today: rain, grit, steps, the city, the world, and the general tragedy of utopia

today: sun
today: & rain
today: catching up
today: "be here now"
today: Grit. & A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behaviour
today: seeing the first red rose petal take shape in the garden
today: new white fluffy bathtowels
today: being there again, for one photo moment
today: the art of adding large small bits of information into a finished layout...
today: Martha Marcy May Marlene

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yesterday and today felt slightly surreal: it was like switching realities from the island time and the home-unpacking-laundry-mode to media-projects-important-next-steps-mode. 

going through the garden, i thought: "step by step." and also: "i want a clone." but then, it’s the counterparts that make life so vivid, that adds and connects the single pieces to the layers of life.

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favourite moment of today: being stuck before a red light, and then turning it around, seeing it as a city stage, and a sky stage, especially when the rain started to pour.

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right now, i am still moved by the Martha Marcy May Marlene film. i thought i just watch a bit of it, and was mesmerized. it made me remember the Man Son exhibition i visited in 2010, and the parallels it drew to the RAF. here's a bit from the blog note back then:

the 2 focus points of the exhibition are persons / events of 1969: the murders committed by the Manson-Family in Hollyood, and the actions of the RAF-terror group in germany in 1969. there is weird parallel between both groups, even when looking at the photos, both groups had so many young, good-looking, energetic leaders/ members. added to that, all the emotions / happenings / moods of this time, and the group dynamic, and also the almost “pop” / media coverage aspect of it, interpreted in artistic ways: this ambivalent thrill of the dark.(into the dark - Man Son 1969)

it also made me think of our vulnerability. our longing for meaning and connection. and all the possible positive and negative things that come from it. how our minds are so complex. how we all basically know what good and bad is: how things sometimes go terribly wrong. how afterwards, it's hard to understand how that could happen. maybe that is so moving about the Martha film: it doesn't give the whole picture, because there never really is a whole picture - there is always a larger frame. but it makes it graspable, how we can get lost/assimilated in a group, and through that, in a value system that eats us up.

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also, still pondering on 3 books i read while on the island. there is a half-written "reading" blog post that is waiting since 10 days to be completed. at least it pinpoints exactly where things got too large to put into some lines. one of them is Hunger Games, and the way it both engages the reader into this life-show-survivor-game, and makes the reader despise the format... which, together with the Martha film, and the other books - both from German authors who lived in the former East Germany, in this society that was supposed to be more social... -  leads back to the Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behaviour, and to a line from the half-written book blog post:

"This hope of a better, fairer, more human world. And all the "necessary" measures that are taken to construct this better society ..  

The tragedy of utopia: the way it can easily turn into its counterpart."