.(constellations)-

To: Everybody involved in running Pasadena Bakery, and everyone who makes up a part in their lives, and the lives of these and those and so on.
PIECYCLE

I am writing a letter in praise of something you made, but I would not be truly sincere if I was to say that I just wanted to show pure gratitude, and nothing else. I cant ignore the fact that, even though I am filled with gratitude to the point that I let it overflow and fill up this envelope, I also see a glimmer of hope in that mixture, a hope that in receiving this praise that you would be compelled to keep on doing what you do so fantastically well.

I am writing to thank you for making custard pies in such a way that goes so far as to make me enjoy life more not only whenever I am in the presence of one, but because I have been so blessed to encounter one. Even further, just the thought of one of your pies stirs excitement within me. With other things I enjoy, of which there are many baked goods, I am almost left disappointed by the last bite, not just because it was good and I wanted more, but because perhaps it was only good enough while it was being eaten, or chewed. With your pies, I taste every aspect of the process around their existence, so much so that even now, after being separated from them for more than half a year, I can still taste the exquisite goodness through my memory of them, and my anticipation of encounters to come. I will describe to you briefly how great your pies really are through a scenario summarising an encounter with them:

I would make the decision to get a custard pie. It would take much too long to include what might bring such a decision about. This would make me excited, and I would share this with others by asking around who would like one. This often involved the sharing of past Pasadena Bakery custard pie stories with fellow pie lovers, or if there were a pie virgin in the room, a passionate description of every aspect of the pie would follow. This description would cover the intense creaminess of the custard, without it being too heavy or too light, the way that you feel perfectly satisfied after one pie, and are not exactly sure why. The way the cinnamon on top is so casually resting there, as if it didn’t matter where it was, but in truth nothing matters much more then than that cinnamon being present, there, on the precious custard filling of that very pie. The way that the crust of the pie crumbles without being crumbly, the way that it tastes so good that it doesn’t matter if your second to last bite accidentally takes all the custard, because the crust is incredible even on its own. I could go on forever. But what makes them so great would not be covered, because it exists not only in the pies themselves.

Back to the scenario: The excitement generated would often involve people being brought together. A pie community would form. There has even been situations of group bike rides with the sole purpose of crossing the city to get to the Pasadena Bakery. Or even if, as I often would, offer to help a friend of mine get over to Point Chev, a large part of this decision-come act of kindness being that I would be near to your bakery. From that instance alone, there is not only the good of the favour in driving my friend, but also the pie for myself and the feeling I have done a favour at the same time. But it does not stop there. I would never buy just one pie, always two, often more, as I would want someone else to share in the experience. The price of each pie, no different to regular pricing at other bakeries that come nowhere near to producing the magic that you do, constantly blows my mind. Please don’t raise the price of the pies, you are incredible. Even if the pies had sold out, the fleeting disappointment would give way to a certain gladness or satisfaction that at least every pie would be experienced by another person, and in the same motion I would catch sight of the next moment when a pie and me and everything I describe here might recycle itself, I would see the whole cycle of life with pies, and my own position in that cycle which I am so grateful for.

The quality of the pies is so high that I would not see it adequate to eat it just anywhere, I would need to find the right place for that time, and I would not mind waiting, because even the anticipation of the pie-to-come would bring with it a most rapturous joy. Often having an extra pie in possession would mean I would be compelled to deliver it to someone I care about, or rather to draw someone in to meeting me over a pie, someone I might not see otherwise. Eating one of your pies, each bite tastes not only of its ingredients which you so masterfully assembled and gifted to the earth, but also of this whole collection of events, sensations, relationships, places, memories and anticipations that are attached to it and somehow make up its filling. But we also know that these could just as well be found in the taste of the crust alone, as long as we acknowledge that that piece of crust contains within it the essence of the whole thing, the whole pie, but also the whole pie-cycle that you give motion to.

Please continue to make your custard pies, they do a lot more than just sell themselves, and I am so very gracious that you have provided me and so many others with the blessing and chain of blessings that follow your pies and lead back to them. Bless the pies and the hands that made them.


Infinitely thankful,
andy<

driftVessel-


.part one

.part two

-eyes>closing>in>sequence/-people>slipping>through>doors-what>can>I>do>from>this>lane/-only>as>long>as>I>can>remember//
;
Pulled away from the curb on my bicycle, having just written down those words which for various and probably uninteresting reasons (unless you think of dreams as visions) were accumulating and repeating themselves endlessly and involuntarily in my thoughts ever since the film ended. I was afraid that they would continue to do so and that the collection would be too much for me. Now, I thought, that they were written away, I am free to forget them, putting an end to the ridiculous, overwhelming collection of simple, immaterial signs. Once more the list recited itself, and as it did I noticed another line I had not noted down on the curbside, (and forgive me for what a crappy phrase it is, at least appreciate my honesty in admitting it here, remember I did not choose these words)
-keep>on>pedalling//
And so my memory had failed me. How do all those great writers do it? How do they record in such a manner that it recreates those fleeting moments when it is as if you have discovered in time and thought, a distinct melody, but one which you know in its entirety just by looking at it- you don't require any more time than that instant in which you possess the tune in its whole form, like you might an object in your hand. How do they reproduce in such a likeness that we can feel an affinity with what is written, or rather what is described? Not so much that they describe a particular experience of your own, more just that it is as if they have been able to transcribe (as if on paper, a musical score) one of those melodies, or tunes. But I worry that perhaps these writers (or even things without such distinct authors, like a great film you watch before you know anything at all about it) are not accurate or honest records at all. As disheartening as it is to imagine it, they could just be complete fabrications. What is even scarier is twofold:
1-that this makes sense, as even if a musical score is transcribed accurately from an improvised live performance, there is always something lost when the piece is re-performed, when the instruments are played and the score recited. It could never be the same song even if it is the same melody.
2-Let's say that these fabricated scores are the ones we admire and even idealise (an act to which, I confess, am guilty). Maybe this even changes what we listen for in the future, meaning that the electric speakers through which we play the melodies we admire drown out the most natural of songs.

see seas, sea sees

buildings.

. toronto

My Grandfather always appeared to me to hold some kind of insight into what I thought was a beautiful, evasive truth. I felt cheated by him at times, as if there was always something he was not telling me. I remember noticing in his stories a sensitivity towards something, which I myself sensed, but found, was never really talked about. I was a young child, certainly unable to question him on the matter, or request a more extensive elaboration of what was of interest to me. Instead I was captivated by him and found nothing more exciting than catching a glimpse in his stories of the sensitivity that I recognised, sympathised with, and longed to develop. Perhaps for this reason I perceived him as the most interesting human being that I knew of. It wasn’t so much that I thought he had a fully developed sensitivity for what I only vaguely sensed during particular moments, it was more just that I felt he had over time collected similar passing sensations to the ones I recognised. But these sensations were not passing for me, rather they were intermittent and would resonate profoundly and continually at the root everything I experienced and everything I remembered.

As I remember now, and you must forgive me if since his passing I have let my memory of him inflate itself and change form, but I am beginning to see ways in which he was talking more about what I wanted him to talk about, than I could hear at the time. Perhaps this owes itself to the difference between hearing or seeing something from reading it, or re-reading it. Perhaps it is in the process of remembering his stories that I have accidentally inserted new, artificial traces of this sensitivity to an evasive truth. But I like to think that it was always present, resounding in his words. Only, I needed to have his stories written, and to re-read them, as I so often do now with my memory of them. So much so that sometimes I feel as though they were my own experiences and I am merely recalling my own past.

My Grandfather worked on a cargo ship, which meant that he was constantly between cities, in-between continents. The ship was built to transport irregular cargo, or single contracted deliveries meaning that shipments were never on a specific route that was traced and re traced (as is the way with container ship routes these days). His ship and crew would travel from one job to wherever the next necessary job might be, meaning that they never had even a particular sea or passage that became particularly familiar, or comfortable. For the crew, he said, the ship itself became a peculiar kind of grounding in the world. What was most distinct during the largest part of his life was a constant, irregular motion. My Grandfather told me how he had started work on the ship as an alternative to furthering his education. He was of a reasonably privileged family and had the opportunity to attend a university, but described a certain restlessness in his youth that meant he looked for a job as opposed to continuing life in his small, all too familiar hometown.
He never spoke too much about his role on the ship. Rather his stories always seemed to centre around the constant journey that was his working life on that one same boat, all the way until his relatively early retirement.

His stories always started and finished on the ship. At first I had found this irritating, I was always eager to hear about foreign lands and far off places but he seemed to favour the ship itself and all the time spent in its cabins and on its decks. Over the course of his time living in our home before his death I encountered countless descriptions of that ship, which largely made up his remembrances of the most part of his life. I feel as though during that time I was able to re-construct the ship for myself. I was able to stare from its cabin windows into the ocean, or pace down the narrow corridors and watch the way they would twist ever so slightly in rough seas.

He would also speak occasionally of port cities that they docked at, or of his time spent on land. But he always did so as if he was remembering dreams, always describing some kind of old image or set of images. He would not recall for me time on land in the same way that he did time on the ship, his descriptions of these images almost never included any sort of attachment or personal impression which might have formed and lodged itself in his memory of the place. For me, at that time, it made no sense that he would dwell so stubbornly on what I saw as just an inbetween to his times at exciting and often new port locations. I had been on an aeroplane twice before I met my grandfather, and although the airports and flights excited me, I felt that his manner of re-telling would be as if I was to produce more elaborate and developed recollections of the time spent in terminals and aeroplane cabins than to describe the impressions I had formed and taken away from my visits and destinations.

I learnt of time passed on the ship, without television, without public radio broadcast, without even newsprint or magazines collected from ports. He did describe, however, a vast library that was well maintained by the crew, so large in fact that there are specific works of literature which my grandfather would still recall with an air of disappointment in not having had the chance to remove from the library and begin to read. Also in the library he described a small wooden chest of drawers, which housed a small collection of exotic board games that the captain had slowly acquired and made available to the rest of the crew. I imagine he must have spent a lot of time engaged in the playing of such games, however this was seldom described in his recollections. After all, how do you remember long periods of deliberation with a sense of time contained intact? Perhaps no more than you can accurately remember boredom. For whatever reason, that small library made large by its collection was intricately referenced in my own memory, despite its relatively infrequent and fleeting appearances in my grandfather’s descriptions of the ship. I had no doubt assembled it for myself from its various mentions, more so even than I had for the rest of the ship. The library’s regular appearance in dreams formed for me strong familiarity with it. Although, in those dreams its contents and features were always changing and being re-formed.

Recently I had one such dream, in which the library appeared. I knew that the library contained games, but this time a game filled out the library to the extent that its capacity was immeasurable. It was a room without walls as is only really conceivable in dreams. It was similar to a video game, in which the playing space has no outer limit, only a regenerating landscape of graphics, and endless artificial topography. It was perhaps one of the most terrifying dreams I can distinctly recall. The next closest thing to that being a series of recurring dreams I encountered in childhood, in which there were in fact no describable features. I have attempted to recall to friends such dreams, although without exception these are inadequate recollections. They supply only a reduction of the actual memorable experience into a collection of attempted descriptions of new sensations, which are not resembled in bodily sensations. Many friends have identified with such dreams, and all that I know of can sympathise with a certain inability to adequately recall or describe them. On occasion I’ll taste a component of these dreams or smell their familiar odour. Such sensations cause a significant discomfort while also managing to stimulate an irreducibly strong desire. It feels as though I have some other extension from my being, like an additional limb. But a limb that has almost no feeling, to the extent that it is largely forgotten. Let us say that every so often, (with the example of the experience of such dreams, or in the recollection or taste of them) this limb becomes apparent through an excruciating pain. But at the same time that pain lends strength to what seems a vital but disused organ.

On a recent journey, I awoke in my aeroplane seat with the feeling I had just been dreaming in the described manner. This discomfort was enhanced by the extreme fatigue partnered with unquenchable restlessness I was experiencing physically, as is sometimes the case with airline seats. Inspired by my grandfather, or out of envy for his journeys on the ship, I had been determined to maintain a constant awareness of the vast surface of oceans below over which I was passing. This determination had come from a frustration with modern vessels, aeroplanes and flights, which I believed alienates the traveller from the most crucial aspects of the trip. Aside from the change of surroundings upon arrival, I had found that the journeys themselves would become encapsulated in no more than a symbol or expression of ‘journey’, which is largely manifested in the airport or aircraft cabin if they are in fact at all different. To relieve my discomfort, I devoted myself to the task of staring out of the small aeroplane window, which, in its frustrating spot to the side of my face, meant I had to turn my neck and shoulders into an uncomfortable position. I attempted to account for every cloud that we passed over, and to catch sight of the ocean with its barely perceivable crawl. No matter how strenuously I attempted to do so, I could not imagine myself on the surface of the sea, moving slowly and more intimately across the earth. Nor could I really imagine at that moment a place on the ship, an impression of which my grandfather had so distinctly imparted into me. All I could do was identify with the imagery before me. I knew the ocean had a particular name and that it so effectively separated chunks of land infested with cities and organisms. Little else.

This only intensified my discomfort which was still sounding throughout my body as if the dream I had just emerged from was continuing through sound while I was awake. I fixed my vision on the porous line that makes up the horizon. I found comfort in applying myself to the task of attempting to gain a sense of flight direction, but the plain of ocean below me offered no reference to what was ‘north’ or ‘west’. What happened was quite remarkable. I started to see a striking resemblance between the horizon as a visual symbol, and the words ‘north’ and ‘west’ (which at base imply something like direction). In both the horizon and these words, I watched my perception of things disassembled into a collection of vague expressions. Then I remembered my Grandfather’s ship, and its library. It had for me encompassed what a journey was, even amidst the dissatisfaction that came from the immediate one. I found that it dispelled my panic without my even noticing it, and soon I was sitting, captivated by the formations of clouds.

.mole man

William Lyttle is a 75-year-old retired electrical engineer. For four decades Mr Lyttle has been digging a series of tunnels under his property on the corner of Mortimer Road and Stamford Road in Hackney, London. In 2001, his tunnelling caused an 8ft hole to appear in the pavement on Stamford Road. Mr Lyttle said the tunnel was just an experiment, but other residents reported seeing a complex network of tunnels when the hole appeared. Hackney Council used sonar technology, and found a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m (26ft) deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house. In August 2006, the Council succeeded in getting a court order banning Mr Lyttle from his property while they carry out emergency repairs. This property is a decrepit Victorian mansion. It is in disrepair to the point that the council has intervened on the grounds that it is dangerous, but it is clear that Mr Lyttle is concetrating his time on what he must see as a more suitable home, his burrow. The council surveyors estimate that the ‘Mole Man’ has scooped 100 cubic metres of earth from beneath the roads and houses that surround his 20-room property, with a spade and pulleys. He admitted to more than 40 years of "home improvements" on his own land. He sees the council's efforts to prevent him from re-entering his property as breaching his human rights.

"I don't mind the title of inventor," he said. "Inventing things that don't work is a brilliant thing, you know. People are asking you what the big secret is. And you know what? There isn't one." Mole Man.

References:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6092178.stm
http://society.guardian.co.uk/communities/story/0,,1839538,00.html
http://www.hackneygazette.co.uk/content/hackney/gazette/news/story.aspx?brand=HKYGOnline&category=news&tBrand=northlondon24&tCategory=newshkyg&itemid=WeED04%20Aug%202006%2011%3A45%3A00%3A093
http://www.londonist.com/archives/2006/08/a_london_bus_in.php

blooms in rooms a city without roots, still stems and canals, chambers and corridors