A vowel that fucks up the pronunciation, renders it variable. And, more importantly, it fucks up the fantasy. How much better. It conjures appetites that make one grovel in search of their impossible fulfillment. Is it just me? It feels like something that can be slotted between fur and foreskin, between the stump of contemporary experience and the phantom limb of richer lives, between metaphor and metonym when these learn to magically animate exercises that expand human behavior past stultifying collective norms.
To know that, e-less, hacked and cauterized, it shares its name with a piece of adhesive cloth used, in prude quarters, to cover the genitals in the filming of nude scenes only infuses it with a more tawdry spirit. In short, Moleskin sounds like something that, in a certain mood or reeved up enough, one should want to lick and lap, to choke on, rather than write and doodle in. Neither, of course, seems to exist any longer. Unlike basement fetish economies that can sometimes teach us to slip the heavy manacles of our conditioned bodies, the Moleskine notebook——the personal notebook in general——is a sadly conservative instrument.
The saddest thing of all is that the blisters from pulling index only energy spent in projection and not, as hoped, in preservation. It just means that to sport it properly requires a certain cultivated decadence, a finely tuned sense of cruel irony, aimed particularly at oneself.
A fetish-figure vesseled in a fetish-object. Kalach——of Vasconcelos Library fame——fell for it. He turned his Molsekine into a reproduction of a sketchbook, into a collection of his ideas at their larval stage, urgently captured in furious lines and ink washes. En plein air sketching is here given a potable oxygen tank so that it can take temporary leave from its deathbed.
There is no room for interpretation. Why not acknowledge, just for starters, in the smartly oblique way that this can be done, the central role that promotional value plays for both Kalach and Moleskine in this project? One brand adding value to another on a two-way street.
