Notes on Dawn and Dusk

It has been ages since I last posted here. My cup of life runneth over, and there has been little space for the sort of musings I like to indulge in here.

Now, I'm on a 2-month artist residency in Sapporo, Japan. As usual in my life, it was a last minute thing. Being suddenly spirited away from the chaos of KL life, and I'm finding the slow, gentle pace of this new city simultaneously pleasant and unsettling. I told someone the other day that going on a residency is like being put through a pasta machine - you get strrrrrrrretchhhhhhed out, and all the starch in you needs to expand to encompass the new experience of each day. My artist life has so far been 4 years of constant extending and retracting - I guess it's like having a penis? I don't like where this metaphor is going. I'm going to kill it.

I never wrote at length about the long awaited administrative job that turned out to be just a mirage. I've had disappointments and rejections aplenty, but I don't like dwelling on them. I shed a few tears, I suppose, maybe shook an imaginary fist or two in the privacy of my own room. I'm pretty much safely over the self-pitying now, and the institution in question has crumbled, if not quite into dust, then at least into something resembling farcical ruins - of the fake rock variety. The point is, the elasticity needed in my artist life had worn me out completely. Stasis looked, and still looks, very inviting. I find I can't tell this to any but my closest persons - or, correct that, the people who know me well, all tell me I have... to... stop. Slow down. They get it. I don't.

It's been two weeks now since I left home. From frenzy into - well, sitting. Sit sit sit. When you proof dough, it means letting it sit in a bowl with a little towel over it. It usually doubles in size, all the yeast is working and getting things going. That's what's happening to me. I'm being proofed, but I want to be kneaded.

I want to be kneaded!!! Well, I also want to be made love to in anonymous hotel rooms, to be photographed naked, to dance sexily at seedy beach bars during sunset. All of this has nothing to do with tame ideas of 'love', but everything to do with what makes me feel alive. I once got drunk with a bunch of strange men - shots of alcohol set aflame, that sort of nonsense, made them buy a bottle of gin - drank them under the table and then abandoned them to feng tau with young chinese boys in an awful disco in Phileo Damansara. Hahaha, yes, besfren, you were there. You knew it happened. That's one of the most vivid memories I have. Fear, recklessness, and some insane instinct or misplaced belief that no harm would come to me.

I see brows furrowing. Bless you. And bless you if yours isn't.

Hmm. I have missed posting here. It's like having a good, comfortable vomit.

Basically, I'm in the process of letting go. Learning to party, being comfortable doing nothing. And the art is coming, slowly, in a trickle. It was actually to latch on to the very beginnings of ideas that I started to write this post. Well, took a detour there, didn't I?

I've said many times that dawn and dusk are my favorite times of the day. They're transition times and so force you to be in the moment. It reminds me of falling in and out of love. The first point you started feel... something, isn't that dawn. And then the end, or the begining of it... that's dusk. The inevitability of what's in between, what follows, and then the whole repeated the next day - if you're lucky. So lucky to be alive.

Observatories. Take some pictures of dawn and dusk from there. Extract the colors... collect some stories of falling in and out of love. Give some colors away. Something like that.

I think.

I hope that's what I'm going to do.