know, a “beauty canon”, or a “literary canon”, there is also a help-code, a bunch of established laws that dignifies some of us with a “title”.  Therefore, if you check the tonight news, you’ll catch an in-depth interview  with “The Helper of the Day” or with “The Helpless of the Day”. Help has become an institution. According to it, there is a dignity in eating muesli in the morning because that means you’ve watched some helpful shows about correct eating. There is, also, an obvious dignity in doing an UNICEF campaign. There is, also, an increasing dignity in writing songs about those who are in need. Nevertheless, music nowadays has two very helpful aims: 1. humanist charity, and 2. sexual relief. Have you recently heard a genuine, well-penned LOVE song? No. You are not supposed to have “small”, daily cares, cravings, and challenges. You either care FOR ALL, or you don’t care AT ALL. You don’t care for one person, you care for the whole country, or, no, better make it for the whole planet, just to be sure you’re “helpfully correct”.

I’m sure you got the main idea: people hate each other, but they give away money for charity. Why’s that?  Why are we so monstrously insensitive to someone‘s existential failure? As a matter of fact, there’s nothing we enjoy most than seeing a “spoiled brat”  failing. Suffering from less dignifying “diseases” like, for instance, being paralyzed by ambition, we don’t seek for merciful treatment because we know we won’t get it. There’s nothing we can do personally for helping other persons out. We’re un-dignifyingly  enclosed in our undignified diseases and we don’t cry for mercy because we want to preserve our right to remain merciless. So we got no one to lower our bed through the roof, and  we got no one to say “raise!”. No one shall help, and no one shall redeem. ‘Cause no one said: “please”. And why one would?

PS: Imagine an ad like this: “Newly paralyzed Wall Street broker, looking for kind, strong-armed people to lower my bed through the roof of the brokerage building, for free”. I wonder what is more fearful: to look for  a helping hand in the wrong circumstances, or to look for the wrong circumstances in a helping hand?

This Monday is a dark, robust, cold Monday. It keeps you rooted in the sober realism of your coffee cup, it discourages every unnecessary move that might keep you – even if only for 5 minutes – away from the heater. You have every reason to remain grounded; and every reason to dream away.

As usual, work should be done. As usual, work is postponed because of “unfavorable weather conditions”. Instead, you feel like doing everything that looks and feels sublimely absurd: like bidding in auctions of antiques, collectibles, pottery and furniture and then fearing you’re gonna win, reading poetry, history treatises and political editorials about the latest political trends in the U.S., reflecting on “Sex and the City” characters, eschatology, and Alzheimer’s disease. Then you speculate about all those wives who behave, when out in society, as if they’d have invented their husbands; then you feel sorry for the world that – in your opinion – is not gentle and not subtle enough, then you think how awesome and cool the doctrine of the resurrection of the body sounded in the first Christian centuries; and then you suddenly realize that, sadly, Laleh will never make it worldwide because she’s too much herself and people don’t know how to deal with such honest approach of music.

And finally, you read in someone’s diary that someone in his 40′s did the same fatal mistakes as you did when you were in your early 20′s, and it suddenly feels great, you suddenly feel like dropping a few more bricks, going out and make fool of yourself, catching up with the world. You can do it.

But I haven’t moved an inch from the heater.

For, in fact, what is MTV? A wormy, monstrous collage of images and sounds you’ve heard and seen before, a continuous, exasperating deja-vu. You can’t tell when a video ends and another one begins, you can’t tell where and when the erotic  imagery melts into the social class imagery, you miss a verse here, you recognize a chorus there,”uhm”s and “haaw”s (but however little “sha-la-la”s), earth, air, fire, water, furs, dogs, jewels, and ferraris. Everything is here, within your reach, buzzing all over, wholly unreasonable, familiar and indistinctive, like a recurrent cloudy nightmare. It would require a considerable effort of the intellect, a painful devotion, a strain of the mind to distinguish between  butts, songs, and outfits. But you’re fully immersed in the flowing stream. You got no clear vision, no fine ear, no full knowledge, you got nothing.

When you’re overexposed to standardized vulgarity something strange happens: vulgarity becomes abstract. There is an unexpected effect of abstractness in the recent pop music and videos. Have you noticed that? MTV not only turns away the music, but actually discourages any distinctive extravagance that a “pop star” is thought to be striving for. No one actually cares for any opulence shown on MTV. It’s irrelevant. It’s not even there. Nothing is there. And the first to go was music. 

Take this for instance. It’s charting well these days. Who is she? What is it that she wants? It’s profuse, it’s poor, it’s pretentious, it’s plain, it’s not.

Just washed my hands (in vain), dropped a bit of fresh ginger in my Earl Grey, cropped this lame picture, renamed it, and uploaded it here. It took me a hell of a time to finish this. It was a strange and unusually long journey, half rewarding, half disappointing. However, it’s still wet and smelly, but it has already got a name of its own: “Someone’s At The Window” (oil on canvas, 100/120 centimeters).

This Monday should have been an extremely sober library-Monday but I ended up in front of the canvas for 9 more extra hours. My present pressing duties are nowhere near art, so what I did today was, according to some, a fairly suicidal gesture. Don’t know if I’d have the energy for a third paragraph, so I say it here and I say it fast: one feels absolutely disqualified from being “an artist” by one’s own doubts. By them, and by them only.

PS: You HAVE to listen to this.

PS2: I’ll try to take a better picture some time tomorrow, at the daylight.

Long time no blog. I’m sorry if you checked this place regularly without finding any nasty updates. I am, to say the least, caught between projects. Can’t move forward, nor backward. Flights should be booked, studies should be written, lectures should be prepared, people should be met for dinner, emails should be answered, curators should be contacted, and fridge should be cleaned. Yet, I sit still in my new desk chair for hours, drinking espressos, fumbling with notebooks, reading one page from Strindberg, one from Bauman, two from Canetti, and no more than three from Simone Weil.

One is the child of one’s endless interstitial phases, hesitations and ennuis. It’s certainly degrading and even ridiculous to feel “busy” all the time (and this was a paraphrase of a Kierkegaardian statement), but there’s nothing more distressing than not quite knowing how to tame your own idle time. It feels like you owe yourself something that’s fundamentally beyond you.

So let’s throw our time on the muddy waters, for after many days we will find it again; all soaked and filthy, but finally ready to serve our extravagant need for tranquility.

IN THE IPOD: again, Antony and the Johnsons, The Crying Light. I’ve learned something lately: never review an album before constantly listening to it for at least 1 month. I have to admit that my previous review was somewhat arrogant and certainly inaccurate. The album grew on me like no other album has done before. Yesterday, for instance, “One Dove” has caused my knees to shake. It’s not that easy, after all, to prove Antony Hegarty’s music superfluous…

To some, nothing sounds emptier than “courage”. Yet, the absence of courage is a fundamental threat to life.

Media, for instance, are fascinated by courageous people. There are plenty of heroes to watch on TV. Some are real, many aren’t. People who enjoy watching television and who, by default, have never been able to commit bravery, particularly enjoy seeing heroes. They really don’t want you to spoil their pleasure and question the “quality” of a broadcasted heroism. Heroism, in all its forms, seems to touch them deeply. Seeing how a savior of lives gets interviewed right after the fire has been put down, and the reporter addressing the audience right from the fire escape, makes any heart melt like warm sugar.

Courage is a self-evident proof for life and it has always been so. From Achilles to Superman, from the Greek soldiers hidden in the Trojan Horse to the recent New York plane hero pilot, from Mother Theresa to Angelina Jolie, we love them all for we owe them our lives.

One’s understanding of life is conditioned by acquiring proficiency in detecting different forms of bravery. There are, of course, innumerable degrees of proficiency. However, as a general tendency, one could notice a certain unwillingness to distinguish between pseudo, high, lame, low, simulated, genuine, exceptional, inevitable, vital and inappropriate acts of courage. Courage is one of the most “misunderstood” human states. And almost every misunderstanding is culpable. Coward people often have no choice but to maintain a certain confusion in evaluating bravery acts. By reminding  courage under lame circumstances, by overrating its newsworthy side, by overlooking its subtle, daily avatars, by trivializing its noble  forms and ennobling various trivial insanities, they seek to make their own lack of courage less detrimental.

All in all, by submitting bravery to such complicated meiotic and metonymic games, people praise the heroes, but sabotage the courage. Once bravery is ridiculed and fictionalized, their own good old cowardice would miraculously turn into good old common sense: the wise choice of the wise men, the middle road that never failed anybody. We posess, I think, a very strong instinct of mediocrity that goes the same direction as the instinct of death.

The “paradoxical” idea of associating courage with life as opposed to it being a life/social status-threatening condition, together with the idea of associating the cowardice of middle-roaders with death-seeking instinct came to me yesterday morning when I realized that I had around, for years, some of the most coward people ever born. I haven’t quite checked, but I suppose they’re dead already.

IN THE IPOD: A Camp‘s exquisite Colonia, and Laleh’s playful Me and Simon. Reviews yet to come. Meanwhile, taste the A Camp song I like most (“Golden Teeth and Silver Medals”), and the one I like the least (“Stronger Than Jesus”, which happens to be the single…).

PS: One of the recent drawings I’ve made for someone’s black ‘n white office.