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| I worked today - Sunday - again, showing up to work in the morning but cutting out a little early to go to PS1 with Bill and his inamorta. Some good, a lot of mediocre, some exceptionally asstacular bad, but that's what you get dipping feet into the limpid pool of mod'rn Art. Highlight, easily, is Tracy Nakayama's weird, embarrassing and yet calming/meditative cut paper piece, which if you're in the area I won't spoil for you but if you ain't I'd suggest you get here or get Googlin'. |
| Yes, I had to work today, but slept in, came in late and crawled through 5 hours of labor to leave early in the bargain. AK and I went to see the new Kim Ki-Duk movie, "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring" and it was completely great, everything I wanted out of it (despite some clumsy symbolism and audience distrust at the end). The theater was crazy packed (even on a rainy holiday) and we had to struggle for seats, ending up in the last row aisle with a creaky armrest. |
| Week's more than half over, tomm'w a freaky and far-too-needed Friday, this pilgrim's progress plonking merrily along. Too much to do, as always, but not overwhelmed or stressed, for some reason - the light's close enough at the end of this tunnel that I don't even care that the canary's keeled over. Not a bad way to be, I gotta say. |
| Another assload of stress this morning - one of the things I hate dealing with the most is people who won't take personal responsibility but who love to place blame. I'm not going to name any names here but when you follow up yelling at somebody for allegedly not working eight-hour days by coming in after noon, you can't blame morale for being a little low. Ah well - can't let it bother me. I've got enough good goin' on to wipe out any bad news that comes my way. |
| Feeling pretty good - recalibrated some gears and wires in my clockwork brain over the late weekend and I think I'm put a little straighter on a couple fronts. The intense stress of the job has really knocked out my balance in some important areas and led me away from doing what I should be doing. Not a big one though - just gotta keep the focus where it needs to be. A little better time management, a little more productive downtime, and things should be back to equilibrius by June. |
| Another day, another week, but hopefully this is going to be the last total hellweek for awhile, as on Friday or so we've gotta wrap this game up in a bow and ship it off to the publisher. After that, I think we have another week or so to polish and fix anything they want sparkling a little more, but my involvement will be pretty much finished., aside from building and maintaining the website and doing the necessary PR work post-releasre. Making video games is hard! As a kid I thought it'd be a lot of sitting around drawing monsters on graph paper but apparently those days are long gone. |
| Woke up to AK's face waking up at me - the best alarm clock a boy could ask for - and then scraped myself out of bed to head down tot he shelter for a little dogwalking. All familiar dogs today - talked to one of the shelter workers about Sheba, truly one of my favorite dogs of all time - apparently somebody adopted her but had to return her 'cause she's too food-aggressive - a common problem with abandoned dogs. Walked Archer and Buddy, ran into some friends on the street, malingered and meandered, overall a fine morning indeed. |
| Very pleasing three-member band practice today, me, Jon and leela working out the kinks (and working out more ways to get our songs to sound like the Kinks) for a few hours in a lovingly air-conditioned room on the eighteenth floor. Things are coming together - congealing - and I feel like I'm getting better on bas ever week, fingers re-nimbling at the same time I'm breaking old habits. If we keep this up, who knows - you might even hear us someday! |
| AK and I, joined by the visiting Townleybomb, headed out to Wmsbrg for a Fake Mustache Dance Party, bedecked in the finest fake mustaches fifteen minutes of cutting and a trip to the craft store could create. It was a good time - crazy crazy dancing on a tiny little floor, in a room with 50 other people all in a variety of fake 'staches. A little disconcerting, that. |
| Friday - rode the week out, surprisingly, but now I am completely wiped-outxhausted. One mor eof this and then I can get back on the regular-life trolley of drawing and playing music and writing these little entries somewhere around the day they actually happened, instead of farcically piecing together the recent past Memento-style from emails and scrawled notebook scraps. |
| The 801, the more than fine Eno cover band feat. Leela (singer for my band) and Douglas (free-roaming genius and former bassist for my band) , played the Knitting Factory last night as part of a benefit for a rock & roll summer camp for girls (best idea ever?) and it was a show for the ages. Originally in early discussions of this project I was going to play some guitar but it's best that I didn't - too much dilution is going to be my lifelong enemy. Rather to leave the things that I don't do well to people who do and improve on my own time, not theirs. Epiphanies coming like single drops of rain lately. Brian Eno wrote great songs. |
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| I had an intensely vivid waking dream this morning - I was taking care of a dog somewhere int he central Washington mountains, late summer - everything golden and crisp. The dog ran off and I chased after her, finding myself completely lost. There was a huge old house on the horizon so I ran towards it, finding the dog there. A huge family lived there and they took me in. All of the kids started playing music on a huge collection of instruments. I sat down at a piano after listening for awhile (there were like 4 pianos all next to each other) and played a few notes. The rest of them stopped. One of the youngest kids was laughing at me. He said he reminded me of their oldest brother, who didn't do or say much, but everything he did was perfect. I asked what happened to him and the kid told me he got his genitals crushed by a horse's hoof. I collapsed to the floor in kneeling fetal position from sympathetic pain. The kid laughed a little more and ran off. Looking out the window, I saw a huge panorama of kids and animals playing - like a dozen dogs, but then apes and large cats (tigers and pumas), and in the distance, elephants - it was some kind of circus family or something. I heard somebody scream that the shark was eating a dog, and I was afraid that it was the dog I was supposed to be watching. I quickly put on this pair of pants that were made out of woven strips of cloth, and then I woke up. |
| Sunstroked, sunburned - out in the sun for most all the day as part of the Human-Scale Chess Game, which was one of those good-ideas-at-the-time that didn't turn out so perfectly in the end. I was black King's rook but the chessmeister didn't know how to use me so I spent most the game immobile while symbolic war raged 'round me. My hangover mingled with exposure to Helios to blast myself insensate once more - retired home, stayed in bed for some fourteen hours. |
| AK and I headed out to a party a friendofafriend was throwing at the Frying Pan, one of New York's doofier club venues - a sunken ship raised from Davy Jones's and then - uh, sorta refurb'd, sorta not - still a lot of rusty metal and awkward catwalks. The party - sucked - but there was at least an open bar, which would bite me in the ass later. We were partially trapped - as we arrived a thunderstorm broke over the city, a torrential downpour making leaving the craft a little sketchy. So, open bar, trying to make the best of it. |
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all content (c) 2003 k. thor jensen