Fish Bowl & Cigarettes: Teil Eins

This was the first enthusiastic spurt of jigsawed ideas that befell me after receiving this project. Cigarette smoke has to be the most intriguing and beautiful part of a cigarette. Produced from this small glowing tip into wisps of shadow… yes, I know it’s already been used in countless films as an artistic device: the curve and grace of it for femininity, the harsh reality of its production for masculinity.

But there’s more to it than that. It’s motion. It’s fluid mechanics. It’s a scientific device; it’s one of the few things that allow us to visualize air currents. We can see the lift that allows us to fly; we can see the backflows that da Vinci studied, which in blood closes ventricular valves. So sure, those are applications, but when I think of cigarettes, I think of the curl of smoke, and that’s caused by those same physical principles.

So a fish bowl? A container. Smoke, a fluid. Contain the smoke? I don’t know. An image of a fish bowl above a cigarette comes to mind, collecting the smoke as it nonchalantly burns low. And something clicks – this whole motion idea. The difference between motion and movement may be merely semantics, but something is there. Motion seems like movement without intention; an object can have motion, but a person creates movement. Automation. The smoke moves automatically because the factors affecting it move it. It happens as a direct result of the inputs, even if there are thousands of them: heat rising, pressures equalizing, butterfly pooping. And like every bad habit, like smoking, I’ve return to my past way of thinking about things, returned to the discussion of the last post.

For me, smoking is absolutely tied to a parentally decided ‘bad.’ “Talk to your kids about not smoking,” “Every cigarette takes three minutes off your life” and “Your dad quit smoking when he got married.” And a fish bowl – how could I escape the image of the reprimanding but futily enforcing goldfish from Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat? I’ll have to read that story again, and figure out why and how he fits in.

Back to the tangible ideas. I don’t want the cigarette to just burn, I want it to move underneath, too. I want to put it on a record player! Yeah, I’ll go to the thrift store and get one. Oh, and records, too, and fish bowls. And maybe a fish bowl on the record player, with water so that the water centrifuges outward (see sketches above). Nick Zammuto of the Books created some great rhythmic pieces with spirograph-type scratching on the inner part of records and digitally reordering them. I want to do that. Wait, automated music. Music caused by the motion and factors. Sweet, something is tying this all together. But why a record player, why was that so immediate? And halfway through checking out in a Christian-based thrift store, this comes to me:

Two starting points
should define
a line
Like orange ember tip to black eye bead
and infinite means between
but no means to an end
because they are two starting
too startling
points.
Who says the shortest distance
is the path of least resistance?
Like the swirl of smoke from filter to ceiling
the eddy of scales that enables breathing
to start
two starting
here’s to starting
Over.