“Hey wait! Is any of you Dutch? You are Dutch right?” She raised from her makeshift bed on the wooden bench of the fifth floor of the New York Art Academy, and pointed her finger at me, as if she cursed me, “You Judas!”

I, the condemned, answered by pointing the finger on to the Irish bloke I was with. “He!” I denied three times.

“Are you Dutch?”

I bend over and whispered the phonetic answer in my friend’s ear: “Ja.”

“Ja,” he emphatically repeated in a syrinxian debasement of his natural tone, but surprisingly correct.

She started laughing… endearingly, admitted. We started talking, her friend, the American girl who always looked smutted in all colors of her palette, had mentioned me, that there was a Dutch guy in the other class, and Dan our teacher, a portrait artist with an honest claim to be gifted and talented, and the son of a NYPD police sketch artist who drew composite drawings of suspects all his life, had not failed to single me out either. But the blood on everybody’s hands was but vermillion. (more…)

Semantics of the black dictionary

You white idiots who are so damn politically correct, who walk on egg shells, move around between crystal and porcelain shells of niceness, your grinding yellow teeth that enforce to display a week smile through which you press a politely over-stated thank you, all of you are bigots with your care and sensitivities, which you learnt to phrase so wisely at your white campi.

“Listen you nigga, you were born with your hands in my pocket, man.”

So what does your oddly stif politeness hide in your heart? That you don’t share the lack of opportunity of the poor black man, that your neighbors are all white, that your academic debate about equality solves nothing of the social segregation that you hold dear in your suburban forts, or that your persistent claim to attach negative values to a nigga word, that your deeper fear emerges only in your dictionary, is really the root of all you so nicely despise about my vulgar choice of words? (more…)

“Man, I am bored, you know. I am falling into a routine: getting up, go to work, have a few drinks in a New York bar, go home, wake up tired too late and go to work. Over, and over, and over again.”

“But is it because you are insensitive for the esthetic of the moment? Cause you would be thrilled a year ago, to do exactly that!”

“Yeah, but I done all that now, and it’s a bore now, I am repeating myself, and I am jumping on the the same subway line, from the same stop on the same corner, getting out at the same street, getting the same cup of coffee from the same street vendor around the same damn hour. How about that for a life?”

“You know, there was a time in college that I was so curious about the divine, that is, the total sensation, the completely whole-heartedly felt feeling of mediocracy that for a year almost I tried franticly to behave and dress unsuspiciously.”

“What?! You crack me up, why would you do that for?”

“Because I think there is something intrinsically enjoyable about it.”

“Fuck that.”

“Seriously, why would so many people live happily mediocre lives?”

“You think they choose to live like that, to be anonymous ants by sheer pleasure? I don’t think so, they are out of impotence or worse out of fear!”

“No I disagree, there is something too evident in deviating from the norm for it to be not easily obtainable, to be not accessible. Think about it, it is the most urgent desire to stand out, the most powerful and most innate will to be unique, at least in western culture, and yet, millions of people choose to blend in with the mass.” (more…)

To be good might be satisfying, but nothing beats the high of winning, of being better than the other, it really doesn’t matter what it is that you excel in, and often excelling is not a matter of outstanding talent or relentless efforts, but more of discovering your niche game. You could of course try to become the world’s most renowned soccer player of the last twenty five years, or even be the most brutal basketball player in the NBA, or you could set out to be president of the United States and beating every opportunist for the common cause, or you could try and invent a medicine against AIDS/HIV, or become Miss Universe or be the lead guitarist or singer of the latest superstar band, but honestly, that is not a very clever idea. Now, think and do the math for a second, and conclude for yourself, the chance of being a universally unique Chinese man are much and much smaller than being the most admired Greenlander in the next decade, that is at least given that you are or will be a Greenlander.

Of course, some of you will say, many of you will be European no doubt, but it’s not all about winning. Now, that is certainly a noble thought, actually it is an outstandingly noble thought, but unfortunately, I don’t buy it. If there is a reason, a cause, an objective behind all your noble intentions, than let there be no mistake about it, then it is to be the best of gooders. Averagely good, you see, is nothing more than averagely good, and averagely good can hardly to be maintained to constitute any good, if it demands no special effort. Sure it might benefit a third person, someone you even don’t know or a close friend perhaps -although to do good to a close friend is dubious given the reciprocality that is expected consciously or subconsciously-, but by mere coincidence you will be good in this case, because you would agree that only that cause which is achieved intentionally can be counted as good by nature. But when goodness, becomes a norm to be appreciated, something to be valued, to be grateful for, than would this expectation not be all too obvious even for the unintentious gooder? And the only way not to be aware of the expected gratitude would be if it was not intended, and therefore sincerely not foreseen and not intended, but thus stop to fall within the scope of goodness. So, you anti-American Europhiles on whose shoulder the guilt of two world wars rests collectively so heavily that you dare not deny the existence of goodness without blackening your own souls, and you anti-American Islamists, Christians and deists whose purity of goodness free of self-interest has decayed into an incompetence which profits no one, you have concluded, goodness per se is impossible.

Now, let me then take you by the hand and lead you back to your pre-Fin-du-Siecle truth that lies beyond good and evil, the will to win, the power of winning, the most elementary sensation of success by which children gain confidence, women their beauty and men their strength, yes by which condition goodness exists. When you do good, make sure you are best in doing good, when you give to charity, make sure you give the most, and when you volunteer, volunteer more and longer, and be better in your efforts than anybody else, when you adopt a baby, adopt the most destitute of babies, when you love, love for the least of all reason and thus love the most, when you fight a good war pick the hardest of fights to battle, and when you are slapped in the face, turn your other cheek, help not the few but help the most, and most importantly, when your company holds a fund-raiser make sure your team beats all others. Because it is only the best kind of goodness that counts.

He was in his mid-fourties, and as an aspiring writer he should have had at least some minor tales to tell, has achieved to get a few of his poems or short stories published in one of the many anonymous, small-circulation press publications, or even like some of the aspiring writers have published a break-through publication of a novel, surrounded by much beating of the drum in the popular press’ book review sections, but none were yet to be found on A.N.’s writer’s resume, in fact, he had not yet written a single letter of fiction in his whole entire life. If to be a writer meant that you actually would have to spent your time writing, he would probably not even yet qualify for the epithet.

Yet, in heart and mind A.N. was and thus called himself a writer. Where you only a writer once a random arbiter of your work decided in his uneducated estimation that grew from his gut that he would be able to make a profit printing and selling your writings? And depended the profitability more on the cost of paper, the number of pages, the number of fools to buy your writings, the profit margin, and would you be a writer if decided to bind your writing in glossy paper so customers would be willing to pay more, being under the lawful impression to gain something more valuable, than bound in gray brown, recycled paper? Or where you a writer if you were born with the wealth to print your own work, or if you were a better marketeer, if you were young and good-looking, and thus fit to promote your work in the fashionable world of modern media?

Where you a writer writing ten pages a week or twenty, twenty-one per haps, should the pages be counted in letter or legal format, single-spaced or double-spaced? Was punctuation and spacial formatting allowed to be part of the writing? But sometimes, one word, two words could form a phrase and some of those single phrases could hit you harder, sounded more clear and sound than the lexis eiromene of some over-zealous Proustian pupil. And how about silence, I am not even talking about silence. A.N. remembered the phaistos disk, a disk of no more than fourteen inches, but one that put back time of history, despite that no one had deciphered one half of it and it still represented a mystery to men chased by many wise scholars. They had found clay tablets burned and baked in consequence by the fire, not larger than the size of my little finger, with no more than three barely readable pictograms in a language only readable by few, were these scribants, scholars in their time, writers? The most famous epics of mankind, Gilgamesh, the Old Testament and Iliad and the Odyssee, written in the highest style and transcending generations, but the writers were lost men who anonymously labored to put their genial thoughts to persistent form, were they better writers?

But as a writer in thought, A.N. perceived the world and its characters in a comprehensive albeit in a totally fictional fashion. Despite the fact that he had never put a letter to the paper, he reveiled his stories in living characters of men around him, and the exceptional events that make up the read threat and plot of a story in the common events of his ordinary life. The Polish girl who grew up in a small desolated village in Poland and whose mother infatuated the American good-heart who took her mother and her every year to the popular holiday resort of Sham-al-Sheik at the Red Sea, where she fell in love with an Egyptian student, so she now studies Arabic at Harvard University in Boston. The Chinese woman in front of the Public Library on Broadway, next to Columbia University, who holds up two plastic boxes each holding two baby turtles, as she shouts at every passer-by, ‘tuttels, tuttels’ with three more boxes between her legs, sticking out one of the boxes in her hand to you. The fifty-three year old man posing nude in the evening hours at the New York Academy of Arts in front of a group of semi-talented part-time art students, half of them women his age but of different stature, and despite standing naked in front of all these strangers, none exchange a single word with him during three long hours in which he barely moves or let alone take a noticable breath. And all these stories he had written many many times in his head, he had told them over and over to strangers and friends and he imagined he was a great writer, perhaps even greater than many famous authors in his time.

As I walked to the subway stop at 125th, I kicked insuspiciously a single dried yellowish brown leaf, scratching it along for a meter over the concrete, causing a ruffled noise, a noise that for a year almost I hadn’t heard but stepping on the dry sand spread on the dirt roads of the Aegaean Islands, indicating that autumn has started.
In the afternoon, I walk home as nature’s rain pours down upon us. I indulge in this fest like Kelvin in Tarkovsky, stoicly forming part in the sensation of the water purging my human sins. Calmly, I walk sternly forward, see each man protruding to catch a glimpse from beneath their umbrella’s under which, no behind which they shelter and hide from nature. Alas, how does modern man disgust being part of nature, and not mastering it. So, we cover ourselves in water-proof skin, hide under hollow artificial skies that deny the rain that’s falling, and we duck into the plastified porticos that extend our homes.
In the evening, through my open windows the rumbling of distant thunder, the constant battering of rain drops around the building, and the occasional drop of an accumulated ball of water on the metal cover of the air-conditioner. Autumn’s turning over the leaves, the wet and yellow winged keys of the green ashes are blown into the corners of city buildings. And so am I swiped into the corner of autumn, intrinsically part of it. I don’t know why, perhaps it is my Nordic constitution, but today is a beautiful day, my senses absorb the coming of autumn and the cycle of nature reaps the weakers parts to make room for new life, which promise blows over us.

“So, and what are you doing?” the husband asked me tritely with a tone of natural politeness. I remembered my friend who once verbally exploded to a friend’s friend, a young gay person who consequently was on the verge of tears for the moral attack against him for asking that very same question.
“What do you mean? Why do you ask that question? Why don’t you ask, what am I about?”
I also remember the European incomprehending hostility toward the very same question, deducting from it the whole American national character as ‘superficial,’ which is not the case at all, because Americans ask this with the greatest sincere interest for your answer at heart, even though the interest shown is not much revealing about a person’s character.
But let’s put this all aside and return to our dialogue again.
“I am a programmer,” I dutifully replied, but the rest of the evening, my smiles and questions were as dutifyl, never did I sense a true connection, not even when I halfheartedly nodded.
“We should get together again soon.”

So, not surprisingly, on our second meeting at Bar None on 3rd Avenue – check out the waitresses’ surgical breasts -, I wasn’t especially thrilled greeting them again. But as the evening progressed, he leaned backward with ease, she looked gently but sternly in my eyes. They had not hesitated to take on the first round of drinks, ordering a pitcher of Brooklyn Lager, which we now steadily sipped from out of our plastic cups. The conversation quickly jumped along various lines of the topic, both animated and in depth, the kind of conversation which either reveals a driven will behind thought, or reveals none or rather the absence of a passionate conviction. This time the polite probe into each other’s true identities was skipped and we had jumped almost straight into an animated debate about a variety of topics that we shared an interest in.

Reconstructing our first meeting after our second now feels estranging. Was my impression really true to the very nature of our first encounter, or had I been so susceptible for my own state of mind and private delicate mood that I had tainted unfairly hours of conversation over dinner, perhaps the room in which we met that first time had been too dark, depressing our opinions. Or can it be that meetings with Americans is second’s best? Is there a first round of initiation, in which you seek not common ground but instead for willingness to consider and stability of character so to prove a certain level of trustworthiness? I am genuinely interested in cultures, but I also can hardly adjust myself to them, and my expectations of first impressions are still deeply un-American.

“Bla bla bla bla, duh, bla bla bla.”
“Not necessarily, bla bla bla.”
“Not if you bla bla.”
“bla.”
“Well how about bla bla bla.”
“Duh, bla bla bla bla bla.”

Now, don’t get me wrong! I know that I am giving off the completely wrong impression, as if it all doesn’t matter, that ultimately, it is just a matter of arbitrary right and wrong, of a few dimes falling off the table, pushing the stakes a little higher, a little lower without a point of orientation, and you might think that I think the intelligence of the discussion is weighed by the appearance of certainty and clarity of words, and that these five people that are seriously investigating and deliberating a minor point are mistakenly believing the minor point to be crucial, as in yesterday’s discussion, and last week’s discussion, but listen, that’s what life is, a chain of minor decisions with crucial consequences! Yes, you might easily mistake the cryptic phrasing of the dialogue as disinterest, and the disinterest as a lack of understanding, an incapacity even of acknowledging the real value of meetings like the above and most likely, oh why deny it, this is true, after all, by not finding meaning or importance in the very same event to which all other’s attach the stone weight of their thoughts to, how could it be different than by truth of common perception that I am wrong.

“Bla bla bla.”
“Bla duh?”
“Bla bla bla bla.”

But don’t be mistaken (more…)

Let’s say a start-up company, a dynamic, virile group of entrepeneurs so typical for New York, was acquired by another company than Microsoft. In the last years they had grown from a small business with a small idea, attracting the interest of a small group of risk capital investors and talented young professionals, and the tide of the market had delivered them great fortune, rising them to the vanguard of new technologies merging with old interests. So, convincingly they had sold themselves to this corporate conglomerate, not Microsoft, in the course of spring the acquisition was closed, and over summer the promises of the young cocoon had undergone a metamorphosis, turning into an adult butterfly, the pride of the whole orchard, bringing color to the gamut of green hues.

The tides of uncertainty that a lone swimmer feels pulling at his legs and pushing against his torso, tempting it to go along, then again resiliently resisting in a stretch of strength reaching deep inward for self-consciousness and hope, that Sirens call of wealth, they require us to be alert, raise our sails if we need to, but respond aptly, there’s no time for a paper trail when shredding an enemy from one’s tail in the volatile conditions of the capitalist markets, where conditions change more often than the New England weather. But the weather might no longer be of much importance, like said, because the work paid off, if even the work of many paid off for only a very few, and the outcome of product placement has become as certain and predictable as the best of money can buy, now the David was brought in by the giant, being not Microsoft.

Part of that stability people with a degree in business would argue is due to the fat and solid layer of middle management that has solidified in the global corporations of our time, managers are like flies, they smell the carrion of the wales of the capital sea like no one else, and they grow on the harvest of bacon that comes from these conglomerations, building their towers of Babylon that watch out over America and the swelling hurdles of American laborers that sink in the mud of their consumer loans to buy ever and ever cheaper and cheaper Chinese made ruins of decaying products, which are the loose brick of certainty that now fills our lives, while the ruins are scraped together again by the harvesteers of recycled labor, that feeds their suburban complacencies that rule a world. But honestly, I would argue against it, these vertical powers have a sight, but can never reach the plains that reach to the horizon, while they elude higher and closer to the sun of hubris.

So this company, this small cocoon, has exploded in the last three months to form a vast army of middle managers, more title than substance sure, this typical bourgeois class to whom ideas represent more value than work and to whom supervision means you don’t need to clean your hands at the end of the day, and that is a good thing, they all nodd to this. So this other corporation has grown into such a network and spread by which to reach their outersides that they need managers to manage the management, they need horses to pull the horses, does anyone know the chariot or the horseman that holds the reins? Is it true we are carrying a lean and deadly warrior? I would argue against it, but then I don’t believe in vertical organizations.

When one is oneself reduced to the concrete, like a dog that fetches his stick that gets repetitiously thrown away from it again, that fills a working day, oneself is only capable of deducing from the concrete, without abstract conclusions that define true thought. So instead of reforming our impressions in abstractions that leave room for greater associations by nature of failure, this is called intelligence, we only repeat, and this we call thinking, this constitutes for a working man consciousness, which reaches its height at the peaks of recognition. And then I am not even speaking of the absolute lifelessness of the subjects of a working man’s thoughts, lifelessness because his subjects are so remotely differentiated from his food chain, that they are unrecognizable. The only remnant of the nature of a working man are the random thoughts of picturing oneself in sexually compromising positions of grotesque perversion with his or her co-workers, an elusive elopement of the lifeless thoughts of work.

Of course, this is New York, this is not the rest of the world, where work is not viewed with such fierce ambition of so many unsettled young people, whose professional and personal insecurities are the solid foundation of their type A personalities, which constitute the neurotic normality of this town, but how normal New York is when you go to work there every day. The friendly dullness that rocks the A train, just a train, in the morning, the docile heads and limbs that dominate so unshakable in their offices now are being shaken like dead meat on their rides home. As dead as my mind, ground, gray matter, because there is no life in the subjects, except their restrained drifts astray toward a more human life that threatens their positions, the carnal concrete that we secretly consume, in order to forget the abstract greatness of a human soul, a thought inspired by the light of a divine fire, instead this raven of the office picks at our livers.