BUBBLE POP OSLO

Artforum- December issue out.

2009-12-13T02:48:00.001-08:00

Reflection

2009-12-12T04:55:00.000-08:00

It was through his reflection on the subway that she knew that promises would soon be broken, words unspoken and hands left cold.

E.Y.

Fairy by Guilherme Jacinto

2009-12-09T10:02:00.001-08:00

Hands united.

2009-11-26T10:55:00.000-08:00

There were lonely moments like this one afternoon that made her remember the certain details in a relationship. Not the misunderstandings relating to hours of frustration or lack of communication but the moments that made a relationship worth remembering. True, she felt narrowminded for missing the substantional sides to it, but she loved it when their hands would automatically unite when they walked in the street where she would connect with her lover and together they would face the world.
This afternoon her hands were empty. She looked at her bare hands and wondered how he felt when he held her hand. So she lifted her right hand to hold her left hand.

They were so small and cold.

E.Y

Patience

2009-03-25T05:48:00.000-07:00

Patience is a virtue that I will never posess. I cannot lie about it and I cannot pretend that it's ok for me. All the hours that I wait for something to happen or done, is a waste to me. It's like I'm watching my life go by and my hands are tied. I look beyond the glory of enjoying the moment and focus on what's ahead of me.

So there I was, marketing myself to a person that has never met me before and faced with the question "Are you a patient person?" Damn it I think, everything was going so well until this moment. I simply cannot be honest about this. You know what the right answer is, but can you fake it?

I start biting my lips and with a hesitation answer "yes".

E.Y.

Esra Røise

2009-11-22T04:15:00.001-08:00

I find it extremely hard to draw hair. Esra Røise seems to manage this perfectly.

Rotten- A short story.

2009-11-20T16:17:00.000-08:00

This old man on the 3rd floor, was just like any other sulky old man though he himself would disagree.
He would make fresh coffee in the mornings and wait until it got cold while he solved the newspaper's crossword puzzle.
"Decomposed!" he read out loud. He had stopped smoking years ago but his fingers still had yellow nicotine stains.
After tapping his fingers on the table he grabbed his old Parker pen and started to write "R-o-t-t-e-n" horizontally. It sure explains my situation. Why can't we use it for people anyway? Isn't that what we're doing; rotting? Why use "aging" or "getting old". We look like a rotten apple and sure feel like one too!

He was thinking about the ducks in the park and wondering if Hilda would be there with her granddaughter. She was a nice piece. She was a widow of an ex German officer and had an elegancy and polite manner that would make a man want to straighten his hat and collar each time he saw her.

It was a gloomy day. If it hadn't been for the rheumatic twinges that grappled his knees, he could have been talking to her and make her laugh with his campus stories. He had many stories but somehow always ended up repeating the same ones, adding new details each time. Hilda would never interrupt him and would always nod with a smile. Today, he was stuck in the apartment.

Just as he was sipping from his ice cold coffee, he got startled by the phone ringing. He frowned as he was quite sure about the ringer since he had been regularly interrupted for the last couple of days. Despite his scepticism,he got up and reached for the phone. "Yeah?" He said and paused. There was a lot of muttering and undefinable noise. Eventually, somebody managed to get their nerves together and said, "Hello,do you have a small dick?" [laughter in the background followed by a click]
Those damn kids he thought. Had I been a little younger I would have showed them! Messing with me like that.

He hung up the phone and walked towards the window mumbling something like, "Hilda...the ducks...damn knees."

E.Y

The land of the forgotten.

2009-11-14T13:55:00.000-08:00

Nothing could make him love that piece of land. The land of the forgotten.There were too many bad memories and the result of not being understood. So he fled, far away, in the hope of a new and better life. Being drunk with happiness, along with every detail of his his past, he managed to sweep his beloved ones under the same carpet. Pounding hearts were turned into stone and honesty was replaced by silence.
For some reason, this always brings me back to the phrase, "The forgotten ones never forget the ones who forget".

E.Y

Addiction

2009-11-12T02:52:00.001-08:00

Ariel Orozco

2009-11-10T02:56:00.000-08:00

Sad endings.

2009-11-07T14:02:00.000-08:00

I do not like sad endings. Cheesy as it may sound. I like it when the good guys win and when everyone lives happily ever after.

In movies, sad or vague endings make you sit with a discomfort, with an emphasis on the conclusion. The conclusion has the impact and the viewer is left to his own imagination. Though not always aware, you may draw parallels between your own life as to what you want to accomplish and not accomplish. A football fan having a bad week can seek comfort in his team winning the cup game. However, if his team looses, his week will remain bad.
When certain things are not so good in our lives,we look for comfort in the outer world and when the outer world does not satisfy us, we start "zapping" to another channel.

According to epinion.com the ultimate TOP 10 movies with a sad ending is as follows:

10)The Pledge
9) Black Christmas
8) Midnight Cowboy
7) A Clockwork Orange
6) Chinatown
5) American History X
4) Braveheart
3) Vertigo
2) Twelve Monkeys
1) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One year!

2009-11-07T05:56:00.000-08:00

It's been exactly one year since I started writing this blog. I've had exactly 105 entries, good or bad but have at least found a way of expressing my complex thoughts and feelings about things.

In Norway...

2009-11-05T04:18:00.000-08:00

I love going to the cabins up in the mountains. A weekend without TV and internet. Sitting in front of an open fire and sipping red wine with good company. Picture taken at Hafjell, October 2009

Don't shoot the messenger

2009-11-05T04:26:00.001-08:00

A dollar bill I got hold of while in New York.

Untitled.

2009-11-04T14:08:00.000-08:00

That year, it was one dissappointment after the other and our patience was constantly put through the test. The weak ones fell quicker apart while the strong ones held on tight like a fly in a storm. The good news couldn't make up for the bad ones. The belief in the holyness of tomorrow were ruined by cluttered dreams and sad weddings. There was no difference in day and night and the worst part was when everyone would say, "It's all going to be allright".

E.Y

Conceptual art

2009-10-27T08:31:00.000-07:00

It's like an epidemic; fashion, trends, art. Many of us follow what we claim to be 'the normal thing to do'. But just like I refuse to wear harem pants and buy an Iphone because it's fashion, I find it hard to accept the elements of "conceptual art" as art.
I am not the person to judge what is claimed to be art or how art should be evaluated, but art to me represents beauty and the admiration for the given effort and time, as well as the artists' sharing of deep thought or a story that lies beneath.

In conceptual art, the idea and concept is the main focus. The worshippers of conceptual art are impressed by the simplicity and creativity that requires no Picasso skills. In that sense, we can all be artists. But does all art deserve to hang on our walls? Shouldn't we be a little critical?

In a section for modern art, stains of coffee cups are being framed and admired as art whilst I stumble upon blocks of concrete, amazed to find a lable beside it with a name on. There seems to be a form of self-deception and pretensiousness where many stand in front of a conceptual art piece and admire it because it is the expected. We stand in front of a black and white TV screen for hours, looking at a man move his foot from side to side. But hey, if this museum is showing it, it must be something, right?
It's a situation where it's not just the emperor that has no clothes, but everyone.

While examining 4 calender sheets, glued together and framed, 2 floors above a museum attendant is pointing at a Monet painting and explaining why he used 7 years to complete a painting, layer by layer.

E.Y

Fiction of friction.

2009-10-26T09:04:00.000-07:00

I was rushing towards the building where I was going to meet the folks in my department for the first time when I noticed a pair of eyes looking at me and walking towards the same direction. She had half-long,dark-blonde hair and was wearing a leather jacket and a green scarf around her neck.The typical "Grunerløkka" fashion of the day. It was a cold and sudden look that knowing my bad luck, made me wonder if this girl and I would end up in the same meeting. Indeed we did.

Pretending that we hadn't exchanged cold (war)winds earlier, we greeted and sat down for our first meeting. Everyone started to presented themselves one by one.When it was her turn, she spoke in a quiet but fast manner with a lot of hand gestures that she was fully aware of. It seemed like she wanted to be comprehended a little intellectual and neurotic. She had a lot of ideas and would raise her voice slightly when someone else would try to cut through the conversation. Trying to avoid the bad karma from earlier, I was being nice and asking her questions. You know, trying to conversate. She never laughed and almost never smiled and whenever she talked to me, she would look over my head and avoid eye contact. I was terrified to be left alone with her.

We sat there for an hour when she stood up and said she had to go. I put on a fake smile and said "See you next week". We were quiet for a few seconds when one of the guys turned towards me and said "Isn't she a great girl?" I was questioningly looking for sarcasm in his face but was disappointed and replied "Yes...yes."

E.Y

Museum feeling

2009-10-26T04:38:00.000-07:00

Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo

MoMA, New York

The Metropolitan, New York

Words and their functions

2009-10-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

The rainy weather encouraged me to do some brainstorming. Ideas were lined up in my head,occasionally overlapping one and other. It was hard trying to grasp the words from this hurricane of thoughts and safely place them on a piece of paper. How many weeks had it been since I saw my own handwriting?

There was too much that had caught my attention. I wrote one word, then scribbled and tried to find a better word. We were older now, weren't we? Maybe a synonym would look fancier.

I wrote, scribbled and wrote again until the whole page turned into a blob of ink. It just wasn't my day. I took the paper, curled it until it turned into a ball in my fist and threw it into the dust bin.

E.Y.

New York

2009-10-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

The ice was getting thinner

2009-10-21T07:06:00.000-07:00

We're not the same, dear, as we used to be
The seasons have changed and so have we
There was little we could say and even less that we could do
To stop the ice from getting thinner under me and you

We buried our love in the wintery grave
A lump in the snow was all that remained
But we stayed by its side, as the days turned to weeks
And the ice kept getting thinner with every word that we'd speak

When the spring arrived, we were taken by surprise
When the flows under our feet bled into the sea
And nothing was left for you and me

We're not the same dear and it seems to me
There's nowhere we can go with nothing underneath
Then it saddens me to say what we both knew was true
That the ice was getting thinner under me and you

The ice was getting thinner under me and you

By Death Cab for Cutie

Untitled

2009-08-25T02:38:00.000-07:00

Maybe not with blood, but I had come out of this battle defeated with sweat and tears.
The promises I had made myself started to bail out on me one by one.
The solid rock whom I can't pronounce his name without starting to choke up,was gone.

E.Y

Goodbye summer.

2009-08-25T02:34:00.000-07:00

Without hesitation

2009-08-16T04:40:00.000-07:00

Without hesitation, I took a quick dive into the ocean that I had mistaken to be deep.

I hit the bottom. My forehead and my nose got scraped up.

I was shocked up by my reality.

E.Y

Office rat, copy cat

2009-07-08T15:17:00.000-07:00

You would think that working in a 9 to 5 job everyday consists of one steady curve without ups and downs. Indeed, you start the day with logging on and end it by logging off and feel that every day is exactly the same, but it is the small challenges of the office rat that keeps them at unease and makes them want to look over their shoulder when they have that brilliant idea.

Any time, anywhere, we are surrounded by copycats that live on our ideas, personalize them and present them to the superiors in a new wrapping. Some of us respond by a high level of shock, followed by a silence, while some people squeek and protest, though fully acknowleged that this will make them seem more as a lunatic as to reasonable.

As the office rat nibbles over the unfairity of life, the copycat is given a halo whilst the applaud of the crowd can be heard several floors below.

E.Y