lawn-circles and ...

it was a spring day in nineteen-eighty-one, one of those days when for a moment or two the air has no motion, I was standing in the backyard by the flower bed along the fence, as I stood there thinking to myself how pleasant it would be if it always was a spring day without a breeze in the air a breeze came up to break the spell.

the breeze continued to grow as i stood there and bits of sand were hitting me as the air began swirling around in a circle and was increasing in strength as if to make up for the minute it was absent. it had grown to cover the patio and the umbrella in the centre of the table began to rattle in its socket, then the wind began to open it up, and all the while more was grit hitting me and the swirling bubble of air was now getting strangely hot and spinning so fast it was lifting the umbrella up and out of the table. i grabbed the pole and held it back but the force of the wind was so strong now that it was tugging on the umbrella and as i was on my tiptoes already and it was getting difficult to breathe in the centre of it all, i decided to let go out of fear it might just take me with it if the wind got any stronger.

i let goe of the umbrella, it went up and over the roof of the house next door, i turned and bounded up the steps into the house up the inside stairs and through the kitchen to the living room yelling that the umbrella from the patio table had blown away over the neighbours house, and as my parents and sister turned to look at me with a what is it now look on their faces, there through the window the umbrella was twirling into view as it fell from the air onto the front lawn, they turned in time to see it falling. there was a woman pushing a baby stroller on the sidewalk, she didn't seem very disturbed by a large patio umbrella falling out of the sky on a mild spring day. after i brought the umbrella around back i noticed the lawn had been pushed flat at the edge of the patio, near where the bubble of air had seemed to begin.

one night not a very long time after that incident when my parents had gone camping for the weekend and my sister was at a friends for the night, i had a strange dream. in the dream i woke in that way that one feels something has disturbed one into waking, i was lying on my left side and i could see a person standing over by the writing desk, it was me, standing there watching me in bed. then i switched places with my double and was watching my self laying in bed asleep with my eyes closed, and from beside the desk i could see that my double hadn't been watching me but a thin long fingered hand that was slowly rising up from behind me as i lay there asleep. as i watched the hand stopped and began to retreat back down behind the bed.

the hand almost got all the way out of sight and then i found myself back in the bed and though seeming to be asleep i could see my double standing there by the writing desk and this time i knew what he was watching. i lay there unable to move, and began to think if i didn't get back in my doubles body whatever was attached to the hand would grab me, and then i was back in my double and i could see the hand of the creature and part of its face, which was akin to something out of a brian frode painting, again rising up from behind my body and then retreating as i watched from beside the desk, and when it had almost gone out of sight i found myself back in the bed where I could see my double watching me laying in bed asleep while the creature reached out its long fingered hand to touch me.

the event repeated itself again with me seeing myself over by the desk and then i was in the double by the desk and this time i could see more of the face and the arm the hand was attached to as the creature reached out to touch me, then as though it knew i could see it the hand and face began to retreat. i watched my self lay there asleep in the bed till whatever it was retreated a part of the distance it had the second time. then i found myself back in the bed but this time i could not see the double by the desk and began to panic as i imagined the creature raising higher over my sleeping body and getting closer and closer as i couldnt get back over by the desk to make it back off.

my only hope then seemed to be sliding out and away of the bed as fast as possible but i seemed paralyzed and couldn't move and as the tension grew i was finally able to turn as fast as possible on to my back and throw the blanket over whatever was there, as I did this I realized there was nothing there and gave up a startled laugh.

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mouldings--doric

mouldings at the top of a column. below the convex saucer-shaped moulding two smaller projecting groups of three mouldings, one a concave quarter circle, one fillet-faced and one a convex half circle make two collars around the column. above the saucer a flat tile with a broken corner is topped by another set of small mouldings the lower one a cyma recta and above that a fillet.

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bike cycle

a person riding a bike slows down and comes to a stop at a bike lockup post, he gets off his bike and locks it to the post. as he leaves he stops and turns and looks back at the bike to make certain it is locked to the post something he does each time he locks up the bike now since he lost a bike the year before by not having the lock around the post and the bike frame. as he does this two are females walking by him and one says to the other "and now he takes two steps and turns and looks over his shoulder". and they both giggle strangely.

a couple of weeks after that incident he left his bike locked to a bike post in the same area and when he returned and unlocked the bike and began to ride south on yonge street he heard a clattering sound from the rear fender. he stopped and took a look back at the wheel and could see a piece of wire about the thickness chicken fencing is made from it is stuck in the tire. he gets off the bike checks the tire from which he can hear the air hissing from and removes the wire, the tire goes flat. so he pushes the bike to a bike store where they change the inner tube.

a couple of months later he returns home one night and parks and locks his bike in the space inside the hallway used for that and goes down stairs to his room which is below the hall area where the bike is locked up. one of the other tenants who lived upstairs liked to leave the front door open all night "to get a breeze he said", that night a few hours after locking up his bike he was laying in bed reading and thought he heard someone up in the hallway moving his or one of the other bikes, he was going to get up to go and check and then the sound stopped, and he laid back to continue reading, that was when he heard through the rooms open window a sniggering giggling sound coming from the general area of the public sidewalk at the front of the house.

when he went upstairs to unlock his bike in the morning he got as far as the front step before he
understood the back tire on the bike was flat while the tires on the other bikes in the hall were ok. so
he pushed it back to the bike store and they changed the innertube and the tire which had been slashed. a couple of weeks after after that incident he began to notice people stopping in front of him on the sidewalk a little ahead of the back tire of a bike locked to a post and then turn to look at the back tire of the bike.

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canadian correctness

one year while living as a tenant in the rooming house i had some potatoes that had sprouted in the cupboard as it was spring and I was taking care of the yard for the landlord i thought of my great aunt who always planted potatoes in the front yard of her house in regina and decided these would goe in the front yard of the rooming house, along the sidewalk to the road. one day several months later I was in the backyard with another tenant and thit brought up the potatoes out front, at the first I thought the comment was a nod of approval, then I understood it was meant as a criticism as thit went on to say thit was concerned what the neighbours might think of potatoe plants in the front yard. thit added that maybe because they were ethnic canadians they might find potatoes in the front yard offensive or unsightly in the culture they come from.

I thought maybe they had said something to thit about it but from other things that tenant had said over the previous year i decided thit simply was too concerned about others, thinking every little thing one does has to be checked with a comittee. so i said I didn't give a fuck what the neighbours thought of the potatoes in the front yard it's not their yard, it's the landlords and the landlord hasn't said any thing but good things about having a tenant do the yard maintenance.

thit gave me a nervous smile and did not say any thing else of the potatoes and then went inside. the whole of the time I had been talking to the other tenant my back was to the house to the west, i grabbed the broom by the steps and began to sweep away the other tenants comments. i had seen front yards belonging to ethnic canadians down the street with tomatoes planted in with the roses and there is a gardening movement that commends front yard vegetable gardens, whats suddenly wrong with a few potatoe plants out front, and as I turned and was side ways to the west house I noticed the neighbour going up the steps of the house to the west in a way that suggested thit wanted to goe inside unnoticed and I thought shit was thit there the whole time I was talking to the other tenant.

 

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classical moulding--confusing

''the simplest decorative details and those that are most universally used in buildings are called moldings. they are plane or cylindrical surfaces, convex, concave, or of double curvature, and they are sometimes plain and sometimes enriched by carving.

''a molding with double curvature is called a cyma, or wave moulding.  if the tangents to the curve at top and bottom are horizontal as if the profile were cut from a horizontal wavy line, it is called a cyma recta, if vertical , as if cut from a vertical line, a cyma reversa, ... the cyma recta is sometimes called cyma reversa, when it is turned upside down. but this leads to confusion.

''some architectural features, such as bases, caps, and baulsters, consist entirely of mouldings. others
consist mainly of plain surfaces, mouldings being employed to mark the boundary between different
features, ''

william r ware, the american vignola.

drag lurker

 

a person is sitting in a cafe drinking tea and reading a book, a second person comes from the counter with a coffea and sits across from him. the first person thinks he has seen the second person before this time, but can't place where or when. the second person noisily puts down his coffea mug and begins to act in a way to draw attention to him self. he takes out a cell phone and holds it in his right hand along the outside of his left leg so it is pointing at the first person, and then holds his left hand up like a stop-hand, twists it left and right at the wrist then holds it to his right ear and begins to mime speaking into a phone all the while moving back and forth and side to side in the chair. the second persons behaviour reminds the first person of the way another person was behaving in the same chair several weeks before.

on or around a month before this situation the first person had been sitting in the same chair in the cafe and a women came and sat in the chair the second person was now sitting in. she took out some paper and a cellphone and began sketching while talking in to the cellphone about deadlines and how she would be there in time for the big meeting all the while leaning forward and back and to the left and right in the chair. as the first person is remembering the details of that incident he recalls where and when he saw the second person sitting across from him.

the first person, looking over the top of his eyeglasses thinks he recognizes the second person as the same one who on one day of the previous week had walked past him in front of the same cafe. on that day the second person was dressed up as queen elisabeth the second, carrying a corgi type lapdog under each arm which was possibly why the first person didn't recognize him immediately when he came and sat across from him. as the first person pondered what was going on the second person seemed to regain some composure and got up and left the cafe.

not long after that incident the first person begins to notice other strange people with corgi lapdogs under their arms, seemingly lurking in wait for him near or inside cafes on his wanderings around the city.

 

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classical moulding--double curvature

moulding at the foot of pilaster showing the contrast of the double-curves against the planes of the brick wall to the right and the stone wall guard to the left.

sluts and lapdogs

a tenant who lives alone upstairs on the second floor has his ex-wife and two sons staying with him for a month while they look for a new apartment, she would of had one by now he says to the person who lives in the basement suite of the house but shes too particular he adds.

the person who lives in the basement suite talks to the wife one day and she says how they had to move because they were being harassed by a bunch of kids at the apartement where she and the sons had been living, they had done things to her car and made noises from the apartments around the one they lived in.

the wife finds an apartment and not long after that the person from the basement suite is leaving the subway station where he lives and coincidentally meets the wife of the other tenant coming in the subway cradleing a lapdog in each arm. 

they talk for a few minutes and he asks about her harassers, to which she replies they dont bother her any more since she made a deal with them. a few weeks after that incident the person from the basement suite begins to notice strange women carrying lapdogs seemingly waiting for him on the subway, in office tower halls and at the entrance to cafes along the path of his daily wanderings around the city.

classical moulding--double-curved

double-curve moulding on plinth at the base of pilaster on the yorkeville branch of toronto public library.

neighborhood watch

a person leaves the house he lives in and notices another person standing on the drivers side of a van parked in front of the house to the east of  his, talking to someone inside of it. about five minutes earlier the person by the van had knocked on the door of the first persons house asking for directions  and giving him a puzzled whats going on here look when directed to the street he asked for, as though that was not the answer he expected.

 as the first person passes the van on the passengers side he recognizes the third person inside the van, who notices him looking, as the neighbor from the house to the west of his, the first person looks over his shoulder at the balcony above the porch of the westside house where he often saw the third person standing, watching the neighborhood, and wonders to himself if this is why he gets so many people knocking on the door and asking for directions to nearby streets.

several months after this incident the neighbor from the house to the west moves and the first person begins to notice a varied collection of strange people, seemingly standing in wait for him at various places, on the subway, in office tower halls, and cafes, along the path of his daily wanderings around the city.

not what you say--who says it

some one is asking me what i am reading, its a book about a theory called monogenisis of the languages of the world and how they all are maybe decended from a single language, nostratic, that was spoken  in one place at one time, and then spread out like the branches of a tree to the rest of the worlds population. "ohnooooo" thit grimaced "that is so racist, please dont believe in that sort of stuff." thit said and went back to chopping vegetables in the kitchen. it was like this so often with this person that i didnt say any thing more and continued reading to my self and laughing at how prejudiced some people who claim to be broad-minded and "im an intellectual!" are when an idea that does not fit their politically-correct guidelines of intellectualism  is mentioned.

about a year later the same person  had been to a party and had talked to some lesbian of colour, from some country of the third world, who told thit a wonderful counter-culture theory she was studying about how all the languages of the world are decended from one original language that spread from the place it was invented, and this explained the incredible similaritys in all the languages of the world. "oh it was sooooogood to talk to someone with the courage to study things that go against the narrow-minded theories of the mainstream." thit said with that politically-correct smile on thit's face and went back to chopping vegetables in the kitchen.

i sat there laughing to my self wondering why it is when a white, male, gay, canadian had been reading about the same theory it was something, somehow misguided and in need of correction, but when! ...

classical moulding

concert hall designed by arthur erickson using the form of a cavetto moulding for the  exterior curtain wall.

shape of unintentional provocation

not an interpretation of a beckett play at vectorbelly.

'' my aim here will be to examine the respects in which the augustine paradox imitates the "shape" of waiting for godot, is in fact a perfect working modle of the play's structural dialectic. ... put simply, the essay is an examination of the ways shape matters in godot. ... i am not concearned with the poetry in the language, or with an interpretation of the play but with the structure of its intelligibility. in fact, if we were to condense godot to a graphic illustration of itself, it might resemble a highly "sucessful" rorschach blot. i have in mind the simple wonder of the blots appeal: like found art, it is unintentionally provocative. ... i am hardly implying that beckett, or any playwright, could be unintentionally provocative with any sucess. what i mean is that the shapes and subshapes in godot behave as if they were.''

bert o. states, shape of paradox: an essay on waiting for godot.

christopher alexander--function follows ornament follows beauty follows centres

flower nails at notcot.

''i have found again and again--without counter example--that our ability to see the field of centers in a thing, and to produce the centers which are indicated geometrically, tends to produce an object which works better. ... form follows function! but if we look at the examples i have given, it seems very unlikely that this is what took place when they were made. ... example after examples suggest emphatically that this is what came first: making the centers beautiful was the driving force. ...

'' the geometry that occurs in the 14th-century nail produces life that has both functional and ornamental qualities to an extraordinary extent. ... it also works incredibly well because of its size and the thickness of the head, it has a very long life and great strength, lasting in some cases 600 years--something that a 20th-century nail could almost never do. is it a coincidence that the 14th-century nail works so well both as an ornament, and  as a functioning long lived nail? what is the connection between the ornament and function in the nail?''

christopher alexander; the nature of order, bk-i.

baudrillaird--cool memories

''fragmentary writing is, ultimately, democratic writing. each fragment enjoys an equal distinction, the most banal one finds its exceptional reader. each, in its turn, has its hour of glory.

''of course, each fragment could become a book. but the point is that it will not do so, for the ellipse is superior to the straight line. it is also a matter of laziness; one has no right to waste time to no good end, anymore than to exploit oneself to no good end. and a matter, too, of compression of words, which have done so much work already.

''another promise of fragment, is that they alone will survive the catastrophe, the destruction of meaning and language. like the flies in the plane crash which are the only survivors because they are ultralight. like the flotsam in poe's maelstrom. the lightest items sink the most slowly into the abyss. it is these one must hang on to.''

jean baudrillard, fragments-cool memories iii, 1991-95; english by emily agar.

barthes--incidents

''incidents is the writing down, the collection, of what barthes saw and heard in morocco. for the most part in tangiers and rabat, then in the south, in 1968 and 1969. ... the text is the written account of meetings--incidents--that could of woven the fabric of a novel. without the support of people; also with practically no continuous thread to the story, which would necessarily force a 'message'. into it: the 'novelistic', in essence, is fragmentary. ...

''this is clear when roland barthes par roland barthes twice alludes to this text; under the heading 'projeto de livres' [ book projects ]: 'incidents [ mini-texts; wrinkles, haikus, everything that falls, like a leaf ]; and under the title 'qu'est ce que ca vent dire?' [ what does that mean ]: 'a non-book could be conceived; one which would relate a thousand incidents, by keeping itself from ever drawing one line of meaning; it would be exactly a book of haikus?' ...

''one may note that here, in fact, the genre is constantly emphasized by a particular attention to surprise, to a break in continuity, to the incongruous. the incident is there: the one thing that falls outside all codeification.''

roland barthes, incidents; english by teresa lavender fagan, from the publishers notes of francois wahl.

zelia nuttall--year of the swastika

''with a veil over his eyes, he can see the stars of the big dipper at noon. those in power distrust his vision.'' i-ching, hexagram-55.


zelia nuttall had an interest in the swastika that bordered on worship, she wrote a book about it, "on the fundamental principles of old and new world civilizations", a 640 page book explaining how she had looked up at the heaven one night and a vision came to her, a starry-vision in which the big and little dippers were repeated four times around the pole star and appeared as two twinkling swastika to her.

once she got over the vision, she went back to her desk and it seemed to her that all of the research on symbols of mexican religion she had laboured with over the previous thirteen years was solved, and that she now held the key to the origins of the swastika, the four season calendar, the septimal counting system, and the triskelion.

her conclusion seems to come from a coincidence in the position of the seven stars of the big dipper on the four nights of the year that break the year into four seasons. on one of those nights the big dipper lies exactly to the north of the pole star, one night to the east one night to the south and one night to the west.

when a line is drawn from the pole star to the big dipper on each of these nights at twelve o'clock, they together form a bent line, repeated four times it does sort of look like a swastika. zelia nuttall thought that ancient star-watchers would of had the same vision as she did, and when they recovered from the vision, use the design as a symbol of the year of four seasons. a calendar sign.

palladio--book-ii,chapter-iii

''... the lavatories are at the side of the stairs and, although they are in the body [corpo] of the building, do not smell much because they were put in a place away from the sunlight and have some vents, leading from the bottom of the pit through the thickness of the walls, that let out at the top of the house.''

palladio, the four books on architecture; translated by robert tavernor and richard schofield.

something about dogs

after petting some ones new lap-dog i wash my hand at the kitchen sink, thit smiles and says the dog is clean. i say we always washed our hands at my grand fathers farm after petting the cats, dogs and other animals and i still do to this day. laughing, thit picked up the dog and let it lick thits face, even thits mouth, saying, no no no never mind what he says you are clean. that was that until a couple of years later when thit told me the dog had been dragging its ass on the carpet and so thit took it to the vet and was told the dog had worms of some kind, and that dogs with worms will drag their ass on something to get rid of the worms hanging on to them. ihk, i didnt think my dog could have worms, thit said.

formula for spam

''stuart pratt sherman engineered an experiment athletic and ingenious enough to deserve a seperate paragraph here. he wrote down, he says, some one hundred words on a sheet of paper, cut them apart, seperated them into piles according to parts of speech, shuffled them, and then aligned them and inserted punctuation--coming up, he says, with the following:

''[from "a note on gertrude stein", in points of view] red stupidity; but go slowly. the hope slim. drink gloriously! dream! simply pretty people through daffodils slip in green doubt. grandly fly bitter fish; for hard sunlight lazily consumes old books, up by a sedate sweet heart roar darkly loud orchards. life,the purple flame, simply proclaims a poem.''

b.l.reid, art by subtraction.

something about dreams

a dream from the 1960s. my mother, sister and i have walked up the road to the field above my grandparents farm. when we get there a pack of wolves appears from somewhere and surrounds our mother, she gets up on a pair of stilts that were laying on the ground and starts yelling for help as the wolves jump and run around her, yet they strangely ignore the two of us on the ground. our mother tells us to run back down to the farm and get help, and we get just far enough down the hill we cant see her and the wolves; then my sister wants to go back and make sure mother is ok, we go back and there is our mother standing on the ground with the stilts in her hand, the wolves sitting on the ground. when they see us the wolves start jumping and snarling at her again while she gets back on the stilts and tells us to go get help before its too late. we start to go back down the road and the dream ends.

something self-rightous

at the end of the day sitting at the table listening to someone else tell me about how his day was perfect till he got on the bus and someone with a dog in a harness sat next to him. how can people who love animals do that, its so inhumane, if he had a dog he would never torture it in a harness and how can people who love dogs do that to them, he complained, dont they know how suffering it is for the dog, and dont say he cant tell it is, the dog looked right at him and he could see the humiliation in its eyes.

he wanted to tell the person how wrong it is to have a dog in a harness and not on a collar which is humane. he went on to claim that harnesses were never seen in quebec, well ok maybe once in a while, and people in quebec would say something about it, and only since moving to toronto did he see it all the time. while here you cant say any thing as so many other people with and without dogs think it is ok and so he held his tounge and was proud of the fact he held on to his tounge because he was sooooo angry about it, and how it must of been all the time he was doing at the buddhist temple was teaching him to forgive people and making him mindful that helped him hold his tounge. and that was how his almost perfect day was ruined.

he then asked me; i suppose because im an english canadian who seemed less narrow minded than most to him, and would likely agree with him, ''why do people here do that'', and i told him what i had been thinking while he was telling me about how his day had been made less than almost perfect; i thought a harness held the dog by the chest and not by the neck as a collar does so the harness dosnt choke the dog as it pulls on the leash possibly hurting its little doggie throat, like when they used horses to pull carriages they didnt make them pull with their necks but by a harness on the chest and i think i mentioned that is maybe why seeing eye dogs are in a harness.

first he looked at the table then at the stairs to the second floor and then said he would have to ask someone else about that, and he had to put some things he brought home away before supper and went upstairs.

and so i sat there at the end of the day thinking of how my day had been almost perfect till he came in and began telling me about his day, thinking to myself ''im glad that im not a dog in quebec, glad im not his dog.''