Monday, 29
listen to this sound - MALOLA Sound System featuring Jason & Anja

Thursday, 12
- Bob Marley Day - Everybody in Gambia is celebrating it whereas i am in Athens to get documenta 14. It is so ample and broad with the lot of venues that i won't be able to visit all within three days. The main ones - EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art and Athens Conservatoire (Odeion) i visited yesterday. More than 30 years have passed since i was in Athens. I really want to enjoy the city herself apart from the organised arts.

Monday, 24
by quoting this excerpt without writing a critical article or review i offend against the copyright. nevertheless, everything i can say - i fully understand Hendrix' point of view. when i was on tour - what is of course not to compare with Experience - it was like after performing a song for the fifth time it felt empty and i had to add or change something to make it interesting again. i think even in relationships you have to do like filling the void after a while.
I LIKE THIS TOURING EXCEPT I DON'T LIKE THE TOURING, if you know what i mean. I dig doing shows in different towns, sure, but the hotels, the lack of service, the hang-ups when all you want is something simple to eat at the time you want to eat it. And you get no kind of private or personal life in this business. A person has to have five or ten minutes to himself every day. When you're resting after working for eighteen hours in a day and trying to have a quiet meaL somewhere, there's always kids coming in and bugging for autographs and pictures, or somebody looking at you really strange, whispering and all that. I can't have fun like anybody else.
And I get very bored on the road. I get bored with myself and the music sometimes. Like, what can you do on a tour? People scream for the "oldies but goodies." So you have to play the "oldies but goodies" instead of some of the things you want to get into.
Of course, those kids out there expect to hear the records we've cut. They've already heard the record, but still they want us to play the song like the record. We could either bring the whole box of tapes on stage, or they could go back home, set pictures of us up on the wall and listen to the record! In person we play things a different way. Two shows a night are tough, and we soon find ourselves completely boxed in with the same numbers. It really gets sticky and icky. So we usually start jamming onstage and have more fun doing that. That really gets it over. Sometimes a three-minute song might stretch into ten.
We play as we feel, and people will never get to know us by just listening to our records. It's only by seeing our shows when each performance is spontaneous and different that they will come to understand what we are all about.
STARTING AT ZERO (originally titled Room Full Of Mirrors), Jimi Hendrix, his own story - 2013 Gravity Limited

Tuesday, 29
A Tuareg proverb says: Men and women toward each other are for the eyes, and for the heart, and not only for the bed.
Geraldine Brooks Nine Parts of Desire. The Hidden World of Islamic Women. 1995.

Thursday, 23
When i talk to him, he scarcely looks at me. Is it because I am white and old, or is it because i am woman? Some people try to be nice telling me that i am not old. Some might call me a spider. That is the reality. Discrimination because of my age is increasing. People are not much interested as life seems to come to an end soonish. No shared future. Not to speak of a practicing love life. Loving in my age seems to be a waste of time. Or let me be moderate and say love is changing. It is not about exchanging your love with some other body or soul or spirit or mind or whatever. It is about freeing from a physical desire that heads for a sexual act. Anyway, I want to live. For sure. Let me be happy with my life that i lead my way, with my desires that make my life prolific. Let me continue looking for comprehension as a means of togetherness.

i started building my house in Tintinto what makes me happy. A certain certainty of a sense is given to my life for the next years by providing a space for exchanging ideas in terms of contemporary art and literature.

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If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely. But I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Brontë, I said, opening JANE EYRE and laying it beside PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. I opened it at chapter twelve and my eye was caught by the phrase 'Anybody may blame me who likes'. What were they blaming Charlotte Brontë for? I wondered. And I read how Jane Eyre used to go up on to the roof when Mrs Fairfax was making jellies and looked over the fields at the distant view. And then she longed— and it was for this that they blamed her— that 'then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs Fairfax, and what was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold.
'Who blames me? Many, no doubt, and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes… 'It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
A Room Of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf, 1929 - Kindle Version

Sunday, 19
- what can i make out of this love that will never become real -

Thursday, 16
Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both, men and women, are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable.
Some people ask, 'Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?' Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general - but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. I would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the problem should acknowledge that.
We should all be feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Forth Estate, London 2014, p 40, 41

Friday, 10
On our artist-in-residence stay in Perth, Australia, in 1996, my English was not that confident and i mixed unconscious and subconscious. One of the there living and working artists, Virginia Ward, who i much adored, scolded and explained moving unconsciously was a lapse, while knowing your subconscious was necessary for an artist (contrary to Thomas Hirschhorn, as i wrote some years ago, who stated artists shouldn't undergo a psycho analysis). Those days we produced a work about dreams. In the morning we told each other our dreams. One by one. The one who was listening had to record the other one's dream. The one of Virginia's works i remember consisted of a school desk completely covered with school kids' tags, a ready made. I met her the following year at the documenta in Kassel. But she was more or less ignoring me. Hmm, that's life, suddenly in different surroundings, they think you are unaccredited or they are not in the mood for you. Can happen to me too that i am on my stairway to heaven of which nobody can remove me.

Thursday, 9
It is true that there are elevations in art, in music, in writing which sustain us, help us to live. They transmute our sorrows into beauty. But it is also true that there are pitfalls from which art cannot save us, and then it becomes necessary to find an understanding of our human life, of our illness. I have found this understanding, this quest for healing and wholeness, necessary to me and to others. The poets, as I observed from my studies of the classical and modern romantics (whom we call neurotics), always end in catastrophe, in tragedy, illness, death. They were the victims of life rather than its conquerors. See the tragic life of Baudelaire, of Rimbaud, Verlaine, of Dylan Thomas. Only recently Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Rimbaud walked out of his poet's life and into oblivion.
Part of our reality is that we invest others with mystical qualities; we force them to play the role we need. We do not take into account the strength of these myths and thus deny one of the most powerful motivations in our character. We invent situations, we live out, independently of others, a private dream relationship, and a private drama, and the frustration of this relationship is acted in a void, taking the greater part of our energies.
I have chosen to write about artists first because I know them best, then because the expression of fantasy and imagination is more clearly manifested in them than in other lives. In other men most of their life is repressed by the bourgeois structure, their professional, social,and community mores. The artist retains his sensibility; it is the element he needs for his profession. The artist matches his life to his needs and lives by his own design and does not conform to patterns made by others. The artist lives more in harmony with his own character and is closer to freedom and individuality, and therefore integrity.
We say the realist describes what he sees, but what we see is formed, shaped, altered, and colored by what we feel. The same city would change its face a hundred times according to our mood. It may appear desolate, menacing, lovely, or hospitable. The change of mood is like the change of lighting.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eye and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness. "Ersatz" in literature. Gangsterism in literature. And in John Hawkes' The Cannibal I am not sure yet, but it seems like an artificial unconscious. Writing should develop our senses, not atrophy them. Gertrude Stein wrote: "Something is always happening, anybody knows a quantity of stories of people's lives that are always happening, there are plenty for the newspapers and and there are always plenty in private life. Everybody knows so many stories and what is the use of telling another story? There is always a story going on. So naturally what I wanted to do in my play is what everybody did not know or always tell."
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 5 (1947-1955) Kindle Version

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mistakes happen to me, spelling mistakes mostly. but nobody tells me about. i always discover them myself and feel ashamed after. though nobody cares it seems they don't kill nobody.

Tuesday, 7
Chinua Achebe Our art is based on morality. Perhaps this sounds old-fashioned to you, but it is not to us. The earth goddess among the Ibo people is the goddess of morality. An abomination is called an abomination against the arts. So you see in our aesthetic you cannot run away from morality. Morality is basic to the nature of art.
James Baldwin When Chinua talks about aesthetic, beneath that world sleeps — think of it — the word morality. And beneath that word we are confronted with the way we treat each other. That is the key to any morality.
Chinua Achebe An artist is committed to art which is committed to people.
James Baldwin ... And I am here to try to say something which perhaps only a poet can attempt to say… We are trying to make you see something. And maybe this moment we can only try to make you see it. But there ain’t no money in it.
from a conversation between Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin. 9. April 1980 brainpickings

Monday, 6
Yesterday afternoon, i had a whatsapp talk with one of my friends from Germany. You know how chatting is. Talking about this and that. Among other things we talked about a 66-year-old woman who had visited her a few days ago. But who had disgusted her too much. My friend complained about that woman's scent of an old woman and revealed all her aversion towards the smell of overage people. To show at least a bit of empathy, she said that the reason might be she couldn't do no pooh-poohs, but only every three weeks. To come to help that poor woman i objected that probably a good doctor was missing. No way, my friend was already on the next topic. Another friend had visited her lastly. A long time artist friend. She enlarges black and white pictures on very fine velvety photo paper; hence the black colour appears deeply black. That artist told my friend she had sold a print for 10 000 € to her collector. Though to my friend she would sell it for 4000 only. Anyway, the German artist had brought a test print, which they hanged on the only free wall behind the sofa, my friend explained. She actually needed that one wall to stay blank. That's why my friend was not really convinced of that artwork for which she had to pay as much as 4000. In the moment she told the artist about her considerations the artist friend clomped to the wall, removed her work and ripped it to pieces to finally throw it into the dustbin... shit happens like my Gambian artist friend recently repeatedly has articulated.

Sunday, 5
last night on my way home i had to stop at a checkpoint. with his torch the officer examined the empty seat next to me and asked why i was alone. i should be with my husband. i thought it was not his business, but i said next time to prevent further discussions. anyway, he is not the only one who investigates about a husband. at least five times a day people use to query : how is your husband? where is your husband? is your husband fine? and so on. it looks like women in Gambia cannot be without husbands though i rarely see them attended by men. so what is it about always asking for a husband? women cannot hold their own? i tell you i'll prove the opposite. yes, she'll manage. yes, she can.

Thursday, 2
some people like to see me sad. even, when i try to make them happy them do everything to get me down. powergame?
no, i surrender and tell, yes, i am sad. you got what you wanted.