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.

in addition to drinking chicken blood, alice cooper speaks the truth

"I heard the title Vampire Weekend and I thought, 'Oh, man, that's gonna be great. I gotta see it.' And there are these guys with little Gap T-shirts on and I'm going, 'What happened to the balls in rock 'n' roll? Why are American bands so wimpy?'"
-- Alice Cooper, via pitchfork

portrait of a usps postal customer

she could almost be a hipster, but her air is too diffident and self unaware for that. her hair is not its natural color. there is something too mocha, mahogany, chestnut and/or burgundy about it. she wears a cream colored trapeze dress made of rayon that barely grazes her knees and tries, unsuccessfully, to conceal the diminutiveness of her body. a black tattoo of a victorian woman peeks out through the semi-opaque bell-sleeves, and more victorian miniatures are tattooed in red on her ankles. she wears meticulously cared for black satin ballet flats. her nose is slightly aquiline, her lips thin, her chin receding. she looks away from me the entire time even though we are standing one foot apart. she asks for a book of stamps, and then hurries out the door to mail her netflix envelope in the privacy of the darkened corridor.

phrases composed while driving

i hope that you know there are many different ways to walk &
the distance between two places never seems so far as when you don't know where you're going

sadly, i spend so much time transporting myself from here to there that the drone of traffic becomes the place in which i gather all my thoughts, but never have an opportunity to write them down. more than once i've been caught at an intersection musing on my latest performance project instead of heeding the green light.

the weather

living for four years in a secluded hilltop town in upstate new york i learned to hate it awful much. the icy snow storms that would spring out of nowhere and relentlessly hail upon you without end and then fitfully change into humid summer without a hint of transition--those were the worst. today on the west coast i felt, for the first time in a while, what it meant for the sky to be pregnant with weather. the first phase of the gestation the stucco sides of buildings bore an eerily rosy cast. the second phase the sun signaled red in an lavender sky over a long line of unquiet cars. 3 traffic skirmishes were narrowly avoided. gradually the clouds rolled in until, with a sudden hush, the sun had set well before its regular hour of 8:45 pm. the storm never broke, but it sank down upon the rooftops like a rounded weight sinking into the curved fabric of the universe. we held our breaths.

on other news, i found the most awesome used book store 5 miles away from mi casa today, and i also took a really gratifying polaroid. small victories, small victories.

do you expect to be the same in the morning?

self portrait with facial lotion war paint, fig. 1