haiku 28 January 19

But for a few waves

That carried me onto shore,

The great seas were calm

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 11 Jun 2018

An uncarved wood-block
Faultless, calm, and unchanging
Formless but quite real

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 1 September 2017

He stepped on some gum
Then, upset, trod in some shit
Before calming down

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

a seaside promenade

The dream started inside a building, which I escaped through a side door that opened onto a street paved with cobblestones. The outside was lit by a bright, white light. With me (on the right-hand side) was as always my psychopomp, as well as a female (on the left-hand side) whose face and features have faded from memory.

Together, we climbed through the open rear door into a automobile that looked like a standard, black Londonite taxicab. It was hitched via leather strapping to four-legged beasts that at first glance appeared to be cats. The driver’s perch had been mounted onto the roof, meaning that I had to climb up through the car’s open sunroof to man the reins.

We took off, rounding corners at speed, and were soon riding astride a seaside promenade made using cut blue granite and featuring an iron railing. People in Victorian-era dress strolled along the sidewalk to our right. Below and beyond them stretched the sea - deep blue and vastly calm, nary a wave or ripple. The vehicle stopped and I leaped off to see if there was a beach at the base of the cut-stone promenade. Using a nearby flight of stairs, I climbed down to its blond sands (with someone or something else in tow), and had just dipped a toe in (to check the waters) when I awoke.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

on the SDUBS codex

Street artists have a method, yet they have no known method; they follow a code, yet they follow no known code. There is a rule and a measure to the business of graffiti, a codex of unwritten, non-binding, and unspoken rules that are themselves constantly in flux, and always changing. As it would be foolish to attempt to capture these rules or to try to fix them in ink and in time, and as few who dare write about them live to tell the tale (let alone receive any sort of respect from their peers), let us examine a few of the more apparent entries in the SDUBS codex, or the Self Directed Urban Beautification Specialist's rulebook.

To celebrate the glories of socialism, the SDUBS applies her artwork primarily to public property such as street signs, USPS mail boxes, pavement, asphalt, utility poles, subway and light-rail cars, city buses, and to any otherwise unadorned surface located in or on local, state, or federal government buildings. (Graffiti will find its way onto privately-owned property, but if it does, it more than likely belongs on whatever boring and otherwise unadorned surface the vandal decided to deface.) Since she cannot hope to please all persons who might cast eyes upon her labors, the SDUBS works to satisfy her own artistic sensitivities and not those of anyone else. As her work is constantly exposed to external and internal criticism, she allows her natural abilities to flourish ceaselessly, and strives to make her artwork more vibrant, more colorful, less oppressive, more daring, less confusing, and more dastardly than all the rest; it is her goal to criticize those things as she sees wrong with the society in which she lives. Driven by a righteous purity that even she cannot quite explain, she is always on the move seeking out virgin surfaces upon which to display her talents. A creature of deep serenity and pervasive inner calm, she goes about the business of graffiti accompanied only by her own steadfast conviction, never hesitating in the application of her work, never fearful of the potential consequences of her actions, never glancing about to see who might be looking at her; she is a seasoned operator who cares about little but the task at hand. She does not linger near the applied work, nor does she deviate from her course any longer than it might take to stick up her dearly departed piece. And, finally, she experiments with any and every conceivable style of artwork creation and application until she has found the mixture that suits her best: Hereby, she avoids frustration, plays to her greatest strengths, and stagnates neither in style nor in daring.

The author hopes that this brief but poorly-worded and insufficiently-researched list might help the uninitiated to gain a better understanding of street art, of the street artist, and of the goals and aspirations of these strange and wonderful persons. To the night-crawling, alley-lurking, pride-swallowing, risk-taking SDUBS of the world: May your pens not leak, your nozzles never clog, and your hearts stay free of pride and malice. Mahalo, friends, mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on disc golf & Taoism

  The game of disc golf (in which players, in the fewest number of tosses, throw discus-like plastic discs from a designated point to a specially-designed metal catch basket) is in certain aspects akin to the elusive tenets of Taoism. Similar to the enduringly simple (but all-encompassing) message that Lao Tzu bound up in the Tao Teh Ching, the game of disc golf is at root an easy task, one that increases in difficulty, however, in tandem with the player's internal stress levels.

  The more pressure the player puts on herself to make, say, a difficult shot into the wind around a copse of trees, the harder that shot, and her subsequent shots, will be. She will be trying to force her body to move so that the disc goes in a very specific direction, but, from her rigid posture and from her attempted dominance over her body, her shot will fly foul. As in Taoism, so in disc golf we must always remember that any attempt to subjugate the Universe to one's own will is bound to backfire, and the most coveted things (such as making that nasty headwind bank-shot) are the hardest to get. (Therefore, the Tao teaches us not to covet anything, as coveting leads invariably to ruin.) The more the player pushes to make the shot the way she thinks the shot should be made, the less she is tapping into her body's inherent ability to not only make the shot, but to do it with finesse and without pride.

  The effective disc golfer is he who can put his ego aside. The great disc golfer she who can revert to a pure animal state by incorporating her ego into herself (thus neutralizing it), a pure animal state that allows her to throw her disc far and straight, her body moving in its own curious rhythms, her mind freed from sadness and joy, her entire being focused solely on the fraction of time at which the disc leaves her calloused fingers. In my humble opinion, this is the magical, secret point that forms the center of the teachings of Taoism: rather than telling you to worship in such way to that god at this time of year, the Tao Teh Ching focuses on reducing you to your most basic and fundamental forms, forms that compel you to act with complete impartiality, intent only on breaking time from This Moment to The Next. Taoism helps you to clear your mind of all the clutter and pollution of modern society; with the Tao, you can more readily realize your deep, latent potential: you can learn to express it. The Tao focuses on deeds, not words, on completing tasks with skill and aplomb but without taking pride in them, or letting them influence your emotional state.

  So is it, at times, with the sport of disc golf. The less thought-interference there is during the throwing phase, the more fluid your body motion. The less the ego is involved, the greater the chance that you will make that daring sidewinder shot around that group of bushes. So keep on diminishing and diminishing until there is nothing left – the Tao is like a bellows that is never made empty, even though it seems hollowed out. The more you draw from it, the harder it works; the less emphasis you put on your own personal achievement, the more you operate for the good of the world, an island of calm in a sea of chaos. One of the trickiest parts, however, is learning not to covet the Tao. To covet anything is to destroy it, so toss your discs with quiet competence, without ever yearning for success, your only desire a state of primal simplicity.

  Your body knows what to do. Now all you have to do is get your mind out of the way.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp