in search of nirvana

in interviews you're just the heroin addict next door, the boy i always knew. but on stage you become something beside yourself, a energy conduit bridging human listeners and a spiritual whole. gosh i have the urge to paint some youtube stills.

mixtape

the soft crooning voice came on the radio and i realized that she had always been one step cooler than me in all parts of life. but it would be wrong to mistake coolness for happiness. or unhappiness for coolness, for that matter.

2 things conducive to lovers

1. portals that allow instant passage from one bedroom to the other.
2. portals that let you disappear into a nether-space in which time passes more slowly, while the rest of the world and their busy schedules stands still.

factoid

my given chinese name is a homonym for "walking on luck", idiomatic for "lucky". it is also a homonym for "walking on clouds". my parents had an inkling i would turn out to be a beatnik (or that my artistic production would thematically concern walking and broken homes AHEM). i also tend to view most developments in my life as consequences of fortune. most of the time, life is good.

for the first day of christmas my true love gave to me

a romance novel written by a conceptualist artist parodying the subject matter of one of my favorite painters (and paintings). he's a keeper.

also, because i was learning to fuse aesthetics, neurotic behavior and social justice at age 5

roommate: i eat red and brown m&ms first. what about you? i bet you eat the yellow ones.
me: well, actually, first i separate out all the m&ms out by color. then i eat from the colors that have the most m&ms in the pile, starting from the highest, until all the colors have an equal amount of m&ms in them. then i make rounds and eat one m&m from each pile in order* so that they will always have equal amounts in them, until the m&ms are gone.
roommate: wow.
me: you know what i was really into? skittles.

*this was not mentioned in conversation, but i used to also line my m&ms up according to rainbow color when i performed this last step. this process is an excellent insight into my larger way of functioning.

words of wisdom part II

"you will find yourself performing poorly at your regular job, because you are losing sleep most nights making art."

GOD, anthony baab (nee beard), how were you so right about EVERYTHING?!

stellet licht

silent light, carlos reygada, 2009

i have the sudden urge to take my view camera home and take mmm-mmm-chiapas-good images of the texas landscape. airport security will not like that. logistics are forthcoming. still, it's about time i started playing around with my sexy old-is-the-new-new toy!

and i mean, for all interested, this is the doodle i made at work the other day. whateva whateva. i am animating the last act of my current project. then epilogue! then credits! then away to new york for my postbaccalaureate show we go!

two dreams of late

1. that i was being trained as part of greenpeace's water-based demonstration crew as part of a save the killer whales initiative.

2. that i was running through interminable corridors of customs at benito juarez airport (mexico city) trying to make my flight to los angeles.

portrait of the artist at work

why am i making like an asian stereotype and wearing a SARS mask? because something in my room which may or may not be my charcoal animation has been sending me into asthmatic coughing fits for the past week. fuck my life. no, really. fuck it hard.

p.s. on a brighter note, don't i look like i'm at the height of my androgyny or what?

procrastination break!

i hereby declare today national layered stockings day. winter is good for two things: holiday cheer and a grunge-rock approach to layering. other than that life is same ol', same ol'. still animating, still reclusing. my happiest moment this week occurred when i realized i could multitask and get in some post-production work while visiting my family for the holidays. ARTIST FAIL.

NEW WORK contd

this is all i'm posting before the final edited version. ohhhh it needs to unfold about 2x slower and i'm sick. eeeuch.

when the grammy's are announced and katy perry feels so two years ago

so much of (post)modern life is spent trying to convince ourselves that things are new and exciting, every second of every day. with so many things happening at once, 365 days of distance often feels like 365 years of accomplishment, but is traversed as quickly as one forgets yesterday's pop song. numbingly spectacular, immediately gratifying, without any sense of temporal rootedness (maybe constancy is a less masculine-oriented word) - this is our generation.

suggested term paper topic

sweat, girls, and skateboards: 90's alternative masculinity in the music of blink 182

NEW WORK

i am taking a break from one of my jobs this month to make new work. which will most likely kill me and all. i've barely been alive (read: i've barely had time to squander my time on internet blogging) since returning from thanksgiving break. this is a short preview:

first 5 minutes home

dad: yeah, so can you give your brother a hand with his college essays? his counselor wrote him the worst recommendation. your mom read it and got so mad. she said this is how the counselor ruined your life!

they're still bitter that i only got into cornell.

remember the days when this would seem normal, because we were in art school?

boss: what are you drawing?
me: oh, well, see, there's this band radiohead, and i'm currently obsessed with this video of their song fake plastic trees...
boss: alright.
me: ...and, um, so thom yorke actually has a lazy eye, but in this video he just acts completely autistic, and the still frames are so funny and amazing.
[boss looks at screen; thom yorke is freeze-framed staring out from within a shopping cart]
me: ...so, i thought i would just make a drawing of the still frames. you know... during my downtime ...
me: ... and that's what's happening at the front desk today.
boss: alright. [walks off]

well i don't know how my bookmark got in there

the text says, "through land, air, water, i will find you." i've been...birds and stuff.

urban anthropology

this mural is tucked away 2 blocks from my house. it transforms a dead end street into a portal to the otherworld. walking around is pleasant here. in the winter morning light i am reminded of walking to studio with a purpose, and pining for you. the stockings of the old ladies match their sweaters, which matches their hair, which matches the bougainvillea growing outside their houses, which are painted an analogous color exactly 1/3 of the way around the color wheel. the houses look as if they're made of marzipan, and their victorian-era railings are illogical. nobody judges me when i break out into ecstatic dancing fits to the yeah yeah yeahs in the middle of the street.

lately i've been wanting to do boring things like make experiential accounts of youth culture in mexico city. but art is feelings, not critical explorations or distanced surveys of contemporary culture, and don't you ever think otherwise. thus is my dilemma.

almost there

strange as it seems i think i've encountered much more normative people in this large metropolitan city as opposed to when i was sequestered in a small town in upstate new york. people with normal thoughts and normal desires, people who did "the right thing" in life, the existence of which i had shut off behind an iron wall in my head in the category of things that don't concern me. right now the forced encounter with which (and the implicit comparison to my personal choices) seems to breach a very core part of my being in a manner that is physically painful, like a part of my reality rupturing in my brain. life goals are funny things because in my instance, they are relatively easy to achieve (study hard, work hard, go to a good college and see the yeah yeah yeahs in concert) and tend to wriggle out of your grasp in an anticlimactic trail of smoke once realized. destinations are not final, but porous markers on the road at which life spills through. my current life goals are just to have a small room to myself in a warm place, an officious landlady, and books to read, paper to write on, sunlight trickling in through the windows. i have all of these things now, except i would like to feel less hustle and bustle, and less of this modernity business. to be able entomb myself with my thoughts a little more. to know what it's like to cocoon myself for 24 hours straight (and what piece of flickering mothwing may emerge). privacy and secret things, mental playgrounds, i miss you.

i read something really good somewhere about adolescence and integrity, but now i can't find it. CRAP!

fake plastic trees: a haiku

thom yorke -- you fish lipped
lazy eyed autistic fey --
you're not of this earth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKd06s1LNik

pleasurable things learned about prague today

czechoslovakia's 1989 nonviolent political revolution was called the velvet revolution. there are so many good, beautiful things about that sentence. one of these days i want to start my own jacquard uprising.

reading over past selves

do we stop or do we stay the same? how strange it is to fall away from yourself so much that you don't even wish the stanza by rilke that iterates this thought in you, over, and over again. shostakovich, rattling bones, the glare of the executioner's light and a box that wants to tell so strugglingly what you cannot. mind caught in a morgue practitioner's cast of wax. it's always sunny in los angeles. kind of afraid i'll never get out of this traumaspace. kind of afraid of the day i'll get out of it. opening it up is like greeting the unabomber. will it break me, splinter us, tear into you? it's just a stupid box.

all moved in

i am officially a resident of the 9-0-0-2-7! why do my new digs rock? lots of reasons. it's 100% furnished according to my neurotic artist-sleeper needs--half of my closet space is dedicated to analog photo equipment, and half of my room space is dedicated to my bed. it's within walking distance of the grocery store, flower shop, gay bar, straight bar, cheese shop, movie place, coffee place, public park, subway stop, and the dangerjob. that's right, i can WALK to places in los angeles now! OH MY GOD! I AM SO HAPPY! NOW I CAN FOCUS ON IMPORTANT THINGS LIKE WALKING TO TRADER JOES, VISITING MY MOMMY FOR TANKSGIVING AND MAKING ART!

and i am slowly getting used to this ikea mattress, which feels like a rock with some sponge properties. i do have this much to say after spending a week building my own furniture only to have to reinforce everything with additional hardware from home depot: fuck. you. swedish. design. AND YOUR LITTLE MEATBALLS TOO!

found on the austin craigslist:

Went on practice date tonight

L.

I went out this evening on a sort of practice date since I haven't been on a real date in years. I went to the places I would like to take you, and I really sort of enjoyed myself. I think on our real date I will get three roses and tie them up with a little ribbon bow to give you first. I also don't know if I should make this a dinner date or just make this a "drinks out late" sort of date. If it's a dinner date I need to work on that and maybe slow down eating a bit.

I still haven't worked out how to ask you to go out with me... I mean I just want somehow things to work. I don't know if you have a BF or SO or anything, but I really hope that you will give me a shot for at least one eve. I still haven't thought of anything more beautiful than your eyes. They have been haunting me for a week, I just am so unsure of approaching you, and so unsure of myself it seems.

I just hope this works. I have been so lonely for so long.

J.

it made me mist up a little. for my city, for the innocence of its residents, for cute heterosexual practices.

public service announcement

moving this week! no time (or internet connection) to update. i spend my mornings packing and my nights unloading. somewhere in between i am at work trolling craigslist for cheap furniture. images of my sexy art-studio-cum-bed to come. i feel sore, sleepless, inundated, and fat--which was basically every day of my collegiate life, but something to which i am not so accustomed now.

let it be known

i went to bed with wet hair again

things that recall austin in the wintertime

-trail of lights
-zilker park
-37th street
-emo's free week
-cardigans
-kerbey lane
-mozart's
-spiderhouse
-long drives at 2 in the morning

getting really nostalgic for all the christmas's spent at home. i don't want to be spending the holidays in a place where it doesn't get cold. maybe i can hightail it up to northern california.

the bad tempered clavier

as a classically trained pianist and a punk rawk nostalgist i often think about what virtuosity means in the two worlds, and whether or not there can be zones of overlap. in classical music virtuosity is performance based - one is commended for the ability to rap out rachmaninoff at 164 beats per minute. but in popular music any one can pick up a guitar and strike some chords. the genius in punk rawk lies in the authorship, the ability of the performer to invent themselves as persona and creator. this process is as much dependent on the spectator, whose careful curation of a music library becomes a sonic guide to their complete being - a being that lends itself more to screaming and crooning because, unlike bach, we are imperfect. classical music has transcended this barrier to some extent with performers like vanessa mae and gustavo dudamel, whose individual and contemporized performance draw crowds and generate excitement commensurate to that of any large rock concert. but when rock music lays claim to instrumental virtuosity, things go terribly awry. see 1970's cock rock and dreamtheater for why guitar playing taken to its technical extreme just, quite frankly, sucks. the purist in me wants virtuosity to stay as it is in both camps. but is there a way to fuse the two without having either lose its integrity? i say this because i have a developing urge to play some preludes and fugues in the back corner of a concert stage while some wiry singer rasps out spoken word poetry and destroys a guitar in the foreground. contrapuntal themes are so punk rock.

boss and i were exchanging musings on 'types' today as we're both aesthetically driven (read: shallow) individuals. he like girls with sharp cheekbones, flashing eyes, choppy dark hair and a yen for the illicit - aka winona ryder. in thinking about my personal types (the male ones, anyway) - gael garcia bernal, nick zinner, javier bardem - a common theme seems to arise: dirty.

letter to a concert security guard: a haiku

do you think we're weird?
probably; you get paid to
stand here every day.

they went through all the motions of being a crowd-raising 90's alternative rock band, and they did it well. but in their well-timed thrashing one sensed a naivete that wasn't present in those who actually survived that time period. it was then i felt like we were all, in some manner or another, impersonating a generation we only wish we knew.

a love story

spent my saturday

dancing stupidly to the vaselines (frances mckee i love thee) and rediscovering how time is quiet. the day almost forgot it was halloween.

first date: a haiku

you checking for lumps?
trying to start a fire?
gentle circles please

non-objective art of the day

instructions: look at an area of reflected morning light in your room. appreciate it as you would appreciate a moving picture.

lately been struck most by vito acconci's following piece and tino sehgal's performances. harrell fletcher is always on my mind. people who tell supporters of objective art to ess-tee-eff-yew, as i have lately been too busy navigating traffic to consciously go to any art museum, and appreciate "art" as we know it. but afraid to relinquish the art object altogether, or to become one of "those bastards" who make purely self indulgent conceptual work. hmmmm? woke up this morning to the sound of airplanes nearby. thinks in warzones there are more bulletholes.

epochal

the early part of our lives, the part defined by mandatory education, has always been separated into neat 3-5 year epochs. the first day of kindergarden. graduation from 5th grade. initiation into middle school. living and dying in high school. college, if you're lucky, and grad school, if you're brave. within this externally imposed structure you become accustomed to operating according to 4-year biorhythms. if you move about a lot as you're experiencing these regular upheavals, your sense of beginning and ending is even more urgent. i always get the itch to move on after too long, to begin things with a bang and run away before they have a chance to properly fade out. fleeing is comfortable.

but then after the education period you're thrown out into a world in which at least half of your life is still staring at you in an amorphous mass, unsectioned by anything or anyone. in fact, you're expected to choose something, and live it forever, and be complacent, and find your beginnings and endings staggering along at a pace that matches no one else's, their dramatic exigencies buried underneath a steady flow of time.

being at the juncture of these two periods, is difficult.

today's theme song is 'middle distance runner', by sea wolf. it thematically concerns tired bodies, longing, and gypsy magic, which, coincidentally, is also the theme of tonight's activities. you say kid a, i say chicken wire?

teen chefs: a haiku

hey, let's make cookies!
use the mixer, not your hands!
you put flour where?!

woke up with this in my head today

the song, not the making out. julie andrews is probably the reason i cut my hair short. and wander through fields picking wildflowers. and try to teach myself the guit-OH MY GOD FORMATIVE CHILDHOOD MOVIES COME BACK TO HAUNT ME!

you have no idea

[kid walks up to the front desk of the primarily latino youth center in which i work. i look up from my current book: race, culture, and the city: a pedagogy for black urban struggle.]

kid: what are you reading?
me: oh, a book about how white people are keeping us down.
kid: is it scary?

typographic love note of the day

he's like blackadder and you're like rosewood, and part of me wonders why i just can't settle for a good clean modern type.

also, kenneth koch, you make me want to wear argyle sweaters, place a headband in my shoulder-length bob, carry a stack of books and sit on a bench full of sweet nothings knocking knees with you in the new york autumn.

shostakovich shakes the soul

lately the term 'russian' has been bandied about me as a catch-all adjective. 'oh, that's so russian. please, make that russian', people would say with equal amounts of vagueness and conviction as to the word's meaning. the meaning began to click, somewhat, when i heard a very russian performance of gershwin's 'rhapsody in blue', the iconic piece about ambulating through new york city. what was so russian about it? the syncopation was present, but not at all jazzy. each note was struck with measured rigor. the most surprising midtones were emphasized, bringing out notes and flavors, street corners and alleyways that never before existed in the skyline of the melody. the entire piece felt full even when quiet, and always stopped short of hitting a dramatic high or low due to the force that reigned throughout. move over, dorothy, because we're not in new york city anymore. this is not your mother's leonard bernstein directs the new york phil, to which you've faithfully listened since age 11. it was like watching the planes and colors of your favorite kandinsky painting get rearranged into something strange and striking. bravo.

sometimes (actually, all of the time) i wish i had more seriously pursued music.

name game

i have this habit of cataloging people, arranging them in categories, flows, color codes and equations in an attempt to statistically resolve heartache, or something like it. for example: if alice plus billy was divided by kelly, does billy therefore equal bad news bears? answer: statement holds true if and only if alice was less than or equal to kelly. i've been collecting statistics on names for a while, trying to figure out the common denominator to people in my life. these are my conclusions thus far:

alan's are smooth criminals.
ashley's will be your friend for life.
dan's are strung out dreamers.
davids are upstanding, sometimes too much so. davy's are cool, and beware of dave's.
emily's will invariably remind you of your mother.
jill's have sloping noses and high cheekbones.
josh's are mentally unstable, but lots of fun.
lauren's are all-american, and lots of fun.
martha's thrive in winter.
meghan's have long brunette hair.
michael's are collected, expedient, and have a dry sense of humor. mike's are significantly wackier.
molly's you always want to love.
reed's have good posture.
ryan's will always be just friends, but gawd do they make you smile.
tim's are troublemakers.

and carol? i've only known one other carol in my life, and we both were quietly kooky.

a place to bury strangers

reading some commentary about a show i recently attended, makes me wonder if journalism nowadays is all about wallowing in the possibilities of language, rather than portraying an authentic (? authenticity always in question marks ?) account of what occurred. for further example, see jonathan gold's food journalism, which, in its sumptuous prose, testifies more to the palate and imagination (and what an imagination, mr. gold!) of the author than the food quality itself.

the show i went to, they projected images of a moving desert onto the bandmates, and their music in fact felt like an outlying wasteland. every now and then the reed-thin lead singer would semicircle backwards in stilted motion like a cougar on the prowl. there were strobe lights. there were fog machines. the most disturbing part of the show when when, under the blinking retina of the strobe light, the lead singer smashed his guitar to the ground and began tearing out the strings as if he were gutting a dead animal (the word desiccated keeps coming to mind as a phonetic description of the horror i witnessed, even though the meaning doesn't match). he destroyed two guitars in this fashion. i was in the front row trying to take pictures, which meant my head hurt more than usual after the show finished. i went home, laid on my bed, and felt feverish for 2 hours.

received an invoice for my car insurance payment yesterday. boo! must start considering grad school, or selling my art, or selling my body. southern california, i will never fully love thee.

hmm

freelance job tonight? no problem. let me put on my thinking 'stick.

peanut butter to your jelly

i was around 5 or 6 and reading judy blume's entire oeuvre for children when somewhere in the fudge series (maybe?), i learned the concept of 'the bite'. 'the bite' was illustrated with butter, but also applies to jam, peanut butter, nutella, and/or honey. 'the bite' is the philosophically perfect part of a sandwich, and it occurs when you slather a piece of bread with sugary goodness, fold it over, and take your first bite right smack dab from the center of that fold where the topping gathers up and its gooeyness is enclosed by soft crustless bread. it is the absolute yum.

also, today at work i convinced a teenage girl that rihanna, and no one on this earth, can "deserve" a beating from chris brown. activism, bitches!

god bless health insurance

reasons i think the nurse's aide was hitting on me today:
-he remarked approvingly that i was under 120 lbs, and asked me what band i liked

reasons i think the nurse's aide was not hitting on me today:
-he was there to take my urine sample

in short, i woke up this morning to realize that the bodily discomfort of friday night was not, as i had then assumed, caused by deafening shoegaze bands and their accompanying strobe light shows. i'm ok though.

metaphor (saturday)

the thought of her hung over us the entire night, a cloud that eventually darkened and rained.

forgive me for writing about your life

at my other work i work with teenagers in a gang, poverty, and violence affected area of los angeles. one of them handed me his college admissions essays to review. the first is about the three churches in his neighborhood, and how much their rites annoy him. after three scathing paragraphs about the inanity of religion, he concludes that he has become a tolerant person through having to put up with religious fools. it's nihilistic, it's blunt, it's not really the stuff of conservative college admissions committees. in the second essay he writes about a car accident that sent his father into a coma for two months, during which he was estranged from his family and sent to live with his aunt. in his own words, he was a nine year boy become a nine year old man. reading between the essays, one wonders if this is why he doesn't believe in god.

moments like these take me out of my own life, and into the amazing strength of others. success is relative to what you have to overcome, and so many of us are walking out there with eyes so wide we're blind to what we never had to experience. here in los angeles, where any value can become superficial and glib, i find myself drawn most to people who display the strength to survive through life--and survival occurs in the most unexpected and overlooked of places. it lives under highways, over gravel, and in the interstices between our two clasped hands. what does this mean for a world which seems to arrange its values otherwise--values such as intellect, creativity, entrepreneurship, none of which are necessarily bad, but somehow incomplete on their own? i don't know.

this is getting rather fiona apple about things. this world is bullshit, but this world is also pretty beautiful and amazing.

i made a postsecret last night

it really helped me say some things that i couldn't say to myself so thank you, frank, for all that you do.

i haven't really been artmaking/artgestating lately, have i? some artists receive their greatest inspiration in moments of physical and emotional disquiet, but i am not one of them. i need to learn how to be silent again. to lie on my bed and think more, dream more, care more. soon, i promise, soon. this bodes to be a very sad winter. a pablo neruda and sweaters kind of winter, to be exact.

things that keep on recurring in my work

drawings, lines, narratives, crossings, space, dumb shit, flowers, rain, silence, white, bodies, loss, me, you

physical sensations experienced today

-tasting popcorn flavored with white cheddar, seasoning salt and the lavender soap my boss used to wash the container. first it tasted like laundry, then like rustic cabin getaways, then like chemicals.
-holding my wrists and fingers limp while a lady with excessive eyeliner oils them up, and enters my fingerprints into an electronic database. she tells me i'm a fingerprinting problem child, and that i need to moisturize.

pffffft

the impossible project announced today that it will begin manufacturing polaroid film again in 2010. i have one word for all you digital naysayers: schooled. the polaroid apocalypse came and went before the sky even started falling. in honor of that, and in honor of me figuring out how to work my workplace's copier scanner thingamajig, here are some polaroids from last night:







a friend had succeeded in bullying me into attending an lgbt mexican dance party in downtown los angeles (friends: best and worst ideas ever). there were all flavors of transsexuals there from mustachio'ed to be-bjorked. my feet stomped tirelessly in medieval torture device shoes while my body seemed far away. i was undercover, not quite hazy enough for my liking, and for the most part, bored.

note for later

this week has brought me tumult with some and peace with others. i am finally able to make peace with the fact that a year ago, in those two electric weeks with you, i could feel all the molecules in my body singing and they will sing in that moment regardless of whatever has since transpired, between and for both of us in our lives. thank you.

all night long

after 2 months of working at dangerbird, i'm only beginning to fixate on the silversun pickups.

also, a proposal

that we begin changing our gmail labels (do you use those? i do. obsessively.) to reference geographic formations. having the option to move your mail to the 'black hole of hell' folder just feels so cathartic.

pleasurable part 3

stripping to MGMT

when in doubt

investigate how other cultures address issues of sexual fluidity and difference.

pleasurable part 2

hipster watching. casbah, a robin's egg blue mid-eastern cafe on the corner of hyperion and sunset, is my new favorite place for reading indulgent theory, drinking loose-leaf tea, and people watching. to my credit i think i caught the woman staring at me all scrunched up and frownyfaced over my zizek. would you like to join us in an incense laden 1970s throwback threesome? her gaze seemed to beckon.

pleasurable

pictured: bran muffin, ceylon tea, indian teapot, luce irigaray, sketch/thinking book, sunset boulevard

love bites

sometimes the shape of, uh, convenient bruising can be a good point of departure for temporary tattoos.

i forgot to mention last time that the area outside my apartment complex has been smelling of coriander lately--one of my favorite spices.

today on the highway someone stole my soul

waiting in the long line of cars to go home. windows down, radio off. then i hear a click, a whoosh, a triumphant phrase. the car in my left lane disappears in front of me, as a camera with a detachable flash peeks out of the right rear window.

some of the time i worry that i am slowly slipping into becoming a hipster whose external appearance legitimates all other forms of her being. but then i convince myself that i have toughness and gumption, two qualities that are instilled over time and therefore, unrelinquishable.

(p.s. that's not a word? well, it should be.)

permanently

last night i read the most heartshockingly beautiful poem in the guise of a short story, by kenneth koch. the point of this is not to talk about kenneth koch (well, a little) but to talk about poems in the guises of things. i think that's a nice way to think about constructing life, art, the movies (poems in the guise of an extended action sequence, for example). because what the world needs now, besides mandatory arts education, is feelings and reasons.

portrait of a french porcelain purveyor

her first and last name both have four letters and two vowels. she drives up to a shoe warehouse in a district beyond traditional abandonment, so i can pay her $10 in exchange for her grandmother's china. she emerges from her car with two mammoth labrador-poodles on a leash that look, feel, and behave like sheepskin rugs. oh, she always walks her dogs in these empty industrial lots at night, she says. she leaves the engine running and the lights on while she takes her dogs for a stroll around the parking lot, leaving me to examine the plates. oh, this was her grandmother's and she and her husband never used it when they were first married 25 years ago, but doesn't food just taste better when served on beautiful plates? i agree. she walks me to my car, wishes me a safe drive, and beams rays of sunshine at everyone in the parking lot, who are by now enthralled with her dogs. on the drive home i realize that she smells exactly like one of my old piano teachers. she is the reason i want to be 50. on a side note, the china is beautiful.

this needs to persist on the internet

via discovermagazine.com

literary analysis taken to the extreme

radiohead's fake plastic trees is about deep ecology, reaganomics, and romeo and juliet. it also sounds like grey and spaceships.

celebrity men who redefine normative conceptions of sexy

1) justin timberlake


2) steve buscemi


3) the reid brothers


true story: i once bought the music video of 'happy when it rains' for the express purpose of watching jim reid touch himself, his brother, and his microphone in slow, pixellated motion.

homeboy j.c. regarding The Man

"I was [...] merely a subject for official writing, filling up of forms with all the artificial superiority of a man of pen and ink to the men who grapple with realities outside the consecrated walls of official buildings. What ghosts we must have been to him! Mere symbols to juggle with in books and heavy registers, without brains and muscles and perplexities; something hardly useful and decidedly inferior."
-joseph conrad, the shadow line

appeals to male heroism aside, i've been wondering about this for a while. when we empower the quote unquote downtrodden and marginalized, do we empower them to function as members of the system, or as members outside of the system? there seems to be a lie somewhere in the ideal that bettering one's socioeconomic position means integration into mainstream ways of life. ultimately, do we believe that the system is, or can be, a tenable way of living?

the weather (part 2)

it's almost october. a shock to think about. i have been out of school and living in los angeles for four months--which is just long enough for me to stop using the 'i just moved here and don't know anything' excuse. i feel as if some great epiphany should be around the corner, but none seems imminent. growing up in colorado i always associated october with the height of autumn putrefaction and flux, the treetops bursting into flames and then disappearing in a river of rot down the sewer drain. but here it feels like everyone is immersed in a sunny mausoleum whose demand on its residents never changes, because the climate never changes. it is still as hot as ever.

one certain colorado october it snowed the day before halloween. i was a witch that year. my mother made my costume out of black satin, as well as my halloween bag which always made my candy stash look deceptively small and my neighbors consequently more generous. that year, and most years from age 4-9, no inclement weather could stand in the way of me and free candy. i crunched through the snow in black pumps and no socks, slush seeping in under the arches of my feet, for 2 hours knocking on my neighbors' doors. i returned with my feet red, almost frostbitten, and, among other things, three whole hershey's bars.

songs about girls

starlett johansson - the teenagers
billie jean - michael jackson
ruby soho - rancid
cecilia ann - the pixies
ada - the national
polly - nirvana
gloria - the doors

latest mental diversion

i've been trying to come up with phrases for the people in my life according to the formula "[abstract quality] + [substance of choice]". so far i've come up with:

-cruelty and cigarettes
-toothaches and whiskey
-innocence and heroin
-languor and weed
-cynicism and candy
-humor and sage

got my first paycheck from the youth center today and am going salsa dancing with a girl on sunday! starting to feel normal again. made an excel spreadsheet of my finances and then promptly broke my 'fun money' allowance to buy a ticket to the pixies. oh life...

go see the silversun pickups

i made their tour poster :).

things i associate with blondie

mittens, sweaters, whiskey, salsa dancing at 4 am, tungsten lamps, winter air, staying warm, hardwood floors, mexico city.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CmhqoB1lNE

more miraculous sightings today

white dresses, office depot

seen on the way to work today

directions to the land of booyah, fig. 1

letter to a lover

austin, i miss you so much. i miss you in the summertime and i miss you in the wintertime. i came across a picture of you today and i wanted to be there with you celebrating christmas on 37th street. i miss the exact coldness of the air in wintertime and how everything smells faintly of smoke. i miss the lake. i miss how quiet and hopeful the streetlights look at 2 in the morning. one could really carve out an existence in you, or maybe it was you that grew around me while i dug in deeper. i feel that everything i was birthed and died there, and now that i'm set free--so what?

per my life-altering experience last week i have not been able to stop spinning it's blitz. i always think that, in the yeah yeah yeahs narrative, fever to tell is the battle cry, show your bones is the aftermath, and it's blitz is the resurrection, an icy, elegant coming into being.

yeah, yeah, yeah

there's so much and yet, nothing that needs to be said about seeing my messiah in concert. it just is, or was. regarding the photographs: the entire band emerged behind a filmy white screen, she donned a crown during the hauntingly lovely skeletons, halfway through the 12-ft inflatable eyeballs they had onstage came unloosed and made their way through the audience, and at the end cannons shot pink and white confetti covering all of us, and it was good, and it was beautiful.

message received in my inbox this morning

re: the origin of love video

i'll try to write, which is kinda tough with all the tears and stuff right now.

anyway there'll be another time when i'll tell you how amazing your work is cause now i'm pretty speechless and crying, but please, please tell me if there's any chance i could buy the hedwig book from you... really.

i'm waiting for your reply.

should i? shouldn't you know that i'm just another self-deprecating artistically frustrated twentysomething, and your message probably means more to me than my message means to you?

in other news, youtube approved the audio on my thesis. yes. karen o WIN.

portrait of a saturday morning (no. 2)

morning ire, teal background

rolling stone, you bastards, you stole my blogging antics.

that is all.

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/09/18/weekend-rock-list-songs-about-girls/

bum bum bum bum bah bah bah bah

oh, you know, just another day hulahooping at work.

life would be so easy if i were a dog

on my way from work to work i found myself on sunset boulevard behind this volkswagen passat with a big shaggy dog in the backseat that restlessly paced the width of the car the entire time. its head would appear out the left window, then out the right window, then back out the left again, etc with metronomic consistency. i wish i could fully convey how funny this was, but i'm pretty sure camerafoning while driving is a punishable offense.

observaciones en la playa: a haiku

iron swingsets by
the santa monica pier
creak like saddened gulls

the communist era beach playground is also the reason why angelenos are all ridiculously thin and toned. parallel bars--the paragon of childhood fun!

i am flanked by abhorrent taste in mass culture

this is a diagram of all the sound occurring right now within a 20 ft radius. my walls are thin. my ears are pained.

dear lorrie moore

even though your paean to being twenty is, in fact, lovely and insightful, i would ask that you reconsider the universal age of passion. it's actually seventeen.

love,
carol

"Here’s the thing about being 20 years old. It’s actually the universal age of passion. It’s the age at which nature and form come together and your individual passion achieves its final shape and expression. When, later in life, when you’re older, you feel furious, it’s the fury of a 20-year-old. When you fall in love, it’s the love of a 20-year-old. It’s articulate, it’s visceral, it’s platonic. It’s the pure form of the emotion. When you observe the hypocrisies and injustices of the world, and feel shocked and betrayed by them, you’re actually being 20 again. And yet, you’re just shy of being able to drink. How perfectly completed, and thwarted, at the same time."
-lorrie moore

para la cena

baked trout with ginger and lemon, tamari sauteed turnips and collard greens, and yellow split pea soup. bring your own vino.

i had a dream this afternoon about losing my clothing in the ice-fishing portion of a maze, backtracking only to find that i would have to sign an animator contract to get my clothes back, and rushing to negotiate with a glenn close-like character in a spa, only to realize that i had printed my resume on a bar of soap. hmm. life.

and hear his glorious voice, sing

every three months or so a certain someone from past calls me up and while i not without some guilt dance around the subject of emotional investment, i find myself spinning the same record for the next couple of days in, mmm, not exactly his memory, but the memory of every troubled dharma bum from the deep south that ever existed. the record is 'prayer of death', by entrance. at its best it reminds me of watching the sunset from a mountaintop overlooking lake austin as lights in the opposite hills quietly flickered on like fireflies. leaning my head against yours, talking about nothing at all, feeling something wild in the wind enter through my face and into somewhere deeper than my bones. i wonder what my fellow angelenos think of me when, windows rolled down, i fly down the highway with my speakers avowing, "i want to die without no fear".



p.s. today is the anniversary of something whose meaning for me has been an incredible work in progress.

say cheese

in seventh grade english we read i am the cheese, by robert cormier. my then best friend and i, in our perverse adolescent boredom, started a game in which we rewrote the lyrics of contemporary pop songs to be about cheese. examples that i recall were i want it with pate and eat me baby one more time, by the backseat toys and chutney spears, respectively. years later, i find i have not outgrown such hijinks:



i'm going to getchu getchu drunk
getchu drunk, off my brunch--
my brunch--my lovely lady lunch
-my brunch, by the black iced teas

the spirit of the beehive

this is such a good movie about movies. it really speaks to the power of cinema to become transformative of your physical reality, instead of alienating you from it like most movies nowadays with their rote story lines playing to an audience sitting still as death in a darkened room. i saw a late screening of miyazaki's ponyo last night in a theater with only one other person in the audience, and it was wonderful. the intimate emptiness of the theater, the flickering screen, and the gleeful beauty of the visual narrative made the space feel uninhibited and magical in a way that i haven't felt in a long time.



how is life, you ask? life is hopeful. i learned this weekend that my astrological patron saint is pallas athena, which is something really nice to think about in terms of structuring my life as a warrior writer woman. i am making dumb pictures, setting up a home darkroom, and feeling pretty creatively freed right now. the perks of having disposable income. the perks of aligning your creative trajectory with emily dickinson (read: aiming for posthumous fame takes a lot of pressure off being famous in the present).

these words are not appropriate for children

among other things this weekend, i had a dessert that looked and felt like the physical embodiment of bataille's story of the eye. it was a panna cotta that came served in a small bowl featuring two egg-shaped globules set atop a lake of chocolate. one of the globules was a scoop of cream delicately melting over a bed of crunchy espresso flakes. the other globule was this mysterious gelatin that bounced expectantly when you poked it with a spoon, and when the rim of the spoon dared to push through its outer hymen, the entire globule shivered, trembled, collapsed as a stream of milky liquid trickled out slowly, spreading over the entire bowl. it was sweet, and cold, and sticky, and soft. it made me want to do indecent things.

observaciones en el yuppie barrio: a haiku

two joggers run past
a wake of cologne follows
i am sweaty, shamed

the unbearable lightness of being and other stories

boyfriend and i decided to do something "aesthetic" for a change and drove to a ghost town for a night. it was nice to get out of los angeles. topics in the car included absence, lost loves, and mexican food.







saw quite a few shows this week. record label for whom i work was having a showcase of two of their bands. one was more photogenic than the other. in photographic parlance that means they were better at lighting themselves.


(bad veins)






(division day)




this girl is having so. much. fun. sooooooooooo much fun. can i express to you how much fun she's not having?



and then i saw patti smith on the santa monica pier. she was really badass and it was a lot of fun, but i was so far away from the stage that pictures of her and her band would be irrelevant. instead here are some tough dudes who like patti smith:




and that, my dear, is that. i'm tired.