Swing from tree limbs every day to make sure your arms stretch to the proper length.
Growing up is not only difficult, but also extremely time-consuming.
Instead of the future, day-dream about the past—the one thing your warped desires can’t destroy.
It’s true that some caterpillars turn into lovely butterflies, but many more turn into drab brown moths. Avoid metamorphosis altogether if possible.
Friends come and go but books stay with you, even in a strong wind.
Instead of going on dates, court boredom, which will never desert you.
Make friends with the invisible family who lives upside-down on your ceiling.
Have somebody record your height on a door with a pencil every year. If the marks start to go lower rather than higher, this could indicate that instead of growing up, you are growing old.
Avoid anything that prevents a good night’s sleep. Prizes, for example, are for livestock.
Remember: you can keep learning all your life, but you’ll never again be able to skip school.
Experiment with different personalities.
Don’t be over-clever or let yourself be fired out of a cannon.
Feeling hungry? Try eating!
When I was your age, I was young.
If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff too? Why not? Don’t you like your friends?
Playing video games imparts a valuable life skill: how to hold your pee.
Watch movies rated for mature audiences. These are usually the most juvenile.
If you dream of a career in politics, learn to do magic tricks.
Hypnotizing chickens is not merely a fun stunt—it also makes them tractable prior to execution.
Go to school with blood on your shirt. Say it’s your name in Chickenscratch.
Write his or her name in the snow, get a comfortable chair and watch how it melts: the letters expanding, becoming illegible and finally disappearing into the earth.
Spend time—the only form of currency the dead still honor.
Find the perfect slab of polished granite and release it into its native habitat.
Every year on the anniversary of your loss, take out a small ad in your local paper. Let it remain blank—an oasis of propriety among the ads for legal services and riding mowers.
Become migratory.
Visit caves that have lost all their bats to white-nose syndrome. Stand at the entrance and listen.
Visit mountaintop-removal sites in the Appalachians that have been terraformed to look like Wyoming.
Wear a cowboy hat and squint.
Become addicted to a tear-flavored brand of chewing tobacco.
Bleed yourself regularly with leeches to remove the black bile.
Follow a river from its mouth to its source: a spring small enough to empty with one long sip.
Repeat after me: reproduction is mandatory, but sex is dirty and sinful.
According to scripture, you can minimize contagion by keeping it in the family, or at least the tribe.
Hold hands when you walk, preferably ones that are still attached to bodies.
Check with local jurisdictions before deciding to go topless or baring an ankle.
Lower the newspaper between you slowly to increase your partner’s excitement.
Use the fire exit only for emergencies.
Boundaries are important in a relationship.
A zygote deserves every right of an American citizen, presuming it’s not in the country illegally.
Remember: oral sex never leads to pregnancy unless both partners speak the same language.
Don’t buy leather unless it’s been cured with brains.
Choose the lovers’ leap that’s right for you. Does the vegetation at the bottom match your blouse?
Holy spirit possession is the only truly safe sex.
Don’t just rock—roll! Make yourselves into a perfect cylinder of lust.
Angels, like snails, are hermaphroditic, which may account for their air of superiority.
Find new uses for mucous, O pushers of the envelope.
Know thyself, sure, but don’t stop there.
If you want the candle to stay erect, dribble hot wax into the holder.
Let your eyes do all the work, like a seed potato.
Use a 3-D printer to make plastic copies of yourself.
Don’t stop with circumcision. Remove the flesh around the ears, lose your eyelids, pull out your fingernails.
We shouldn’t presume to separate ourselves from the suffering world.
The mouth is born without teeth, just a tongue and a howl.
Nature is against nature.
Most birds have no penises, and most honeybees are non-reproductive females who act as sexual go-betweens for flowers. So much for the birds and the bees.
As for storks, they only live in the Old World. Their closest relatives in the New World are vultures.
Delivery of your order is by sea, and may take up to nine months.
If you follow my poetry video collection Moving Poems even a little, you’ve probably watched more than one videopoem by the Belgian video-artist and soundcreator Swoon — and I haven’t even posted all his work. Not only is he prolific and (obviously) fast-moving; he’s one of the most inventive and interesting artists working in the medium. I like the music he composes as well. So I was thrilled when he asked me, this past week, if I’d mind him making some videos for my new Manual series.
He’s also kindly provided an English translation of his blog post about the videos as well as a short bio, which I have tweaked just a little with his permission:
Poetry, words and dreams form an important basis for the work of Swoon. As a stranger in our midst he recycles “virtual” internet images, shoots his own, creates soundscapes and makes dreamlike, moving paintings out of it all — a dream made real out of vague bits. Swoon’s work has been selected for several festivals around the world. He’s an autodidact.
For images I wanted to do something with what Dave said on Facebook: “My biggest influences on the writing in this series, by the way, are the Serbian poets Vasko Popa and Novica Tadic. That’s the level of absurdism I’m trying to mine — a challenge for my somewhat too-logical mind.”
So I needed to go away from my usual way of setting up a project. I was not going to use layers; the feel of the films needed to have a slight touch of absurdism.
For “How to wait,” I wanted to film two bare feet standing/waiting. When I used a piece of bacon (lying around, waiting for lunch) to set focus and I looked at the test-footage, it struck me. This works. I love it when coincidences like this take a lead.
All I had to do was follow my trail of thoughts. Keep it simple. Film at home with what you can find in the kitchen.
For editing, I created three “storylines” of film for each text. Then I edited three different versions (backwards, …) of those three into a “nine-screen.”
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Swoon adds that more videos will probably follow. How exciting! I think the bacon works in part because of the English expression “bring home the bacon” and related phrases such as “save one’s bacon” and “chew the fat.” According to the U.K. site The Phrase Finder, “bacon has been a slang term for one’s body, and by extension one’s livelihood or income, since the 17th century.” So to me as a viewer, the bacon in these videos seems to symbolize the generalized object of striving or attention. In any case, I think Swoon’s use of it is a good demonstration of the Zen dictum, “first thought, best thought.”
