I have imaginative young friends
who play table tennis
or ping pong as it is also known
I can hear them in the future
proudly telling those forced to listen
how they did not even have a ball
back in the long past
but that they were happy
for it is of our being as if destiny
to tell the kids today
how we did much more before
with less.
Mister Chu:
Would that I had the imagination when I stare down into my plate of slop that Miss Yi so beautifully demonstrates.
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/04/artist-hong-yi-plays-with-her-food/
I particularly like her work with cucumbers:
—Marguerite gets married (part)
Mister Chu:
I have been asked three times recently (some kind of charm) as regards my consideration of marriage and its possible suitability for others.
Hard to say. Each to their own. Horses for courses. Etc.
However, I was married once, and it did not go well. And it led me for a while to be unhappy, ungracious even. This was long ago, but the shadow of the scab of it remains. Not the woman involved so much, but the event itself and its slow repercussions.
And thus I am likely an unreliable witness however well-tempered I now feel or try to be.
I believe in the truth of the first half a second. The moment you hear a voice or a suggestion and what you are flooded with, however quickly your inner frown turns into a polite (and perhaps insincere) smile.
This small piece by my friend Clench who lives close by here in Austin speaks (literally) in the voice of a vicar or pastor making remarks before a wedding might begin. It is from a slightly longer remembrance of an occasion he attended while living in New York City.
Perhaps he will finish the whole thing one day. He doesn’t often.
I am not this clergyman, being far too softened at this point, and that’s good, but still.
But still.
Three die each year in America
having stood on ring pulls
long buried and gone rusty.
Eight people eat cottage cheese
which disagrees with them
permanently.
Five get stung
in the eyes
never to recover.
More than a dozen people
meet their maker
having underestimated olives.
Two of us will die
as a consequence
of inhaling confetti.
Dear Lord
whatever your form or apparent instinct
protect me from unusual outcomes.
From coincidences
suitable for reporting
on local news stations.
From the sad but true stories of others
which result in being memorialized
as a statistical anomaly.
Save me from death via ill-luck
hubris or random fucking folly
if at all possible.
Hereby do I beseech you
as a somewhat cynical hedge
against the outside chance of your existence.
Amen.
Resentment will breed
when we are expected
to take responsibility
for something
we are also expected
to accept we have
no ability to control.
-Uncle Joe
Gustav Klimt and the five-years old niece of Emilie Louise Flöge (Klimt’s life companion), Gertrude, on the landing stage of Villa Paulick in Seewalchen on Lake Attersee.
(Source)
Mister Chu:
I didn’t imagine him to be like this.
Or perhaps I had just never imagined him.
Bearded and relaxed.
Large in places possibly.
Although his scale is given form
by the small girl
and the even smaller coffee cup.
A dinner perhaps. Or lunch.
It’s still light.
Is it still light?
He died in February 1918 at 55.
This picture was taken six years before in 1912.
Emily, the child, was five then.
It was Easter.
A busted trunk and a shattered screen
a Texas plate of what might have been
a lifetime gone of Intant Karma
this is why they call it Americarna
Mister Chu:
In the words of the great American prophet who has taught us so much about brevity and the power of shortened language: Holy fuck.
These are the paintbrushes that are needed.
(via crispyrealization)
Coming out of a parking space,
full of life and gym sweat,
pulling round to make the car straight,
I moved (or rather the car moved) north
and at about five miles an hour,
accelerating slightly, but slowly,
aware of children or their possibility
and the dashing out that children bring,
as I also once dashed out to be
hit squarely by another car,
an older Korean model,
and not quite die
although my four year old skin,
in memory, shredded off
and my mother was screaming.
Action Men were expensive.
I got only a little a week.
I was saving, about half way there.
They bought me my own
without negotiation.
Not worth it, but still, something.
On the ground and squashed
(what a word that is, squashed),
black against black, but obvious,
there was a freshly dead bird,
as though passed over by a car,
but still in places re-inflated.
I did not swerve, but avoided it,
ensuring it remained centrally
between my two front wheels
in a very deliberate moment,
not of grace so much,
but instinctive respect,
for the dead are indeed grave,
and when it’s over it’s done with,
but not for those then left.
Mister Chu:
Humor is a very difficult thing to place or persuade another of. It is or it not is.
Nor is there an adequate explanation (despite Freud) for those things that ferment in a minute or two to leave you destabilized by giggling despite yourself. And the more unexplainable (to another) it is, the more subversive it is also.
I am sure the following clip is a common object to people who are more attuned to popular internet matters (this will likely include your good self). However, my laughter was fresh and new (to me)
It is not even the silliness overall (although I am very partial to silliness), but the place where the man claps in the silence and with enthusiasm, certainty.
I am that man entirely, and have been this whole lifetime.
I laugh nervously for many reasons, none made up of rational thoughts, but mostly because I had never recognized myself so completely, but still.
But still, I imagined I must be the only one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-0CS-T1HUQ
This reminds me of the old essay question:
“Is this a value-laden question?”
About which one can write ten pages when under the examination gun, but not today.
Now, if you wish to ask the same question with a name attached (even a nom-de-plume) I would be happy to begin a dialogue of sorts privately about the nature of the Self and Illusion (Disinformation and the Mask even), but otherwise you are a rabbit hole down which, upon a cold Monday morning, I feel disinclined to wander.
Be well.
—
A full minute (inside the chemical notion of your own head)
There are three distinct noises you can hear,
not Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost by any means.
There is a low tone which is all of your thinking,
an intermittent note, your heart beating,
and a hundred thousand chemical termites
for every worry and lust particle,
every rapidity, every hope that still remains,
there inside your otherwise perfect head.
It is a simple collection,
accelerating towards its conclusion at the same moment you do.
Certainty is the great lie.
-Nanny Chu
He always imagines
shoulders like these
or just one I suppose
unless you were to sit
astride them
and all day long.
Mister Chu who is Korean
but allows others
to imagine him Japanese
can smell the dust
of each internment camp
out there in California.
Before The West
allowed for all things
it was not free
but instead wild
in the way that animals
kill each other.
We against them
and us against you
until the taming is done
and enough time passes
to make a quiet history
out of shame.
But even the dead
dream of their fathers
of some safety in the world
and even the living
search for the missing
and a peace of mind.
