Back in Action

It's been quite some time since my last post here. Much has happened.

Moved to San Francisco. Have actually been here for more than a year now.

Am now in a long-term relationship with a wonderful fellow named Jonathan.

That's two years and then some.

Am unemployed.

This is because of a career change. I'm working to become an educator! Teaching kids in a non-classroom setting to immerse them in cinema studies, media literacy, and art appreciation. I've been doing this for a few months through internships and volunteerships, and am loving it.

 

Much has changed since that last post, just below.

I plan on being back here with greater frequency. The kids I teach have definitely had a hand in bringing me back to my writing. I miss it, and look forward to making it a routine in my life once again.

 

See you.

Posted with Blogsy

2012, part one

My spine is the tuning fork to some lilting vibrations, and those vibrations are an enhanced and reified sense of anticipation for the general election now that it's more than certain we'll be seeing an Obama vs. Romney ballot this November. Maybe far less than most, but I'd become weary of the primary/caucus GOP race, and though I have strong reservations about the kind of man Romney is (a shrewd businessman, a manager), just the smallest sigh of relief left my lips as I considered the worse situation the nation would be in if a fearmonger like Santorum had unimaginably and impossibly won/stolen the three primaries on Tuesday. So while I find Romney's approach to America (read: as another capital enterprise) and his lack of conviction on issues key to me and mine powerfully dissatisfying, I can at least appreciate his grasp of the ideological landscape and his place within it and his strong verbal skills. I look forward to witnessing spars between him and Obama in the coming months. I look forward to Romney sharpening Obama's pacifistic relationship with the shaky, maybe panicky Israel, and I look forward to Obama fleshing out his plan of nuclear disarmament to the public alongside plans for firmer relations with Putin and Russia. I'd like to see Obama waving the flag on his Obamacare in defiance of, but respectfully of course, the Supreme Court justices. And I'd like to see Romney defend Paul Ryan's proposed budget.

Quick Take: The Changing Role of Africa in Global Politics

It's easy to call the state of continental Africa a mess. There have even been headlines and front-page articles discussing the idea of "giving up on Africa," and that phrase itself has left the lips of friends and acquaintances of mine, spoken casually even. Of course, the implications of such a view are deep and enormously complicated, but sidestepping the logistics of what giving up on an entire portion of the world's people would entail, what remains at the root is a sentiment built upon two truths.

The first is a notion that the non-African world, mostly the West but also China, is essential and inextricably tied to the campaign of "uplifting" Africa's capital and cultural contributions and development, and that despite its intentions is finding mounting difficulty in doing so. This campaign is fueled by several ultimate goals stretching from that of the altruistic (human rights, economic and political independence) to that of self-interest (channeling the wealth of African resources for corporate gain, politicizing regions of Africa in the never-ending culture wars between, say, America and China). Both ends and every shade in between exists in the various ways America, Europe and China has acted upon the people and their factioned civil groups, and it is difficult to discern how these corporate, government and other institutional forces have met their goals and whether or not those goals are shared by the peoples themselves (after all, and like everywhere else on the planet, different groups of different people have contradictory views of an ideal society). But for the purpose of this Quick Take, which may receive amplified attention at a later date for a later post, it is impractical to apply a gaze more critical than this. At any rate, this first notion leads strikingly to the next latent view held in the phrase we're considering...

Which is that, in all of this, to "give up" on Africa in the sense we as laypeople not engaged in African policy think means to disengage from the selection of interferences we have had on their entire system through colonialism and in the modern forms of colonialism, of which there are many. A history of imperialistic expansion by the West into Africa, and by China in more recent times following similar patterns, installed a presence by each of them that has never diminished, to bolster each's respective economies, that in one way or another has affected and impeded the development of African countries on their own terms. And for development to occur on their own terms is problematic for those with investments there. An emergence of Africa based on their longstanding traditions of kinship formation, political structuring, and sociological posturing, like the emergence of the Middle East, in the global economy as well as in global politics, presents to the West and to China an alternative to our understood ways of conducting business and transforming natural resources into capital and individual wealth, and by virtue of our still-active hand in their development has only cost us. This is, in the end, absolutely undeniable and virtually impossible to stop. The only way we can lessen or stop the leaking of our investments is to keep our curious and overprotective hands from their transforming, and burgeoning, population and economies. Enabling their own development of infrastructure, allowing them to utilize communications technologies towards advancing political and civil solidarity (not homogeneity, which is a pitfall for any nation), and halting the grabs by corporations of their natural resources for exportation are ways to "give up" on Africa that will not only help their development, but help provide greater equity between people all over the globe.  

i'm knocking on the doors of your hummer, hummer

I'm obsessed with this woman, her music, and this song in particular:

her sound is a hodgepodge of experimental pop, free jazz, and R&B flavored with ukelele and looped drums, and of course her distinctive voice. I described it to a coworker as "Nina Simone providing vocals for a Kevin Barnes production, with a worldview somewhere between M.I.A. and Peaches." I think that's a pretty bingo way of describing it. 

Quick Take: The De-Valuation of Animal Life

The relationship between the modern human species and the rest of the animal kingdom is an odd one. We as a collective, at once, regard the lives of animals (and animal souls) both with disdain and bafflement. Eat them, love them, want to protect them, debate the necessities of doing so; few people have an all-encompassing view towards the whole of the animal kingdom and even fewer act upon those determinations. The human mind has normatively been framed around the dispensability of any given animal, no matter its purpose or role. As a potential or actual food source, kill one and it becomes your meal and it's no problem, another one exists elsewhere. Entire food empires have been built around the idea that among certain animals, cattle or chickens or pigs, there is homogeneity. The fact that you can get a burger at any McDonald's anywhere and it'll taste the same as the last one, or the first one, you had says this is so, and distorts the view of an evolutionarily-built plurality of species, replacing it with an industrially-powered manufacturing metaphor. The terms 'bred' or 'breeding' have all but replaced 'birth' when referring to the ignition of animal life. Shamu dies, and another orca is assigned to its place.

What sits at the root of this, I think, are the choices we make as adults towards providing children with animals as companions, pets, or prizes. That last one is an odd word choice, but I selected it because it is the end of fair season in California and in the last few months I've seen more pictures of people holding plastic bags filled with fish - prizes for successfully throwing balls into glass containers or squirting water into a miniaturized target most securely - than I ever have in people's homes still living. Dogs are known as man's best friend, but I've never found it common at all for children to be allowed to adopt dogs or cats as pets until they've reached the age of six or seven. For most children, the hamster or goldfish is the first pet, and almost never regarded later as the dearest. That fish populations have never been common knowledge nor viewed as one with the potential for threat of extinction, and that hamsters and all other rodents are viewed as an overpopulated and possibly incestuous bunch has everything to do with our views and therefore regards towards animal life.

Quick Take: The Capitalistic Mind

I'm not a stout socialist, nor would I say I'm out-and-out against capitalism, but I have an issue with the impact that this corporate-structured, profit-driven, American Dream-fueled economy has had on the minds and perspectives on young (emphasis duly noted), entrepreneurial people in this country. Meritocracy, that is, the creative and practical approach to one's services or products, as applied to the design of a business, is now so overwhelmed by the need and desire to earn visibility and thus profit that, inevitably, the entrepreneur or producer compromises the integrity of either the product/service or his approach to marketing it to potential consumers. That essential dialogue between the value of the business and the potential or actual consumer on a personal level of interest is usurped and replaced by a megaphone-like glutting of visual and auditory avenues (via advertisements) towards simply grabbing as many people to take note by tangential, and consequently unrelated, means. It is the salesman selling the product more actively than the product can sell itself.

Note that this is not an attack, per se, on capitalism itself, but an aside about what I perceive to be a psychological effect of our sociological traditions in America.

the world is so curiously large

the streets of sf

are lined with red roses

and mad hatters

tell their stories

of the occupational landscape

over cups of java from a man

named Phil or a merwoman

who works for the Red Queen

Space and Policy, Pt. II

I've recently made the move from Orange County to San Francisco. To adopt the lifestyle of Bay Area people, I decided long before the move to adopt public transportation as my primary means of mobility. But because my sister, whose place I am co-habitating at the moment, lives in Vallejo, it's entirely impractical to rely on buses and trains to get into the city. That being so, my sister and I made a compromise: if she could give me a ride into Emeryville where she works and when she works, I would take the BART the rest of the way. I would save her gas and time, and I would feel better about being one less motorist on the already-congested roads of San Francisco. I'm also unemployed at the moment and the thought of filling up a tank every other day to make the hour-long trip to and from Vallejo from the city to find work makes my head and wallet hurt.

It's Day Three of this Unbearable Lightness of Cash Income and my sister and I were, for the first time together, going through with our plan. We'd gone a little past her work to reach the MacArthur BART Station and because my sister relies solely on an automobile for traveling she wasn't sure where the station actually was, or how to get back to the Bay Street Plaza for work. Smartphone handy, I retrieved the route and we arrived successfully and briskly, bright and early at 8:45a. Pulling up to the curb, which was a red Bus Only zone, that encapsulates the station, I attempted to hop out of the vehicle to begin my journey into the city, but I was stopped. Not knowing how exactly to get back, my sister required my smartphone once more and for me to record the information on a pad of paper. We sat for all of two minutes as I pulled up the directions on my phone and wrote them down quickly, leaving out unimportant information and using symbols where appropriate.

Done and done, I opened the passenger door and threw one foot out onto the pavement. Upon making contact with the ground, I heard a sound on the other side of the vehicle, next to my sister's window. It was a traffic officer, a keeper of order and efficiency. I looked up from my transitional position between the car and the curb and saw right there a sign that said "Bus Only," then below to see red paint lining the curb. Windows rolled down to their bottom-most position, the officer began telling my sister that she was going to administer a citation for parking in a red zone. I looked around some more, now standing outside of the vehicle (it was all happening so fast and my body was already locked into a series of motions to get to the train) and started looking for any oncoming buses whose stop we were deterring. Nothing. Left and right, back and forth: nothing. My sister sat sheepishly but frustratedly, and I informed the officer that we were simply making a stop, hardly even a stop, more like a st--, so that I could be dropped off. We were NOT going to be parking, I said firmly. In fact, my sister still had the car in Drive and the officer had to command her to put the car in Park to administer the ticket. And there was no bus, I said to myself but loud enough for all to hear.

I followed the officer to the rear of the vehicle where she began recording the license plate number, which took as much time as it did me to write the directions for my sister, and reiterated that we were just about to leave, me on foot and her back to the flow of traffic, smoothly, calmly, and responsibly. No response. Panicked and feeling terribly about this turn of events, I turned to an emotional argument, saying that I was new in town and that my sister didn't intend to stop at this junction but that I had urged her to. Her rebuttal trumped mine, as the officer reminded me that my sister obviously wasn't new to the area since her car was registered in California and that the law regarding parking in red zones was applied all throughout. She misunderstood what I had meant, my apparently fool-proof puppy-dog-faced reveal that San Francisco was a new place to me and that we should be given a fair warning and a slap on the wrist, but I understood exactly what she meant. The law is the law: parking, stopping, lingering, pausing for a breath or a drink of water, stopping to blink or to fart, at a Bus Only zone is prohibited and always cause for financial punishment and emotional trauma. Even when a bus isn't there, or on its way, or possibly even in operation.

I had given up with the arguing, my shoulders sunken and my sights set on my poor sister who was now going to be running late for work. I got back into the car and shut the door, not really intending to but being locked into a series of motions that had become routine. I apologized and told my sister that I'd pay for the ticket, an offer she denied, which, I suppose, actually makes sense since I never told her to pull over at that spot of all possible spots. But going to the BART station and the DIY project of reducing my gas emissions were both my idea and I had imposed them onto my sister, so I insisted. Her face downturned with misery, mine with guilt, we both looked back to see the officer back in her own vehicle, waiting for us to pull out from the curb so that she could enter the flow of traffic. "Wait," I said. "Since we've already gotten the ticket, wait for a moment to get out and then I'll tell you when to go."

Out of the car I got. I looked back at the officer with a look of witchery and malice, then to oncoming traffic, then I closed the door and signaled to my sister to go. Just at the proper time, she entered the lane and drove off, and lo and behold came the bus, which now had to stop abruptly to accommodate the intrusive position of the officer in the Bus Only zone. Maybe I'm new to San Francisco, but I'm not new to douche-baggery.

Pulled into the crest of the wave

the world

is far larger

than 

the amount of space

that you take

up

Hot Property: Life in a Day

The film that was conceived of by Ridley Scott, who also produced, and Kevin Macdonald, who directed, and shot by people all around the world, has been earning phenomenal reviews out of Sundance and from its YouTube, a partner in the project, broadcast earlier this year. National Geographic is the other partner, a fitting one, and is releasing the film on July 24. I will be in line to see this on Day One.

I hope this sets off Anthropology programs worldwide ablaze with enthusiasm, and funding. It is the endeavor in most dire, dire need.

My Cynical Views on My Degree

Not an image of my actual degree, obviously.

[This entry was intended for another blog that I keep with a friend. The basic requirement was that we write about how we feel about our degrees and how we view a college education.]

When I was a kid, it was always said by adults that one should never discuss politics, religion, or money with strangers or at the dinner table. As to why, I never received a definitive, consistent answer, but all the responses feel very much related: it's too revealing; it's rude; it leads to arguments or animosity; it's far too much to discuss to everyone’s content. Seemed fair to me as a kid. Now, as a young adult, these are all the things I talk about, and I talk about them with all kinds of people all the time. These are topics that I think most people think about and discuss often as well. The one topic that makes me tense anymore is college. With today’s job market and economy looking the way they do, it’s making others nervous too. People are of several minds when it comes to the necessity or use of higher education and of American universities, and each of the different sets of views is gaining greater and greater representation within the population, versus before when the general consensus was that college was a good unto itself no matter what. How people feel about a college education is often separated into what they imagine is appropriate for themselves, how they feel about it on a theoretical level, and how they regard those who have had a college education. There is frequently overlap but just as often there is not.

I'll note here that I possess a college degree, and I'll note here that it in itself hasn't given me much of anything quite yet.

Dialogues about college before it actually happened for me were always tentative but full of hope, and people engaged in these conversations with me readily just to reiterate how delightful and wondrous the experience was going to be. They would say how life after college was sure to extend the glories of my college days, with classmates becoming co-alumni and allies or possible spouses in that place called the "real world." Course objectives would become mission statements, class curriculums would become the gist of my work, and overall GPA would translate to my position within whatever company I was to be part of. Whatever was paid for tuition would be earned back doubly in a year’s pay.

During college, conversations remained largely the same if just a tad more interrogative and detail-oriented. That undifferentiated word ‘success’ was replaced with jokes of me winning Oscars or Golden Globes, or writing best-selling books on the Tiwi, or becoming employed by The New Yorker. Questions about my major abounded, and talk of what would happen to me after college turned into what I wanted to do after college. Life with a degree still had promise, but now control was in my own two hands.

Control, in this job market, is a delusion. How my life is now as compared to how I thought it would be back when I was still attending university are different, but this is mainly based on changed timelines. A hiatus from academia was always intended, but a two-year break was not in the books. I expect to work almost full-time during graduate school to make a living and to make ends meet, compared to three years ago when it was purely supplemental. I’m considering extending my hiatus so that I can pay back some of my loans from undergraduate study before I take on more loans and debt to pay for graduate school. I’m no longer feeling that a Ph.D is a wise option even though I intend to teach at the college level; and I’m nervous about how my lack of experience in both film and in front of a classroom will impact my ability to gain employment. My feelings about the future are multi-faceted, but don’t reflect my one-dimensional view about the value of my college education: it hasn’t done enough for me to find worthwhile work, and I underestimated the need to utilize my alma mater’s resources towards that end.

Talking about college, now, post-graduation, has been an extraordinarily fascinating and thoroughly involving affair, and surprisingly therapeutic. The tone of these conversations has everything to do with the setting I find myself in, not to mention whatever mood I'm in. When I’m at work, talk of my college experience is flecked with grunts and grumbles. I suppose it’s a defense mechanism, to deflect judgment from others that I’m still working a low-income job despite having graduated from a top university, or to deflect guilt from within over the same thing. Outside of work, my attitude is far less cynical. Talking with friends, most of whom have graduated from some university or another, I find myself speaking in future-oriented language, and I refer to goals that I’ve set up for myself, deadlines and all. These goals have little to do with desired salaries or markers of success, unlike some of my peers, and resemble lifestyle expectations that I’m trying to uphold or learn to uphold by a particular age. I want to teach world cinema and I would love to be a programmer for a movie theater or film festival or museum of modern art, and I haven’t paid much thought to whether or not these sorts of jobs will keep the bills paid.

There is a multitude of outcomes that begin with graduation and they don’t always end in success. Attending college can be as much a crutch to one’s chosen lifestyle and livelihood as the key to opening the doors of wealth and happiness, and it’s certainly not an experience I’ll ever forget, or can afford to forget considering my loan repayment, which will continue for years to come. 

Ungodly Symbols: Notes on "Zodiac" (2007)

A slow pace down the streets of suburban America: fireworks ablaze in the night sky, folks on the pavement feeling the atmosphere (and each other), cookie-cutter houses adorned in patriotic decorum. Seen from the vantage point of a slow-moving vehicle and you know something's going to go wrong. The fully-demarcated beams of light cutting through the darkened fog from the mug of the same car only now at lovers' lane says it is so. And it is true, these youths are going to die, but it's a rarity among cliches to rear its head in David Fincher's "Zodiac" which successfully averts most truisms of the serial killer genre to become a fine and handsome exploration of how the mythos of a monster escapes his own grasp and becomes the fare of the populace. This is the stuff of legends.

The plot of the film, though titled "Zodiac" after the killer who terrorized Northern California from the late-1960s to the mid-70s, is not about the man but his opponents, told in disjointed segments which fade to black every couple of minutes (and as short as two) to draw out a sort of detached view of the repercussions that begin to swirl. The framing device is almost episodic, each piece devoted to one setting and only a few of the handful of characters that come to dominate our perspective on the investigations, and unsheathing just one revelation, normally, in a fashion that's still more economical in filling in the details than most in the serial killer archive. The film's running time is insignificant in its ability to conjure up a dense portrait of the people and places economically, to stitch them together to form a dynamic, and totally alive, entity. (I loved the references to the kids on Haight Street and on Castro, to "Dirty Harry" and Steve McQueen, to the Altamont concert by the Rolling Stones on the radio, and to the construction of the Transamerica building set against time and bad weather.) It is a city fascinated as it is frightened at the prospects of the killer's next unavoidable move. And while disjointed, the picture's still cohesive, progressive, each short segment offering ample visual flourishes to build a layered perspective of the lives that, ultimately, were built around these - let's face it - surprisingly few deaths. Letters, television screens, radio broadcasts, files, photographs. One stitch of shots showed Inspectors Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) in the safety of the police department, but entrenched in materials all related to the Zodiac killer: they can't escape him, he's seeped into every nook.

The segments become like the symbols etched in ink on the ciphers themselves in that they are bounded in time as the symbols are in space - allowing for fluid transitions to sometimes many years later - and they signify little when isolated. But taken together, as not a sentence but a three-dimensional agglomeration of history and reality, and theme for the sake of the movie, it chronicles just about every facet of the people in question, so that we may feel in our examination the horrific weight of a dead body, the terror of looking evil straight in the face, treading in a sea of his dark materials.

It's amazing what Fincher is able to achieve in his visual and thematic reaches by using three (four if Armstrong is included) central characters as opposed to just one, and his inclinations towards generousness are sparse, so the decision is all the more atypical of him. Fincher's own "Se7en" explored similar territory using a fictional serial killer who equipped a biblical motif to peddle his self-righteousness. But where that film used Brad Pitt to explore the pressures of a world in moralistic transition, with Kevin Spacey as both prophet and executioner of that movement in John Doe - a nod to the everyman at the heart of many a Philip Roth novel who's caught in a perpetual struggle with nihilism and the atrophying of his traditional morals - "Zodiac" invests in its heroes, and splices the themes of truth and accountability across its multiple characters to show its multitude of colors (its cleansing powers vested in Jake Gyllenhaal's Robert Graysmith, its value as a commodity for Robert Downey, Jr.'s Paul Avery, and the desperation for justice and balance in the endlessly book-abiding inspectors Toschi and Armstrong). Each somehow pays the price for betting in on the game to find the killer's identity, be it through family deterioration, career loss, psychological turmoil, the forfeiting of years from life.

Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.), the San Francisco Chronicle journalist, pre-alcoholism

The lack of a prevailing point of view on the side of the protagonists with instead a set of them beckons to Fritz Lang's "M," showing us society's dance to flood all of the communication systems and caution the public about the evildoer's presence, although "Zodiac" does this within the institutions of media and police enforcement while "M" lodges itself at society's grassroots and the underworld below it. This dance - a veritable game of telephone - in which no one knows entirely the same things as everyone else, and no one knows exactly what's true at all, is practically the preliminary steps to the development of the urban legend. It is a choreography of gesture, word-of-mouth and broadcasts. But while "M" ends up empowering its serial killer by buckling itself to his perspective throughout his pursuit and in the subsequent trials which end in his persecution (and nearly execution), "Zodiac" obstructs any such attempt, keeping the killer an exaggerated version of himself. It becomes appropriate that a cartoonist, likely influenced by the aesthetics of the comics, would make the attempts at demystifying him both in illustration and in investigation, reaching the best conception on both terms.

The tenets of the urban legend, I think, elucidate a rather strange scene at the two-third mark of the film where Graysmith (Gyllenhaal) follows a tipster back to his home, ultimately making their way into a very unhealthily-lit basement. Why was the theater operator framed in that way, dampened by rain and drenched in shadow, in one of those basements that's a rarity in California, staring down the Boy Scout hero, noises opening up out of the walls and ceilings like a chest filled with monsters? Was someone there? Was it intended only as the requisite scare-scene that's a staple in serial killer movies where a character finds it is their lack of keen insight or awareness that has finally doomed them? Fincher's parody of such stock sequences? It would have to be more than simply Graysmith's elevating levels of paranoia as he further invests in the case, engrossing himself in demonic details of death and deviance, because Fincher's perspectival approach has up to this point and ensuing thereafter been detached, impartial, without predisposition (no, it only gives you enough reason to think it was Arthur Leigh Allen by film's end, it doesn't make the verdict for you). It would be inconsistent in a myriad of consistency, of strict restraint and immaculate discipline, for this to be so. The old man, then, must be parodying the specter of the killer, no doubt keyed to the opportunity with Graysmith so obviously expressing his distress, a perfect moment to release all of the tensions that come with having lived in the same city and possibly worked in the same theater as the looming killer. You are not the killer, but you and the killer share a basement and writing styles. It's too easy. The lingering shot of the man as he stares down the boy, fingers fondling the light switch as he draws it down, is comical compared to the rest of the film's tone, intense only because it resembles our childhood memories of Scooby-Doo.

The Zodiac's third couple: Bryan Hartnell (Patrick Scott Lewis) and Cecilia Shepard (Pell James) at Lake Berryessa in Napa County

There is also a brief scene in which Robert Graysmith confronts Arthur Leigh Allen (John Caroll Lynch) for the first time in a hardware store after having courted the actual evidence through his acquaintanceship with the more experienced, and more self-obsessed, Paul Avery - and make no mistake, their short partnership was no fusion of friendship, it was a partnership only founded on the grounds of their common drive - and after having taken on the mantle himself, and romanced the idea of his being able to identify the killer after Avery's descent into drunkeness. It is rather short, simple, but wracked in tension, the antithesis of a release - it raises the stakes in fact, the chess pieces assembling within their minds (if you do believe Allen's the killer, which could go either way given the manner it's so masterfully wrought in ambiguity). A friend of mine told me that he found the scene particularly hokey, like one of those payoffs where the hero needs not accomplish any real thing, he's satisfied conceding defeat because he's learned a lot and knows he'll always keep the receipts of victory in his heart. But this isn't victory, this is a vendetta, and his confrontation is not about holding the real truth in his heart, it is about laxing his self-destructing obsession with a man he knows nothing about. ("We know he reads the Chronicle," is what Graysmith's wife tells him, the only truth they ever attained.) He isn't conceding defeat, he is actively preventing his own implosion, something Inspector Toschi failed to do and what Paul Avery did too early given his talents (but in spite of his narcissism). Graysmith's ending severance is our realization that the deeds of some men can never be figured out because of our nature to imbue them with more power than they deserve (and if Zodiac was talented at anything, it wasn't killing, it was self-publicity), and that our derivation of reality is often composed of too many layers of bullshit. Reality, the world, is simply a harsh place, so let the youths sort it all out.

The Spread of Snark

I made a tweet earlier about the worthlessness of snark and, immediately afterward, felt odd about having done so on that forum. The tweet itself went something like: "Quite sick of all these young people who only speak snark and nothing else. Try being wide-eyed or celebratory or outraged or even cynical." But part of my realization was owed to the deeper realization that it is the very limitation on the breadth of our virtual communication with one another that drives the world towards a spiritual niche that involves shortened breaths and mere moments to absorb each others' presence, even in the eternal vastness of the internet. But I digress. Sort of. Snark is a perspective and sentimentality that I would like obliterated from the world, it is distracting and empty and mean-spirited. We're all familiar with snarkiness, even if we're not with the word itself. It is to hold the world with an ironic disdain that disallows one to see things vulnerably. It is dismissive language. It is people saying, "oh, this" in such a way that you're left with nothing but those words and it is the displacement of an actual idea or worldview. To snark is to make oneself appear knowing but boastfully, and at the expense of whatever, or whoever, is being discussed.

Yes, I now most definitely digress. But I do so with swiftness and purpose.
I want the world to embrace naivete! Embrace regret. Embrace the fullness of your heart and your mind, and then embrace that of your neighbors and friends and then the strangers who surround them. Embrace the idea that life is interesting and that the world is a strange and wonderful place. And that we belong in this place at this time.

Maybe my suggestions aren't coming through, so watch this video and try to tell me it didn't somehow inspire something real out of you.

Jaw-dropping.
Listening to: Cults' "Go Outside"

Flavor of the Week

James Blake, "The Wilhelm Scream" from his album James Blake.

"Vex" and Infinite Control

I've always found the word 'vex' an appropriate word for that which it describes, namely the feeling of anxiety and its implied neurological and physiological responses to stressors. Its monosyllabic - and snappy - quality as simply a word aptly reflects the constrictive, not to mention restrictive, properties of that feeling we call anxiety. I imagine a rigid torso inflated with breath, expanded and tense, resembling a box full of stagnant, still air and weariness rather than as a balloon, which it ought to resemble. The balloon can retain its form and shape while still accommodating the fluctuating stream of air flowing in and out of it, reacting in its typical and minute but absolutely essential way to its given environment; air and atmosphere as the external enters the body and becomes internalized, but organically. Air in a balloon is a delightful thing to behold because we imagine the pressure differential between the two sides of the plastic wall and wonder how equilibrium can be achieved and how the balloon can withstand those forces which would have it pop or deflate uncontrollably. Yet the balloon does this, and only pops when an intrusive force - which can remain undetected by the observer - acts upon the balloon. This can be dangerous but is entirely avoidable with care. I must remember to always keep my lungs and my chest balloon-like and not as a box. 

The word 'vex' resembles an exasperated breath outward, exhalation with force, rather than as a satisfying pouring out of air like water, and though its final sound is homophonic to the universally-recognized sound of running water, sss, the word also ends with a halting letter-x that makes a prolonged exhalation and that lovely watery sound, sss, inappropriate. There is no vexssssssssss, only vex. That letter-x resembles crossed arms over that enlarged chest, a restrictive force in itself, but internally-driven, a self-limiting and built-in mechanism that not only tightens the word and limits its longevity, but also overpowers the other two letters that make up the word itself. A process defined and marked by its cessation rather than by the entirety of its execution, its consummation. The breathy nature of the letters-v and -e together in that linguistic combination is countered by the concluding nature of the letter-x's pronunciation. The breath, an all-important component for life on Earth and a central figure in the agency of anxiety, is the path and the letter-x is the printed sign on the fence that reads "dead end." To be vexed is to be limited, and denies oneself that essential pocket of air that propels the lungs and body and, indeed, the mind. 

Anxiety is the worst. 

But here's a neat trick to cope: imagine yourself a character in a novel (the main character, of course, though you'll have to decide on whether you're the hero or not) and your life as a series of decisions, actions and thoughts that are being transmitted and expressed linearly, that is, not as a chart of interrelated events but quite literally as a novel being read by some disembodied, faceless reader (or an undifferentiated audience if you enjoy the thought) in a manner exactly like a book. Lines upon lines of you and the things that emanate or are produced from (or by) you. This has a two-fold effect: it eliminates the anxieties that can stem from a multiplicity of pressures, forces and plans that are perpetually tugging you in all sorts of sometimes contradicting directions. (Sure you are going to have to consider where to go every step of the way, but take solace in where you've last stepped and plant your foot down with conviction, no matter what.) And it also gathers your mind and trains it to treat thoughts as possible actions, so that your life becomes quite literally a path. There is only one kind of dead end on this path, and none of them look like what the letter-x does. There is no 'dead end' sign posted anywhere in your life, but there are plenty of opportunities to be deterred by loss of breath, by anxiety.             

March on in life. 

(March is in five days, keep this as a good reminder.)

Food and TV.

Joy to me is an enormous ceramic mug brimming with English breakfast tea, a whoopie pie, and Top Chef on the television. Breaking up that rich, soft cake and marshmallow filling with my fork then introducing and re-introducing it to my lips, I imagine that I'm simultaneously enjoying one of the pastries or desserts that are being prepared by maybe Malika or Zac or Yigit, my favorite for perhaps obvious reasons, on the 'Just Desserts' spinoff of the original show, which I only caught one season of in its still brief lifespan. The show, unlike my delicious treat, is far from fluffy, and far more watchable than most of those awkward televised competitions on the Food Network, save for Iron Chef. The FN has lately been fancying these types of shows, showdowns and food battles, but hasn't quite found the proper way to best tease out the drama. Chopped is drivel, as has been The Next Food Network Star. I'm not more likely to watch your program just because I watched you outlast other chefs week to week. Iron Chef on the other hand is prime food-related watching, and does an excellent job fetishizing the dishes and ingredients that are and should be the ultimate draw of such shows in the first place. Top Chef is more like a traditional competition-based reality show with a slant in food, which is what makes it so addictive. It did oust Amazing Race from its throne in the reality category at the Emmy's, followed the next year by A&E's Intervention, which is also addictive viewing for mostly the same reasons. Messed up people dealing with substances. In my case, it's messed up shirts covered in chocolate stains.

By the way, I have my money on Yigit to win Just Desserts, and not simply because he's adorable. Ever since I was a wee lad, I've had a knack for picking contestants (Bravo calls them cheftestants for this show, which is silly) who end up winning, most of the time without ever really having a specific reason. I just know how to pick 'em. I called Adrienne Curry and Yoanna House on America's Next Top Model, Fantasia Barrino on American Idol, Guy Fieri on Next Food Network Star. Maybe if Yigit wins and gets wind that my powers of cosmic persuasion on the judges won him the competition, he'll make me a whoopie pie. That would be pure joy.

What's Working?

According to MGMT, their latest single, 'It's Working,' is about taking drugs (ecstasy specifically) flecked with their signature cheeky self-reflexivity. Here, they hearken back to the track that brought them fame to begin with, 'Time to Pretend,' which facetiously likened fame and wealth to fulfillment and success, and reach a final message: substance-derived euphoria and material goods aren't all that great. (I've taken a couple drugs, and as fun as they can be, I'll have to agree.) The video reflects the point, taking some visual and thematic cues from 2004's best (time-traveling) film Primer, pitting rockstars Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden against what first appears to be some piece of furniture from IKEA and ends up being a Frankenstein-like creation of terror, harboring drummers, soft-serve, magical ballerinas and a fair amount of glitter (not to the level of 'Electric Feel,' however). Add this to their collection of visual oddities to go with their latest collection of spooky, psychedelic music. Don't take drugs to this.

The video was directed by So Me.

 

PS: I love Andrew.

What is the What.

A great big congratulations.

Pre-Coachella.  

Who I'm most excited to see at the festival this year hasn't really changed much since purchasing tickets in Janvier; I'm simply more excited about more of the artists/bands than I had been before. Been scanning the lineup poster a lot over the last few months and checking out a lot of the vaguely familiar, the stuff that's related stylistically to the stuff I already listen to. So far I haven't discovered too many bands that I've developed a love for as much as the artists I've loved continuously for the last many years (Bjork, Portishead, Goldfrapp, Massive Attack, Prince) but there are definitely some who've got the kind of swagger and substance that'll have me curious to check in on them sporadically from here on out. Local Natives and Deerhunter are among them. Fever Ray and La Roux are working on me too, and should firmly fall in that list after this weekend, that is, if they put on a good show. I'm still most excited to see MGMT, Yeasayer, Grizzly Bear, Beach House and Miike Snow.

What should I wear?
Hundreds of thousands of people will have been in attendance by Sunday (Day 3) and I imagine a lot of them will, on top of merely wanting functional wear to cope with the expected heat, want to dress for everyone else's eyes, and I don't quite know what kind of look I want to put on. Comfort is priority number one, but I want to look good! Most of my personal style icons don't typically dress for heat, crowds, or longevity (doors open at 11AM and closing is 1AM) - Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Pelayo Diaz Zapico - so my brain is being taxed to come up with something that'll sustain a 12-hour day of blistering weather. I do, however, enjoy the look of these guys, who are actually going to perform on Day 1 of the festival...

 ...and whose look, though eccentric, is perfect and perfectly mainstream for Indio, California heat and Coachella indie culture. MGMT is composed of Ben Goldwasser (left) and Andrew VanWyngarden (right). Colorful, breezy, psychedelic, retro-futuristic. I'll have to post pictures of what I decide, after much putting-on-and-taking-off and deliberation.

Here are some fine examples of what was (stylishly) worn in the past:

 

Lesson learned: wear white, keep away from self-made contraptions that double as helmets and animal costumes. I should be okay. Still, picture to come (partly because Valerie has made this her second Coachella-related project after discovering new attending bands)!

Just to warn you.

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