I think New Year's is supposed to be a time to pause and think.

About the year that passed, about the year that's just beginning.

But tonight, I'm not interested in reflecting on the past or thinking to the future.

Every person, experience, thought, feeling of the past is filling me up.

All the potential of the future is making me overflow.

In this moment, everything - everyone - is with me.

And I can only be grateful and happy for that:

to be exactly where I am.

Here. Now.

We are intrepid.
We carry on.

Please, please, please...

Haven't had a dream in a long time
See, the life I've had
Can make a good man bad

So for once in my life
Let me get what I want
Lord knows, it would be the first time.

I believe that accessibility does not equate to disposability.

I believe that quality does not equate to inaccessibility.

I believe that the abstract can be accessible.

I believe that accessible does not equate to transparent.

I believe that pop can endure.

I believe that authenticity equates to quality.

I believe that reproducibility does not decrease quality.

I believe that the context of the moment of exposure affects reaction.

I believe that personal truth is in the reaction.

I believe reaction is performance art.

I believe art is connection, and art is reaction.

I believe art is life.

Goddamn. I just want all of this for everyone, all the time.

"I'm full of bad feeling."

Mrs. Murry stroked Meg's shaggy head. "Do you know why?"

"I hate being an oddball," Meg said. "It's hard on Sandy and Dennys, too. I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're just able to pretend they are. I try to pretend, but it isn't any help."

"You're much too straightforward to be able to pretend to be what you aren't," Mrs. Murry said.

- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

"Life is filled with abstractions...

"...and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution--seeing it, knowing it. It's emotion and intellect going together...

"Personally, I think intuition can be sharpened and expanded through meditation, diving into the Self. There's an ocean of consciousness inside each of us, and it's an ocean of solutions. When you dive into that ocean, that consciousness, you enliven it. You don't dive for specific solutions; you dive to enliven that ocean of consciousness. Then your intuition grows and you have a way of solving those problems--knowing when it's not quite right and knowing a way to make it feel correct for you. That capacity grows and things go much more smoothly."

- David Lynch

I really dig this.

(This is long but please, bear with me.)

Lynch talks about intuition as an "ocean of consciousness" that can be nurtured through meditation. I think it can also be expanded through exposure and experience.

Well; maybe "exposure" and "experience" are the wrong words. Let me try to explain. I quoted Robert McGee on story structure last fall:

"We all walk this earth thinking, or at least hoping, that we understand ourselves, our intimates, society, and the world. We behave accordingly to what we believe to be the truth of ourselves, the people around us, and the environment. But this is a truth we cannot know absolutely. This is what we believe to be true.

"We also believe we're free to make any decision whatsoever, to take any action whatsoever. But every choice and action we make and take, spontaneous or deliberate, is rooted in the sum total of our experience, in what has happened to us in actuality, imagination, or dream to that moment. We then choose to act based on what this gathering of life tells us will be the probable reaction from our world. It's only then, when we take action, that we discover necessity.

"Necessity is absolute truth. Necessity is what in fact happens when we act. This truth is known--and can only be known--when we take action into the depth and breadth of our world and brave its reaction. This reaction is the truth of our existence at that precise moment, no matter what we believed the moment before."

By McGee's explanation, I feel like the "sum total of our experience" shapes our intuition, and intuition is what we tap into when necessity prompts us to act. To me, McGee is saying, truth is in the reaction. Reaction stems from intuition. Intuition is our "ocean of consciousness," our personal truth.

How do we elicit reaction? We experience. We expose ourselves to new art, new happenings, new places and people and things and ideas. (New nouns? Haha.) Sometimes we partake. Sometimes we observe. Either way, if we are conscious that our reaction is a bit of our own personal truth, part of our own self, we can use that consciousness to identify the truth in the reactions, to sharpen our intuitions.

Jarmusch says to "steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination...select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul" to maintain authenticity. I say, do this also to sharpen intuition. Absorb everything, and be conscious of everything to which you react.

Lynch has something to say about action and reaction himself. He starts off talking about how he fell in love with the idea of the "art life" in high school and wanted to devote himself exclusively to painting.

"The art life means a freedom...it doesn't have to be selfish; it just means that you need time.

"[Painter] Bushnell Keeler...always had this expression: 'If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.'

"And that's basically true. You don't just start painting. You have to sit for a while and get some kind of mental idea in order to go and make the right moves...The idea just needs to be enough to get you started, because, for me, whatever follows is a process of action and reaction. It's always a process of building and then destroying. And then, out of this destruction, discovering a thing and then building on it... Then it's a matter of sitting back and studying it and studying it and studying it; and suddenly, you find you're leaping up out of your chair and going in and doing the next thing. That's action and reaction."

Joseph Campbell says that destruction and then the rebuilding of something new and better is the work of the hero. The true hero looks deep within himself, identifies the demons of dream and myth that we avoid because they threaten our security and comfort, and in tackling them, discovers his true self. Upon resurfacing, he becomes something better, and then helps the world become better as well.

Isn't, then, the work of the artist the work of the hero?

I am in love with exploring these ideas.

"Sewer Walking"

You and me, we used to talk
Like a river underground, the sewer where we used to walk.
The hole at the end empties out to the pier
Where paperboats disappear

Me, I try to send this note,
Float it like a paper boat,
But paper sinks and words are weak.
I try but I don't speak

Join together in the silent snow
Turn our faces up to see
Not endless night, but day
A pier
And you and me, talking.

- Unknown

"I will not allow it to be more man's nature than woman's to be inconstant and forget those they do love, or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe in a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings; capable of bearing most rough usage, and riding out the heaviest weather," [said Captain Harville.]

"Your feelings may be the strongest," replied Anne, "but the same spirit of analogy will authorize me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer-lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments...

"I hope I do justice to all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you. God forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures. I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman. No, I believe you capable of every thing great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as--if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone."

- Persuasion

In the center of the first world

It's laid out before us, who are we to break down?

Every day we wake up, we choose love, we choose light

And we try -- it's too easy just to fall apart

Love can free us from all excess, from the deepest debts

'Cause when our hearts are full we need much less...

This is a list of things that are currently taking up space in my brain. Most of them should NOT be there at this moment in time, so I am trying to empty my mind and regain some focus.

• 17th century Venetian opera.
• Let Me Down Easy and how it might compare to a historical theatre that existed pre-1850.
• Edward Albee.
• The degree to which my poetry sucks.
• How the way words sound affects the way we react to them.
• Why music is the one of the most universal art forms.
• The effects of blogging on the publishing industry, and in turn on the flow of [good] art into the public sphere.
• To what extent my GPA this semester will affect my cumulative GPA.
• What makes a given style of anything popular at a given time?
• "Appearance vs. reality," and not as a theme in Shakespeare - to what extent is everything appearance? If everything is relative, based on our perspective, is there a base reality to everything, a sole and inherent truth that is above all else?
• Existentially speaking, does one make a conscious decision in assigning meaning? Or is it something instinctively felt, not something given thought to? If the the latter is true, then is the meaning compromised the moment thought is given to it?
• How there is a distinct possibility that all the chemicals in diet soda will one day give me cancer.
• How bad of an idea it is for me to consider making macaroni & cheese right now when I ate gross amounts of Chinese food today.
• How things are named. I.e. bands, song names, books, eras of history, ice cream flavors, cars.
• How everything, including images, can be boiled down to a chemical reaction.
• How advertising often does not sell a product - it sells an image.
• My obsession with images, their creation, their meanings, and the ways they affect people.
• Art as a way of using imagery to convey a truth.
• The various ways people try to stop feeling empty, including but not limited to drugs, alcohol, food, meaningless sex, material objects, personal appearance.
• The implications of recreational drug use vs. the use of recreational drugs for the purpose of productivity.
• Hedonism.
• The process of discovery.
• The way we ascribe value to physical objects based on the feelings of nostalgia they evoke.
• The way geographic regions and cities become personalities with their own characteristics.
• The power of black and white vs. the power of color, and the contrasting values of both.
• Narcissism and obsession with one's own image, the ways in which interest in self image contradicts the hippie ideology, and the difficulty in navigating this in an age of digital social networking. The degree to which people now form connections through social networking.
• What it means not to care.
• Typography, and the use of different fonts and typefaces to manipulate an audience's perspective.
• The negative connotation of the word "manipulate," the magnitude of the power one has when they can manipulate something successfully.
• An artist's intention when creating, and to what extent his goal affects the overall impact and quality of his work.
• The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. Photography as a reproducible art with no inherent authenticity.
• Authenticity vs. originality in the creation of art.
• The differences between dignity and self-respect, and between them and pride, and pride and independence.
• Academic integrity.
• Christmas.
• Grad school. Gag.
• Personal style.
• How pissed I am that I missed the Vermeer exhibit at the Met this fall.
• Money. I'm broke.
• Self-destructive habits.
• How to stop thinking.
• Reality television and how it is demeaning to the whole art of television programming.
• What "home" is and how it changes.
• Giving, what it means to give, what it means to receive, ways of giving.
• Other people.
• Death.

Aside from those first 3 items, none of that has any business being on my mind right now.

Oh, and as is typical for lately:

• What am I doing. What the hell am I doing.

I don't know what number this is.

Mother of pearl. I definitely just spent the last hour and fifteen minutes sitting in the computer lab writing a less-than-mediocre poem instead of doing the massive amounts of work that I have due tomorrow. Whoops.

You won't let me catch you sleeping.
We sit silently on the daybed
in the sun room after midnight, shrinking back
into the shadows, skirting the fuzzy lights
of the color television broadcasting in black and white.
No floor boards creak -- everyone's asleep -- but you
[and I]
stare intently at the screen, thieving fleeting glimpses --
attempts to catch the movie playing in each our eyes.
Glasses serve as shields but can't stave off wayward raids
and the night makes us susceptible
to imperceptible waves of sudden indefinable need
to ask for what we should not have
that is not ours
that should not be.
I won't give up, you won't give in: no surrender, no one wins.
So we just sit, side by side, in the bleakest early light.
The TV becomes a dream to me as I slip into a rapturous repose,
and you become a figment, a sentinel at his post watching over me
with a sincerity that I can't see. Suddenly awake,
you stay to watch me sleep, and somehow I can sense it:
your irrefutably unaffected affection sweetens my dreams.
It spreads through my reverie as you kiss my forehead
and slip away unseen. But the aura doesn't linger,
and when I wake in midday, the television is color once again.
Did you catch me sleeping?
Did you enter my dreams?
Or was it just a black and white movie
playing out on a color TV?

There's nothing I can do

To keep from feeling like I blew

The only chance I had to make it better.

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

- John 8:32

I want to be free.

The more we struggle for "normalcy," be it society's definition of normalcy or simply what we perceive as comfortable and regular, the more perverted and twisted our condition becomes - the harder we grasp for control, the more out of control we spin.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

...in short, I was afraid.

"...There was this . . . entire life behind things. And this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever."

I love Explosions in the Sky. This song breaks my heart every time I hear it and I love that I can't explain why.

Peter: I still don't know what to write about.

James: Write about the whale.

Peter: What whale?

James: The one that's trapped in your head, dying to get out.

- Finding Neverland

For the first few weeks of the new school year, Nadia hardly spoke. All the sixth graders--like Mrs. Olinski herself--were new to Epiphany Middle School, but Nadia--like Mrs. Olinski herself--seemed the most disconnected. Both were watchers and waiters, cautious about being friendly, about showing themselves.

Then on the middle Monday in October, Nadia Diamondstein arrived in class with smile and addressed her teacher. "Don't you think, Mrs. Olinski, that autumn is the most glorious time of year?" Mrs. Olinski confessed that it was her favorite season and told Nadia that she sometimes felt guilty because she thought she ought to prefer spring, with its pledge to make the lilies bloom again.

Every morning thereafter, Nadia smiled as she entered class and greeted Mrs. Olinski with a word from her southern past. She said, "Hey."

Mrs. Olinski knew that Nadia Diamondstein was not only incandescently beautiful but was also a star.

- The View From Saturday

E. L. Konigsburg

Goddamn I miss this place.

One day, I woke up and realized I don't want any of this.

Then I realized, okay, that's a partial lie.

I don't know what I want. So how can I know if I want what I have or not? Or if I'll ever want it?

I can't decide if I think this has been a good semester or not.

Academic failure. But. Question mark.

"Okay, I can handle this. I'll just get myself into a Zen place. Play music. Cook. Write. Focus."

A time for departure.

I was talking with a couple friends tonight, and it made me think of these old blog entries that I wrote:

Monday, October 29, 2007: So this is actually pretty funny.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008: Life really bugs me.

The frustrations I describe in them are feeling all too familiar again. What renewed me last time was 1) Venice and 2) Venice friends.

I wonder what it will be this time. I have to find something. Someone. Something. Be proactive. Ha.

"Good luck exploring the infinite abyss."

It's interesting, seeing the things people will do to fill that inexplicable, unreachable void that parasitically inhabits so many of us. These things range from self-destructive, to brave, to completely futile - and aren't mutually exclusive in design. It's like watching someone trying to fill a pinpricked cup and not understanding why it won't hold water: amusing at times, and often absurd, but there's pathos in it, too. And sometimes it's just frustrating to watch and not be able to help.

Although, I don't know how to find the hole in the cup I'm holding, either, much less how to plug it up. So I guess I shouldn't talk.

"I'm worried I'm always in love."

Well, not really. I just really like that song and it seemed appropriate: I was thinking before about how often I say I'm in love - and how often it's true.

Andy was their easy going child. He...called on his cell whenever he was eating a really great meal or looking at something beautiful. In Andy's life these things happened frequently. "The most amazing sunset!" he would say. "The most amazing tapas!"

That's basically me. I used to wonder how I could love so many things so much. Now I just enjoy it. I get that precise thrill of discovery and wonder on a regular basis from so many things, both mundane and extraordinary. But that's just it - to me, it's all extraordinary. Even if it is, at times, painful, as only this kind of staggering awe can be. And like Andy, I always want to share it - usually, unfortunately, with people who aren't there. Isn't that what it's all about though? Falling in love with the small, exquisite moments and sharing them, connecting over them. A line in a song, the way a cloud reveals the sun, the way a certain painting looks. I've fallen in love with them all, shared them all.

I just miss having someone to share them all with.

And having someone who shares theirs with me.

In that sense, it's easier to choose to be alone than it is to be surrounded by people who I can't share things with. To wander a museum, to watch the sunrise, to admire architecture, to observe the way the wind moves tree branches - it's so much easier to do these things alone than it is to try to do these them with people who can't understand or appreciate the way I see them.

In isolating myself like that, though, I find myself not giving people a chance. I don't let them try to see what I see, or even to try to see it their way. Like cauterizing a wound before anything else can infect - or help heal. I'm so clumsy at communicating anything, I get into a funk and feel like there's no point in trying. I hate that. I'm trying not to do that.

The absolute worst, though, are the empty days that I don't get that thrill at all.

I'm trying so hard not to have any of those. When I do have them, it's my fault for not having the gumption or the sense of humor to see the beauty that can always be found.

Story of my life.

I'm in love with illusions,

so saw me in half.

I'm in love with tricks,

so pull another rabbit out' your hat.

"It was November...

...the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines."

Look how icy those blues are. So blue, so blue.

I hate November. In theory, I love it. Or, I suppose, I love my romanticized mental image of it. Crimson sunsets and sad sea hymns? Deeply, painfully lovely. The experience? Just painful.

"The elemental vastness of the windblown world."

"Elemental vastness."

Around here, November is a month of transition. The brisk, rosy days of October and Indian summer don't fade - they drain. The skies are emptied of their life and left drab and dull, and even the sun cools to a stark, hard white, piercing through the listless clouds. The nights are darker than ever, except for the glinting stars. Sometimes the stars help, crowding the "spiritual firmament" with a friendly glow. But sometimes they hurt. Sometimes they seem so far away, and the world seems bigger and emptier than ever. Deep breaths of night air just cut like knives through your lungs. Everything reassuring is gone. And the windows of the apartments, the dorms, the houses - their warm yellow lights warn away trespassers. It gets harder and harder to fill the space between.

All I can remember of last winter is the emptiness of the spaces between, and how badly I want to close the gaps.

I'm getting restless again and I don't know what to do.

----------------
Now playing: Simon & Garfunkel - Bookends

Every stupid, miserable word that falls from my mouth or slips from my fingers sounds feels looks is wrong. Every attempt for smooth, fluid motion stops short and fails in action. The words just die, flat and useless, the moment they materialize. It just all feels so hard and plastic. I want loose and elastic. It's like I'm trying too hard. It feels false and premeditated. But my mind is blank and I flounder - I have to try just to come up with anything at all. These aren't images. They're empty structures with fluff plugged into them. Something's missing.

I need to read more.

Joan: How could you?! How could you just leave me?!

Adam: I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Joan: No! How could you just leave me there?

Adam: I tried! Okay? I couldn't do it. Not after my mother, I . . . I couldn't. I . . . I just couldn't see someone throw her life away like that.

Joan: She didn't . . . she didn't kill herself.

Adam: Some people do it all at once. And some people do it a little bit every day.

Joan: [pause] I loved her.

Adam: I know. And I don't know why that doesn't matter.

I copied this down a few weeks ago after watching this episode with Kay and crying, like I do every time I watch that episode, but I never wrote anything else down about it. I don't really know what I had been thinking about or what I had thought about writing. I just know that every once in a while, those last two lines of Adam's, they pop into my head. When it feels like everyone around me - including myself - is acting self-destructive. When life doesn't seem fair. When I try to help someone and can't. When I can't help someone understand how loved they are. Just in general, when someone I want to be close to, seems so far away, and I can't reach them, or have no right to. When life hurts, sometimes those words will pop into my head. Sometimes they make me feel better. Sometimes they don't.

I think I need to start sleeping more.

----------------
Now playing: Ray LaMontagne - Be Here Now

I'm pretty convinced time is doing something funky right now because the past five days have felt like months, but they have passed at the speed of light. If the rest of semester - and year - goes the same way, I'm in trouble.

She said, "Take me to London, tell me something I don't know."

Trying to decide how serious I am about potentially going to grad school in London. If I'm pretty serious, I might nix UCLA, USC, and NYU from my application list and just do 4 or 5 schools in London. And maybe still Columbia.

The upside:

• When else am I going to get the chance to live in London for a year?
• Easy access to the rest of Europe. By which I really mean, I could go to Scotland and France. Finally.
• It's only one year.
• Slightly cheaper tuition...I think.
• Easier applications - they don't care about the GRE's and are less interested in writing samples.
• Last I heard, James McAvoy was living in London. :: Swoon. ::
• Probably easier to get into a PhD program should I decide to continue after getting my M.A.
• West End theater!
• Great chance to get away from everything that makes me think too much at home and have a fresh start. (That's one of the upsides of life, actually: you can always mentally wipe the slate clean and start again.) (It just struck me that that is a very American notion - the idea that a person can go somewhere new and create a better life for himself. Mmm.)

The downside:

• Away from family and friends and home for an entire year. (Even though they could visit!!)
• London is maddd expensive. At this moment, one British pound sterling is the equivalent of $1.656 USD. Better than it was last summer, but still.
• Before I grew up and got a dose of that little thing they call "reality," Columbia was one of my dream schools. Well, okay, it WAS my dream school. That and NYU. I didn't even bother applying to either for undergrad. I don't think I want to throw all my eggs in the London basket. But I also don't want to do/pay for the extra apps.
• The weather. I got depressed when it rained here for two weeks straight. How could I ever be okay in England?

I shouldn't be thinking about any of this, yet. I'm pretty sure after tomorrow (when I fail the GRE miserably), I'll realize once again that I'll be lucky to get into any grad program.

Meh.

"Time to Pretend"

I hadn't gotten to MGMT's Oracular Spectacular when I wrote about the music I was listening to 2 months ago, but I recently read this description of my favorite track by them and wanted to copy it down.

What makes "Time to Pretend" so universally liked (even by cranky indie rock purists) is its dazzling wire walk between smug, smartass irony and actual lust for the kind of fucked-up celebrity lifestyle that keeps Perez Hilton in bandwidth. MGMT's perfect sound was an evolution. The duo's earlier self-produced Casio-chintzy version of the song made no secret of then-college students Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wyngarden's dry disdain. But Dave Fridmann's major-label-funded take two is something out of Hieronymus Bosch, a lush pleasure garden of melodies twining like naked limbs, guitars and drums distorted into dirty, Ecstatic grooves. It's all a little unsettling-- decadence always is. But MGMT pull "Pretend" off with the kind of conviction that standing on the precipice of stardom can give you. --Amy Granzin

Pitchfork Media's notes on the track, which they rated as #99 on their list of the top 500 songs of 2000-2009.

I told a friend a while ago that "Time to Pretend" is my favorite song by MGMT, even though most people prefer "Kids" or "Electric Feel." I said that I think most people interpret it as the singers' serious desire to screw around with their lives and have a good time while they're young, but I prefer to see it as a disdainful mockery of people who do that - or a weird mix of the two. I love how absurd it is, and how it bounds between being youthfully indulgent and angsty, artfully annoyed and celebratory. A lot of that is in the contrast between the music and the lyrics. Ms. Granzin pretty much read my mind, I'm convinced. I recommend it highly.

Also, I really dig Hieronymus Bosch.

I don't know if gin was around in 15th century Netherlands, but if it was, I bet Bosch enjoyed it.

"Self-sufficient." Well, that's one way of putting it...

In one sense, I really admire people who can just let things roll off their backs, who can just let go and move forward without looking back. People who never seem to lose, but to leave. In another sense, I wouldn't want to be like that, for fear of taking for granted everything I do have. How can you appreciate what you have if you never mind leaving it for something else?

To find beauty in that moment of loss and departure, for me, means reconciling the two. Appreciating that you're losing something great but having the strength to leave it for something new. It's a peculiar balance.

I wrote something about that once. Junior year I guess. Let me see if I can find it.

Mmm. Here:

I've come to the realization that I'm addicted to sunsets and Island Heights. They're such good company - sunsets I mean - silent, never the same for more than a couple minutes, warm, and so full of beauty, that they're incapable of failing to soothe even my worst mood. Of course, they leave one feeling rather lonely when they end and drain the rest of the color from the sky, but it's that way with people too - only with sunsets, you just have to leave them before they leave you. Thinking about it, I suppose that could work with people too, if you're self-sufficient enough. Or if the people are really bad company. : )

Yes, I did include the smiley face when I originally wrote that. I really was addicted to watching the sunset in Island Heights back then. In April and May, I'd go almost every night after dinner and sit there on my favorite bench in my favorite park and watch the sun set over the river. Sometimes I'd take pictures. Usually I'd bring a blanket and sometimes my mp3 player and would just stew. Depending on my mood, I'd either stay til dusk had passed, or I'd leave just as the sun disappeared below the horizon, before it got dark - before I felt alone again. Soon after that I discovered my preference for sunrises - you start off in the dark instead of ending in it.

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
- The Catcher in the Rye

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Now playing: Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins - You Are What You Love

No. 12

Forgot to post this the other day. Wrote it down on my cell phone at the Jason Mraz concert during the shortest set in the history of the world. Figured I'd copy it off my phone even though it doesn't really say anything because I haven't posted in ages..

so give me all you got
because I’ve never had enough.
lift this weighty cup of hate and love
to my thirsty lips and tip
it back to feed my cravings
and fill the holes that
hunger has gnawed in my paper heart
like earthworms through the dirt
beneath the soles of my
tired feet that tread
water churning slowly
flowing to and fro
full of froth and foam so sweet
it melts like whipped cream
in a mug of dark, rich cocoa –
nectar or ambrosia that
dripped off spilled saucers on Parnassus
into the sea to feed the starfish and the whales
and the men who sail on waves
that grow and build before they crash
and drown all things in a blanket of
glorious darkness, cold and smooth
sugaring the land to sweeten the future
triumphs of the next life to brave the waters,
who plans and makes and lives anew
amidst blue winds
that paint the world
in brilliant brushstrokes of
royal violet and gold
so pure it’s whiter than light
the platinum plated love cup
that quenches all.

----------------
Now playing: Chris Ayer - The Revealing

Windblown World.

I do really enjoy Kerouac's journals though. I read bits and pieces from this compilation called Windblown World for a report a couple years ago, and I keep meaning to pick up a copy so I can read the rest. This was part of one of his entries, and I adore it:

If all our greatest writers had been men who were constitutionally unhappy and constitutionally defeated in the world, we would have reason to despair of all knowledge and imagination, or if not that, despair of the utter lack of responsibility in imaginative talented men. But there are great writers who were true men in every sense -- Mark Twain is one. An uncomplaining man, a man who did not believe that literature is a constant tale of sorrow and nothing else. What does the gloomy sophomore write in his melodramatic tragedy? -- certainly not the whole truth. Mark Twain piloted steamboats, dug for silver in Nevada, roamed the West, 'roughed it', told jokes with other men, hunted, worked as foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, lecturer, and was a family man -- and yet, he did not have to sacrifice all that to his 'art,' he lived and wrote, he was a full man and a full artist, equally happy and whole as unhappy and unwhole, equally gregarious as he was lonely, equally, healthily, simply all things, and I believe he asked that his work not be compared to 'literature as it is known' because he wasn't doing 'that kind of thing at all.' He was just writing, not what he thought 'literature' demanded of him... Let's have another man who lives his life in the world, complete, and also writes great books.

It's easy to look at someone in retrospect like that, and idealize his life. I'm sure Twain wasn't as content with that constant struggle between being whole and unwhole, as Kerouac makes him seem. That's the thing though: it's such a terribly wonderful balancing act. Here's from another entry, which I also enjoy immensely:

The flesh has ceased to mean anything to me. What does it matter whether I gain the meager satisfactions of the penis or not? What has that foul, insuitable, lame worm to do with me? – even if it fills at the sight of a thigh? So no? The sun goes up, the sun goes down – so? The sea is golden; does that make me golden? does that make me salt
What’s me? Me is that which want to be amazed without natural cessation, in an eternity of ecstacy.
Rules? Laws? To me, what?
I am free to want what I want.
I want uninterrupted rapture. I believe this has been made manifest to me in dreams, and in music, and in the pages of Dostoevsky, in the lines of Shakespeare, in sexual joy, in drunkenness, in being high on tea. Why should I compromise with anything else or with the “Bourgeois” calm of the backyard lawn, The Edgar Guest concession wild, wild happiness.
On tea I have seen the light. In my youth I saw the light. In my childhood I bathed in the hints of light; I hankered, eager.
I want a blaze of light to flame in me forever in a timeless, dear love of everything. And why should I pretend to want anything else? After all, I’m no cabbage, no carrot, no stem! a burning eye! a mind of fire! a broken goldenrod! a man! a woman! a SOUL!
Fuck the rest, I say, and PROCEED!
(This is what I want to write, not stylistic crap!)

Some of his phrases are just so perfect, I can't even stand it. The way that only a handful of commonplace words just seem to belong to each other, it's like they burst from some secreted, unreal place, and just flowed forward and came out together. And the imagery is so vivid, I can see this whole flash of color and light and darkness when I read these simple combinations of words, and it takes my breath away. That sounds so ridiculous, but it's true. It's exhilarating. I love it. It's so...raw. Perfect.

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Now playing: Wilco - Misunderstood

Application of Kerouac's 'Belief & Techniques.'

21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better

27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

Hypocrisy alert: I've never read On the Road. I got about 50 pages in and never finished because I couldn't tolerate the indulgent nature of Kerouac's "spontaneous prose." I admire it in theory but actually trying to read it and then decipher it gives me a headache. However, I have no problem applying his techniques myself and writing beyond stream-of-consciousness in his "spontaneous" way. So if this gives you a headache...sorry. You don't have to read it or make sense of it.

I do feel a bit better having written it though.

all I want is everything, to snatch and catch and grab and squeeze all of human experience, everything there is, the highest highs and lowest lows, the deepest of emotions and oceans of love and hate and pain and peace and tragedy and ecstasy and madness – especially the madness – and oh the LAUGHTER, and capture it, hold it for a moment in the palm of my hand, in a fierce orb of pure life
and then RELEASE it.
unchain unbind the tiny microcosmic cosmic blast and watch in slow motion as the most dangerous fearsome weapon and greatest most powerful healer expands across the universe in an unstoppable unreasonable irrational force beyond all reckoning
flowing like lava, a nuclear holocaust flattening, washing over everything in its path but killing nothing and everything at once blanketed in whiteness icier than snow and warm in its grasp, not wrath, but true clarity
exposing the distance between us, the mere inches centimeters millimeters that feel like miles and the darkness that exists in the in between that pushes us apart like electromagnets fueled by the ungovernable blinding blackness in which it lives no exists like a parasite feeding off our doubt and pain and hunger
our hunger to devour, to express, as we starve desire yearn for everything contained in the LIFE released in that moment and chase it down like it’s the only thing that can save us and maybe it is, maybe that’s all that matters is the race, the chase, the pursuit that ensues when we awake and see and realize that what we feel is real RIGHT NOW and even when tomorrow comes and nothing is real any more, it doesn’t matter, so long as we keep on fighting the good fight in the neverending struggle that consumes us
and then time resumes and that fleeting life vision vanishes, the ephemera become phantasms and disappear in a flash, but liberated I saw it with my own mind’s eye, reflected in your eyes, because all I want is everything and everything is you is me is us is one is all. right now. forever.

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Now playing: Stars - Ageless Beauty

19. Accept loss forever

- Jack Kerouac
Belief & Technique for Modern Prose

I like words.

These are some of my favorites:

- mad
- quibble
- conundrum
- illusory
- nebulous
- ephemeral
- clarity
- flee
- vast
- dusk
- transient
- inhibition
- lingering
- anguish
- spectrum
- whirl
- sacrilege
- consecrate

- intrinsic

And of course

- absurd.

Restraint is more painfully tragic than the most emotional explosion, and the most heartbreaking words are the ones not uttered.

"They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?"

I'm presently making a huge mistake:

I'm attempting to multi-task while watching Richard Linklater's Waking Life.

Bad move. Most of the film is dialogue/discourse, and most of the discourse is thick with philosophy and heavy ideas. A lot of the people are speaking quickly and I'm having trouble keeping up, since I'm not devoting my full attention to it. What I'm catching, though, I love. It's giving me a much clearer sense of Linklater and his aims in film.

Now that I've seen Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, A Scanner Darkly (which I really didn't like), and this, I guess I have to go back to the beginning of his filmography and see Slacker and Dazed and Confused. And I want to find subUrbia on VHS still, since I really enjoyed reading the play.

As far as I can tell, 1990s Linklater seems to be preoccupied with Gen X angst and 20-somethings coming of age. One thing I love about Before Sunrise and Before Sunset is that in seeing how Jesse and Celine grow and mature between 1995 and 2004, you consequently see how Linklater's grown. I also like that about Ethan Hawke. Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites and Before Sunrise is not the same as Ethan Hawke 10 years later.

A lot of people don't like him. I do. The more interviews I read with him, the more I respect him. Gen X-ers came of age in the mid-'90s and he had to do it on film for an international audience. It seems like he had to endure condemnation for that for so long, that looking back, he has a different kind of an attitude that seems to say, "I'm doing what I want, I'm looking for fulfillment, and if you don't like what I'm doing, fuck you." Very Jersey, haha. He did, if I recall, go to high school here. This is from an interview that came out right after he did Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

EW: Do you feel more in the zone creatively now than you did at the peak of your infamy as a Gen-X icon 10 years ago?
Hawke: Absolutely. We as a culture love to celebrate people in their early 20s. But it's not a comfortable place to be in your mid-20s. You don't know who you are as a person. You're screwing up left and right. It's very awkward. I've found that the older I get, the easier it is to be the person you want to be. Self-importance has a stranglehold on people in their early 20s. That's the razor's edge you need to walk: to take yourself seriously but not too seriously.

Did it make you feel vulnerable to revisit [your] novel [when adapting it for film] after being so criticized for its self-absorption?
If you're me, there's a lot of advantages that come with it and a lot of disadvantages that come with it. People never hesitate to tell me when they think I'm an asshole.

So aren't you tempted to bury that part of yourself and hope people forget?
I can't. I buck at that. I was too young to be held accountable for how you felt about me when I was 23. I enjoy life too much to let myself be defined by that.

Are you happy with how it turned out?
It was a weird opportunity to get to make such a personal film in such a corporate age. To use cinema for self-expression in an age when everything is supposed to be a commodity for sale, I felt so privileged, and all of that was such a luxury. People who don't like my film don't like it passionately because they get this idea that self-reflective art is an act of egregious narcissism. And if that is true, what do we say to Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, to Proust to Whitman? You start to take a certain pride in their hatred of it. But the truth is, I'm really not only interested in self-reflective art. There's also a bunch of other stuff I'd rather do.

That's encouraging.

I understand why people denounce anything that even hints at self-importance and -involvement--I do it too. But part of me thinks, what is art for, if not for expression? And what's wrong with a little self-reflection, when so many people go through life without ever stepping back and really looking at themselves? Or without anyone ever really looking at them?

I'll probably look back at this some day and laugh at how self-involved and self-reflecting I was. I kind of am already. I'm okay with that. Everything is absurd, and sometimes all you can do is laugh at it all.

Commencement.

Yesterday, I went to a funeral to celebrate the death of everything I know.

We stood stiffly shoulder to shoulder in standard issue uniforms around the burning pyre as they handed us receipts—proof that we had passed through town and stayed here for a while, and a one-way ticket out.

No one knew what to say.

The silence spread through empty rooms and barren halls where ghosts still dance on tabletops to the echoes of our soundtrack, the musical story of our time together punctuated with laughter and end-stopped with a teardrop.

After an hour or two, the fire began to dwindle, but still we stood staring until the last spark died and a cold breeze blew the ashes into the sea, taking with it everything but our memories.

So we packed away our uniforms and became ourselves once more, but nothing was quite the same, and they gently pushed us out and firmly closed the door.

Empty and uncertain, we looked at each other and shrugged, not knowing where to go next.

One by one we fell away without a word—no one dared to say “goodbye” because “goodbye” implies “forever.”

Until, we remembered the permanence of impermanence, and began again.


(Not about me, despite the first person. Just the general atmosphere. What else is there to say. And like everything else, it's a work in progress.)

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Now playing: Vampire Weekend - Walcott

It never ends.

About two months ago, I was talking to a few friends. One said she was afraid of the fact that she and a close guy friend had romantic feelings for each other because she was afraid of ruining their friendship, and even though it sounds corny, she can't imagine not having him in her life.

I told her that I hate that reason for not giving it a shot because 1) If it doesn't work out, you truly can still be friends if you BOTH want it enough, and 2) There are people that we think we can't live without. And then something happens and we find out, we can live without them. Life goes on.

I fully believe that.

I do, however, also believe in something I wrote four months ago:

You never really "get over" losing someone you love. You just learn how to accept it and turn it into something else. And if you loved them, you never really lose them, because they've had an impact on you--they've made a difference in your life and it's a part of you. The pain just mellows out.

It's funny. I was thinking before about the day in Venice when we went to the Universita Ca' Foscari and heard Kathy's friend Shaul lecture about the Venetian ghetto and The Merchant of Venice. After that, we took the vaporetto up from Dorsoduro to Cannaregio and had lunch in a cafeteria and then walked down to the old apartments that used to constitute the ghetto. During lunch, I somehow got to talking to Kathy about "intellectual alienation," as she called it, and we continued talking about it the rest of the day. I don't even really remember what we said, but I do remember that she emphasized to me: the struggle never ends.

I remember exclaiming to her that that was terribly depressing to hear. She shrugged, and told me very earnestly that it's true: she's been struggling with it her whole life, and even now, she still does.

She told me that nearly one year ago, to the day. In the past year, I've found myself oscillating between contentment and hopefulness, and despair and frustration, fairly evenly. When I came back from Venice, I was still pretty high. By July/August, I was falling hard and fast. September, I started getting better again. Pretty mellow for the most part, aside from some moments, through the fall. Winter break I went nuts, and it was even worse when I got back. I started looking up in March, and after Relay, I was pretty content all through April, though tormented by other things. Now I'm back home and frustrated and angry and feeling this dull ache all the time again. I'm trying to embrace it and channel it toward something productive, but sort of failing so far.

In a strange way, this past semester has kind of mimicked the second half of my junior year of high school. All of that year was pretty great, but the second half was just so crammed full of new friends, old friends, adjusted relationships, and crazy emotions, that the first two and a half years of high school are barely memorable by comparison. I can distinctly recall vivid, isolated incidences from those six months, while the two and a half years before that seem like a blur. That's how I feel about this past semester--as though I have lived more in the past five months than I did the two and a half years before that.

I wrote in my journal a lot at the end of junior year. I journaled a lot this semester. Mmm.

Well, I just hope senior year of college is a lot better than senior year of high school. Well...less painful. I don't know if I could go through that again. Although, isn't that what life is--fearing pain, taking a chance and living anyway, getting the shit kicked out of you, and then finding the strength to get back up again?

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Now playing: Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma

Anticlimactic.

The past two weeks, I've mostly been too busy, too cranky, or too overwhelmed to write anything.

Super lame, right.

I don't really have anything to say right now, either. Womp womp.

I realized before that I've put a couple hundred miles on my car since getting home on Friday, purely from driving up and down Rt. 35 aimlessly so much.

I do a lot of that when I'm home--driving around feeling frustrated and angry and lonely and scared and like a failure and trying to pinpoint why I feel that way.

Is summer over yet?

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Now playing: She & Him - I Thought I Saw Your Face Today

I know that I know it.

"The response we make when we 'believe' a work of the imagination is that of saying: 'This is the way things are. I have always known it without being fully aware that I knew it. Now in the presence of this play or novel or poem (or picture or piece of music) I know that I know it.'"
- Thornton Wilder

I would add "person" to that list.
Art is an awakening to something you always knew existed but were never quite aware of.
You could say the same about love, I suppose.
I love being woken up. Especially by people I know.

A poem.

I'm in the middle of hurrying to write 3 more pages about the Holocaust in media in the next hour, but I had a moment of inspiration(?) so I stopped and jotted this down. It needs work, but I like it. Especially the fat lady.

hidden gazes
stolen glances
across a crowded room.

soon, I say
I’ll walk on by
nonchalant
casual like.
trying not to stare at her…
there’s a lump in my throat.
she turns.
I duck and cover
behind the fat lady
with the red purse
and three kids who go running by.
I peer…
she's still there.
the brats spill fruit punch
on my shoes.
over the fat lady’s shoulder, I see
the laugh rises in her throat.
she chokes it back
but her eyes can’t lie.
amid the chaos they dance

and then
the fat lady moves

and there he is.
his dark eyes widen.
in the headlights, he freezes
crimson climbing up his cheeks
like a bounty paper towel
soaking up spilled punch.
I can’t hear anything.
just Bach running through my head
the lone cello…
I can’t see anything.
the fat lady has dissolved and it’s only
him.
the second lasts for hours in my mind
and when the music stops
he turns away.
I’m not blind.
you don’t want to look me in the eyes
because that’s the only place you see yourself
because you know I always see you.
I see you.
I see you.

Generally speaking, I think we lose a little and gain a little every day. Some days we lose more than others; some days we gain more. Keeping it in balance and finding the perspective to see the gains outstrip the losses is how we keep on keeping on.

"We choose love...

...We choose anger. We choose happiness. We choose boredom. You pick and choose based on the rush you give your body when it experiences a certain emotion. Some people, or the lack of some people, help you to trigger these emotions. So if you want Joy, all you have to do is trigger it yourself."

- Jason Mraz

I have discovered that recently, I have acquired the ability to trigger joy myself. There are about a thousand different things (and people...) right now that should be (and normally would be) making me stressed out, angry, upset, sad, and a ton of other not-so-pleasant. emotions. But I'm actually embracing my anger and frustration and disappointment and riding it out, for the most part, and enjoying the experience and the moment. It's kind of a miracle, given how super sensitive and overly-caring I am, and my tendency to let things get me down. I'm feeling buoyant though, and I like it. I said to someone today that I'm a pretty happy person, and right now, that's actually true. I'm pretty proud of that.

I suppose that explains why I haven't written so much on here lately. Haven't felt the need to. I like feeling like that, sometimes--compelled to obsess, to try to write out my frustrations. I like not needing to do that, too, though. Or channeling it into something different and more creative. That, I need to do more. And I still need more discipline. But in general, I'm okay with myself and my life right now. That'll probably change once school's over, but we'll see...

GET ANGRY

Buff: Yo man, you're getting me all upset here.
Jeff: You should get upset! Everyone should get upset... It's my duty as a human being to get pissed off. Not that it makes any difference in the first place. Nothing ever fucking changes... It's all so fucking futile!
Tim: If it's all so fucking futile what the fuck are you so fucking upset about, fuckhead?
Jeff: I'm fucking alienated.
Buff: Me, too! I'm alienated, too. But at least there's Oreos.


...I don't even really like Oreos.

New Poem.

Formatting's messed up as usual. Whatever.


my words
they're falling in pieces
meandering
trudging through mind muck
breaking up
smaller every second
syllables separate
disintegrate
dissolve
spinning
they revolve
tumbling
down
brain to blood
blood to lips
lips to air to ears
HEAR:
what’s in my brain
doesn’t make it to your ears
fear and nerves rattle my words
they race around mental curves
vibrating herds of garbled noise
jumbled
they are mine no more
the moment the sound slipped from my lips
I knew:
the words were from another
from a foreign tongue
or a clumsy puppeteer
borrowing my lungs
to fuel her mixed up message
to mess with my sentiment
scramble my meaning
my feeling
perhaps it will translate
untangle
unravel
between your ears and brain
aim for restoration
reassemble my narration
patience cooperation
come to understand:
my words,
they have a mind of their own.

This is precisely how I feel today.

It had been years since Dick had bottled up malice against a creature—since freshman year at New Haven when he had come upon a popular essay about "mental hygiene." Now he lost his temper at Baby and simultaneously tried to coop it up within him, resenting her cold rich insolence. It would be hundreds of years before any emergent Amazons would ever grasp the fact that a man is vulnerable only in his pride, but delicate as Humpty-Dumpty once that is meddled with—though some of them paid the fact a cautious lip-service. Doctor Diver's profession of sorting the broken shells of another sort of egg had given him a dread of breakage. But:

"There's too much good manners," he said on the way back to Gstaad in the smooth sleigh.

"Well, I think that's nice," said Baby.

"No, it isn't," he insisted to the anonymous bundle of fur. "Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them."

"I think Americans take their manner rather seriously," said the elder Englishman.

"I guess so," said Dick. "My father had the kind of manners he inherited from the days when you shot first and apologized afterward. Men armed—why you Europeans haven't carried arms in civil life since the beginning of the eighteenth century——"

"Not actually, perhaps——"

"Not actually. Not really."

"Dick, you've always had such beautiful manners," said Baby conciliatingly.

The women were regarding him across the zoo of robes with some alarm. The younger Englishman did not understand—he was one of the kind who were always jumping around cornices and balconies, as if they thought they were in the rigging of a ship—and filled the ride to the hotel with a preposterous story about a boxing match with his best friend in which they loved and bruised each other for an hour, always with great reserve. Dick became facetious.

"So every time he hit you you considered him an even better friend?"

"I respected him more."

"It's the premise I don't understand. You and your best friend scrap about a trivial matter——"

"If you don't understand, I can't explain it to you," said the young Englishman coldly.

—This is what I'll get if I begin saying what I think, Dick said to himself.

He was ashamed at baiting the man, realizing that the absurdity of the story rested in the immaturity of the attitude combined with the sophisticated method of its narration.


Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Pet peeve.

I hate it when people think I'm indifferent and indecisive about everything just because I don't care about stupid shit.

I'm pretty easygoing about a lot of things. Most of the time, I'd rather that someone else pick what tv show we watch, what music we listen to in the car, who drives, where we go for dinner, what time we go to the movies. If it doesn't matter to me, and it matters to you, why should I decide? I don't want to hear you bitch if I decide and you don't agree, when it doesn't perturb me either way. It makes other people happy, and it's so easy, so why pretend to care about shit I don't care about?

But just because I can go with the flow about little things, doesn't mean I don't care about anything.

Art and "Why?"

I suppose no one ever stops thinking about the "Meaning of Life" or whatever you want to call it, even if they feel like they should stop thinking about it and just live. There are a few things I've concluded in the past few years, though, without really meaning to do so, and I'd just like to jot them down before I forget.

Art is life.

My favorite quote from Dead Poet's Society is this:

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

We live for art. That's basically what he's saying. And this is what that means to me:

As humans, we each lead singular lives. We are all individuals with our own individual perspectives, views, feelings, thoughts, and these defining elements will never be reproduced in someone else in exactly the same way. At the same time, while we experience separately, much of what we experience is the same, and while we embrace our uniqueness and celebrate originality and independent thought, we embody a strange yet innate contradiction by constantly seeking companionship--by looking for ways to assure ourselves that in fact, we are not alone.

No one wants to be alone. Even if a person takes cold comfort in desiring solitude, it's not truth. No one wants to feel like he is the only person on earth in history to ever experience what he is experiencing. Everyone wants to be unique, and everyone is--but everyone also wants to be understood and heard.

To me, this is the cause of all art.

Art is the attempt to share your perspective, you own individual assessment of an experience, with someone else who can identify with your experience. It's letting others see an experience that they share, through your eyes. It's communicating your thoughts and emotions and ideas. It's introducing others to your way of seeing and feeling. It's inspiring them to reevaluate their own way of doing this.

Art brings people together. It gives them a shared human experience. It makes them feel like they are not alone. It lays the groundwork for connection on a deeper level. I don't think you can love art without loving people. Though sometimes art is making people feel uncomfortable, forcing them to confront something real they would rather avoid, it is still truth. Art is truth--personal truth in words, images, sounds, movement. To create real art, you must believe in what you're creating. You have to be passionate about it. If it doesn't mean anything to you, why should it mean anything to anyone else?

Art is courage. It's risky. It means finding your own personal truth, embracing every vulnerability, channeling it, and opening it to the world. And the world is frequently unkind. I think that stops people from trying to get people to listen and see them. It stops me. I have this habit I've developed of assuming that 1) no one cares about what I have to say, 2) I don't have anything to say worth listening to, and 3) I don't really want to lay myself out so vulnerably, anyway. It's terrible. They're awful excuses, and they shouldn't stop anyone from trying to make himself heard. We're constantly bombarded by images, sounds, words, all the time. There's a lot of garbage out there, and a lot of stuff that just doesn't mean anything to us--but it may mean something to someone. By not sharing, we're potentially depriving someone else of something meaningful. (I've gone off about this before.)

The Pop artist Ronnie Cutrone said that Andy Warhol taught him not to waste time trying to define art because you can't do it. I don't think that's true. I think you can define it--it's when you try saying what is "good" and what is "bad," that's when it gets tricky. I think that to me, "good" art is something that successfully communicates the artist's perspective, inspires interpretation, or both. There's plenty of entertainment that is not art, and I can appreciate it--but it doesn't mean anything to me. The only way I can criticize anyone's creation is look at it and ask myself, "What does this mean to me? What could this possibly mean to someone else?" If either answer is anything of significance, then I can't just dismiss it, can I?

But now I'm getting off on a tangent, and a really complicated one at that. I didn't mean to make this so long. These thoughts are full of contradictions. There's no logic to any of this. If you can find some, congratulations. If you can use logic or reasoning to destroy the validity of any of this, that's cool too. There's not really logic to anything I stick up here, 'cause that's not really my thing. This is all just what I know based on my own intuition, my own feeling and reaction to what's around me. It's just how I feel, in the most basic sense, about what I love and what I see.

I like day and night equally, for the same reason:

I like light.

Make sense of THAT one.

“Have you seen them? The words cut open . . . there’s something living in these lines.”

A steamy mug of dark coffee—or five—
nursed between soft palms as the night becomes
the morning. Lines begin to come alive.
They dance a reel or two and twiddle thumbs
for their audience is dull and drowsing.
Together in a mass of curves and limbs
thrusting out at all angles, harboring
resentment in the hours dark and dim,
they protest in anger: “We are not one,
but many—individuals!” they cry.
“Don’t let us blur, with your weary vision,
into a moody mess of black and white.”
Stare at the sheet in hand, eyes full of tears,
blink til it fades to black and disappears.


'Cause this is really what I need to be doing with my time.

The businessman at Sunday brunch.

I’ll have the eggs over easy, bacon
on the side. But I’d like sausage instead
if you could—Can’t you do that? Yes, you can?
Thanks. On what? Whole wheat or white or rye bread?
Whole wheat. Can I get that toasted? I said,
Can I get it toasted? And on the side,
not under the eggs? And jelly, not red
currant, but grape? And yes, the eggs are fried
but runny. I don’t want them if they’re dry.
To drink? A Bloody Mary, please. Give me
celery on the side. I can’t decide
if I want coffee also. Well, we’ll see.
Maybe later, when you bring me my drink.
No, now, please. That would be better, I think.

I feel exactly like me.

I like it.

It's completely perfect outside.

I hate wasting time sleeping.

I don't want to miss anything.

Another poem.

Awful, but I felt like writing and poetry + 6:55 a.m. don't always mix. It's on the lj too. Something different for me--trying to work with actual structure and form, whoa! I'm not happy with the last line in particular but it'll do for now.

Also, I never really noticed just how hard it is to figure out the syllable breakdown of some words. My meter is screwy and a lot of the rhymes are soft, but hey. You try writing a Spenserian sonnet at this hour. Iambic pentameter is not as easy as you might think.


Staring at the blinking neon numbers,
dim chartreuse entrances—wide eyed lying
flat on my back as guilt washes over
my body like the flow of sea crying,
creeping stealthily toward dunes, sighing.
You never mentioned her—that’s not my fault.
You smiled, shrugged. Thought you were teasing
until I felt your hand on my thigh, taut
fingers squeezing gently, then brushing soft,
tickling my ribs. I laughed helplessly.
Your arm came ‘round me, but I did not stop
your empty gestures. You grinned drunkenly
at my indulgent smile. I know next day,
you’ll forget. I won’t. I should not have stayed.

A poem.

I wrote this a week or two ago and just forgot to post it. It needs work but whatever.

the hours fade away
peel
pare
husk
pumice to the heart
rubbed red and raw
the guards, they fall apart
dissolve into the dark
releasing brief relief
a voice to sing to speak
to mutter to uncover
to liberate and loosen
a tongue stiff but not forgotten
thoughts and words and longing
fears and hopes and wanting
chaotic and disheveled
they were crossed
with inhibitions
lost
in self suppression
fraught
with old tradition
until the night surrounded
unwound the tightness halting
the reticence untrusting
stripping weary wanderers
of their wariness inhuman
but now they see the dawn is coming

and each retreats.


The spacing is screwed up as usual but whatever.

"No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan...

...has ever had the power that a filmmaker has, the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark. That is a tremendous power, and you have this power as filmmakers. You have the power to say anything you want, so why not say something positive?" - Frank Capra

I love going to see movies in the theater. I used to prefer watching them at home, but the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center changed my mind. There's nothing particularly wonderful about this theater. But after spending every other Saturday morning there for two semesters, I realized that even if I don't want it to be true, movies are meant to be seen in theaters.

Don't get me wrong. I still love watching movies at three in the morning in my pajamas, snuggled up on the squishy couch in my basement with a couple of blankets, or on my computer in bed at school. But, the experience isn't the same.

There's a completely different mindset that you assume when you watch a film in a theater. When you take a trip to the cinema, you drag yourself out of the house in respectable clothes to pay an absurd amount for a bit of shiny, non-recyclable paper, bad popcorn, and corn syrup and water. If you're at an old theater, odds are, the screen quality is lackluster at best and the seats are tight and uncomfortable.

But, when the lights go down and the obnoxious commercials give way to trailers for a bunch of movies you don't want to see, you're excited. You're there with a purpose--you must really, really want to see this movie, for all that you're enduring. You're ready and willing to be entertained, to fall under the spell of "movie magic." And amazingly enough, so are two hundred and fifty other people.

Your defenses are down when you see a movie in theaters. You're more susceptible to the tricks of the filmmaker--you're more likely to suspend disbelief. You let the movie get away with things that you might not dismiss if you were at home, and you let yourself get caught up in the moment--and you're okay with that. You're one of millions of people who walks into the dark and sits down, prepared to listen to what the filmmakers want to say.

Going to the movies is a community experience, and it's a much better one if you happen to be a member of a good audience. It's one of the reasons I enjoy midnight screenings on opening night: every single person in the audience is there because they want to be, because they're dedicated to seeing and enjoying this movie. There are no annoying people talking about something else in front of you. Everyone is ready to laugh, to cry, to gasp at all the right moments. They're ready to be whisked into another world for two hours.

And that's such a great feeling. It's the experience I want to have when I watch a movie. And when the audience is right, watching a film in a theater, I think, helps you have the best movie experience possible.

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Now playing: Nina Simone - In The Dark

"Dance instead."

I really like watching scenes that take place at balls in period dramas.

Well, really, I just like to watch the dances. The clothes are nice. The goings-on are interesting. But the dancing--that's what really gets me.

It's so different now from what it was then. Now, going out "dancing" is basically an excuse to move suggestively and rub up against strangers. It's so sexual--so intimate--in a public sphere. I understand that there's a certain appeal to just letting yourself go, especially when it's dark--it's easy to feel like there's no one else around. In Funny Face, Audrey Hepburn is in a dark sort of beatnik cafe in Paris, dressed moodily in all black with a little flip of a pony tail, and she tells Fred Astaire, "I rather feel like expressing myself now, and I could certainly use the release!" She then proceeds to dance solo in a wild expression of pent-up emotion for about five minutes straight. It's beautiful.

When it's done tastefully, dancing is such a gorgeous form of expression. Passion and grace and taste, especially when set to song, make for something sublimely beautiful. It can be so otherworldy, so ethereal. That's one of the main reasons I enjoy musicals, both on stage and in film--that combination of mediums make for something so powerful. Though, even when dancing's not tasteful, there's something to be said for the raw, primal emotion being expressed. But I think it's even lovelier when that emotion is expressed through restraint. And period dramas that have dancing scenes that totally do that. Haha.

James McAvoy and Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane are my favorite. They fairly exude sexual tension through sideways glances and light touches through gloved fingers. Keira Knightley and Matthew McFayden are full of resentment and intrigue in Pride and Prejudice. And Jeremy Northam and Gwyneth Paltrow show this unrealized desire for each other in Emma--he knows he wants her and thinks she doesn't want him, and she doesn't know what she wants.

It's pretty masterfully done in all three films--the music helps, and the context, but a lot of it comes purely from the way the actors gracefully and dramatically move toward and away from each other, the way they steal glimpses at each other as they turn, the way they gently clasp each other's fingers. It's subtle, but so effective.

I'm with Philip Seymour Hoffman. I like subtlety.

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Now playing: The Decemberists - The Rake's Song

New Faculty Search

On Wednesday, I met with the third candidate for the American Studies faculty position that's open. I'm really glad I got the chance to be on the student search committee. Aside from allowing me to meet the potential professors, it's made me think about what it is I appreciate about the professors I've had and how I feel about my choice of college in general.

One thing I've realized is that my professors and courses really are my favorite part about school. Yeah, the food is acceptable, and the dorms are great. But I could have found that somewhere else. Here, I have a certain structured independence, academically, that would have been difficult to find elsewhere. I remember looking for colleges and finding out that only about 200 in the country had official American Studies programs. My program here is both structured and loose, so even though there are 16 categories of requirements for the major, you can develop your own focus within them. (Oh, the beauty of an interdisciplinary major.) Contemporary Arts--it's a contract program, and I literally develop my own major, my own focus. And I can do both of these majors, still have electives, and graduate on time without driving myself insane. I wouldn't have been able to do that at any of my other potential schools.

As for professors...even though I complain a lot about several of them, I have to admit (grudgingly, in some cases) that most of them are excellent. Beyond that, there are definitely at least half a dozen professors that I've worked with individually on one project or another. These are the professors that never have a problem staying and talking a few minutes after class, or meeting me during the week regardless of whether or not it's during their office hours. They've taken an active interest in me as a student, and I feel like that's something I wouldn't necessarily get at another school.

Anyway, this third faculty candidate. One thing that I found really interesting about her was that she said she really made a point of reminding her students that history isn't just "Truth"--it's framed by someone's perspective, and therefore, it's open to interpretation. She also said that she really likes using primary sources, images, and other media to pinpoint the humanity in whatever it is that she's teaching. I got really excited about that, and I told her, I think it's really important to close the time gap and make history feel more immediate, because it's so easy to distance yourself and look only at the facts, when really, history isn't just dates and numbers and names--it's about people. History is a story. The word "story" is in the word "history", and stories are about people, they're part of being human, so dehumanizing history is taking away something vital from it.

I read a GQ article today that reminded me of that as well. Entitled simply, "The Garden," the article focused on the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery. These men dig thirty graves a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year. They saw the plane go down into the Pentagon on 9/11. They've seen the Kennedys come to visit their family's graves. They've talked to people about to commit suicide and they've found a body on the Eternal Flame. And now, every day, they bury bodies that come in from around the world. Most of them voted for Obama because they're ready to see an end to the conflicts in the Middle East--because they don't want to bury any more kids. It's so interesting. It's easy for us to forget about the war. For them, all the death is a brutal reality. Telling that story from the gravediggers' point of view--it adds an extra layer of humanity to a story that could easily fall into a barrage of numbers and facts. This way, though--it means more.

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Now playing: Band of Horses - Our Swords