My friend K wrote, saying that my previous fragment here on disapearance/double lives/dopplegangers made her think of this collection of images which show stunt double/actress Hannah Kozac next to people that she was doubling for, mainly in various David Lynch movies.

The stills themselves seem like troubling real-world extensions of Mullholland Drive and Inland Empire.

K wrote: "it looks like the beginning of a big collection. and something about  star quality, and then suddenly a picture of her on fire."

*

Third part of a three part interview with William Gibson at Amazon, in advance of the release for his new one Spook Country which I'm really looking forward to after Pattern Recognition, has this nice interchange on writing and using google.

Amazon.com: So are you able to google during your writing day, or do you have to block that off and say, all right--

Gibson: No, I've got Word open on top of Firefox.

Amazon.com: That's very courageous.

Gibson: It's kind of the only way I can do it. It's replaced looking out the window, but I have to have--

Amazon.com: You need a certain stimulation to work off of.

Gibson: Yeah, I need a certain stimulation. It kind of feels like when you're floating underwater and you're breathing through a straw. The open Firefox is the straw: like, I can get out of this if I have to. I can stay under until I can't stand it anymore, and then I go to BoingBoing or something.

Amazon.com: I think for some writers, they'd never get back in the pool with Google open to them.

Gibson: It's not that interesting for me. I'm okay with it because it doesn't pull me in that much. The thing that limits you with Google is what you can think of to google, really. There's some kind of personal best limitation on it, unless you get lucky and something you google throws up something you've never seen before. You're still really inside some annotated version of your own head.

You are woken by the sound of a child five metres away, sat on the floor, assembling and disassembling Lego, as carefully and quietly as it is possible to do so.

*

When you check mail there is spam with the subject-line 'big king'. Later, when the mood dips, they write to you with more Viagra/Stock Offers under the headings 'laser down', 'compressed tabloid' and 'surly pocket'.

 Someone has arrived at my site using the search terms/keywords 'live not exist' and 'i do not exist'. Phillosophy students or anxious teenagers? Someone with other motives (?) arrived from the search term 'where does Meg Ryan live?'. Hint: this info cannot be found on my site.

*

V reporting an overheard phone conversation:

a guy in the line behind me at duane read
_{23/07/2007 16:24}
talking on the phone very loudly
_{23/07/2007 16:24}
First he says 'why have you not called that girl yet?'
_{23/07/2007 16:25}
then pause then he says
'shes a fucking assistant district attorney you idiot. and now theres fucking reporters everywhere. and that little bitch, i want her handcuffed when you take her out and i want her picture all over everything..
_{23/07/2007 16:26}
..cos that guy - hes a litle faggot - he wont keep his fucking mouth shut'
_{23/07/2007 16:26}
the checkout girl and i were looking at each other like 'oooo kkkk'

A nice invite for my video Starfucker as part of a show which will be in Stadtgalerie, Bern this September 8 - October 21st.

Curator Barnaby Drabble wrote me:

I originally saw the work in a hotel in St Sebastian at around three in the morning when i drunkenly turned on the tv set in the corner of the room and encountered the work (in Spanish) broadcast on a late night arts channel. I was thoroughly confused about what exactly I was watching, I had been hoping for figure skating.

The show Ein Zweites Leben/A Second Life sounds great in fact, with the following narrative explaining part of it's rationale:

As a short and easy overlooked side-plot in his most famous detective novel The Maltese Falcon, the American author Dashiel Hammet introduces us to the story of an everyday estate-agent named Flitcraft who, after a close brush with death on his lunch-break, leaves his wife and baby and simply disappears. When Hammet’s detective Sam Spade manages to track him down he finds him living under an assumed name in another suburb, similar to the one he lived in before, married to a woman more or less the same age as his wife, with a baby much like the one he left behind. When confronted by Spade, Flitcraft shows no remorse, explaining that in his organized life this was the closest he could come to escape.

In the third in a series of international exhibitions looking at contemporary pop-cultural phenomena the British curator Barnaby Drabble shows works from a selection of artists who deal with issues of re-enactment, multiple identities, double-agency and parallel worlds...

Kids in Conakry, Guinea gather late at night to revise for exams in the airport's main carpark, vying for positions under the streetamps. The country's economy is in severe crisis and most of the country, under martial law, is currently without electric power. A scene that's at the same time too strange, vivid and touching, too depressing and somehow optimistic to have been invented - with a reality like this one Science Fiction scarcely seems necessary. 

"The lot is teeming with girls and boys by the time Air France Flight 767 rounds the Gulf of Guinea at an hour-and-a-half before midnight. They hardly look up from their notes as the Boeing jet begins its spiraling descent over the dark city, or as the newly arrived passengers come out, shoving luggage carts over the cracked pavement.   

"I used to study by candlelight at home but that hurt my eyes. So I prefer to come here. We're used to it," says 18-year-old Mohamed Sharif, who sat under the fluorescent beam memorizing notes on the terrain of Mongolia for the geography portion of his college entrance test."

The whole story is here. I found it by a link at the excellent BoingBoing.