broken spoken

I don't care what words, sometimes I just want to be a man of many

In a new city (in new cities) I am new conversing every night, I don't have that much to say, I feel cliche, I feel stupid often, I am mesmerized by people and how much they know

Tomorrow I will shut up shut down and read

Bedsurfing Berlin

My sleeps here, because I’ve been next to a man (last week a stranger, this week an acquaintance) is sporadic, like I wake up and feel his hair brushing against my elbow and I shift closer to the edge of the bed because I know, it's like an essential truth, this isn’t my bed (it's the half-sleep of a watcher or squatter). As soon as he gets up and out my body sighs of relief, it actually curves into an S, Something relaxed not Sensual, my head falls deeper into the pillow, my arm wrap tighter around whatever and eight hours of tension melts away with the help of a rising sun.

(To my generous couchsurfing host, R---, to whom I owe, if not good rest, then everything else that shouldn't be taken for granted)

Love,
Winston

slow

I should want a second to be slower than a decade so to say I've tasted a century, a millennium... and then in that second to forget and forgo time entirely.

This is a wish of mine.

(flohmarkt am mauerpark, Berlin, July 2010)

how now my why Berlin

You won’t get a real answer if you ask me why I’m in Berlin. The only true, albeit shortened, response is long, in which you’d have to let me trace behavioral patterns to demonstrate that my going to Berlin is really no different than spending a day’s allowance on a jar of muscadet honey, a take-away curry wurst and an assortment of German gummy bears (notice, all these things I have never tasted until today)…

It is Berlin, and it is not just Berlin that brought me here. It without a doubt is the compulsion to up and leave that pushed and continues to push me away from comfort, routine, friends and family. Berlin is secondary to the compulsion, whose kinetic force will drive me from here, soon, too.

One thing though has changed since Paris at seventeen – I no longer expect to discover something altogether better. Newness, I’ve come to realize (what with all of the money I’ve blown on “new” foods in foreign supermarkets, for example) teases me with the promise of something tantalizing, beyond imagination, something ideal, something—and here’s the clutch—inhuman. The actual result and the old usurper of my unconscious anticipation, named confusion or just bland banality, prompts the opposite of disappointment. Yes, two negatives make a positive, and I find my senses opened, my mouth ajar with a dropped jaw a sideways smile and a chuckle.

Time to get to work, I can’t wait to get to work, when I settle into my studio next week.

NIGHT SWEATS 2

Part two, I bonding-breakfasted with L---- who slept opposite me these past three nights in Aloha Hostel’s 8-bed dorm room, and maybe within our first thirty minutes of conversation we opened up the lid on sleep, engaged with the ghost, shiver-shiver-freaked a little about our shared “sleep paralysis” afflictions. Ah! For each of us, two nights of severed consciousness and psychical intestinal ruptures!

The question superseded the conflict of answers—chemical imbalance, spiritual sensitivity—and settled on, “What could have happened in this building?” This is Berlin, built upon people over people upon people, dead and now alive. Who, what, where, when, why, and how at 60 Torstrasse, Berlin, Germany?...

NIGHT SWEATS

If you believe in ghosts, take this at face value | If you don't believe in ghosts, decipher the metaphor for me (please)

Aloha Hostel, Berlin, deserves a positive review on hostelbookers.com save for the debatably German debatably female ghost that's kept me awake for two nights straight -- I think she has long hair, and I think she died by stomach trauma because she won't stop churning mine.

Sleep paralysis is my family's affliction, we are a sensitive bunch.

This is when I wish the ol' garlic trick were true, or maybe a cross on the headboard and a silver chain 'round the neck. But only superstitions can be dispelled with more superstitions, and my night sweats tormenter is very real, and very annoying.

Welcome to Berlin, besides her I love it.

continuums

The moment after I'm here (here is Paris, is lunch in my temp apartment, is a window wracked with rain), then I'm there, and there's nothing to hold onto except maybe the ghost of an image. I think this all started ten days ago when I turned 22.

(Photo from weekend at La Baule, Brittany, France)

Good night, Boston, Good bye

My youth art projects in skyward sparks: Tiger, he burned up through and through, I believe, I mean four years of waiting does expedite release

Thanks, dad, for helping me set him free; and tonight, when I, too, ascend, the glistening of steel wings in the clouds -- that's both of us waving goodbye.

Good Morning, New York, Good Bye

6 AM in Greenpoint a walk good bye

Interrupting the flesh

I've reached a point, I think, where I've mastered painterly "tricks" (how specific they are to my five-year-old-and-counting brushes remains to be seen, when I purchase myself a new set this summer...) and with that has returned a sort of amateurish phobia: that a signature style has developed into a stylistic dependence.

I drafted a manifesto once that outlined vague "rules" in painting, such as: do not use white pigment until the final layer (--I've since X'd out this one--); when blending turns to unconscious muddy-ing, hit it strike it and drip it (the gung-ho enthusiasm can take a back seat but I'll still share a ride with it); etc.

The manifesto served its purpose, but has become historical -- because I've moved on from essential rules, and believe more in a dynamic system: if I do this, then I need to do that (for example, if I use bright colors, then I should thin them out). And in a moment when you take your circulating system and drive a dagger right into its flesh, it hopefully can adapt, first by absorbing the shock, then assimilating it into a new web of functions. The hardest part is thrusting the dagger, and the second hardest part is sticking out the recovery.

vegan seepage

A silk-thin-skinned man sporting a sugary ensemble of peachy pinks and baby blues (fanny pack, visor, socks) assumes the role of MTA poetic missionary on slow Sunday afternoons, and last week as my train car approached 1st avenue he let out a, "Ladies and Gentlemen! We are approaching 1st avenue, enjoy your vegan blueberry cheesecake because your loved ones secretly hate the stench of meat that -- well, for some of you, anyway -- seeps out of those enlarged pores USE-SPF-AND-SAVE-YOUR-SKIN-LADIES-AND-GENTLEMEN!"

And for a second there, as the train steadied itself into a slow stop, were smiles and giggles and dead eyes that came alive.

I'm an uptown boy! Wednesday 6/16 opening

Just two of us this time (me + Leah Dixon) popping up for a night in a high rise apartment on the Upper East Side. Come join us for art, absinthe I mean champagne I mean wine yeah (no, I didn't say a thing, shhh) and secure a few positive points for your very own quality of life index.

Details for those who are blind to all but text:

THROUGH AND THROUGH

Winston Chmielinski and Leah Dixon

Cocktails: June 16 6-9

220 E. 72nd Street
Suite 14A

low-budget Narnia for little wasp children

I decided to scatter my trinkets in a public place frequented by little wasp children because I know how exciting "the discovery" can be as a kid... And I like to imagine stretched-face mothers scanning the hills and triangulating trees for kidnappers, 'cause only freaks leave frogs and conch shells and pewter people and troglodytes on the ground, right?












(... all the while avoiding poison ivy 'cause that shit's bad news)

car crash coincidence

Coincidence, a search for meaning, I'll tell you what I found.

Yesterday morning at breakfast I explained to my parents why I was throwing away grade school art projects (a fiery orange paper-mâché tiger, a Harry Potter puppet): "If I rid myself of personal ephemera, then when (if) I die you won't feel compelled to contain the memory of me in things, like a shrine."

They were confused, me talking about death over scrambled eggs, though I often speak detachedly and they're starting to take it upon themselves to infuse my words post-dialogue with emotion. They paint me pretty.

Anyway, I left a couple hours later on a kid's size bike (I'm 6'2"), redoubled immediately to switch from a handbag to a backpack, then glided down Pond St. to the rotary crossing, saw an opening in the traffic, crossed, wrongly gauged my speed (bike was in a high gear), didn't look to the left, went went straight straight rolling sluggishly and BEEP and BRAKE and FLIP head over handlebars right where the silver car going about 40 MPH had just barely brushed by my front tire. Hip knee ankle hit hard on the pavement, but I sprung up grabbed my bike and jumped onto the grassy knoll in between two opposite lanes of traffic; a few cars stopped rolled down windows and asked if I was OK, my seizing ankle shook "No" but I smiled "Yes" and off the world went.

Consider the post on Thursday (Boston, wipeout whiteout), the picture from that post, the next-morning conversation, the upcoming month of life changes (I'm done with school, I'm archiving the strewn around tangled past into bullet-point lists in Helvetica partitioned to the E: drive, I'm moving to Berlin, etc.) and any shock at the unexpected will quickly be absorbed by the plush padding of expectation.

It all fits; in retrospect I could've predicted it; I'm shaken humbled razed to the ground when I think how everything would've changed had I been hit -- and I was so fucking close to being hit. Another definition of Coincidence: justification for being stupid... I should steer clear of that ... And instead see myself sitting in front of my computer, typing this, with just a faint throbbing in my hip and a kink in my ankle, as pure luck, another chance to make the most of what I have, now, and to wait for the walk sign and look both ways the next time I try to cut my journey-time by a few minutes.

Fuck. I'm alive.

Boston, wipeout whiteout

My friend Jordan asked me whether it's better to lose everything in a fire or throw it away. I said I don't know, but that what I'm doing now -- purging my cream-carpeted doll-filled room of its lingering adolescence -- feels good. I'm lucky to be able to say good-bye, actually to make a week of saying good-bye, before I fly away on another six-month transplantation.

Dusty room, dusty paintings, dusty mind. I'd like to rip out the carpeting, throw away the furniture, and paint it all white; but I'll probably just donate books dolls and clothing and then buy some coconut ice cream and vegan cookies and play Wii for the rest of my time here. I hear Super Mario Galaxy 2 is mind blowing fun.