Bouillon Chartier

just a quick note on one of the restaurants worth noting from the culinary and drunken trip to france. i had a lunch with very good company, to whom i am indebted, in the place seen in the picture on the side and in bold above. they take your order on the fly, writing your entire order in illegible scratch on the paper tablecloth replaced on each table, and sum everything on the same tablecloth after you have finished your meal just before finding a new home for the dead and thinly sliced tree. the prices, especially for france, are quite inexpensive and the food is quite good; though that is not to say that there were not others that were better.

Bouillon Chartier

March 28th 2007
and 
March 18th 2010

sandcastles

(a song that i wrote about myself - though I didn't realize that it was autobiographical at the time - during the trip to spain in 2002-2003, in cooperation with josh colpitts. funny how things seem to apply to various facets of one's life)

she's got nothing on her feet but her pretty pink shoes

a whole in all her pockets, and nothing left to lose.

she´s jumped a train to nowhere and can't wait to see

that no one's there waiting, and there never will be.

she climbs sandcastles, nearing the sky

someone so damn low, should never climb so high

she climbs sandcastles, nearing the sky

someone so damn low, should never climb so high

she smiles to the sun, then cries herself to sleep.

she´s got a worm inside her sole, and it's digging too deep.

well her heart's still pumping blood, like the day she was born,

but the skin she wears outside, is jagged and torn.

she climbs sandcastles, nearing the sky

someone so damn low, should never climb so high

she climbs sandcastles, nearing the sky

someone so damn low, should never climb so high

a paper airplane to the coast, she road to find,

the castle in the sand, that she used to climb.

a paper airplane to the coast, she road to find,

the castle in the sand, that she used to climb.

she climbs sandcastles, nearing the sky

someone so damn low, should never climb so high

she climbs sandcastles, nearing the sky

someone so damn low, should never climb so high

almost forgotten

I cannot remember your squint after a long fit of laughter

nor the touch of your hand as we sit, awed by the fire.

The color in your eyes has sunk deep into an old photo,

and the corners of the photo, reminders of your forgotten your smile.

Reminders of the days, when I awake with your warmth.

Gone are the days, when we occupied my spaces,

warmth now disappeared from each corner and each nook.

There is, but one place where you remain sharp and alive;

one place where your hands still pull at my heart.

But gone are the days, when I awake to your warmth.

As I return for a dream between morning and snooze,

15 minutes to recover a loss that should never have been.

Behind a fountain your figures disappear into shadows

and the figures in silhouette grow closer to one .

You return to speak, awaited words also seem to arrive,

slowly and with clarity the unknown seemingly released.

Then just when you are ready to tell me your truths…

15 minutes are gone and your voice turns to what wakes me.

Also gone are those days, when I awake to your warmth.

damn memories.
goddamn memories.
they are so lovely;
they are the company in absence.
they are so warm;
they are the fires that keeps us warm in the cold.
they are so hot;
they are the fires that burn us.
damn memories.
goddamn memories.
i love them

look of sincerity

funeral lesson

i remember having gone to a funeral with my mother when i was rather young, well before my tenth birthday. we walked up to the casket and my mother leaned slightly to see what it was that remained of her memory of someone. i could not remember ever having met the man who previously occupied the body that was laid just slightly below eye level, palid and foreign. the experience, as innocent and natural as it was, turned to some kind of trauma in the moments between the funeral parlor and the boundary of my bedroom. as i tried to sleep that night floating on the surface of the waterbed, my little evening sea, the face of the stranger, with his eyes closed and skin the color of ghost, spun slowly in my waking and sleeping vision, each meeting the back of my eye-lids. to escape, i tried wedging myself between the hardside of the bed and the matress, completely under the protective shield of sheets, but in the end, the only thing that would remove the image from my head was the truth of soothing words, "nothing has happened, you will be fine honey."

.

i have had many sleepless nights since then, and many of those many have been over the past three weeks. i have tried to hide under the covers. i have searched for the words to be softly spoken close to my ears, to ease my fears and bring me to a good night's sleep. hiding beneath the covers hasn't helped; to face things so much more frightening than the face of the dead man, the covers and sheets must be ripped from the bed.

.

from an empty body to an empty seat.

just learned today, that not only is it really counter to any leaning you may do on your terrace or any surrounding area of your home, but that also, at least in madrid it, is illegal to feet the pigeons. here is me doing my part recording the destructive practice of pigeon feeding...

thankfully i wasn´t forced to break the law for this shot...

the first step in the experience that has brought many great - and difficult - moments, we had to make a trip to l.a. to visit the spanish consulate. neither one of us was completely prepared to deal with the varying regulation of the consulates and we returned to the house of a friend with empty hands and very heavy minds, burdoned by the thought of not getting the paperwork completed in time. during our stay there, papa lehr brought us out for a drink on the pier in san clamente. the following is a series of surf photos taken while we watched the sun set over the side of the pier towards san juan capestrano.














































at least he was able to swim.

not so many minutes to hours ago, my parents returned to their hotel after a pizza dinner, at what used to be chez jimi, and i shortly there after headed to the nouveau chez jimi for a few drinks and then a night slowly towards the northeast before the final southwest. i had never heard of liniers, the argentine cartoonist. just above the keyrack, on the wall of what was the home of the uraguayan musician, jorge drexler, is a drawing by this artist helping to protect the keys from any king of danger. here is one of the pics of the ghosts that guard the keys.

my father and in the reina sofía,

a place where guérnica seems to

bring tears for some, but not always

for the same reasons.

self-portrait.

22 feb 2010

I don't want to clean

.

I have cleaned, again and again,

each part of my external eye

with the sweet saline of a cry

only to see it will need to be cleaned

again.

I have also cleaned, with the same

frequency, the part seen through my eye.

Wet, drenched, and sopping; with its trouble

it slugs, burdened, through my new, internal sea.

Tell me that my eyes are not

the only to see what looms ahead,

nor what weighs, like a plow, behind.

Were these tears not caused by the future,

forged in the fires of past mistakes?

My heart begs that neither is too true,

that neither is our present.

It would have made much more sense to get less sleep during the day today so that I wouldn't be up at this point in the night writing this, the reflection on the past few hours of sleeplessness and thought. S just came back from the trip she took to London with the students and the teachers from the Real Colegio Alfonso el XII, where she works as a language auxiliary teaching both students and teachers the wonders of the modern English language. The truth is that we don't get to see nearly as much of each other as we used to, being that we lived in the same apartment in Boulder for over a year. I cannot say that it has really been much for how we are relating to eachother lately. I am losing touch with the girl that I love, slowly, with each day that I spend in a tiny bed in Madrid and that she spends in a tiny bed in San Lorenzo de El Escorial.



This was the answer I had, close the book that I had started so long ago. I was hooked on the memory of the time that past between Agust of 2002 and May of 2003, and it seemed as if everything had pointed to my finally being able to walk through the door, with S, closing it behind me and leaving all the insecurities of that period behind. Now, I am forced to ask myself whether I have made a mistake and let someone that means so much to me get too far away. Her words are very reassuring, they give me hope: her actions are cause for concern, they seemed to have cooled with the Spanish air. 5 months here and five months remain. They have the possibility of being five months of near bliss, spending time with my love, but they too, have the possibility of being a natural pergatory. I do not believe, or at least do not want to believe that the latter is a true possibility.



One phrase, to (was to) be uttered in a restaurant in Rome, (was to be) really, the asnwer.

The building and nearly the perspective of which I wrote yesteday. Shannon's family came to visit her here in Madrid so we spent a good portion of the time walking through the center of Madrid as well as with other side trips.

This picture was taken durin the trip that we took to Granada, during the sunrise one of the first mornings we spent there.

The memory is a funny thing, what it wants to remember and what it wants to forget. Pictures do there best to force the memory into an accurate rememberance. They also help place those memories in a more organized fashion in the imagined brain, the frame, structure and rooms where related memories are held and the halls between them.

(please note the images are property of the author)

Todo fluye, nihil sepiternum est: It is so easy to let my life simply flow by, each minute merging into the next without the least bit of importance. The paths that I have taken appear to overlap, to move in the same direction over the same coordinates at a different point in life, so why is it that the second time seems to imply a level of bitterness that, I can only speculate, is born from the lack of newness? Trying never to lose the natural enjoyment for the moment in which I find myself, I have managed to lose the persepective that the times do in fact change the path even if it passes over the same exact coordinates. Borges argued the same in his review of the second writing the Don Quijote, that those same coordaintaes, the same footprints over the same path, give even more meaning to the steps taken and the experience since there is a more profound understanding of each moment and its implications.

In part those implications are the birth of a rougher conscienciousness that gives way to a bitter reflection. The same historical awareness, and history itself, that has inspired such great literary works that react against the institutions of their times and atrocities that often come in tow, continues to leave the wake of bitterness in the lenses of being. In that same breath, when I write the following words, without that same awareness as to the history of the locations through which I pass, some of the beauty is lost. The bitterness seems to be as much a disgust of the loss of ignorance and the decrepitation of the idealized social memory that was taught outside its borders and that made the buildings glisten in their crumbling state, as it is simple disappointment.

How I would love to return to the project that I organized with the help of so many friends, artists and musicians. I supplied the artists and musicians with a brief history of the Alhambra, primarily focusing on the cultures that played a part in its construction and partial destruction over the years, as well as the myth of the origin of the name: the crymson glow. The same artists and musicians were given a brief history of Flamenco music, in a sense synomomous with Andalusian music. The inspiration of the project were the few brief moments I spent at the age of 16 looking up the hill towards the artificially amplified crimson glow, with the music of a gypsy's voice and his guitar filled my ears and completed the sensory overload provided by the hot summer night, the slight, warm breeze and the cold vinilla ice cream. To complete the packet given to the artists was a disk of a few pieces of flamenco music and a few pictures that offered the same perspetive that I had as an aging child. The concept for the artists was to somehow encompass the movement as the passion that fills the historied music into the an image of the façade of the great fortress.

How the overlapping paths both haunt and liberate me, seeming always to find another trailhead to lead me back to them. While in Granada not all that long ago, while a guide for the Alhambra spoke about the last battle and the taking of the last, great Islamic city in Spain, he told the story of the King of Granada and his mother. While they climbed through the mountains the king turned his head and began to cry, leaving the city and the Alhambra behind, and his mother chided him, saying, "You cry like a women at the loss of a paradise you were not man enough to defend."

To change the proposal of the project, to offer the same images but instead of the movement and the emotion of the music, to have the artists each paint two images inspired in the emotions of both the defeated Arabic King, leaving behind his paradise, and the emotions of the victorious Catholic Kings, viewing their new trophy. The depth of the emotion and the significance of the history would lend room for the interpretation and commentary needed for the voice of an artist to truly take form on whatever canvas and medium.

Can I also return to other memories and other paths and, without the destruction of those beauty of the memories, forget the truths that I once used to form them? It is yet another fear that forms a sense of bitterness. To risk losing the beauties formed in life at the cost of continued, seemingly uncontroled growth. I am not sure where I will be tomorrow, but where I was yesterday continues that influence that decision, and that history is built nearly every minute. If I break the chain at such an early point, that is to say at the base of the reality I have forged, the changes could be chaotic and unnerving, and could simply end with my sanity.

Humorous how my last blog was ages ago relating a story about ousting Starbucks from the forbidden city and now the Olympic preparations seem to have taken place without any though as to their cultural devestation . . .

The Forbidden City in China re-earns its name, forbidding Starbucks to keep its store open in the Imperial Palace. The store was originally opened seven years ago, but behind the protests that it tainted the image of the imperial palace and the culture and tradition behind it. With about a half a million online signatures from a petition posted on a television presenters blog, the store finally closed its doors. The palace museum is going to run all of the stores and brands under the imperial palace museum name.

To maintain the integrity of ancient tradition, the people of China hit the web, digitally signing the ousting petition.

Today I opened the paper and on the front page of the Denver Post was an article titled Cock-a-doodle clue. The article was about a "farmer" who was receiving large amounts of roosters in the mail. The post office agent, familiar with the fact that there is only need for one rooster on any chicken farm alerted the authorities. To shorten, the "farmer" was arrested, his home searched and in it the police found fight related materials. He was running an illegal, underground cock fighting ring. The cocks were each physically manipulated for fighting, preparing them to fight in the ring, occasionally to death, other times they would be bloodied and dizzy from the loss of blood and blows.

So of course instead of allowing the cocks to fight in the ring, or removing the metal spikes and razors that had been fit to their spurs, they killed all of them. The man was arrested for animal cruelty, but had not, himself, killed a rooster. Instead, the Colorado department of agriculture painlessly killed all of the fighting cocks . . . That'll fix it. Good thing they caught the guy before the new cocks had a chance to kill each other.

here is a link to the article itself, titled differently online.

Cock-a-doodle clue found in mail

It has been some time since I have posted, or pissed philosophical about life's encounters. It is time to return to the site and let go of some interesting stories. Quite a bit has happened over the past few months. I had, what some of my friends call, a quarter life crisis. To manage through the difficult time, I did what so many mid-life crisis sufferers have done in the past: I bought a Harley. That wasn't quite enough though, I am not sure why, but it wasn't. So I got a tattoo. Oh, and then I started hanging out with the long term sub that had just graduated from Colorado State University.

All three are still constants in my life. I won't be washing the tattoo from my inner-left shin anytime soon. I won't be paying off the rather large loan for the Harley anytime soon. And well, the longterm sub, I think she'll be around for at least a little while.

What was it that caused me to nearly thrash out and reach for such change all at once. . .
A tunneled routine that had no visible light at the end.

I sat down a few weeks ago with a friend from Romania, Ionella. She told me a story of when she was a child and her brother had to go to a handball training camp pretty far from the house, "We didn't have a car, so we had to walk over three hours to get there, I went with him. We knew that if we followed the railroad tracks, we would get to the training camp."

"He was thirteen and I was much younger. The first trying moment of the walk was having to cross a railroad bridge hundreds of feet above a river in the mountains. There were planks missing and a train could have come at any time, at which point there would have been nowhere to go. It was very frightening, but my brother and I made it across. Besides the constant awareness of the wilderness and the animals that hid within it, the second trying moment was the tunnel. We followed the tracks because we were unsure of any other path to get to the hotel where the training camp was held. It wasn't unusual to walk such long distances, even with the whole family. We had done it before with our parents, but they were used to the trails and the wilderness and knew their way. We had to follow the tracks. We started into the tunnel for the train and the light from the opposite end seemed the size of a nickel, and with no lights the entire distance to light our way. At any moment the train could have come, and with nowhere to hide, no where to get out of the way, we would have been hit and crushed by any coming train. After what seemed like ages, we finally made it back to light, resurfacing to the sun and the wild around. Not three minutes after we exited the tunnel, a train followed our steps and came out from the dark. We were lucky that we made it through."

I was lucky that I made it through. What I grasped for, or what I needed was the company to help me make it through. The tunnel is still near, and the tracks may be cyclical, but there are added rails each time you pass through the tunnel with success.

Well, I have been up to quite a lot which adds up to very little. This is in part why there have been no updates since September. My desk no longer looks like I don't use it, well, actually it is so covered that it looks like I cannot use it. I wanted to go in today, but it was so cold during the run, that the will was sapped out of me little by little on each hill repeat. I had one of the guys in the group take a photo with my phone which some day may end up on this blog, but once it makes it through the chain of text messeging to someone who can email it to me.

I had an interesting thing happen to me the other day at school. I remember a rumor [circulating through my grade school or high school] about a student that laced a teacher's soda with acid, which sent the teacher tripping to wonderland and the student tripping to the administration office. My story fortunately has little to do with Terence in Wonderland, but it does have a similarity. I had just arrived to the doors leaving the commons area for lunch duty and as per my daily ritual set my bag and tea down near my post and headed around the corner for a chair so I wouldn't have to spend another 55 minutes on my feet in one spot. The photo class that I usually enter to get a chair was giving presentations, so I returned back around the corner to see a student who I didn't know bent over with his hand near my bag and mug. I made my presence known and ask why his hand was so near my possessions.

"Have you done anything to my bag or tea?"

"No... I didn't do anything." he said nervously.

"Are you sure?" I press a bit.

"Yeah, I didn't do anything," and he heads off with his friend.

I was more than a little curious, but accepted his answer in order to return to my quest for a chair. I hadn't had the opportunity to find a chair or sip on my earl grey when a familiar face appeared through the doors that I keep like a cattle herder at the gate.

He had concern in his eyes and said with a weak voice, "I just came back to tell you that, um, I did put something in your coffee. It was just soda, but I did put something in it."

"It's not coffee, and good thing I haven't had time to drink it yet. But thank you for being honest and coming back to tell me. I am not going to write you up because you came back to tell me, but I am not going to drink the tea now." I handed him the mug and asked him to clean it out and bring it back to me.

He did, and again apologized.

I didn't know his face before, but I now see him everyday as I walk through the halls.

I'll keep my tea closer to my side once I buy another mug, I broke it two days later in the middle of class putting my hands behind my back...