Carrot Black in Soho

Stumbled onto Carrot Black's street art again today in SoHo right next to the Mulberry Branch of the New York Public Library. Wonder where I'll see Carrot next.

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That's Boring! - A Propaedeutic

First off, I have done fuck all. It's very Zen. To do is not to do. My inner Zen boredom master says, "Overcome the urge to be productive, Greig." It looks good on a resumé. Don't leave the house. Lie in bed and don't think. This induces boredom.

Clearly inspired by boredom

Mourning
There is a mourning though that occurs first. After resisting the urge to do stuff, to be productive, the brain clicks into mourning, a low grade melancholia — it’s like the experience of loneliness — because ideally boredom like the kind I am talking about also requires solitude. I want to connect with another person and I have this insistent urge to be with someone, or someone to be with me. Kurt Vonnegut said it this way: “When I am alone I want to be with others and when I am with others I want to be alone”. Resist! It’s not that hard. Really. Tell your friends you have something really important to do and unfortunately you can’t do that really fun thing. They’ll insist. The creative spark comes with being with others. I am with my friend and I have a creative idea and I wish I were in solitude to pursue it but I am with my friend so I put it aside. The creative nugget that surfaced is there waiting for solitude to bring it out afresh. For me it is a nasty business to be creative.

Boredom  
Boredom was anathema in my mother’s vocabulary. She would punish us with laps around the house if we said the word — “You’re bored? OK. Run two laps. I want to see you pass by that window every few minutes.” The punishment didn’t work well for me because after three quarters of a lap I was distracted, a tit mouse in the garden, a glint of light from a water puddle, or a red fire engine charging down the street to the station, or my friend Clay walking his dog on our friendly suburban street, and I would say distractedly, “Hey, Clay!” By the way "red fire engine" is for me the quintessential metaphor for childhood. I'm sure the phrase is laden with hidden unconscious meaning that I have yet to plumb. Red. Fire. Engine. Figure it out.

About the laps:
I would forget about the laps but then, maybe Mom was right, because the boredom was gone. Until it came around again. I would spend many hours in my room as a child listening to books on record players. I loved reading Hans Christian Andersen's “The Tinderbox”. Even as a little kid I knew there was something seriously transgressive about transporting a sleeping maiden to your bedroom. The color of the storybook with the words that matched the narrator’s strong masculine voice accentuated the sexual power of the tale. I think this is when I realized I like men. Something about summoning, maybe? Fairy tales are friggin' powerful vehicles for raw desire. No wonder Plato in the Republic forbade the telling of certain tales to be told in the city. Something as simple as a narrator’s voice can shift attraction, help form identity — the power of the tale, the desire to wake a sleeping princess, to bring her to your chambers, the fallout and punishment, and lastly, the reconciliation with hero and lover. All that in the idle wiling of one day. Boredom is awesome and filled with potential for unbridled creativity. Human beings have formed their identities through idleness — it's the stuff of tales.

Boredom is an emptying out.
To be creative it is necessary to carve out a creative space to create what the Classical Greek philosophers called leisure time. By boredom what is meant is leisure — when nothing that is done has immediate value. The highest form of boredom is leisure.  It’s a special time because everything else has to be accomplished first. I can’t be bored if I am worrying about a package due to arrive by FedEx or if I have a class to teach in an hour. Boredom requires true relinquishment of responsibility. To get to that leisure time — the true elixir of creativity that boredom promises — is to get past the urge to fill up time with useless crap. Like check email or check the post or check text messages. I know. It’s nearly impossible.

Bartleby the Scrivener
In literature, I most identify with Bartleby the Scrivener, Melville’s famous office clerk who says, “I prefer not to” — until the very end of the story, where he is put in the loony bin for saying, “I prefer not to”. This is why I have trouble with cover letters. 

I’ve accepted my mediocrity. My averageness.

Life Lesson: Just because it don't look like "work" don't mean it ain't work, bro.

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All Ready Made (Building #7), 2012-2013

View from the New Museum, The Bowery, New York City, 2013

Carrot Black
b. 2011 New York, NY

All ready-made (Building #7), 2012-2013
Brick, mortar, steel, concrete, sheetrock, living people, found objects

Art is meta. Looking out the window at the New Museum on Bowery the other day, the back wall of a building is in view affixed with a ginormous title card, the same style and font found in museums. I like how the title card makes me think of the wall it is affixed to as art - as if the card itself authorizes the wall as an art object, perhaps a swirling Rothko or a new experiment in Abstract Expressionism. Or maybe it's just a wall. Hmmmm. *scratching my chin*

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Floyd Bennet Field, Brooklyn, New York

Floyd Bennet Field, Brooklyn, New York

This picture was taken at Floyd Bennet Field, a former New York City airport in Brooklyn. Today it's run by the National Park Service and is essentially a collection of abandoned runways overgrown with vegetation. The Marines have an outpost here and there is a hangar on the property that has been restored into an athletic center replete with two ice skating rinks and a huge basketball court. This photo was taken in the northern section of the island near where the NYPD lands emergency helicopters.

G., 2013

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Greig Roselli

Photograph: "Plato's Cave"

"Plato's Cave"

© 2013 Greig Roselli

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Scared D Train (Repost)

Just to say: this is my neighborhood subway station at 36th Street and Fourth Avenue, the contractual confluence of the D, N, and R trains! Sometimes the D does hide in the hollow of the station entrance. This phenomenon also occurs at Delancey/Essex Street most commonly with the M train waiting to go over the Williamsburg Bridge. 

Scared D Train: Reposted from Adam Sack's Youtube Channel

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"Who AM I?" And Do We Ever Change (Also A Brief Reflection On "Is Being Together Possible?")

Looking Back At March 31, 1997

Pencils in My Pocket

I spent last Saturday reading my journal from 1997. Look at what I wrote on March 31, 1997. It’s proof that I have not changed. At all. I will be sixty and still wondering about my place in the cosmos (and hopefully with a better HMO):

How do I fit in the grand scheme of the cosmos? I am seventeen, medium height, medium weight, hazel eyes, brown hair, mild complexion, have acne, am Catholic, attend a public high school, love to read and participate in other cultural activities, learn about historical events, visit art museums and view fine films. That’s me in a nutshell (into clichés tonight). I am an independent person and don’t care for much intervention. I get the most joy out of completing tasks by myself, not because I like doing it by myself. I don’t get my joy for performing and doing things for others, when I act I please myself. It is fun to see people laugh at my jokes or comment or something. I do, but frankly I don’t do it for them. People who know me well may think I am cold-hearted, I don’t think so. I love people and love seeing people happy. I desire the best for anyone I know; I am talking about the core of my being, what gives me most enjoyment: people or myself? The answer must be myself. I’d rather ride my bike alone or walk my dog alone. I’d rather cook a meal or read a book alone. I’d rather tour a museum alone or view the stars by myself. But I do love sharing my experiences. I am not shy when it comes to depositing my knowledge. The gift of teaching resides in me. That is what God gave me. I never grow tired of friendships and good conversation. I would get lonesome being by myself too long. I would want to escape and experience something else …. I have more to offer the world than wash dishes, get braces, being obedient, etc. I am impatient, but am hanging on the vine.

  I am not sure I agree with my seventeen-year-old self that teaching is depositing knowledge but I will forgive him because he had not read yet Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I no longer have acne and I am not sure where I stand on Catholicism but the gist of what I wrote that night in March of 1997 still rings true in 2013. Is this the same for everyone? Even if you don’t have access to a journal entry you wrote 16 years ago it is still interesting to reflect on how much we change. It's interesting I wrote that entry during my Senior year of high school. So it makes sense I would be thinking about what I want out of life. Now after having finished college and two graduate degree programs, as well as some years of teaching - and don't forget my six years as a Benedictine monk - I still think of what this seventeen-year-old boy was thinking: who the hell am I?

I think I am thinking about this more than ever because I feel this persistent push to be something, to do something, but at the same time I have this other feeling inside of me that I am (and have been) doing it all along - I just hadn’t noticed. It’s like I spend so much time thinking about what I will be or will do that I have forgotten what I did, what I have seen and heard. My seventeen-year-old self is telling my thirty-three-year-old self “to please myself” and continue to take pleasure out of art, novels, friends and all that jazz.

It sounds like what I am saying is that if I am ever going to find someone else to share my life with they also have to know their joy. We come together and share what joys we know. When I first read this entry I thought, *&^%, I will be alone for the rest of my life. But I read it again and it struck me, something I did not notice the first time I read this scrap of paper from the past. It’s so human to want to please yourself and to think of the future but at the same, I sense a longing to share that something with someone else and to know their joy. Is that what they call interdependence? It's when I say “I love sharing my experiences.” That’s the art of being together. That’s what I crave and I think it is what a lot of human beings crave. I love how at the end I say I am impatient and holding on the vine. That’s very Greig Roselli.

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