The boundaries of reality are the area of play…

If we could do it all over again (and how I wish we could!),
I’d try to love you less.

Yes, love you less but like you more;
Calculate less but understand more;
Be tongue-tied less but care for you more;
Cry less but paint my eyelashes more.

Eternal promise of sunshine, rainbow, and lollipops….

© Post-Modern China Doll

Currently listening : Silicone By Bang Bang Release date: 16 March, 2004

That farewell letter of mine
was:
a preemptive strike,
a self-preserving measure,
a malignant needle,
a surgical procedure on our hearts.

© Post-Modern China Doll

Currently watching : La Peau Douce (Original French ONLY Version- NO English Options)

Infinite sense of perception following mini-epiphanies, the world turns crimson like a giant virginal flower. I turn my head to watch the past, events constantly reorganizing themselves, under the form of memory, dreams, analysis, remembering, forgetting. Dazed by the morning, the day rolls out like a sheet of precious rice paper, neither white nor creamy, neither smooth nor wrinkly. Buckets of tear from last night’s nostalgia have evaporated before dawn, streaks of salt left on the pillow case. If only tears left more permanent traces…. They say that with each drop of tear, a tiny portion of memory is released, like the repeated viewing of an old celluloid film. When all synapses break loose, it becomes impossible to behold the images in sharp vision, and things become increasingly blurred until they finally disappear into a wash of white noise. I thought that if I really cared about the film, I should try to space out the viewing, but an inordinate amount of pain is associated with the act of remembering, and I wonder if it’s better to space the pain out, or take it in all at once, like an avalanche of oppression, of disorder, of falling into the darkest black hole, hoping that the experts were wrong about there not being an other end.

Desire has again vanished, like the near albino prince with the white horse - the most abstract character in little girls’ fairy tales. No rescuing from dwarfs or genies, only the non-continuity of the stream of living. Feet swollen, eyes weary, hair tangled from endless wandering, searching, and questioning. Days gone by, nights drunken in, do we become any wiser for having lived? I only hope to gain solace in your arms, as I trace the delicate curves to your collarbones, wondering if the hollows could contain all the sorrows of this world. Slowly, you whisper these words to my ear: “All endings are new beginnings.”

© Post-Modern China Doll

Currently reading :
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Release date: 13 March, 1989

This is finally coming out! I’ll be at the Palais de Tokyo Friday!

Le vendredi 1er juin à partir de 19 heures,
à la librairie du Palais de Tokyo,
M19 vous invite au lancement de

publisher, editor : Pierre Denan associate editors : Frédéric de Lachèze, Arnauld Pierre translations : Chin-Chin Wu en librairie à partir du 20 mai, ou commande sur site M19 dès le 14 mai
artist’s publication 480 pages couleur, format 24 x 32 cm 45 euros impression de la couverture sur couché 350 gr, pelliculage brillant impression intérieure sur couché brillant 150 gr œuvres créditées en trois langues : français, anglais, chinois périodicité annuelle
avec : Pierre Ardouvin, John Armleder, Olivier Babin, Francis Baudevin, Nicolas Chardon, Claude Closky, Liz Cohen, Pierre Denan, Véronique Joumard, Vincent Lamouroux, Lang/Baumann, Guillaume Leingre, Stéphane Magnin, Mathieu Mercier, Laurent Montaron, Bruno Peinado, Daniel Pflumm, Hugues Reip, Yann Serandour, Veit Stratmann, Yo Zolnir
les artistes sont réunis par the artists are brought together by Pierre Denan
Suite et somme d’œuvres originales, 2860 grams of art regroupe vingt et un artistes. Les contributions, au nombre de vingt-huit, se suivent les unes les autres. Aucune information de nature éditoriale n’est imprimée en surimpression des œuvres, lesquelles sont créditées en fin de revue.

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As I slowly archive all of your e-mails,
I notice that
if I pared down all the palaver,
and clipped off all the “love and kisses,”
there would be sadly little left.

Of course I noticed this before,
as a matter of fact perhaps each time I opened my Inbox.
A woman in love is not incapable of discerning;
she just prefers the magick of faith-leaping.

It’s the only tool in the illusionist’s bag
that spreads sheen over the threadbare
and temporarily turns the self-conscious frog into a dazzling prince!

© Post-Modern China Doll

p.s. Why do I have an issue with princes these days, really? I think my castrating streak is resurging, so watch out if your penis is too close or too erect. Otherwise, you should be on my good side.

________________________________________________________________

“The one thing that is necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth.”

-Leo Tolstoy

Currently reading : The Tiananmen Papers By Zhang Liang Release date: 04 June, 2002

The wordless state of the morning has that beautiful possibility of containing unknown universes, the new cell ready to burst into a collision of ideas and sentences, freely associated in the manners of morning reveries. Perhaps because dream-states are so wonderfully liquid, the mind is yet reluctant to follow the solidity of road maps, floor plans, measurements, pre-ordained formatting of any kind that limits the interpretation of dreams.

I shut my eyes tight, and I open them again. I am in the skin of the prehistorical, free-roaming ancesstress that has given birth and life to pre-civilization, humanity, patriarchy, democracy, technology, books and ideas, nuclear weapons and rocket ships, yet I do not recognize any of these things as they are, vision yet untainted by cultural lenses. Yes, you are wearing a cultural lens too, even as you adamantly claim to the contrary! You are just so accustomed to it that you take it as an appendage of your own, much like the root canal filling or the grafted artificial heart that becomes cyborged into your organism. The most resistance you can do is to remember to change your lens from time to time, to take up other people’s lens just to understand how they may see things, to stop clinging to that one lens as your moral code of arms.

Even silicon breasts are disposable. One friend told me that silicons have to be replanted at least every 15-20 years because the organism will end up rejecting the foreign body. So make sure you change your lens from time to time. Even if you like it as it is, you will still benefit from that slight shift of the vision, the unfamiliar migration to the peripheries of your cultural framework.

Go out and talk to someone from a foreign continent. Strike up a conversation and try to make a connection with someone whose job you feel you cannot possibly relate to just to understand his or her motivations in life. Go to the park to see how many shades of green the English language does not take into account. Most people are running straight to cataract, which is really the dulling and the sclerosis of the soul.

© Post-Modern China Doll

Currently reading : Testaments Betrayed: Essay in Nine Parts, An By Milan Kundera Release date: 11 September, 1996

Wireless is faithless, and I’ve just gotten myself back on the Wifi network. Mom was here for about 9 days, which was short and long. That was true for both of us. We’re the only surviving members of our nucleus family of three. When Daddy Doll was alive, we had this powerful bond that seemed to exclude the rest of the family, i.e. Mommy.

Triangle relationships are very fascinating. My life seems to be full of these: Mommy, Daddy and I; me and my twin male cousins whom I loved and hated by turn, and with whom I formed and broke pacts; me and my “wife” back in boarding school, and the “daughter” we adopted (and sometimes tried to get rid of), and the resulting threesome “wedding portrait” at the local photographer’s. It is still the oddest piece of souvenir from my pubescent years.

When I was a kid, adults seemed to have the tact of bombarding kids with the “innocent” question of “who do you prefer the best - mommy or daddy?” By the way, my mom was a part of a sisterhood of three, and to add to the confusion, my cousins and I called all three sisters “mommy” and all their husbands “daddy” (don’t ask me why, I think it was linked to some Communist ideal of sort, and I still have three moms, but only one dad left from the original Communist days, having lost one to divorce and one to death). So the questions could also turn to, “Which mommy and which daddy do you prefer the best?”

My cousins were stupid enough to give the honest truth, including their rankings, and got subsequent punishment from invisible forces. I always told everybody, “I love mommy and daddy the same!” And the adults would nod their heads in approval, “What a smart kid!”

In fact, this was the watchword of mommy, “Share your toys! Love everyone the same!” Until this day, I cannot bring myself to say that I feel closer to cousin #1 than to cousin #2, or vice versa (I’m careful to add), for fear of being punished for my unfaithfulness and partiality. As a matter of fact, I am so out of touch with my feelings in this arena that I cannot answer to that question if my life depended on it.

Most people think that my concept of faithfulness is more than a little bit skewed. There are days that I don’t want to share my toys. And sometimes I really love one person more than anyone else. But I usually immediately tell myself that this is selfish thinking, and that I have to elevate myself to the status of a selfless saint, at any rate enlarge the couple to a triangle. In the end, there’s really no striving necessary in the formation of couples or triangles, or in the acquiring and giving up of toys. What is yours will be yours. What is meant to be will be. The dynamic is never static, ever-changing, as you are struggling in the very act of defining. This is like the flow of Yin and Yang, and the subsequent creation of all things from this generative force; or Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva - the Hindu trio of the creator, the preserver and the destroyer; or the Christian trinity - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost…. All ancient wisdom seemed to have understood this principal of three and the ceaseless movement that is a part of our life in this universe.

In my case, it has been one long stupendous suspension of judgment facing the delicate threads of human tissue being constantly weaved and re-weaved, exactly like how as a child, I could watch in wonder for hours at ends my Chinese silkworms spin out their own miraculous universe.

Oh yeah, in case you still wonder, I’ve always loved both Mommy and Daddy the same, only differently.

© Post-Modern China Doll

p.s. I’ve got questions about private posts. I have cleared some of them out from MySpace and all diary is in Livejournal now, and everything there is private. I think the blogging function of MySpace sucks ass. Have tried Wordpress and am thinking of integrating either Mambo or Wordpress into my website. Does anybody have any suggestions?

Currently reading : Curves to the Apple: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities By Rosmarie Waldrop Release date: 15 September, 2006

I stumbled on this Seneca quote a while ago:

Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.

I immediately saw the timeless wisdom in this advice. Confucius discoursed amply on the necessity and benefits of careful reading, but I suspect that it was a lot easier back then (especially since he largely contributed to establishing the canon of what scholars should read) then it is in our age of global information bombardment and hyper-specialization to determine ahead of time what exactly a carefully-directed reading program should consist of.

For someone who is both a specialist (I try to *barely* keep up with image/art theory, contemporary art, market trends, current research interests, et al), a literature junkie, and a ceaselessly curious pseudo-intellectual *too much so for my own good*, applying this advice seems to present particular challenge.

I do realize however that my reading tends to go under the following categories (I’m trying to list everything, however ridiculous):

1) How to’s - how to file my income taxes in the US and in France, how to bill a client, how to start a company, how to streamline my workflow, how to breathe, how to make and keep friends and make love like a rock star (Aha! Does this sound like something you want, or rather need to read?) Most of this stuff takes place online and I often get sidetracked into something intellectually more engaging and totally lose track of time. I still haven’t done my US taxes yet. I don’t understand which form(s) I’m supposed to use. I have until June 15th. I really need help.

2) Trance reading. This is the kind of books that you are so familiar with that you enter into a trance immediately and are transported onto another plane. Probably the most self-indulgent type, this can range from reading a favorite passage from the Dream of the Red Chamber for the 30th time, to reading my own manuscript for the potential that it presents, to rereading favorite poems; I read that for George Bush Jr, it’s the Holy Bible for Dummies - anyhow, the point is, we each have these readings.

3) Research-related reading. When I finished my thesis at Louis Lumière, I was so done with school and research, but somehow the theory bug just would not wear off. Let’s face it, even in the most pseudo-intellectual of all pseudo-intellectual places known as Paris, you still don’t need a firm grasp of theory outside of the academia, really! It will get you no cash; you will acquire a bunch of weirdo friends of manic brilliance and despairing social outlook; and if you write books, you’ll be sure that the 1000 copies that you manage to print will be handed to the friends aforementioned, and possibly collected by the libraries of institutions where these nerds abound (albeit still a minority). If this still sounds mildly attractive to you, then Paris is your city!

4) How often have you put something on your reading list upon someone’s ardent recommendation, or because it’s part of THE canon, world treasure and whatnot, and find yourself utterly bored out of your mind, or completely revolted by the style? You carry on just for the sake of future prestige or face-saving in a cocktail party, whatever, fuck that! If you recommend me a book in this category, I will come after you! There are other things that are truly great that I just haven’t had the time to read for some reason. I’m lucky that I got a strong head start in Chinese classics, but can you imagine that I’m still on Volume I of A la recherche du temps perdu? And it’s truly breathless…

5) Other people’s blogs. This category is self-explanatory; however, how we are supposed to deal with this deluge of reading material is something less clear.

6) Non-fiction: history, biographies, interviews, science, research…. (My brilliant and socially adapt photography friend Pierrot and I both agree that non-scientific theory is fictional. The official term is la théorie fictionnelle). Despite being left-handed and an artist, I am actually quite left-brained as well. Caculus and physics were my strongest subjects in high school. I like to understand how things work, and can never resist the elegance of a flawless system, exemplified by integral calculus or a Bach contrapuntal fugue.

7) Current events. Over the years, I found that politics and current events have been relegated to the last place, because they just don’t engage me intellectually like they used to and I don’t find following them mentally or spiritually rewarding. I also cancelled all my magazine subscriptions to avoid clutter and unwanted reading material, and now consult most newspapers online and buy magazines on impulses.

Secret reading material. This could be pornography, e-books from a sect that you secretly belong to, manuels on how to manufacture nuclear bombs in your kitchen, textbooks on witchcraft or lucid dreaming, whatever is chicken soup to your soul.

I know some of you here are big-time readers, and would like to know if you have any thoughts on this. How consciously do you choose your reading material given that time is a limited resource? How do you deal with the frustrations of knowing that you can never master an area of study as well as you would like to?

(Now finished with procrastination and back to writing proposal and artistic statements for JM and me. We are waiting to hear back from Arles for an exhibition space during the photography festival. He will kill me if he knows that I’m posting this instead of working on Arles. Plus he’s a subscriber, but will probably not have time to read this till the end )

Currently listening : Bar Kokhba By John Zorn Release date: 20 August, 1996

Prieuré, May 24, 1923

On Love

There are two kinds of love: one, the love of a slave; the other, which must be acquired by work. The first has no value at all; only the second has value, that is, love acquired through work. This is the love about which all religions speak.

If you love when “it” loves, it does not depend on you and so has no merit. It is what we call the love of a slave. You love even when you should not love. Circumstances make you love mechanically.

Real love is Chrisitian, religious love; with that love no one is born (???). For this love you must work. Some know it from childhood, others only in old age. If somebody has real love, he acquired it during his life. But it is very difficult to learn. And it is impossible to begin learning directly, on people. Every man touches another on the raw, makes you put on brakes and gives you very little chance to try.

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Currently reading : Views from the Real World: Early Talks Moscow Essentuki Tiflis Berlin London Paris NY Chicago as Recollecte (Arkana) By G. I. Gurdjieff Release date: 19 July, 1991

New York, March 1, 1924

The Education of Children

Question: There is a way of educating children through suggestion during sleep. Is it any good?

Answer: This kind of suggestion is no better than a gradual poisoning, the destruction of the last vestige of will. Education is a very complicated thing. It must be many-sided. For example, it is wrong to give children nothing but physical exercises.

Generally, education is restricted to the formation of the mind. A child is made to learn poems by heart, like a parrot, without understanding anything, and parents are glad if he can do that. At school he learns things no less mechanically and, after graduating with honors, he nevertheless understands and feels nothing. In the development of his mind, he is as adult as a man of forty, but in his essence he remains a boy of ten. In his mind he is not afraid of anything, but in his essence he is afraid. His morals are purely automatic, purely external. Just as he learns poetry by heart, so he learns morals. But a child’s essence, his inner life, is left to itself, without any guidance. If a man is sincere with himself, he has to admit that neither children nor adults have any morals. Our morality is all theoretical and automatic for, if we are sincere, we can see how bad we are.

Education is nothing but a mask which has nothing to do with nature. People think one upbringing is better than another, but in actual fact they are all the same. All people are the same, yet each is quick to see a mote in another’s eye. We are all blind to our worst faults. If a man is sincere with himself, he enters into another’s position and knows that he himself is no better. If you wish to be better, try to help another. But as people are now, they hinder each other and run each down. Morever, a man cannot help another, cannot lift another up, because he cannot even help himself.

Before all else you must think of yourself, you must try to lift yourself. You must be an egoist. Egoism is the first station on the way to altruism, to Christianity. But it must be egoism for a good purpose, and this is very difficult. We bring up our children to be ordinary egoists and the present state of things is the result. Yet we must always judge them by ourselves. We know what we are like; we may be sure that with modern education children will be, at best, the same as ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »