Paper
It's very difficult to get into the frame of mind one once used to be in, especially under somewhat extraordinary circumstances.
It makes me suspicious of my once near-fanatical appreciation of Jack Kerouac: how could one write so fluidly what had just happened, without making some - or most of that shit up - or, without writing as it happened - RIGHT when it happened.
The answer is a simple one, "He made it up".
So, I'm going to make some stuff up, since these events happened months ago, but I at least play with the idea that it's all fresh in my mind and real and autobiographic:
On the day I cycled into Paris, I ended what had been an adventure of almost two months: two months of riding well upwards of 5,800 km in the biggest circle I could manage, touching both Spain and Switzerland and hitting every mountain pass I could have possibly absent-mindedly find in my follies.
I had camped the night before hitting the city limits as close to Paris as possible, without being in the actual periphery - a ring of the most disgusting trenches of suburbs one could possibly imagine enclosing a city, in a small apple orchard in the entrance of a town only a few streets in heft.
The town and my tent were in the direct path of incoming jumbo jets to Charles de Gaulle Airport and my late ride into the site was illuminated sometimes with the plane's wing-mounted lights pointing towards the runway they were about to smash into, with great speed. I thought they were first car headlights, until I would look back and see no one else on the road. That freaks you out the first few times, especially since a car you can't see is a car that may shortly be the car that has crashed into you. And then, you're dead and you don't remember anything, anyways.
My sleep in the tent was light. This wasn't the first time I ditched - it's what I had been doing the entire trip. I had crashed in heavily wooded areas between towns, in hunting reserves next to towns, in ditches in the dark and in the rain, in very middle of towns next to the town hall just to try it and next to medieval ruins, surrounded by grape vineyards and chateaus. And every where, it seemed, in between. But that night seemed different - maybe because of the proximity to one of the most heavily congested cities in the world. I could hear people not far away from my tent - congregating. Young voices - but I couldn't understand what exactly they were saying, since my French is lacking that sublty that I will never acquire or what they were doing, their distance and the surrounding brush took care of that.
I'm pretty sure they were teenagers, in the same farm field as I was, screwing around on a summer night and just looking,
looking for some dumb fuck (me) to screw with. But, I'll never know.
The planes overhead kept an orchestra of noise so normal in rhythm I could keep time with and a visual show of their dancing running lights hitting the various angles of the cloth of my tent. It was magical, if it wasn't the worst conditions to get some sleep. With a heart racing and legs that hadn't had a rest since Switzerland, mere days before (and only one day of rest more, since the Southern Alps), I laughed maniacally to myself - taking it all in and thinking what the worst could really happen to me.
Oh - And there always could be the angry farmer,
or, his dog,
or, his dogs on the prowl.
My glasses were lost with my luggage before I event started the tour. Taking them out makes me feel incredibly vulnerable. I literally can't see the tip of my big nose in front of me. Leaving them in risks the very real reality of an eye infection and my entire body was already starting to break down, from mere exhaustion.
I put the contacts back in and put my knife in my pillow, waiting for any sort of first light and when it came, I got the hell out of there.
The ride itself into the city and to my hotel was psychedelic. The mere thought of approaching such a busy city with little sleep and being in such an exhausted state leads one to believe that it may well be impossible. It's something akin to a mountaineer's problem with intense cold, lack of oxygen and water that's not in some sort of solid form after a few days - but I'm not on top of any mountain, I'm just on a bike - on the road. If something happens, it doesn't look heroic to get out of the problem, I just look a fool.
And at the same time, I was in tears - tears because the adventure was over and even though I was in physical and emotional pain - I didn't want this whole thing to be over - in fact, I wish it would never stop, that I would circumnavigate the globe and just keep going, that the mere thought that I couldn't led me to a crushing depression.
It's hard to relate to people.
My food for the morning consisted of 3 halves from stale baguettes I had been sleeping on top of by accident and Nutella from a glass (it's always, glass) jar that had recently shattered. And no water.
I navigated in, by highlighting a path I had just made up on a local road map and would just look for the numbers. Every round about, every fork in the road, every time the tarmac changed colors, I would have to stop and reset my relationship with the map and the real world.
It worked out smashingly, until I got to Paris, proper.
Paris, Proper:
And then, I got completely lost and, unlike sound advice - such as GO BACK EXACTLY HOW YOU CAME, I just kept going forward - if it was West or North, I thought it would be near my hotel, so what the fuck - how large could Paris be?
Fifteen minutes later, I was completely lost. And I just kept going. My senses were assaulted by what could only be described in comparison to the country roads I had been on, as a clusterfuck of French. I could only ride through it at 15km/hour and hope that my lack of awareness of what truly was going around me wouldn't get me murdered.
I started picking off landmarks I had never heard of, but sounded, "big" and big landmarks may be ones with lots of streets that converge and one of those streets my lead me to the hotel I need to go. Like, honestly, I was out of my little analytical mind and just madingly reaching for something - anything that seemed to make sense.
10 minutes later, I was at Champs-Élysées- the Mother of all boulevards. In Paris, it's the main artery of the sewer-like Parisian road system, blown into being by long-gone army troops that wanted to make sure they could get their munitions through the byzantine-like medieval roads if there ever was an uprising of the people. The end looks like this:
I took one of the avenues that connects to this end, like spokes on a wagon wheel and took it back to the road the surrounds Paris' periphery. My hotel was in San Owen and it the road, would hopefully take me there.
And it did.
I smuggled the bike into the room, which was barely large enough to keep it and thought, what do I do know - there's a bed, I am tired and safe and
I don't know the next time I will ever be here,
So I left, without even taking a shower. I just got onto the train and headed somewhere.
I ended at the Pompidou and this is where this story starts connecting to the image above.
Why the Pompidou? I've never been. There's art. I like art and I was, then, completely insane.
So I went and I was absolutely overstimulated by the amount of everything in front of me. I had been camping - ditching, for two months and now I'm in a place like this: slick, designed, urban, holding many uncalculable masterpieces and there I was. Really smelly.
Even though I had a hard time even keeping a memory of what I saw before closing time, I remembered the hanging mobile in the main floor,
And I just, liked it. I had no idea who it was or who did it. I continuied my adventure in Paris, getting in trouble and getting laid and all that, but last week, I thought of that thing again - I can't really remember why. Maybe it's because I'm hanging out with a French girl and all I can think of is French things and I'm editing photos from France and brushing up on French sayings and all that cal,
But last week, I also finished a huge project and needed something small to work on, so I worked on trying to re-create the effect of that mobile.
I liked it, because it reminded me of cheesy silhouettes you get as a child - the type cutout from within the small-in-scale fake shops on the fake road that leads to the, "magical kingdom" castle at Disney Land. I just so happen to have mine from age eight, complete with engrossingly long rat tail:
My first insight on how to make the Pompidou mobile was that - it was just like the silhouette, but instead of just one cut, there's columns of cuts.
The second insight into the process was that the source image was made up of black and white - no colors in-between. So you take an image like this one,
And change it up, like this:
And that, in general, the wider that line is that makes up the column the more black there was to the left and right of the middle of the column of the source image.
So, I printed out the above picture with lines about a quarter of an inch between each other, colored red, then blue, across the image.
I used the blue lines to denote the center and took a knife and started cutting down. If I reached an area that was black I cut away from the blue line, until there wasn't any black to the left of my blade - or I was about to hit a red line that was to the left - sort of the border of the column. I did the same to the other side of the blue line, except I cut to the right until - well, you get to the point.
You can see the results, above - it's just a piece of white paper, glued to another black piece. If you look really closely, you can see the lines I used as a reference for my columns - I actually flipped the original image horizontally, so that I cut the backside - the frontside then would be relatively clean.
And that was fucking fun. In fact, that's what I did on Christmas Day.
That pique my interest in who actually made the original. Probably French, as it was in a French museum and the French are nothing if not nationalists and probably someone associated with geometric art, or post-painterly abstraction - it's a modern art museum. The process was so logarithmic as to almost be generative, yet still has a little hint of craft - I'm comparing it to a cheesy Disneyland keepsake - for all cripes, to perhaps pre-date computers, at least home computers.
The shape of the original mobile that's hanging up at the Pompidou gave it away, there's only two places I've seen it:
One is a ripoff of the original: The Consolidated Skateboard Company logo. The other is the original:
Vasarely.
Who is actually a Hungarian, but the French have a tendency to adopt people they like and those people eventually die in France and that's good enough for the French, I guess. See also, Marc Chagall and most likely, and randomly Dimitri From Paris, who is not Parisian, but Turkish - but also Knighted by the French government in... general funk house bootylicious, I believe.
The mobile is by Vasarely and it's of Mr. Pompidou himself.
The other thing I liked about the stencil, is that it's a stencil, if I could make a really nice one, I could blow it up really large and then we can get spray paint involved - or even cut my own mobile and then things would get very interesting indeed.
But these cutouts I'm doing take forever - my hand hurts. It always hurts. It's been broken more times than I care to tell you and that sort of a pressure is a no-no. So I need a way to experiment with a lot of ideas, in a little amount of time and do some boring work, automatically. And then I remembered, I know how to program computers. So I made this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use GD;
my $victim = ('victim.gif');
my $img = new GD::Image($victim);
my $width = $img->width;
my $height = $img->height;
my $a = 1;
my $gutter = 1;
my $chunk_size = 10;
my $flip = 0;
my $num_parts = $img->width / $chunk_size;
my $transformed = new GD::Image( $img->width, $img->height );
my $i = 1;
for ( $i = 1 ; $i <= $num_parts ; $i++ ) {
print "working on part: $i\n";
my $cropped_img = new GD::Image( $chunk_size, $img->height );
print 'Copying from source image: 0,0, '
. ( ( $chunk_size * $i ) - $chunk_size ) . ",0, "
. $chunk_size . ','
. $img->height . ",\n";
$cropped_img->copy(
$img,
0,
0,
( $chunk_size * $i ) - $chunk_size,
0,
$chunk_size,
$img->height
);
if ( $flip == 0 ) {
$cropped_img = $cropped_img->copyFlipHorizontal();
}
my $transformed_part = transform($cropped_img);
if ( $flip == 0 ) {
$transformed_part = $transformed_part->copyFlipHorizontal();
$flip = 1;
}
else {
$flip = 0;
}
$transformed->copy(
$transformed_part,
( $chunk_size * $i ) - $chunk_size,
0,
0,
0,
$chunk_size,
$img->height,
);
}
open my $DONE, ">", 'final.gif' or die $!;
print $DONE $transformed->gif() or die;
close $DONE or die $!;
print "ok\n";
sub transform {
my $orig_img = shift;
my $width = $orig_img->width;
my $height = $orig_img->height;
my $c_pos = -1;
my @pos = ();
my $y = 0;
for ( $y = 0 ; $y < $height ; $y++ ) {
my $x = 0;
ROW: for ( $x = 0 ; $x < $width ; $x++ ) {
my $index = $orig_img->getPixel( $x, $y );
my ( $r, $g, $b ) = $orig_img->rgb($index);
# If it's zero, I always want it to be black.
if ( $c_pos == -1 ) {
$c_pos = $gutter;
last ROW;
}
if ( $x < $c_pos ) {
if ( $r == 255 ) {
$c_pos = $c_pos - $a;
last ROW;
}
}
elsif ( $c_pos == $x ) {
if ( $r == 255 ) { #white?
$c_pos = $x - $a;
if ( $c_pos < 0 ) {
$c_pos = 0;
}
last ROW;
}
elsif ( $r == 0 ) { #black?
# I kinda just want to lookahead
if ( $x == $width ) {
$c_pos = $x;
last ROW;
}
else {
my $next_pixel_index =
$orig_img->getPixel( $x + 1, $y );
my ( $r_n, $g_n, $b_n ) =
$orig_img->rgb($next_pixel_index);
if ( $r_n == 0 ) {
$c_pos = $x + $a;
last ROW;
}
else {
$c_pos = $x;
last ROW;
}
}
}
}
}
if ( $c_pos < $gutter ) {
$c_pos = $gutter;
}
push ( @pos, $c_pos );
}
my $img = new GD::Image( $width, $height );
my $red = $img->colorAllocate( 255, 0, 0 );
$img->transparent($red);
$img->interlaced('true');
my $white = $img->colorAllocate( 255, 255, 255 );
my $black = $img->colorAllocate( 0, 0, 0 );
my $y = 0;
for ( $y = 0 ; $y < $height ; $y++ ) {
my $x = 0;
for ( $x = 0 ; $x < $width ; $x++ ) {
if ( $x <= $pos[$y] ) {
$img->setPixel( $x, $y, $black );
}
else {
$img->setPixel( $x, $y, $white );
}
}
}
return $img;
}
Because I was too lazy to figure out how to acquire the already-created Photoshop Filter,
Which takes that image up there and turns it into something that looks like what I initially made. Viola:
And if I get my shit together, I'll take that program and make it a little more user friendly and play with things.
Not to get all philosophical - I thought starting with some random story of end of a book adventure of a completely heroic and masculine kind and ending it with an analytic and generative breakdown of a piece of artwork in one of the most famous museums in the world would be enough, but I always wonder why I do such things - and then, why I take hours to write about doing such things.
It may be that I find it all very interesting. That even I'm absolutely and blatantly admitting to stealing an idea, I find no problem with it, in at least I reverse-engineered the problem and learned about it. I didn't just make a copy and called it mine. There has to be said about the relationship between myself and what I do and sometimes -
Sometimes I find it lacking in people's work. That's all.
And I like hearing other peoples similar stories.
