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.