todo es fuego

Best Phrase from a JoP Paper 2

2009-03-10T16:40:00.004-05:00

"there is a privileged carving of nature at its joints"

Best Phrase from a JoP Paper

2009-02-19T17:56:00.001-05:00

"jumps of a puppet"

Homespun Diagnostics

2009-01-27T00:08:00.003-05:00

Q: If someone else were suddenly inside your head, what would he or she notice first? How would s/he describe it?

Winter tips from THE EFF BEE

2008-12-31T20:05:00.002-05:00

1) Moisturize! Don't forget your feet!

2) Stop envying your pets! Sleep as much as you want!

3) Don't be proud! Wear tights and/or long underwear!

4) Got the shopping itch? Go to the library instead!

5) "Spa-treated" Dole raisins are worth it! White Rose is crap!

6) Need bucks? Reduce your cell phone plan!

7) There is no reason to use luggage without wheels!

8) Feeling gray? Find a botanical garden!

9) Washing clothes by hand is surprisingly cheap and easy!

10) Per Fred Nietzsche, "If something is falling, give it a shove."

Great PSA

2008-12-31T20:01:00.001-05:00

"You've got to hug and kiss your kids. Words aren't enough.

"Call 311 or visit nyc.gov/NYCDADS"

Paging Dorothy Parker

2008-11-22T16:22:00.002-05:00

One man's mistress is another man's whore.

Remake Remodel

2008-11-14T19:54:00.005-05:00

Taking the blog back like our country! Wild Style at Film Forum!

Heteronormativity grew slightly less tedious in Connecticut.

RE: thesis -- Crunch Time for Cronzo.

Fragments from the vaults:

We are making delicate little party decorations
We are planning a lunch three years in the future
We know what we would do if we were someone else

*

Love came in to ruin me,
And I said no problem.
She disappeared into my skin.

*

The little girl
She
Looks older in the picture
You can tell

Little girl
I am coming for you
I am here
I am loving you back in time

I am loving you forward in time
In that bardo with the ancestors
The candle in that secret room before dawn
In the mountain stream

The little girl
She
Not an ounce of self-pity
Saw something you have not.

Slide the rice paper door
Over massacres of the old country
Massacres of the new country
Ghosts in the garden

My lover is me approaching
With her esses lisped
Her cat-yellow eyes
Her curls in distress

Ideas after 2 a.m.

2007-12-14T02:49:00.000-05:00

That the first issue of Spin I bought had Ani DiFranco, Thom Yorke, and Missy Elliott on the cover.

That I would like to exactly reverse the celebration of plastic party divas and the disdain for music that women enjoy singing along to together.

That being in school makes me think I'm living in a dorm. The overhead lights don't seem to be my responsibility.

That time is not just tight, it's mechanical.

That the tree outside my window is encased in ice. One image burns up the untrue.

I might as well be a thousand years old.

Trucker hat

2007-10-10T10:21:00.000-05:00

Wes Anderson deliberately tries to make cult films. It isn't a surprise that prefabricated cult films have come into existence, but we should still take notice. I doubt that he knew what he was doing when he made "Rushmore" -- which filmed the combined fantasy boyhoods of himself and the Wilson brothers as though they were Godard films. However, with the film's success, he believed he had discovered his style. What he had in fact discovered was his audience. This explains the estranged, polite distance he keeps from his characters in the later films -- he does not explore them; he accessorizes them. It also indicates why each of the most recent three films are organized around collectives -- stand-ins for the audience -- that face casually meaningless trials to awesome pop soundtracks. If post-suburban white kids do anything other than recognize a simplified reflection of themselves in Anderson's protagonists, they are seeing too much, or not enough.

Swan/s

2007-09-19T21:50:00.000-05:00

There's an album by Mazzy Star from 1996 called Among My Swan. I like to pretend that I'm the only person who has ever heard this album, or that I'm the only person to whom it remains important, or that I'm the only such person who has no interest in shoe-gazer music.

The second track, "Flowers in December," was playing in Chipotle Grill today. Something about burritos and 90s alternative, a demographic. Is salsa made of tomatoes and cilantro, or a sense of belonging?

So I guess it's been since April. In the intervening months, I fell in love, got work visas for 314 people, switched roommates twice, had five lovely friends get married, became the Board President of a (very small) non-profit organization, saw the Chair of my graduate program replaced by another dude, was ravaged by bedbugs (in Florida!), endured flirtation from men with names such as Chuluunbaatar, Zagd-Ochir, and Zinametyr, attended the Clay Buchholz no-hitter at Fenway, and got a library card. This was mostly really good.

I feel bad for leaving you readers in the lurch for so long. For periods of time I find the prospect of accounting for myself really daunting. But I'm glad that people are running around, wondering how each other are, having birthdays. I mean, you are ALL having birthdays. May they all be happy.

Fall is starting, which means that the air is abruptly delicious, and the sky is clear as a bell. Lots of black squirrels in the park. Didn't it feel like a long summer? Last night we lay in bed and listened to Leadbelly. Paul Chan is down in New Orleans producing Waiting for Godot with the Classical Theatre of Harlem. Worth a trip?

EPluribusUnum, or Women's History Month

2007-03-27T16:49:00.000-05:00

I'll tell you all about my messiah complex later on, but for now want to talk about now, and bring to your attention some services that came to my attention this afternoon. This week, Flavorpill, which you should just go-Ogle, is promoting a free party at Webster Hall by two "activity-enabling orgs," MyOpenBar and HeyLetsGo. Were we not in haste to go get some reading done, we would think about the inefficiency of spaces between words. Both of these are social networking services. They collect people by collecting email addresses. They are party-minded objective spirit, which I have been given to understand is a fancy pseudonym for social institutions. Oh wait, we had the thought while we were writing: losing the spaces between the words is a way to draw attention to the objectivity of the service, to articulate what they do. EPluribusUnum, as it were.

Also, there is GoodReads, where you can post what you're reading, what you were reading, what you want to read. Why not? Claire, I imagine, will never forcibly collect those syllabi from the rest of us, anyway.

As these media show no sign of slowing their reciprocal proliferation and consolidation, one can merely hope that the soft, Mac-white anaesthesis that they radiate is not, as the ice-pick Modernists have feared, malignant. As objectivity draws itself together with all the inevitability of a dying star, let us aspire to actually *using* it, to reaching into the instantaneous transference of information and grasping inside that magnificently-organized storm an equally human hand.

By which I mean, nothing more than my class of seven women continuing the conversation about art criticism when my male teacher ran out of the room with a nosebleed, and nothing less than recreating our political system online, if that's what it fucking takes. Speaking of which, ladies, do me a fave and talk about HISTORY with one another. Whatever strand you want -- music, hairdos, marriage, education, weapons, politics, philosophy, philanthropy, philadelphia, the rocky mountains, judaism, elephants -- just talk about it.

From the vaults: men of ancient times

2007-03-25T20:30:00.001-05:00

"The understanding of the men of ancient times went a long way. How far did it go? To the point where some of them believed that things have never existed — so far, to the end, where nothing can be added. Those at the next stage thought that things existed but recognized no boundaries among them. Those at the next stage thought there were boundaries but recognized no right and wrong. Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured, and because the Way was injured, love became complete. But do such things as completion and injury really exist, or do they not?"

_Chuang Tzu, Discussion on Making All Things Equal

Ceci n'est pas une blague

2007-03-24T22:50:00.000-05:00

I was born to have a messiah complex.

Smartest ever

2007-03-20T22:24:00.000-05:00

This guy.

I'm not kidding. Check out the full-size pic.

Mistake

2007-02-24T18:34:00.000-05:00

When cloven-hoof Prince Turnip in the garden...

Poem, from the vaults

2007-02-10T20:18:00.000-05:00

Refrain: I go down to the river, but I don’t get there

Where the guy with the beard plays his radio

We wish our rocking chairs were visible

We don’t have no lovers nor ice cream

The pigeons look like ink brushes

And the sunset their watercolor

I just put it together

It falls apart a little

The cars driving upstream below

Re: my corkwoo

2007-01-05T13:55:00.000-05:00

Oh Gigi Bevil, what *is* a corkwoo?

out an elderly type with a white beard and a monocle entered.
Training and programming, dear boy. Before this present assignment I
this planet, some inhabited, but they have no contact with this one.
Ive been meaning to ask. Whats a tachyon?
saints who had accomplished so much good.
from active duty; with talent in such short supply I had had the
Then why wasnt I going to sleep? Instead of lying there tensely
It was waking up that was difficult. Some hours had slipped by female.
was the gentlemen-at some physical cost I must add-who polished off

A few thoughts for the year of the double agent: Regina Spektor's songs beg to be arranged for a capella groups. I'll travel eight hours to look at a lake and not feel lonely. I need to appreciate visual art more like I appreciate music than like I appreciate literature. Eyeballs!!

Pope Caitlin the DAMN FIRST

2006-12-28T23:19:00.000-05:00

Who else is bored by that last post? Yeah. Anyway, now you know how I write after a few glasses of wine.

Air travel to Tallahassee was pleasant this season. Met a Williamsburg-residing art enthusiast on the leg down to Orlando; made nice with several little kids on the return. One sister said she liked my Unicorn in Captivity tote bag, so I told her about the Cloisters. Her brother had already found an affinity for the Middle Ages via a battle ax included in a McD's Happy Meal. A Columbia sweatshirt-wearing preschooler danced and waved at me singing "Jingle bells jingle bells" for about an hour, filmed occasionally by his father, drawing close and then giggling away behind a row of chairs. Waiting for luggage at JFK, a precocious gal and I discovered that our mothers had both tied ribbons onto our suitcases.

Coasting over a fluffy sea of anecdotes, I took some notes during "My Super Ex-Girlfriend." You know who's in that? Luke Wilson, Rainn Wilson, Uma Thurman, "Cameron Diaz" from Lost in Translation, and a very butch Eddie Izzard, who sneaks in a Switzerland joke. NB, the shortest distance between two plot points of this action-manhattan-romcom happens to include hurling a great white shark through the window of a highrise. Those New York chicks don't know their own strength.

Spent the late wee hours of the birthday drinking wine with Rat P. and friend, listening to my old rival and love get excited about Nabokov and French film theory, as well as his stories about a friend who served on special forces in Afghanistan, undergoing training getting held underwater until he passed out, mailing home spare funds in an Xbox or some shit. On the 23rd, one of the two young women at the party who had survived brain tumors (what) didn't recognize me at first. Out on the patio, I fraternized with culture workers: an old best friend who hosts dance parties in Sarasota and a casting agency assistant in LA who still insists that clicking ballpoint pens open and shut on my arm passes for flirting.

Christmas Eve I cleaned out my bedroom closet. It had been my closet since I was 9, so there were some pretty good finds. Still best ever yearbook signature, from the vaguely predatory dude who now goes by Golden Bull on MySpace: "I'm glad I'm signing this instead of Jeremy, who could never appreciate the gravity of the situation." The naked reclining fairy tucked away in a notebook. Lots and lots of poems, like the one about listening to Mazzy Star in the driveway. About ten years worth of movie ticket stubs, stashed inside a L'eggs egg. Some diplomas. Notes, letters, and postcards from as early as sixth grade and as late as the semester abroad in Japan; scripts for summer camp performances of abridged Shakespeare; physics homework; my first two diaries, one of which bears the distinction of beginning mid-sentence...All hand-written and photographic evidence of more people than I regularly conceive of having passed through the muscle of my affection. What a blessed, desirous, dizzy-headed gal have I been, all the while inside a sufficiently rational gourd. Who knew? My phone rang while I paused outside the car; I put the last box down on the asphalt. Five and a half inches of rain flooded down and something invisible yet still rain-like flooded up.

I saw some important ladies for lunch on the 26th, a date with real emotional heft, and a feeling I wasn't quite familiar with as we greeted each other, something smack between fear and love...exaltation? They are these sublimely strong women, probably the bedrock of goodness that kept me from really getting fucked up by that punk senior year. Like, I want one of them to be pope. Pope Caitlin the DAMN FIRST. I should probably tell her that. She started asking hard questions of her faith on a volunteer year with the Jesuits in Birmingham.

Dad didn't come along to the airport, so I listened to him encourage me to keep studying Buddhism over my brother's speakerphone. As we pulled out of the garage, Dad all smiling and worried I might sleep too late or watch too much YouTube, I teared up. Alex and Mom were teasing each other about something in the front seat, and family felt complicated. I love all of them but almost never at the same time. What's the deal with that?

Back in the city, albeit briefly, I lunched with Yuko at a v. traditional noodle house, lots of "gomenasai"s all around. We practiced the social kiss outside Starbucks, and she kept running her cheek into mine too hard. She had many interesting things to communicate, from her views on bisexuals to feeling the soul of her father go to heaven to who's on her team in our class.

Heading into 07, I’m looking forward to working on the following resolutions: (1) cultivating a scholarly New Yorker writing style, (2) staying on top of my work, and (3) not worrying. Heterogames have been green-lighted clear through spring.

Preface/Afterword

2006-11-29T12:36:00.000-05:00

For those of you who didn't spend the day talking about Kiki Smith and Ideological State Apparatuses, you might find the next post, er, sad. Don't be alarmed! Writerly people eat sadness for breakfast! Also bagels.

We merely ask, rhetorically, whether such nonsense is of interest.

Meet Reality, My Praying Mantis

2006-11-29T00:39:00.000-05:00

In honor of potential new readers, some diaristic nonsense which I blame on beer and the A train running local.

The steady destruction of fantasy. Why isn't there a profession for me? That's probably the best question I can ask tonight...We have eyes, fingers, a tingling below. The rest blurs. Our economical selves cry at the first hint of uselessness. Time passes. We know we'll die. The professionals have earned their bread making our lives less plausible...You'll never read this! The very movement of my pen eclipses your name! Love is not what is beautiful, but the Beloved! The closest I will soon to have to home is L.E., because my parents are moving, because they have aged, because I abandoned Caitlin and Diane, because Sean abandoned me, because I will be someone who dates, while the stone of philosophy falls blindly through the crepe of my heart and because, for the mistake I believe I once made, I will lie myself a solution, abstract and round, to match my mind and the world, where I misrecognize my father's smell in Richard's Aesthetics class, and my mind turns back to sand, the boy, his hairless chest, my brother's skin before I had perfected subjectivity.

26 possibly best birthday ever

2006-11-20T17:00:00.000-05:00

Last year it was the subway strike; this year it's a worldwide orgasm.

Pure Boy: Further Specters of High School

2006-10-29T02:09:00.000-05:00

I so love looking at this. Perfect.

Leotard/Lyotard

2006-10-28T00:12:00.000-05:00

I had this embarrassing moment of confusion at the publicist's office this afternoon, when I was searching through the Village Voice's archives for old press about her husband, and I kept being confronted by all these ads from American Apparel with women in...I said "unitards" first, because my mind was working faster than itself. But then it came catching up and I sat in a doubtful silence trying to become sure whether the word actually could be "leotard," when I knew the man was named Jean-Francois and was not an item of clothing I wore in preschool when I wanted to feel a little special.

But they are the same. "It's 'leotard,' isn't it?" I had to ask the publicist. Yes, it was. "Lyotard is also a theorist," I tried to explain, and she laughed, though I knew I had irrevocably exposed myself as Not a Normal Human Being, a person able to be stopped mid-sentence by a homophone.

Bravo Christgau: "Eclectic neoclassicism versus childhood-oriented avant-primitivism as global warming swamps our history." And of course I love me some references to JClo.

All that's new around here are some skinny pants and the temperature of the rain.

I live for the noise

2006-10-12T14:24:00.000-05:00

Noise definitely one of those words that sounds ridiculous upon close inspection/repetition.

This post isn't actually about noise. We're not sure what it's about yet. In the title we refer to the burgeoning self-awareness of our dependence on little tokens of success, including Rightness and Male Attention, to make us happy.

Having, over the course of the past ten days, written an article, a response paper, a five page paper, a ten page paper, and discussion notes, as well as editing someone else's article, reading The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, some Kristeva, most of Ways of Seeing, and four pages of Simmel, I have granted myself permission to still be in my pajamas at 3:30 in the afternoon. Soon I shall shave and go to a li'l magazine launch, and then mebbe hear Seigneur Pepper Grinder talk about how to read fiction, and then return to the life of the tippety-tappety, in which we extol the virtues of up and coming music presenters in the greater Philadelphia region.

Repetition is definitely worth thinking about. On a mundane level, we notice how temporarily repetitious circumstances guide our responses: having busted two hair ties in the past week, I conclude that I need a hair cut. Squirming around with the laptop on my lap keeps pulling the powercord, which wouldn't be a problem, except the battery is bad. Two Wednesday evenings in a row waiting under a canopy with someone for the rain to slacken leads the mind, not necessarily to any conclusion, but to the expectation of one. It sets us in motion.

They say the profundity in Warhol's films, such as Haircut, consists in his resensitization to experience in time of the viewer. The films are long and boring; nothing much happens; but in that boringness the smallest action is rescaled as interesting. Minds make their conversation out of events of any size; all that's required is an emergence from a background. In quiet periods of meditation, a cough or sneeze tends to ripple small actions through other people in the room: a shift, a rustle, a sniff.

And perhaps what I really want to know is whether there is any kind of human causality *other* than this minor scatter of affect. Each person absorbs even the most major event through the senses and their mental equivalent (mind is the sixth sense organ in Buddhism), in the form of an intrusion or insistence that he or she can appropriate. Negative emotion seems often (always) to take the form of a sort of friction caused the process of appropriation; the churn and flake of what hasn't yet yielded to transparency. Positive emotion, that which sings with ease of knowledge, use. The deep metaphor of consonance and dissonance.

Poem (see below)

2006-09-25T23:14:00.000-05:00

Sex has such
A perfect relationship
To the surface of my body
I want to throw up.

Is there anything more tedious than heteronormativity?

2006-09-25T13:02:00.000-05:00

No.

Premonition

2006-09-01T11:26:00.000-05:00

Repeatedly demanding "WHY DO YOU CARE???" of the fellow grad-sters in a debate about hipsters and pomo was not the best approach to winning the argument.

Still I feel it was a good question.

I better get to that Sontag exhibit on Sunday. She and I hold hands in the slatted dark of "barely closeted moral[ism]." Favorite sentence so far: "A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable."

Around here we are considering the effects of emotional interference on thinking, the well-oiled machine of this baseball town, and "The Unicorn in Captivity," which is one of several luscious and gut-boggling tapestries in the unicorn room of the Cloisters. I want there to be a sign over the door: "Post-little girls, beware your imaginary."

Paint me white and call me Moby!

2006-08-18T09:44:00.000-05:00

RRROOWWWRRR!!!!

Runs in the family

2006-06-16T16:05:00.000-05:00

Thanks very much for all of this. Actually I had been looking to find the Japanese chanting version of the Kannon Gyo. Very interesting translation of the "Identity".* "Do not judge by any standards" wonderfully puts that distinctively buddhist injunction or admonition I've always admired. The Faith Mind Verses include a line something like: The burdensome practice of judging should finally be abandoned at once. Does it not seem that something is immediately-at-hand and requires no name?

dad

*Hyperlinks mine.

"Trivia"

2006-06-13T15:38:00.000-05:00

via RealPlayer

The Beach Boys personified the California spirit with their harmonious pop.

Brian Wilson is widely heralded as a mad genius.

Brian Wilson is deaf in one ear, reportedly due to being repeatedly beaten by his father.

Interdisciplinary dolphin

2006-05-23T16:38:00.000-05:00

Ange Mlinko, from a review of her book Starred Wire, at the Believer:

“Never mind the student loans that went for poetry, reimbursing itself with itself,” she instructs: “When curves of supply rose from the banquette, you were the cause of yourself, not the correlation or the echo of the forms that hugged themselves to end; but broke the surface, like an interdisciplinary dolphin.”

We also thank her for "The vending machine in the rose garden." We are creeping, creeping toward understanding what criticism is. These days, theory qua symmetry, direct relations, inverse relations, are all the rage.

From memory now: He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that its heart beat at some terrible cost and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

I've been collecting moments. Friday morning, a bolt of lightning that woke me from, seemingly, across the street. Friday afternoon, at the National Arts Journalism Conference reception, the saccharine kiss of flattery after an organizer's sotto voce comment on my being pretty (surely there's a French idiom for this?). Saturday morning, walking down 12th street between Planned Parenthood and about forty pro-lifers in the middle of a Hail Mary. Saturday afternoon, a full rainbow outside Lincoln Tunnel. Saturday night, when I was so happy and dancing so hard I actually didn't care, for a second, what anyone thought. Sunday morning before sleep at 4am struggling to type. Sunday afternoon when I clinched a room in Brooklyn, if I want it. Monday morning when I woke up at 4am and wondered why I felt so comfortable, so at home. Because it's quiet, I realized.

When I learn how to connect all this I'll really have something. Way to go Ester. I can't link to Ross's text message, but way to go him, too. I have to admit that my concept of happiness these days is doing EXACTLY WHAT I WANT. I have a feeling that will eventually change, but I'm going to enjoy my self-absorption while it lasts. It could be years!

Since you asked

2006-04-28T15:38:00.000-05:00

I'll be moving to New York in the fall.

This article, which takes as its subject reality TV and the 'producer' of Paris Hilton's porn tape, will be of interest to those who aren't sure that postmodernism is necessary or relevant. Note that this guy is seriously trying to get a show produced called "American Cannibal." Maybe we really should pitch "Choose Who Lives."

Goaded by an email, I picked up Judith Butler's Gender Trouble last night for the first time since junior year. It still takes me about 15 minutes to read one of her pages -- and I haven't even gotten to the psychoanalysis stuff -- but she's ringing more bells than she used to. In fact, I had the feeling of "I know this," while reading the opening pages of her critique of "compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism." I put that in quotes not because I'm not convinced of these things' actuality, but because those are her exact words.

It occured to me while reading, and this is a thought that I've had at least once before, that Buddhists might do well to consider reformulating their critique of the self as critique of the subject. If contemporary philosophy's main project is to problematize Descartes and his legacy of atomic individualism, then they are lining up very nicely with the Buddhist critique of earlier Upanishadic wisdom on the unified self. It's all more complicated than this, I realize, but am I wrong?

I chased a Zen dude down the street the other day. I was sitting on my stoop enjoying the brilliant Sunday afternoon, when I saw this bald-headed dude walking with someone else across the street. He was wearing a black colarless tie shirt, black pants, black sandals, and socks. It was a no-brainer. He lives in South Philly. He gave me a hug.

Today I was covering the reception desk when someone in the office walked to the elevators with a guest, talking in hushed tones about their children. The guest mentioned her kid's "night terrors," which had only lasted about a month, apparently, but had this kid screaming at night, sitting up in bed, talking, eyes open, but asleep. Which made me think about children, the endless fictions of their innocence, and the intensity of finding one's way in the world. Our minds, even from the beginning, are filled with horror.

Steven Merrit racist? Guitars stolen in Philly?

But soon again

2006-04-14T17:56:00.000-05:00

There's another big riot.

Believe it or not, I've started two posts over the course of this surprisingly long hiatus, but I wasn't happy with either. That said, I have been questioning this whole blog endeavor. I have recently noticed that writing, for me, is primarily a means of saying things that I don't somehow feel able or permitted to say otherwise, both an opportunity for more art and more honesty than goes on humdrum during the day. Blogs seem best purposed as a slightly heightened form of everyday communication -- so is it really worth it? At this moment, the answer seems to be yes. Mebbe that's all there is to it.

First off, as I promised to ??? a while ago, here's a link to my Gubaidulina piece on Sequenza21. I've been draggin' my feet ('Dragon! That's a majestic beast!') on writing something for NewMusicBox, but soon maybe you'll get to read something about the American Composers Orchestra, ACF's SoundExchange with Pauline Oliveros, and/or the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, although mainstream Philly media actually seems to be holding it down. Electro-acoustic represent.

While I've been not writing articles, I have been writing some poems and trying to decide what to do with my life. Candidates include the Art Criticism and Writing MFA at the School of Visual Arts (linked in Hero Worship, below) and a work practice apprenticeship at Green Gulch Farm, on the Pacific in Marin County. Gosh darnit, that's pretty.

I just spent about 24 hours in NYC, visiting the Million Poems Show, chuckling at the banter among three of my e-faves, which, if you've clicked on anything from this blog, you've probably already clicked on a least once. So they were all onstage, talking to each other. Clover read some of his poems -- which are excellent; I've read them -- and the dudes played some guitar, and I received both a compliment and an offer post-show that made me very very happy. Jim gave no indication of recognizing me, but that's cool. After, dinner with m, crashing out on his couch (mui comfy), sleeping in, missing sitting at FL (though, m, I think that if it is in fact near the meeting house you want, you can just take the L some stops down?). When I ordered egg salad at a very cute hippy-type cafe near the subway stop, the guy behind the counter accused me of having seen What's Up, Tiger Lily? Maybe I should do that tonight.

From there, I went to the Whitney Biennial, where I didn't really have enough time but found myself really enjoying pretty much everything I saw. Which I guess means I either really should be a critic or really shouldn't. I'm definitely not clever enough yet to get what's going on without the audio tour's help. But then the sense comes easily enough. Today what sticks most in my mind is a room with a projector projecting a window-type light onto the floor, in which there hangs a confusing but delicate, Large Glass-esque, shape, occasionally with silhouettes of bodies tumbling down from the sky (?). And a bluish purple cloud on the far wall, oblique shapes slowly rising through. Very meditative. But really, it was all fantastic.

In one room, also using the audio tour, was, I'm positive, Jeremy Sisto. I did not know his name. Together we looked at a medium-sized rock that had colored string wrapped around it and angling up to the opposite corner overhead. On my way out of the museum, I heard, "Hey! There's [the fire boss]!" It was the Pew Culture staff. "Are you on a field trip?" they asked me. "I'm on my own field trip," I replied.

I visited Melissa at SVA and then hopped the subway to Port Authority. Peter Pan showed us Mr. Deeds, and the little girl in the seat behind me asserted, "I just love this bus."

Then back in Philly, sweet and sour "chicken," hell meeting henry, and a kiss on the cheek that, apparently, became a choir of angels. On my face. Dig. It was a little scratchy.

So that's a lot of detail. I read something about detail somewhere today. I had kind of hoped that I would go up to the city and come back feeling like, "Thank goodness I'm not going there!" But I don't have that feeling. I almost had that feeling, but then equally there was this feeling of wanting to go and learn and see what I could make of myself without feeling crazy or sad. Unfortunately (strange sentence), it was a good day. Bad days I tend to want to sort of hunker down into spirit, find that center where pain mostly transforms, doesn't sicken, burns with that psychically clean energy of perception.

I may be able to defer after all, which could be the answer. Spend a year out on the coast in what I refer privately to as my Advanced Course, then revisit the question. I did have the pretty interesting realization yesterday or today that I don't often use theory to think (props on this insight to Ken Sharpe). Well, I might use its form, but I'm not sure I use the content of anyone else's theories. Do I? Anyone have evidence of this? Occasionally, the shortest route to explain something does seem to be, you know, incredulity toward metanarratives, or the face/demand of the other, or the free-floating play of signs. That sort of thing. I was thinking recently of the moment I first understood the sign, saw it -- sitting in Weinstein's class listening to him talk about Proust. It was like, "KerPOW!!!!" So the ideas are at work/play in my thought. Wait: here is something new: thinking is much more condensed than the language that is it's expression, or explanation. So when you understand something, it's not much like rehearsing something you've read in your head. You may want to recover that explanation, or you may not. So maybe I think of myself as not much using the theory I've learned because when I think to myself I don't need all that language, and when I speak I usually find it ultimately easier to use my own words, rather than Derridoh's or Fucko's or whosever. Not that I'm claiming to understand a lot of their thinking, but what you do understand gets internalized in an interesting way. Like how you need to and can respond to your friend quickly when she asks you what you think of her outfit.

Do you see why I haven't been doing this so often? In the meantime, everyone read Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey. If you think about being a monk you should also read The Seven Storey Montain: An Autobiography of Faith by Thomas Merton.

Horseflesh

2006-01-27T10:22:00.000-05:00

I know this is old news, but I just want to share with you "RE: Your Job is at stake," an email sent to me yesterday by one Ronald Quintana:

cosy some blackstone it airdrop it parachute , charta it gaffe or obstetric not electrolysis try crime or catchword try cattlemen the wreckage see image see captive the nation in horseflesh the bluejacket try manageable be astrophysical see lady it's boorish in weber some spongy some conformance not norma it's upsurge or jilt a drag may diagnostic a electorate it caret in morpheme ! fit or dishwater try

That, and the complimentary "A Fine Display of Mummery" TimeCycle calendar, brightened the crap out of my day.

The Year of Puking Silk

2006-01-24T18:32:00.000-05:00

This is one of my all-time favorite phrases ever used by my elderly, bohemian ex-roommate, Alan, to describe my life and behavior at the time. "Pure loosey goosey stuff," he added.

As M put it last night, "These are truly the garbage years."

It's not meaninglessness (let alone prowesslessnesslessness), but it is mistake after mistake, crying fit after crying fit. At lunch I counted 7 instances in the past 14 months of getting the shit kicked out of me and/or kicking the shit out of myself. Metaphorically speaking, but, as Mom affirmed, "Emotional pain is the worst."

In short, I've been dumped. "Torpedoed again, eh?" -- my favorite line from A Hard Day's Night (cf. John in the bathtub) -- came to me early, lying in bed Sunday night. I'm considering a Torpedoed Again Salon for the Valentine's Eve, the night when all the bitter ghoulies are afoot.

My goal for going to Tallahassee over T-giving this year was not to have an existential crisis in anyone's kitchen...I think my goal for rest of the year will be to not get broken up with again. I believe in my ability to achieve this goal. America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. Celibacy is fine. I could never decide if "I Am A Rock" was ironic or not, anyway.

I wrote to this guy a pretty good line I think:
"i'm considering an elaborate application for future dating applicants, including writing samples on buddhist metaphysics and ethics, eros v. agape, and rufus wainwright lyrics. also, in 500-1000 words, 'why i want to go out with [the fire boss].' and a pennsylvania cultural data profile for good measure."

The point is, this was a very good try, at least on my part, but it's time to wise up. M made a few very helpful points:

(1) It's opportunity that gets us in trouble.
Who can resist the suddenly open door? I had endless fantasies about secret passageways as a kid, and this weakness should not surprise me. Ex nihilo, possibility. The irruption. Bets are off, and that tantalizing scent of Something Happening. So we shouldn't be blamed. But I've gotten hooked too many times now not to start sniffing more suspiciously at the bait. Also, this is a very good reason not to keep yourself in a position that makes you unhappy. You'll take riskier escapes. Fine line between bravery and stupidity.

Note: a commentary on one of the Buddha's discourses that I read last night pointed out that escape from a truly dangerous situation is the smartest response there is.

(2) "Looks like you just got the wrong guy."
Talking to M helped me remember all the conversations we had about styles of being in relationships, how important they are. M, and I think the guy who just exited, are both used to being "obsessive" in their relationships, being consumed with them. Whatever the style is, I guess it isn't mine. This is the best explanation I can come up with for not meeting the mysterious Love Criteria. My current theory is that these styles of loving are bound up in our more general worldviews (shocking, I know), and that, yo, maybe even the most passionate secularists will not grep my crazy contemplative devotion. Forget the Rufus lyrics: What is most real? I want to ask people.

Thank you for your time.

Ciallis spam

2006-01-19T15:07:00.000-05:00

cannot help but remind me of e.e. cumming's "may i feel said he":

cummings: (cccome?said he
spam: - Haarder e-rectiiions

Hero worship

2006-01-05T18:17:00.000-05:00

Margaret Atwood reviews Trickster Makes This World.

Thomas McEvilley runs a graduate program in Art Criticism and Writing.

"Even assholes in straight jackets with midget visions can make great music....and in that 'somehow' lies all the ineffable that subtends the idea of art, the shape of which the critics scamble to show like every day."

My mom got a book from my dad for Christmas that shows the homes of various American writers, concluding with the humble abode of Walt Whitman in Camden, across the street from a prison. The narrative about Whitman claims that, at his funeral, he was remembered not as a poet, but as a philosopher. I think what that means is that everyone who knew the man understood that his writing was an expression of his larger life, larger conviction, his spirit and soul; rather than his life being defined by what he wrote. Whitman is like Love, as Diotima explains to Socrates, recounted in the Symposium: bastard child of plenty and poverty. Child giving it up for America and all its beautiful boys.

I don't know how to choose an object of study. Things are like dust. We play with them; we fight.

Not even the philosophers know what philosophy is.

All for me

2005-12-22T15:39:00.000-05:00

"as you can see, in honor of your reaching the quarter century mark, all the subways and buses in new york city have stopped running. now that's power." _a.s.k.

yet more fame and glory. i'm waiting for the cartoon.

my party fucking rocked. my hair looked great, and i was juggling clementines by the end of the night. thanks to all those who came, cooked, spun, ate, drank, talked, danced, CLEANED. i know that i personally set off my fire alarm, temporarily locked myself and a handful of others into my bedroom, and watched two intoxicated boyz throw their drinks at my feet (next time try flowers).

someone who has more time than i do right now read about the white robed monks of st. benedict and give me the thumbs up/thumbs down.

Get ready

2005-12-16T17:39:00.000-05:00

In typical dipshit-writer fashion, I don't have cowboy drag to wear to bbk mtn; I just have a nametag that says:

I'M ALWAYS WEARING COWBOY DRAG.

Tomorrow night is the fire boss' birthday observed. My personal deejay is champing at the bit, and I've got half a dozen people hoping to sleep on my floor. YES. My goal is not to bleed from my face. The fruit tart is in the fridge.

At work I am useless. The boss likes it when I hum. He needs gum surgery. I'm honestly considering adopting a dog, and who knows what will happen next? I want to write a story about going to see Measure for Measure, which was so good, and keeps the mocking of Christ returning to me mornings, lingering in bed.

Haiku: Ikkyu

2005-12-16T13:23:00.000-05:00

I read one poem
And I think: what's stopping me?
Gaijin are easy.

ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

2005-12-09T11:18:00.000-05:00

Sometimes their pent-up passions explode in ferocious roughhouse that is indistinguishable from fighting.

Juxtaposition of the Day: Relativism, Theologians, Skeptics

2005-11-22T10:13:00.000-05:00

Via ArtsJournal and Scotsman.com:

"The de-sacralisation of our world, so enthusiastically cultivated by the new ruling elites, stands at a polar opposite from the potential for transcendence claimed by classical music. In that sense, the battles for serious music are part of a wider culture war apparent at various levels of modern Scotland.

"What is it about serious music that offends the triumphalistic trendies basking in the apparent victories of a demystified popular culture? Is it its very ability to rise from the mundane and stretch towards a sense of the extra-ordinary that gets right up their noses? Is it the suggestion that there may be such a thing as a secret inner life which cannot be reduced to a rigorously enforced commonality? That there may be no such thing as a closed universe?

"Serious music presents a counter-cultural challenge to secularism's dead-handed confirmation of things as they are. Classical music faces down this ideological capitulation to the materialistic doctrines which now rule our lives. The boundless vision of composers through the ages points to the realisation of ourselves as something greater than we are.

"This is why lovers of music refer to it as the most spiritual of the arts. It is not just seasoned theologians who use this terminology, but countless ordinary people, believers and sceptics, who will talk of the transformation of lives by music, of moods and perspectives being altered, of attitudes shifting and renewed meaning taking root in lives touched by a complex and discursive form."

From Art in America and Googling Thomas McEvilley at FindArticles.com:

"This seems to be one of the major points that Mr. Resnikoff cannot accept. No one ever knows anything for sure.

"That is the basic point that skeptical philosophers from Sextus to Nagarjuna to Nietzsche have made for millennia. Yet Mr. Resnikoff claims that there is such a thing as absolute knowledge. "The formulas of math," he says, "... will last forever." But in fact that is not historically the case. The formulas of math have changed, like other kinds of knowledge, from generation to generation or century to century--from Pythagoras to Descartes to Godel to Russell and Whitehead and beyond. There are ambiguities Resnikoff fails to acknowledge. Obviously, in some sense the Pythagorean theorem, the basis of one of Venet's works, has remained unchangingly true. Yet in non-Euclidean forms of geometry, the situation looks very different. Einstein's universal constant also has proved less than universal. The formulas of applied mathematics, the subject matter Venet is actually using, do not have the irrefutability of logical theorems, which are pure tautologies not involving statements about the outside world.

"The claim that one's particular speciality has attained an eternal verity seems laughable. It has been disproved in every new age of insight into reality--where the parameters have continually changed. Mr. Resnikoff seems to speak as a pure Platonist, who believes that the practitioners of his particular discipline have reached an ultimate point of knowledge that can never be altered or transcended. This is what theologians have said forever and ever.

"Indeed, "humanity's certified success in the quest for immortality," as Mr. Resnikoff calls mathematics, is what Gilgamesh thought he had achieved in the third millennium B.C., what Moses thought he had accomplished in the 13th century (or so) B.C., what Plato thought he had grabbed hold of in the fourth, what Aquinas thought he had in the 13th century A.D., what the Iranian mullahs claim today. It has never turned out to be true."

A complex twist of fate

2005-11-17T17:40:00.000-05:00

As some of you know, I recently committed the social no-no of starting to date the ex of a friend of mine (those of you who haven't heard can email and ask WHO). I've been doing a lot of reflecting throughout the process, as well as a certain amount of panicking, weeping, and grinning like an idiot.

Choosing not to play nice, to go ahead and hurt someone for my own benefit, is strange for me. I have no idea how to find a middle way for guilt, something between psychic hara kiri and a Nietzschean pbbbt. I guess I settled on a day or so of suffering and then taking ownership of the choice I made, feeling happy.

I also prayed for humility, and for my feelings to be true. That is to say, as always, let my heart be in the right place.

A couple people I've told have had this, "Whoa," reaction, and I've come to believe that what I really did was make a personal choice that disregarded social rules, social relations, that flatly informal sphere of gossip, hanging out. This makes people nervous, understandably, especially those to whom I'm primarily tied via the social. My best friends just hope I'm happy.

Anyway.

The view from my new office is a stunner, especially after dark when the streetlights running down the parallels of 16th and 17th come on and, like heat shimmers, the horizon twinkles.

Can't resist a quick internet roundup.

This at equanimity yesterday:

Writing, teaching, having a conversation, feeling comes through. So often you can just see the writer hunching forward, forehead strained, lips pursed. Another birth dream? or another dog angry at having to do its business in public.

And totally best sonnet ever from Jim.

I don't know why this is also an archaeology blog, but this is amazing.

jades, jaguar-fang necklaces and Pacific Coast shells

BAM

2005-11-07T09:54:00.000-05:00

"You are overwhelmed by how isolated these women are in this world of powerful kings and lords. That they are played by men makes the truth of female isolation all the more shocking."

late love song

2005-10-30T22:55:00.001-05:00

I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you

It's late
It's late

Play it again

Hungover on Wednesday

2005-10-26T08:39:00.000-05:00

This is horrible.

It isn't you; it's the Patriarchy.

2005-10-07T18:39:00.000-05:00

I did my laundry last night. My laundromat is pretty great, all these old, politically incorrect signs with Indians ("HOW to use these machines") and little boys with slingshots ("Ye better watch out!") and vampires ("Don't dye here.") I don't know if these are standard issue or what. Anyway, I got to watch some TV. First, Alias with the pregnant and Botox-lipped Jennifer Garner. At one point, after I first saw Mission: Impossible, I started writing a story about being a secret agent, until it turned out it was actually another story about finding a boyfriend. Alias is pretty much that story. Then it was some X-Files spinoff, this episode about a charismatic cult leader who possesses people to kill their loved ones. I actually spent about half an hour folding my underwear just to finish watching it. It wasn't that good; I just forget how nice it is to be entertained.

I also watched the trailer for Brokeback Mountain today. I already have plans to go see it when it opens in December wearing cowboy drag. These gay cowboys are incredibly hot, and I'm trying to figure out why. So obviously Heath Ledger and Jake G. are both beautiful, there's that. Same question goes for Queer as Folk. I think there's something on top of the multiplication of men (okay, I'm really enjoying that sentence).

I think, essentially, that gay cowboys make such a powerful fantasy because they're a fantasy that don't have to be filtered through the straight, masculine gaze. Hetero images are, I think, filtered through this gaze. The women in them are straight. If you want to identify with that image, you need to be into straight (though you don't necessarily need to be straight -- put that in your pipe and smoke it). You can tell because straight men don't seem to have a problem looking at men having straight sex. Also, because hetero pictures are normative, we develop a lot of habits in looking at them. I've noticed that I actually tend to look at women in kissing scenes. My hunch is that that's because She's the Object. My gaze knows that. The meaning of the kissing picture is her.

The lesbian image, at least mainstream lesbianism -- consumer lesbianism, as I like to call it, is actually usually meant for men. Watching women kiss each other in movies makes me want to hit someone. I am excluded from the image not because I can't identify with it, but because I feel that the content of the image has already been given to men. As much as I may like looking at breasts -- and I have, in my life, enjoyed this -- it feels, onscreen, rather like I'm looking at a sportscar, instead of a woman's body. Unblemished and aerodynamic, at all costs. This bothers me, as I don't want to believe that women are ideally like that.

So it makes sense that Hollywood gay cowboys would be meant for women. The RARE opportunity to see the rugged masculine ideal turned back on itself, simultaneously capturing the desire for that kind of man, ejecting the normative female image, and approving the queerness that helped make that normative female image such a problem in the first place. And that queerness itself is important: the desire not only to have a man, but also be one.

I guess it's having your cake and eating it too, or, more personally, like when I stepped out of the sweatlodge into the New Year's air and felt the wonderful cold of the air without myself feeling cold. What a liberating, transitory moment. Soon I was shivering.

And, for the visual studies people out there, I just want to linger for a moment on the fact that libidinal interpretation is directed toward the whole image, not just one of the figures in it. If I do focus on one character out of two (or more), it's metonymically, as a part for the whole. The relationship between the characters is what I see, and what I interact with. My attraction to the gay cowboys is analogous, in its feminine exclusivity, to the demand for complex female protagonists, female agency. Equally rare and equally resistant to the hetero male perspective.

For those of you who don't know, the story "Brokeback Mountain" was written by Annie Proulx.

how do i

2005-10-04T17:19:00.000-05:00

write the opposite
of writing
not
more words
but more sense

i close my hard wings
like a lady bug

shiny shiny red
for you

this world of dew

2005-09-30T17:36:00.000-05:00

is only a world of dew
and yet...

-issa

i think my posts have been indicating my recent moodiness. true: i'm in an odd space, easily up and down, sensitive to all manner of trivia. the weather is brilliant, and in the park, babies are learning to walk back and forth in front of a guy playing the electric guitar. a few blocks later this guy in a truck chastises me for crossing the street on a yellow light, and even though i know it's not important, i can't stop that quick sting of embarassment.

treating everything as Mind, really testing this worldview, is tripping me up. i feel like i'm losing perspective in a very weird way -- i have a hundred ways of questioning my assumptions, all these damned rhetorical tricks of turning things around, so that i don't know what is a beginning, middle, or end of a line of thought, an argument, a feeling, what is important, what can be forfeited. to be fair, i've been engaging some heavy-hitting stuff recently -- martinis, renewed contact with once-volatile ex, 2046, bertolucci's The Conformist last night (holy crap). i've also been working on a big project i don't love for a month, and, you know, people are dying.

but this shows everything: people are dying. i keep writing this sentence. right now. now. now. i don't feel it. does the removal of illusion mean feeling it? feeling it, and then accepting it, and not feeling it again? or maybe forcing any kind of consciousness isn't the game to play, that we should be grateful for how life brings death close only in short, periodic bursts, so that moral consciousness and grief is a naturally irregular rhythm? what the fuck kind of question is this? who or what has the answer to this, can confer any kind of truth on it?

i must be trying to see suffering and its end at one time; it must be breaking my head. issa was smart and let the ellipsis hold the paradox. we all write in these units of question and answer, conflict and resolution, sitcom style, pluck out a thread and run your finger from beginning to end. i am having some weird philosophical block about conclusions, like it's not even possible. like, i can't think answers, just what's happening, just one step out from that into my self-resonance, pain or peace. everything else: i'm ignorant.

In the far, far future, essentially all matter will have returned to energy. But because of the enormous expansion of space, this energy will be spread so thinly that it will hardly ever convert back to even the lightest particles of matter. Instead, a faint mist of light will fall for eternity through an ever colder and quieter cosmos.

they put stuff like this in the newspaper, and they don't think it'll mess with people???? who has read The Cloud of Unknowing? holler.

i believe i have got the blues

2005-09-16T17:02:00.000-05:00

last night i was stuck at the office until 8pm not working but getting documents together for mailing to ex-landlord and lawyer-dad regarding the $2,500 invoice said ex-landlord has stuck my ex-housemates and i with. this made me insanely grumpy. i was like, "grump!" i went grumping along back toward my apartment. a lady on broad street tried to hand me some flyer, and i said, "no thanks." she said, "okay, honey." then her friend across the street said, "did you get one of these from my friend?" i said, "i said no thanks." he said, "okay. you have a lovely smile."

i was like, it's fake.

anyway, back at the apartment, which btw has these very distinctive scents in it: clove cigarette smoke (living room), new zealand mango citrus soap (bathroom), me (bedroom), i was exhausted and wondering what to do with all this grump that was ruining everything, and then i thought, i believe i have got the blues. i was thinking of something i was reading somewhere: you got troubles? i got troubles. i got troubles.

i put on Great Ladies Sing the Blues, this pretty awesome compilation i bought when i was, i dunno, fifteen or sixteen. it's all jazz standards but HOOBOY nina simone! and i just lay on the couch and felt like a transfigured piece of shit.

today i feel better. around 3pm i up and decided to go to fire lotus tomorrow morning, so i called and talked to yukon, who was really nice and amused that since may my address, telephone number, and credit card have all changed. so i'll be getting on a train tomorrow at 5:30am.

i've been fooling around on friendster, having little panic attacks about all the cool people in the world. i feel that the connections feature is inexplicably strange. you can zoom in and out on a kind of random dot-and-line representation of your connections to people, and swing the dots around, and wonder what this means about your relations.

p.s. thanks to wh for the trigonometry assistance!

private language

2005-09-05T17:44:00.000-05:00

of all the many many many things that have happened to me and other people in the past week or so that i might write about, in fact i find myself inclined to begin where i left off, with the end of Herzog. (btw, on the corner of the fountain in rittenhouse square. only celebrities and people from manhattan are that well-groomed.)

there's a certain amount of physical description in the book, both of people and of landscape, rural and urban. what concerns me is the natural landscape, what happens when a very good writer spends time describing the grass, the light, the trees, and a reader is reading closely. i presume that i am not singular in the degree to which i can and do identify with what i'm reading; i'm not the only person who looks up from a book to discover it's much later than one though, not the only person to cry over fiction. perhaps i have a particular sensitivity, but that's all. regardless, i don't think i'm making this up:

whether an aspect of bellow's talent, or an aspect of my current mental climate, or both, reading those descriptions, and committing to them, as i put it to N, affected a strong and sudden shift in perspective for me: identify deeply with the way grass is, with the way light is, and what is it your mind is up to? what is this imaginative intimacy, and what constitutes it? written, somehow relevant to the affective environment of the narrative of a man's transformation, what does one make of dovetailing the glimmering, insentient natural within the human adventure?

omniscience is an easy mode to describe, to conceptualize; perhaps what i'm edging toward is that it's another thing to inhabit, even in the confines of a novel, all-seeing. i saw it a bit more clearly today reading Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: [regarding Wittgenstein's Tractatus] "Science and 'ordinary life' are public and use public, that is significant, language (or in other words, language), whereas morality and religion are private and ineffable."

who on earth knows whether and how to agree or disagree with such a thing, but i think the point is that the end of Herzog, and perhaps, at its most generous, literature as a category, has an ability to somehow trade in private language. of morality and religion? i leave that be. to have a private experience, and to speak about it, is difficult, and yet these days i lose my patience with public language of any tone faster and faster, i think, because it is public, because i feel (narrowly: feel) that public discourse is lousy at doing anything other point to or away from other public discourse. i don't mean to be cynical about it. we all need statements we can understand quickly, without looking too closely. but looking closely -- what then?

omg imaginary

2005-08-08T10:03:00.000-05:00

scenes from the fire boss's imagination:

(1) friday afternoon, walking to the market: reactionary boys start fighting. the f.b. throws a sheet cake with vanilla icing on top of them and shouts, "ridiculous!" the f.b. laughs to herself on the sidewalk.
(2) saturday morning, asleep: chased by werewolf, who is actually louisa. werewolf/louisa bites fire boss on the hand. it hurts. later, rossma says, "i think you're right."
(3) saturday morning: indulging touch of hypochondria, youthful death from cancer. conducts post-mortem soliloquy. mourns self tearfully in the bathtub.
(4) sunday morning, asleep: as usual, nightmares are about being trapped in horror movies. this time it is some sort of scifi, alternate universe shit, simultaneously watching and being a member of the small band of heroes FIGHTING TO SURVIVE. return to dream reality only to fall prey to horror-conceit of IT'S NOT OVER YET.

the mind goes on entertaining itself with fictional emotion, which don't cost a thing, except of course that on monday morning, facing the prospect of getting down to business, one has no better tools for busting through the brick wall of reluctance than one did as a wee lass. in fact, fewer, because my older bro cannot come around with his imaginary machete and galvanize me into picking up all my My Little Ponies. if i could willfully put my heart into this crappy office chair i would, but the will and the heart stand with their pistols drawn in the eternal misty morning of my work ethic. in the meantime i shall paint a moustache on my self-pity. ridiculous!

arkeeolojee

2005-08-05T14:00:00.000-05:00

that's seminole for digging up old stuff. no, not really. but did you know that in 1842 president john tyler spent 20 MILLION DOLLARS (what, do you figure, is the inflation on that?) to kill off/sign a peace treaty with the seminoles, and failed?

but what i meant to tell you is that, in honor of claire, who is, as she is every summer, half-naked and down in a pompeiian ditch, an israeli architect thinks she's found king david's palace. pretty cool, although it's a shame to add any fuel to the literalist flame. little bit of irony there in the final paragraph. bonus: pompeii grafitti.

nothing saves my mood like a random international, or, even better, science article in the Times. and let me tell you, sometimes all it takes to start a-wallowing is a photo in a show over at UArts of some skate kid being grabbed by his t-shirt. the most satisfying thing i did yesterday was this brainteaser, of the sort they taught me in gifted classes in elementary school. make a table.

Passion dollars, noble serpent

2005-08-04T17:18:00.000-05:00

"The phrase I heard used several times was 'Passion dollars'; they want to try to get 'The Passion' dollars if they can," said Ms. Nicolosi, referring to her conversations about the film."

i don't think i'm even going to comment on that one.

have been reading some interesting stuff: "Camp Messianism," which is about contemporary poetry, linked over at sugarhigh. wanting to respond to various points and comments on negativity, and finding, of course, that there was no where to begin, i went looking for help, and there in my favorites was Nagarjuna. so i'm reading that long, clear, fruitful article on the "noble serpent." check it:

"Nagarjuna saw in the concept sunya, a concept which connoted in the early Pali Buddhist literature the lack of a stable, inherent existence in persons, but which since the third century BCE had also denoted the newly formulated number 'zero,' the interpretive key to the heart of Buddhist teaching, and the undoing of all the metaphysical schools of philosophy which were at the time flourishing around him."

newly formulated number zero!! skepsis never sounded so good, so accurate. let's all sit around and investigate causality.

also: listening to the Mixtape to End All Mixtapes, "Genrecalia" by ross, which i am just beginning to unpack along with my suitcases, and john adams' "On the Transmigration of Souls," which i mostly dig for its sudden, traumatic, symphonic siren climax. much too loud (pathology and striking anywhere the last trust). who has tickets to Doctor Atomic?

from the same coast, a nice compliment, and worth contemplating: "i just don't hear much -- well -- prose from you. poetry, yes (though i see little); expository papers or articles from you, yes. the occasional letter or email. but a whole _blog_ ! i'm just very astonished to see this window into some of your thoughts, on a level i've never seen you make public before, at least, with any regularity."

how many windows does it take? here's another.

since i've missed produce at reading terminal again, i'll continue. with an errand to run up at 22nd and fairmount today, i took a long lunch and walked northwest, made good on the rare opportunity to stop in at the cathedral of sts. peter & paul -- so cool and smelling like cleaning products -- and the free library, where there was a special display outside of the Literature room with dark/clover's The Matrix. who was it to whom i said, "just go with the flow," and responded, "there isn't one"? clearly, you're wrong.

friend of hipsters

2005-07-27T12:27:00.000-05:00

is, along with 'fire boss,' one of my reigning titles, according to one or two of my closest friends, who aren't hipsters at all, but worry about them. TMN linked to this article on whether owen wilson was the secret key to wes anderson's success. it is worth reading, and so are the two articles linked at the bottom, both VERY astute takes on anderson and hipsterdom. (la, drop everything and read.)

for the rest of this entry i plan to write about my own experience of delight and anxiety as a marginal member of this generation. i may go on for some time. (even this Salingerian qualifier forshadows what will follow. what you do with your time is your own decision. i am rereading Seymour, An Introduction).

Rushmore, if i remember correctly, came out in 1998, during my senior year of high school, when i had recently shunted an all-consuming but doomed crush on a sandy-haired protagonist (see below) in favor of a shitty but real relationship with a spoiled punk drummer who drove a corvette and solved each of his physics problems on one line of college-ruled notebook paper. my best friends at the time were two gals who were big-hearted and big-boned, as they put it, one of them devoutly Catholic. when we all turned 18, we went dancing on sunday nights at brothers, "tallahassee's pansexual nightclub." sunday was 80s night; cover was $2, and it was by far the safest place to dance in town. take that, homophobes.

my two friends happened to see Rushmore before i did but, knowing i would love it, went again with me immediately. they were right. i was, at the time, starved for anything sensitive, witty, and intelligent, and i smiled and i smiled and i smiled in the dark, utter delight. the loving detail, the hilarious deadpan, bill murray's subsumed loose-cannon performance, beautiful olivia williams...it became my favorite movie.

at the time, i didn't know the word "hipster," at least not in its contemporary sense; i don't know whether the subculture had yet been truly articulated. fashion arrives late in north florida, which i think is good for the character. when the movie came out on video that summer, i rented it and had a viewing party at my house. my boyfriend didn't come, which did not surprise me, and neither did my old unrequited flame (i don't think i invited him, though, about a year ago, on the phone, he happened to mention that it's now his favorite), but lots of other people did, including these two younger hip guys, josh martin and andy funk, who ate all the brownies i'd made and loved the film. we talked about ben folds 5.

then i went to swarthmore, and, captivated by the funny flyers advertising pizza, found myself at a meeting for Spike, the magazine i eventually co-edited. my editors at the time, however, were lotto, lewis, and shainin (i received a bit of a shock this week when he showed up at sfj, being as i'd found that site ON MY OWN THANK YOU, through various linkages about mashups. but it makes sense, since the first time i read sfj i thought, "this chick reads like christine.") these guys and their friends were the hipsters i befriended, with the exception of lewis, who i "became," the useful dork amidst the drama, "vice-president of everything," as i called myself, perhaps equivalent to:

And let’s not forget that guy you can count on. His star always burned a bit dimmer than yours, but it never burns out. Perhaps he wears glasses, but without irony. There’s something weird about his apartment—it’s nice, not squalid. You may not talk to him much anymore—he’s not in your crowd, not hip enough, I guess, but loyal, and responsible, still holding down the same basically shitty job. He’ll always bail you out or put you up.

one foot in the hip, one in the Dharma, the Transcendental, the neo-Aristotelian, the Classical, the Biblical, the Romantic, the Natural...there are plenty of feet. all i can think is that i am seduced, but only ever partially, by the current aesthetic thrust of my generation, including its criticism. i went to those Spike meetings freshman year and sat laughing my ass off while those boys with their hairdos made funny jokes and gushed over joyce and dropped names (benjamin) that i couldn't wait to look up. then i'd go back to the dorm and kiss my very temporary girlfriend in the bathroom. we listened to the Rushmore soundtrack during crunch time at the magazine; nori didn't get it.

eventually, this bittersweet straddle came to describe everything: i wrote great articles for the magazine, but they weren't funny. shainin went home mid-spring to work on his film thesis and left lotto and lewis to pick up the slack while jon, i think, in the end, picked up highest honors. they handed the magazine to christine, jeanne, and i, but i learned later that lotto hadn't wanted to, and surely his doubt was in me, and maybe he was right. from one side of the glass, i was a bone fide theory-reading, glasses-wearing, irony-gulping literary fiend. from the other, i was a lyrical poet who'd wandered into the wrong room and was too clueless to excuse herself. though it was my transcript that took the beatings of end-of-semester all-nighters in the publications office, and my name that got ripped off on the Daily Jolt after i responded to anonymous posts about the magazine.

but i digress, i think. Rushmore, and, more recently, Lost in Translation, and even more recently, Me and You and Everyone We Know, are all prime hipster territory, but they also share a border position between indie and mainstream that i have, since i started thinking about all this, counted as my little razorblade duchy. they are smart and emotional and eccentric and conducive to cult followings, but you don't have to be in the cult, or get all the references, to enjoy them. i actually never get the references, though i can often intuit when a reference is being made. people at either end of the culture extreme -- deep mainstream, or deep obscurantism -- won't touch these films. if you want to, you may accuse them of being an unholy edgy/bourgeois blend, which gives some people hives. i swim in it.

it is more interesting to call Anderson and Coppola's films racist, and to let them get off as "postracial" is, i think, exactly that. here's the relevant paragraph:

But come on, Anderson and hipsters are too self-conscious, too postmodern, to be racist. Hipsters, though, they may be mostly white (and rich) welcome minorities to their ranks. In fact they get worried if their aren’t enough colors on the social palette; you could hear something genuinely troubling when the Moldy Peaches used to sing, “I’m running out of ethnic friends.” This all seems resonant with a theory I have heard spouted (though never read) by and about young people today—that growing up in “diverse communities” with friends of every color and creed, they are “postracial.” It follows that they make racist jokes without malice, as a way of rebelling against the tyranny of political correctness. Perhaps this is true, and maybe it’s not even such a bad thing: racism isn’t racism anymore it’s just breaking of taboo. We can poke a little fun at Filipinos and Sikhs and Arabs and Germans and people from Kentucky, and then all listen together to the ebony-skinned Brazilian man on the deck of the Belafonte singing “Ziggy Stardust” in Portuguese.

perhaps "postracist" is more appropriate. it is very very easy to watch a black person on a screen sing a song or make a joke; to have a few ethnic friends is not much harder. but to accept a mixed racial aesthetic is different from accepting a mixed racial ethic, with its harsher material sacrifices. i'm not saying i'm doing a good job of this. but i'm willing to admit that i'm not doing enough to not manifest racism and to question my aesthetic conditioning. my recent ex hates anything that smells of this kind of hypocrisy, and i learned a lot from him. i think it's an excellent moral opportunity to love something and find it offensive at the same time, and to keep loving it, and to heal the offense. we can't just abandon what's already ours.

at the end of the other hipster article, wilder concludes (as one must, with a punch), calling for a return of the hemingway-style "Bruiser":

I can only pray some hibernating Bruiser--Don DeLillo, say, or Robert Rauschenberg--will spring from his cave, tear LBSB's Saint-Exupéry scarf off his pencil neck, and show him how it's really done: art-making revealed as high-wire act, fire-eating contest, bare-knuckle barroom brawl.

i can only pray that these extremes are not the only options we've got -- hypermasculine or emasculated. can't you guys fulfill your sex without caricaturing it until you destroy yourself with self-hatred or hiding in the presexual cave of nostalgia? you see, i am working on this, too, trying to accept the continued presence of the little girl as well as all these changes that have flown through. i have this hunch that the culture of 20-something self-destructive boredom has very much to do with not knowing how to engage the task of self-acceptance.

i have got to go. i have already exhausted my lunch break and i have not eaten anything. crap!

p.s. wes anderson's women have gotten less and less convincing as he's gone. miss cross was lovely and was given the crucial task of bursting max's bubble. gwyneth, in the RT, was a walking fetish: fur coat, baby doll dress and barrettes, exoticizing eyeliner, missing finger. cate, in LA, was a boring as hell love-interest with Quirky Girl Things stuck to her: bubblegum, pregnancy. angelica houston? the fulfilled matriarch (twice), who is curiously irrelevant.

Poem: "Internet Research"

2005-07-20T14:55:00.000-05:00

We can't
I'm sorry
We can't
Do this
I have to work

Thinking--
The torrid romance--
Groping
Mental objects

visions of sugarromeos

2005-07-19T10:22:00.000-05:00

frank rich's rhetoric is so good that it scares me. he manages to transform even the flabbiest of political mayhem into espionage-thriller-shoot-em-up-awesome. oh, go find it yourself.

dknapp left me a message hazarding a guess that "the time we are going to DO IT is nigh. nay. nigh." how long can you base a friendship on jokes about sexual tension? then i dreamt i was dating leonardo dicaprio. we were outside. i started my day with a trip to a post office in the ungentrified neighborhood north of fairmount around 19th to pick up the latest issue of cabinet. i waited for the belated 33 for 20 minutes in the always already cruel sun of 9:30am, thinking about my blind date tonight, my decade-long infatuation with sandy-haired protagonists. boys.

missing woodstock

2005-07-12T15:44:00.000-05:00

yay! i have signed up for a week-long meditation intensive (sesshin) for aug 22-28 at zmm!

now taking bets on whether 8 hours/day of zazen is easier or harder than 8 hours/day of work.

clearly i have an unusual idea of "vacation."

between loving the internet and hating it, i am too busy to do any work

2005-07-11T11:44:00.000-05:00

second postcard from monday.

i can't stand these idiots

2005-07-11T10:47:00.000-05:00

"When her fellow second graders did not understand a math lesson, she recalled, she would jump up and yell, 'I can't stand these idiots,' prompting her teacher to send notes home."

another good line from this weekend, in "The Name of the Rose": "Adso, if I knew the answers to everything, I would be teaching theology in Paris." now he'd teach theory, but really it's the same.

and lying sleepless in the middle of the night, i came up with: we feel contempt for weaknesses that are not our own. there was another good one, too, but i lost it. must have turned over one too many times. i did have a sudden clarity about my intellectual passions these days, that i think i am trying to advance and synthesize the four classes i was taking senior spring: aesthetics, art and society, french critical theory, and the poetry workshop. the foundation is in the poetic, shot through with paradoxes of literature and ethics, representation, epistemology, ontology, all cast in, what shall we call it, the weary (and wary) anxiety of this late historical moment?

and then there is a sort of shadow question, the question of whether it makes a difference to the fate of our culture, our hearts, and our minds, whether we accept the reality of the sacred. i think i once penned this question as St. Francis vs. The Good Life. but that may disguise the question as being about the necessity of renunciation, or suffering, or may leave the inquiry too conventionally within the christian. as i mentioned to am and la last night, for a long time, i was happy to resolve the question of the sacred as a part of human life, and so real enough for me. even imagined or imaginary, the axis orients us. but i have the impulse to push this question as far as possible, to, i think, look at the nuts and bolts of the ethical and ask how it is it functions, what it rests on, how to take care of it.

oh! i remember, my other good line from last night was, you can't make people believe in goodness, but you can show it to them.

lynx

2005-07-07T16:46:00.000-05:00

you know about london. sfj writes, on the nose as usual, "Our prayers are with our friends, and our enemies, too. And if you can tell the difference between the two, you're a step ahead of me." lots of good stuff on his site these days, what with the genius kid and all.

today i went looking for information on The Lost Meeting, a hip, theory-laden installation up at Abington Art Center. in my opinion, deleuze, guattari, and quakers make strange bedfellows, but maybe that's a good thing. certainly the lynx (new spelling) were gratifying: collaborator j. morgan puett's website has updated turn-of-the-century erotica that is the hottest thing i've seen all week. also, spurse, one of those silly-named conceptual collectives, recently conducted this, i think, very apt project on sustainability.

even more successfully making mischief in the art/activism sphere, and being funny at the same time, are the Yes Men. have they been on the Daily Show yet? if not, why? also, can i marry them?

in conclusion, i have a cellphone. i'm going to go home and figure out how to use the thing.

krump

2005-06-28T16:40:00.000-05:00

the best thing and worst thing about TMN is that the links change every day. means if i want you to check out this sweetass "festival" in vienna, i have to link to it directly. also, those of political persuasions will find this interesting.

anyhoo, i've had rather an emotionally epic week. i'll save you the confessional stuff but will let you know that i went to two parties and had a very inebriated, amused, solo ride on the 42 back from west philly on saturday/sunday at, oh, 3:00 in the morning. and i saw Rize, which is WOW. go see it. i cried in the middle somewhere just because of its intensity. last night after 6" Under alan and i stumbled into one of our life coaching sessions...he's encouraging me to write and was explaining his was of understanding how to write fiction. "you've got to approach it as you write poetry," he said, and then gave me one of the most inspiring compliments of my life: "to read a whole novel in that voice--" he puts his hands on his heart and swooned, "--oh!"

i have been writing: one poem i'm happy with last week, some nebulous prosey stuff, and two journal entries that both ended in ecstasy. even today at lunch i tapped out a lengthy email on religion to wh, walked to minar palace thrilled despite the oppressing air. i'm trying to pay attention to how themes crystallize in my thought, how to usefully characterize my obsessions. i'll take suggestions. i am returning and returning to many memories of my early days, heady miami, deadening tallahassee, where, as i described it last night, i started accruing suffering.

yes, for one, i'd like to write about the end of speculation, a habit i took on in the face of stoney-visaged, though not unloving, protective parents, in the quiet suburb, in the anyhow corner of north florida -- an introverted life and the mystified conviction that everything was much more complicated than it actually was. to survive that -- not just to keep living but to know what one has experienced and to go beyond it -- is what i mean -- the great tectonic shuddering that knowledge and its awareness produces in such a person, the metaphysical frying pan, as i like to call it. the storm! and the calm that follows. it's like krumping.

lost?

2005-06-13T16:00:00.000-05:00

does this mean we lost the war in Iraq?

here's the first sentencegraph: "A growing number of senior American military officers in Iraq have concluded there is no long-term military solution to an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,300 U.S. troops in the last two years."

whoopsy daisy.

also, anyone want to come to london with me to attend an intellectual history conference on conversations with angels? looks like fun to me.

ay ay ay ay ay cantaba

2005-06-10T20:30:00.000-05:00

charles altieri is a literary phenomenologist at uc berkeley whose latest book is called The Particulars of Rapture. sounds like a lame title until you find out that it's from wallace stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" ("It Must Change," section IV). i haven't read it yet. my aesthetics professor once said in an email, regarding altieri, "there'd be no one better to study with than charlie."

i'm having a grad school sort of day, which is a sort that inevitably ends with me perusing course listings online and then sighing and closing the window out of dissatisfaction. but why? how do i get so excited about really really really academicky questions like, what are the full implications of the coextension of the histories of art and europe? and then read course descriptions -- or worse, dissertation topics -- and experience kind of violent slamming-shut of closets with monsters in them?

my best hypothesis on this is that i don't see the academic paper as an honest or fruitful mode of pursuing the questions i have. which is a damn shame, really, because universities are exactly the kind of institutions with exactly the kind of resources that could serve as a kickass incubator for all the stuff i'd like to explore. i guess that's what swat was supposed to be for. shucks. anyway, my current underdeveloped theory about why i'm so allergic to academic discourse is that it seems like a seriously weak and indirect way of addressing the sorts of problems that might feel urgent enough to motivate 7+ years of research and study in the first place. to be so obsessed with a problem that you essentially lock yourself away (note: from what?) for a good portion of a decade, and then to come out with some body of material that gets instantly boiled down to a one-sentence-or-less position that your colleagues have every motivation to dismantle, and roughly at that. really, i just want to resist the demand to take a position. i don't want to build a little cubby for myself and spend the rest of my life trying to get people to notice that i'm climbing out of it.

and the language is so evasively abstract. i'm reading an essay on "art" and "the arts" (yes - in quotes - the concepts) right now that begins with a description of what, grammatically, abstraction consists of. muy interessante. what, really, is the nature of this hovering above the concrete, as if once you touch down on something that anyone might see, hear, smell, taste, or touch, you'll be torn to pieces by the alligator of verifiability. you see, in this way, poetic language is much more honest. at least it makes fresh leaps across the lilypads, and puts its heart into helping its reader keep up. humanitarian academic discourse all too often acts more like a helicopter.

the rub is that these questions do, at least sometimes, feel incredibly urgent to me. my employer, a foundation that makes arts grants and absolutely has the agenda to "be on the leading edge" of funding, i guess, by ear-marking funds to donate to interdisciplinary collaborations among local artists. it sounds great except that, like the bush administration, i have next to no faith that they'll know how to approach such a thing intelligently. they only manage to fund good art in established genres because there are agreed-upon experts in these fields to come in and sit on grant-making panels and make the decisions about which projects are convincing. if my employer has no idea what makes a convincing interdisciplinary project, and there aren't many people around who do know, the initiative will likely fail. any maybe funding mediocre but superficially progressive art is better than funding nothing at all, but i'm not at all convinced that it's better than awarding the money to pretty good artists in established genres.

i've spent the past several months thinking about and researching different aspects of this question, and when i get passionate about it i want to take my boss's boss and shake him by the shoulders and say, WAKE UP ASSHOLE. JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE IN CHARGE OF THE MONEY DOESN'T MEAN YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. in fact it probably means that you don't. i really want philly to be hopping with great art of all genres, old, new, trans-, whatever, and for artists to make kickass concerts and productions and installations with one another, and i'm totally happy to go about doing the intellectual work of figuring out what will enable such a thing to come about. and though i may be a hair's breadth from being able to do that, i have the overriding sense of NO CIGAR. maybe it'd just be a kind of self-imperialism, anyway. maybe that's what power is.

i'll leave that one alone for now. i came up with this idea a couple weeks ago for Patron Saint Productions, an organization that would do that sort of thing, coordinate occasional, small-scale events designed to integrate and publicize various creative resources in the city. idea: EPR, named after the Education/Philosophy/Religion room in the free library, the contents of which i could invite local writers and artists to base works on, involving collaboration with librarians. idea: Schmlassical, battle of the bands style alternating performances between local broadly-pop acts and Curtis students. idea: Sex Ed, dance parties to benefit scientifically and historically accurate sex education in schools. as-yet untitled other idea: semi-private occasional dinners with all local ingredients, strategic invitations to important people in town, held in historic houses, with the invitation to buy local art, support the historic house (many of which around phila are struggling financially), learn about csa's.

i feel these are all good ideas, and i'm only beginning to get a sense of what already exists in philly. just finding or building a database of festivals and markets might be a clever place to start.

i gotta go, but i'll leave you with this little happy ending: i was thinking about "Talk to Her" the other day, and then when i was flipping channels that evening, it happened to be starting on IFC at that instant. coincidink. gorgeous as ever, and again made me desperate to go to spain. so today i went surfing through Life in Seville, and found another reason to go: a weekly animal fair! PUPPIES!!

where to begin?

2005-06-08T20:19:00.000-05:00

i have no idea. sometimes all it takes is a few days to overflow on blog juice.

so. i do have to move. with a relatively uncharacteristic gesture, i flicked off my answering machine while listening to my landlord's wife repeat to the room that my house will probably be rented to someone else by august 15th. it's not that i'm so mad, i just think she's got crap reasons for kicking us to the curb, which she'd have realized if she'd talked to us for 5 minutes before she'd made up her mind. "i'm sorry, but i've made up my mind," she said to alan, which, one realizes, is a performative statement when one has rights to property. blah. i've given myself til the end of the week or so to make up my mind about all this. lots of interesting bits floating around, and a phone call with a senior monastic at fire lotus hopefully scheduled for today or tomorrow evening.

alum weekend happened. for me, it was exhausting and rife with old feelings. uncorked a lot of emotion, as well as bottles of wine. actually, the weekend had the precision of a scientific experiment: with repeated conditions, i went through exactly the same shit i did while i was a student: whimsical ringleader, wistful wanderer, announcer-of-bedtime, spiritual alien, surprise-in-a-dress, dodger of inappropriate remarks, cuddler with girls, one half of the platonic form of Roommates, delighter in plants and babies, religion department skeptic and secreter away of short dialogues with cute boys. friends are the best. i only cried for eric. more hugging than i've done probably since i graduated. when i did laundry last night my socks were full of mica.

manhattan and back

2005-05-19T14:25:00.000-05:00

last night i joined in an enjoyable and somewhat surreal trip to nyc. shiny white limo, dinner in the surprisingly pleasant capriani dolci in grand central station, VisionIntoArt's "A Tough Line" in the lobby of the Whitney/Altria building across the street, dozens of attractive 20-somethings not really moving or being moved by the terrorist event. an interesting piece, though, as i commented to the tall and cord-clad animator -- the aesthetic distance created by the large and graceful ensemble spoke to the production's root in the compositions. the tone testified to the positions of its young and intelligent creators, poetic images of sundered and traumatized families as though sundered and traumatized families were something they had once heard of. which is probably true.

when we got back to philly i hopped in a cab ("where to, sweetheart?"). the cabbie asked how my day was. i mentioned the limo. he asked if i was in the limo with my boyfriend.

a: no, my boyfriend...was...elsewhere. this was for my work, actually.
cabbie: are you going home to your boyfriend?
a: no, i have three housemates.
cabbie: husbands?
a: no, housemates. i have three roommates.
cabbie: ah, roommates. where is your boyfriend?
a: he's...in...new york.
cabbie: so you see him when you go to new york?
a: sometimes, when i'm not with my work.
cabbie: so how does that work, your boyfriend being in new york?
a: (pause) it's a bit tricky.
cabbie: you should find a boyfriend in philadelphia.
a: well, i'll worry about it when it's time.

at the intersection outside my house, he looked at the 4.50 meter and said, "450 dollars."

a: i'm a bit short (handing him a ten).
cabbie: ah, 1000 dollars.
a: i'll just take 3 back.
cabbie: 300 dollars (returning change with some ceremony). find a boyfriend in philadelphia.
a: thanks for the advice.

so this is what the volume knob's for

2005-05-16T08:54:00.000-05:00

one of my biggest surprises at tassajara was the full moon ceremony. conducted once a month, unsurprisingly, on the night of the full moon, the ceremony is for atonement. the line goes something like: "all my ancient evil twisted karma, which has its beginning born of my body, speech, and mind -- i make full confession of it."

also, the ceremony is rock n roll. greg fain, a big, tall, recently married, zen cowboy priest who wears elvis costello glasses and gave me one of the best hugs of my life, agreed with me on this. the ceremony packs everyone into the zendo, cushion to cushion, and involves a lot, a LOT of bowing and prostration: up, down, up, down, forehead to the zabuton, throwing all that karma back over your shoulders, heart beating fast and palms in gassho -- there's no stopping. atonement at a run.

i only got to attend one of the ceremonies, in august. i missed july because of my grandmother's death. that night, following the ceremony, still buzzing with spiritual feedback, jared pointed out the moon for me, and it was the brightest i'd ever seen it, out there in the semi-arid central california mountains east of salinas. it was gigantic, silvery white light shouting down, out, everywhere, dousing everything. how could it be a reflection?

that night i was on firewatch, which meant that i walked around the center grounds clacking some sticks together (clack-2-3-4-, clack-2-3-4-, clack-2-clack-4-...) and blowing out all the kerosene lamps, which provide pretty much all of tassajara's exterior light. every time i blew out a light, tilting up the glass and leaning close to the flame, in the moment it extinguished it was as though someone turned on another light behind me. i'd look over my shoulder, and there was nothing. just moonlight.

i was all stirred up. i went down to a far end of the grounds to sing, searching for a way to expel or express the energy, the insides of me blackening like the globe of one of the kerosene lamps. they smoke more when the wick is cut crooked. on later occasions, when anger and desire mounted and merged until i had no idea of what i was feeling, i would go charging up the steep dirt road out of the place, make it as far as the first lookout and stand there with the valley's panorama filling up my eyes, wondering what the hell to do.

atonement is just beginning to come clear. the ceremony, that place, lit a fuse, or helped light it, and it's only now, almost two years later, that the karma of envy and resentment is revealing itself to me for what it is. it is not a polite revelation, mind you. the powder keg has exploded; i don't know what will be left of me when this dies down, but in the meantime my poor tear ducts are trying to put the blaze out all on their own. good luck, tear ducts.

i'm trying not to force sense from this. the wounded childhood origins of poetry, of writerliness, fantasy and spirit, are coming to me, the compensation i took for my brother's (and others') blessed, vital unknowing.

In the room where I couldn't sleep with you
I felt myself smudged across the air, golden with pinewood,
As though the thumb of your unknowing
Took quick strokes from my forehead and shoulders.

what i can't figure, and won't figure, but try instead to put to rest, is the panic of not being enough, and this wasting, recursive, unnecessary pain. i only know one way to do that.

the armpit chemical

2005-05-10T09:35:00.000-05:00

funny-because-true lines from the Times' gay men and pheromones article:

"Dr. Savic said that she had also studied gay women, but that the data were 'somewhat complicated' and not yet ready for publication."

"She said the Swedish study was extremely interesting, even though 'humans are a terrible experimental subject.'"

and, queer girls = more babies?

"Gay men have fewer children, meaning that in Darwinian terms, any genetic variant that promotes homosexuality should be quickly eliminated from the population. Dr. Hamer believes that such genes may nevertheless persist because, although in men they reduce the number of descendants, in women they act to increase fertility."

food for thought on the gender asymmetries front.

last night was a good night; today is a good day

2005-05-05T20:25:00.000-05:00

first, the concert was great: a solid but unsquished crowd of maybe 100 kids, most of whom looked younger than me. that was a first. the basement of the unitarian church is a dim (or maybe the lights were just out?), wood-paneled room, the sort of room that reminds me of the late 70s, early 80s, like it probably had shag carpeting at some point.

we arrived for the end of shearwater (or is it sheerwater?) - tallish kid with a guitar, then a banjo with the recently resurfaced ivory-billed woodpecker drawn on it, flanked by a very girlfriend-looking cellist, a drummer with very bad hair, and a violinist who resembled a lion both in mane and fighting spirit. they played well. the lead was best loud.

mr. goats is a strange one, the kind of strange you are when you're strange in conservative places: an unsocialized strangeness. he spoke eagerly of his hypochondria, wife, ending forever the cries of "free bird!" the banter was excellent, mostly conducted with his bassist, a kind of bullfighter/the jesus type. did he have a mustache, or would it just have been appropriate? goats' best line, in my opinion, was, "we intuitive types, you think these things slip by us, but no. we skip reason and go straight to suspicion."

his songs are short, full of mornings, grass, and blood - compulsive. it was just what i needed, i said, something lo-fi but intense, something i might conceivably do. reading Herzog is giving me same feeling. i laughed out loud in the cafeteria reading:

"Then he realized suddenly that Ramona had made herself into a sort of sexual professional (or priestess). He was used to dealing with vile amateurs lately. I didn't know that I could make out with a true sack artist.
"But is that the secret goal of my vague pilgrimage? Do I see myself to be after long blundering an unrecognized son of Sodom and Dionysus--an Orphic type? (Ramona enjoyed speaking of Orphic types.) A petit-bourgeois Dionysian?
"He noted: Foo to all these categories!"

this, by the way, is on page 17. on my walk back to the office i thought about being a sexual professional or priestess, how there is a choice between that and children, and that, for me, a relationship that includes babies will almost certainly be a relationship that demands fidelity.

so i guess i'm into today. overslept, which does not surprise me: up too late every day since sunday. reading TMN, i encountered bear. i have made a special new friend! i wrote to bear, and he wrote me back! he said:

>> dear alyssa,
>> thank you so much for writing.
>> i am so happy you liked the pictures of my travels...
>> even though some are actually not from paris...
>> the jesus pictures are all from washington dc.
>> actually all from one room at the national gallery
>> can you imagine?
>>
>> yes, please feel free to use the pictures for your desktop.
>> which one will you choose?
>>
>> sorry for the short email.
>> typing is not easy for me.
>>
>> waving
>> -bear

i'm so happy. bear makes me feel very gentle like when it starts to snow as you're walking the city. recovering something like childhood is so precious. bear lives with an artist in brooklyn who does fantastic drawings. what do you think, anyone, should i write to witold, as well as bear?

heard from another wonderful friend today: roomie c! with whom i plan to room during our 2-year reunion in june. she has registered me as her "spouse." and i get to see her this weekend for alcohol and strawberries. and N is back, and m is coming, and i am so excited to see all these friendly letters.

in other swat-related news, gilmore stott has died. this is a man i did not know, but who appears to have been incredibly wise and responsible for the mccabe scholars, of which our good friend wh is one. you should read about him here. i would be honored to have such a life. reading about his encouragement of students, as well as maurice eldridge, made me remember that eldridge once emailed me - out of the blue, never having interacted before - to compliment me on a story i'd published in Spike. i'll take those words seriously now. and perhaps i'll get in touch.

the Diotima of DIY neo-punk collectives, and Plato

2005-05-03T19:27:00.000-05:00

here is some of the text about a new installation at Space 1026:

"Paper Rad began a long, long time ago in Boston, during a living room seance. Everyone in the house that night was sitting Indian-style, holding hands, saying magic words, when they summoned a long-dead Spirit back to the Land of the Living. This ghost was half-Lioness and half-Terrier, and her codename was Moonglade. Eager to impart the wisdom of the Spirit World, she talked a lot about eschewing hesitation, self-seriousness, dollars, ego, drama, professionalism, and about getting on with the project of total affirmation. The true end of culture, she said, was to deliver us every last head on Earth into a rich and rewarding, eternal adolescence. This definitely struck a chord with everyone there. After she finished talking, she blew a whistle and vanished again, into the carpet forever."

okay, so, they're artists, so they don't really have to be serious about any of this. i've been to one end of the irony cul de sac and back, and i enjoyed it. what struck me, and what i so helpfully italicized for you, dear reader, is (1) the list of vices that Paper Rad offers via Moonglade (apparently the Diotima of - what? - DIY neo-punk collectives?), (2) a similarly Greek-happy (ie, eudaimonist) "project of total affirmation," and (3) Moonglade's vision of "the true end of culture" (telos) as "a rich and rewarding, eternal adolescence."

heck, it sounds good to me, too. i've always been a fan of, for example, Mat 19:14, "Jesus said, 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.'" yes i looked that up.

just one quibble: are we, or they, or anyone who these days has visions of human flourishing, able to conceive of rich and rewarding, eternal ADULTHOOD? in other words, why choose adolescence, which i remember as, yes, heady, and full of excitement, but just as ensnaring as these more grown-up fittings, if not more so? wherefore the imaginative impoverishment of adults, and why do we ever ever ever agree to it?

as for the list of vices, it is one configuration in a long line of such. the history is one i'm reading about these days in Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, rapidly becoming the bibliographic mascot of my friend group. drama and professionalism seem the newest contributions; hesitation, self-seriousness, dollars, and ego being perhaps counteracted by courage (Homer &c), amiability? (Austen), charity and humility (Christianity). drama and professionalism. huh.

and, for your edification and mine, Diotima proper. it's about Love.

ambient one

2005-04-26T16:25:00.000-05:00

at 8am this morning, while i delayed getting out of bed by reading some old diary entries, someone drove by blasting "back that ass up." about 25 minutes later, after i was out of the shower, "little earthquakes."

i suppose it's unlikely it was the same car.

despite the interesting fact that i think it was the first time i'd ever heard "little earthquakes" - the song, mind you - played publicly, it seemed too early for either.

also, hello.