Just finished watching the Bob Dylan documentary that was on PBS ; what a fucking weird person. You can almost feel the wrench being thrown in the film's otherwise user-friendly texture by the MASSIVE WEIRDNESS that is Bob Dylan. By turns mercurial and taciturn, always refusing to give a simply-true answer (which is not charming or deep, but extremely frustrating), Dylan confronts the movie with the unfortunate paradox that this artist whose heart we think we have deduced from his hundreds of his songs is a complete enigma, almost a non-entity. He is so completely detached from his own life, from commenting on his work, from trying to place/label himself, you wonder how the man ever wrote a song in his life! Not to mention his completely dessicated, almost tacky appearance. And yet it is undeniably the same person.
By the way, undoubtedly Scorcese's best film since Goodfellas...
-- Musical development seems more and more like Seinfeld's routine about women's fashion: each season, they hide a different body part, until when the next season, they cover up some other part and reveal the long-awaited (say, calves), men go crazy. A rock act that turns acoustic. A rapper who puts out a pop song. An acoustic act that turns rock. A psych-noise-folk group who turn pop. A tough, forbidding artist putting out a sensitive ballad. Unbelievably, this is continually shocking to music critics and audiences everywhere. The fiction that people "grow" as artists is more laughable every year, when inevitably they are just shuffling the cards.
-- You can't get rid of your friends or quit a job very easily, or move, or get a new wardrobe, or anything very easily. So, on one hand, you see it taking an awful long time for people to drop out of things and become their parents already, just because they are still going through the motions. And on the other hand, it is a pretty arduous, tortuous grind to try and do anything interesting with your life.
-- This Side of Paradise is pretty crappy, but I am reminded of something wise a drunk told me at a party my parents had when I was in high school. I was reading The Great Gatsby, or about to start, and he said: Oh, Great Gatsby, that's one of my favorite books. There's a lot of truth in that book. They probably won't teach you this in school, but the rich characters in that book, they are a lot like crabs. In New England, when you go crab-fishing, the first crab that you catch, you have to put a lid on your bucket, or else it will crawl out and try to escape. But once you have a couple in there, they pull each other back in, if one tries to leave. Now, surely he heard this from somewhere else but damn if that doesn't sum the Great Gatsby up perfectly. Also this reminds me of reading "The Killers" by Hemingway the other day and crying at the part when the Swede says, “There ain’t anything to do now.” And Nick: “Couldn’t you fix it up some way?” “No. I got in wrong.”
-- The more Lacan you read, the more you cut people slack for being in some fucked-up intersubjective position vis-a-vis you, or for acting out on behalf of some field of the Other, or for erratic contradictions and most of all, instead of "taking the magic" out of things like love, what is more remarkable (like the movies, like Nabokov, etc), what is even more incredible about love (or other neurotic processes) is how perfectly they function even when we know how they work. Any "common-sense" criticism of this aspect of theory misses the point that there is no *undoing* the logic of these systems; they don't dispel once they are named.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Saturday, July 29, 2006
who wants to see "Time Regained" next week?
-- books finished this week: Jacques Lacan Seminar I: Freud's Papers on Technique, Sir A.C. Doyle A Study in Scarlet, Bruno Schulz Crocodile Street.
-- Dicks and Carbonas were great on Thursday night. Dicks shed a member since I saw them in Austin, so they were a four-piece (as in "the day"), and miraculously had not at all improved on their instruments since 1980. Their ineptitude, however, was somewhat mesmerizing, since it re-created the sound of their records perfectly, and since their not-quite-fast-enough, stomping beat has always been somewhat hypnotizing. Carbonas were too cool by half, but also sounded just like their records, but somehow blew the middle of their set by playing a string of uncatchy numbers and some KBD cover (which was alright but what are you gonna do it's 2006).
-- last night watched The Specialist, which made me realize I need to read Eichmann in Jerusalem really badly, but a few comments: 1) "the banality of evil" is pretty dead-on, but not quite in the way that I thought before I saw the movie; like, "banal" is not really equivalent to "bland" or "mundane" and is the only word that captures Eichmann's obnoxious, insipid, pathetic vibe. 2) also, dude is pissed off for most of the movie, since this is in some ways not a "real" trial and while normally I would sympathize with that sort of self-important indignation, y'know... you can't really, here. 3) best shot in the movie is when Eichmann is doing a typical oh I wasn't in charge of that or well we didn't *call* it 'burying people alive in mass graves', we called it 'deportation,' and the prosecuting attorneys play this tape of something similar he had said previously, and all you see in the camera shot is the bailiff rewinding the tape and on his arm the Camp tattoos. Heady stuff, people.
-- Talya was complaining about "post-Wes Anderson" films as being worse than the genre I was complaining about (the shitty independent films that Landmark and Angelika are always playing). Discussed: Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, You and Me and Everyone We Know, etc. I really liked Squid and the Whale, though, which is definitely "post Wes Anderson". The phenomenon that I was talking about was movies like "Happy Endings" with Tom Arnold, "The Good Girl", "Closer", "the World's Fastest Indian" and any movie where Paul Giamatti is the main character (I'm sure "Cinderella Man" sucked, but it isn't really the same phenomenon). Basically, movies that think they are more steamy/thoughtful than "average Hollywood fare," and are self-absorbed enough to try and make the Festival rounds but need someone to tell them "you aren't arty; you are just boring." This is almost exclusively what they play at the one or two independent theaters in Austin. SUCKS
-- Dicks and Carbonas were great on Thursday night. Dicks shed a member since I saw them in Austin, so they were a four-piece (as in "the day"), and miraculously had not at all improved on their instruments since 1980. Their ineptitude, however, was somewhat mesmerizing, since it re-created the sound of their records perfectly, and since their not-quite-fast-enough, stomping beat has always been somewhat hypnotizing. Carbonas were too cool by half, but also sounded just like their records, but somehow blew the middle of their set by playing a string of uncatchy numbers and some KBD cover (which was alright but what are you gonna do it's 2006).
-- last night watched The Specialist, which made me realize I need to read Eichmann in Jerusalem really badly, but a few comments: 1) "the banality of evil" is pretty dead-on, but not quite in the way that I thought before I saw the movie; like, "banal" is not really equivalent to "bland" or "mundane" and is the only word that captures Eichmann's obnoxious, insipid, pathetic vibe. 2) also, dude is pissed off for most of the movie, since this is in some ways not a "real" trial and while normally I would sympathize with that sort of self-important indignation, y'know... you can't really, here. 3) best shot in the movie is when Eichmann is doing a typical oh I wasn't in charge of that or well we didn't *call* it 'burying people alive in mass graves', we called it 'deportation,' and the prosecuting attorneys play this tape of something similar he had said previously, and all you see in the camera shot is the bailiff rewinding the tape and on his arm the Camp tattoos. Heady stuff, people.
-- Talya was complaining about "post-Wes Anderson" films as being worse than the genre I was complaining about (the shitty independent films that Landmark and Angelika are always playing). Discussed: Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, You and Me and Everyone We Know, etc. I really liked Squid and the Whale, though, which is definitely "post Wes Anderson". The phenomenon that I was talking about was movies like "Happy Endings" with Tom Arnold, "The Good Girl", "Closer", "the World's Fastest Indian" and any movie where Paul Giamatti is the main character (I'm sure "Cinderella Man" sucked, but it isn't really the same phenomenon). Basically, movies that think they are more steamy/thoughtful than "average Hollywood fare," and are self-absorbed enough to try and make the Festival rounds but need someone to tell them "you aren't arty; you are just boring." This is almost exclusively what they play at the one or two independent theaters in Austin. SUCKS
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Saturday, July 22, 2006
"lady in the water"
I really
really
really
want to see this piece of shit. The person writing in place of Roger Ebert for Ebert's website gave it the WOSRT review in recent memory, and it's actually about two to three times longer than the normal Ebert review, because (not being a genius like Ebert), Jim Emerson is not able to contain his loathing in the standard # of words.
Ebert said that to call the plot-twist in The Village " 'anti-climactic' would be an insult both to climaxes and to prefixes." I saw that with my buddy Corey, who incidentally does not know how to whisper in a movie, and it was the most wonderfully atrocious conversation-piece of the summer. What a piece of crap. Implausible. Badly scripted. Boring. Facile. Pretentious.
And so, under the fucked up premise that Bryce Dallas Howard (get a real name, you rich fuck), daughter of Da Vinci code auteur Ron Howard, is somehow analogous to Mr. Shyamalan (whose initials are even pretentious!!!) as Robert De Niro was to Martin Scorsese, or as Diane Keaton was for Woody Allen, which is unbelievably insulting, and under the equally fucked up premise that we are in the hands of someone with any cinematic credibility or capital to blow, and with a vast critical apparatus massed against it like a bow-tied, pop-corn-inhaling phalanx, movie-theater-trailer-voice-guy tries to get us to take this film seriously as a continuation of not only Shyamalan's...ahem...legacy, but also of Hitchcock's, and Spielberg, and god knows whose else besides. (how's THAT for a sentence!)
Little do they know, what makes these movies so delightful (although honestly Signs was hardly watchable) is the ponderous, pretentious, arcane, pretentious, non-signifying, and pretentious Shyamalanalia that proliferates in his movies like the riff from "You're Pushing Too Hard" when it crops up in other songs by The Seeds.
It's like watching a precocious but dorky and unlikeable 10-year-old make up his own game and then try to get other people to play it with him.
Because I've always hated that kid. In my elementary school, his name was Michael Hemmings, and he had a rat tail, and the greatest day of my life was when someone cut it off on the bus. So fuck you, M. Night Shyamalan, I may pay $11 to see your movie but so help me god I hope your next film is about backwards-walking Xiardglopeths who fix your shoes in the night but really they are trying to find the Chosen One (and you'll never guess who it is!), and that it stars Bryce Dallas Howard, and that you play Jesus yourself in a shocking cameo.
fUcK you
really
really
want to see this piece of shit. The person writing in place of Roger Ebert for Ebert's website gave it the WOSRT review in recent memory, and it's actually about two to three times longer than the normal Ebert review, because (not being a genius like Ebert), Jim Emerson is not able to contain his loathing in the standard # of words.
Ebert said that to call the plot-twist in The Village " 'anti-climactic' would be an insult both to climaxes and to prefixes." I saw that with my buddy Corey, who incidentally does not know how to whisper in a movie, and it was the most wonderfully atrocious conversation-piece of the summer. What a piece of crap. Implausible. Badly scripted. Boring. Facile. Pretentious.
And so, under the fucked up premise that Bryce Dallas Howard (get a real name, you rich fuck), daughter of Da Vinci code auteur Ron Howard, is somehow analogous to Mr. Shyamalan (whose initials are even pretentious!!!) as Robert De Niro was to Martin Scorsese, or as Diane Keaton was for Woody Allen, which is unbelievably insulting, and under the equally fucked up premise that we are in the hands of someone with any cinematic credibility or capital to blow, and with a vast critical apparatus massed against it like a bow-tied, pop-corn-inhaling phalanx, movie-theater-trailer-voice-guy tries to get us to take this film seriously as a continuation of not only Shyamalan's...ahem...legacy, but also of Hitchcock's, and Spielberg, and god knows whose else besides. (how's THAT for a sentence!)
Little do they know, what makes these movies so delightful (although honestly Signs was hardly watchable) is the ponderous, pretentious, arcane, pretentious, non-signifying, and pretentious Shyamalanalia that proliferates in his movies like the riff from "You're Pushing Too Hard" when it crops up in other songs by The Seeds.
It's like watching a precocious but dorky and unlikeable 10-year-old make up his own game and then try to get other people to play it with him.
Because I've always hated that kid. In my elementary school, his name was Michael Hemmings, and he had a rat tail, and the greatest day of my life was when someone cut it off on the bus. So fuck you, M. Night Shyamalan, I may pay $11 to see your movie but so help me god I hope your next film is about backwards-walking Xiardglopeths who fix your shoes in the night but really they are trying to find the Chosen One (and you'll never guess who it is!), and that it stars Bryce Dallas Howard, and that you play Jesus yourself in a shocking cameo.
fUcK you
saturday= coffee and talya
-- books I finished in the past week: Foucault History of Sexuality, Bowie Freud, Proust and Lacan, Proust The Guermantes Way, Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Raymond Williams Marxism and Literature.
-- i'm crossing my fingers that saturday brunch will happen; skrewdrivers! pancakes!
-- "panini?"=my new favorite punchline
-- check out bob dylan in his most hippy-jew period (including some kind of head-rag) playing the most ignorant, jammed out, slide-guitar, alternate-melody version of "shelter from the storm"
-- how embarassed would you be to be, like, a registered Democrat? i think in a way they have the "guy who has been dating the same girl for a while" syndrome-- they start wearing sweatpants, don't shave, come to class with bed-head, etc.-- because they know their base has nowhere to go, but C'MON, have some dignity.
-- I'm going to watch the Eichmann trial documentary ("The Specialist") this weekend or monday, or wednesday after my French mid-term; anyone interested? we can use your VCR
-- suggest someone to cut my hair; I can't really pull off the Greg Ginn.
-- UGH!!! i just remembered I had the looongest dream about espresso; like, revolving around that I don't know how much coffee to use in an espresso machine. Fuck that! where are the Sarah Michelle Gellar dreams?
-- but, to explain the espresso dream, clearly it has to do with the obnoxious businessman yesterday who was asking too many questions about the espresso beans at Fairway, BUT WHAT IT'S REALLY ABOUT is that i have a crush on the concession girl at Film Forum (you know the one) and that they don't serve coffee there, only espresso drinks.
-- i'm crossing my fingers that saturday brunch will happen; skrewdrivers! pancakes!
-- "panini?"=my new favorite punchline
-- check out bob dylan in his most hippy-jew period (including some kind of head-rag) playing the most ignorant, jammed out, slide-guitar, alternate-melody version of "shelter from the storm"
-- how embarassed would you be to be, like, a registered Democrat? i think in a way they have the "guy who has been dating the same girl for a while" syndrome-- they start wearing sweatpants, don't shave, come to class with bed-head, etc.-- because they know their base has nowhere to go, but C'MON, have some dignity.
-- I'm going to watch the Eichmann trial documentary ("The Specialist") this weekend or monday, or wednesday after my French mid-term; anyone interested? we can use your VCR
-- suggest someone to cut my hair; I can't really pull off the Greg Ginn.
-- UGH!!! i just remembered I had the looongest dream about espresso; like, revolving around that I don't know how much coffee to use in an espresso machine. Fuck that! where are the Sarah Michelle Gellar dreams?
-- but, to explain the espresso dream, clearly it has to do with the obnoxious businessman yesterday who was asking too many questions about the espresso beans at Fairway, BUT WHAT IT'S REALLY ABOUT is that i have a crush on the concession girl at Film Forum (you know the one) and that they don't serve coffee there, only espresso drinks.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
the inevitable "fat kid" comparison
-- someone in my french class today coined the phrase "not to pull a Ben" to preface making a snarky and pedantic comment about semantics/conceits/mixed metaphors. THANKS GUY. i haven't even started the program yet, and already my name is synonymous with asking time-consuming, off-topic questions.
-- i know you guys think that we hang out because we enjoy each other's company, and that's all well and good, but from now on an extra dimension will be in playing the game: Did I Just Flirt with That Person and its counterpart Were You Just Flirting with that Person?
-- what is behind my undissuadable tendency to make analogies about "the fat kid" and his analogous tribulations? perhaps, that i am thinking like a book. and this book is prone to homeric similes like WHAT. (cf: Milton, Proust, Tolstoy, Homer, who are to analogies what Gary Larson is to fat kids)
-- please enjoy this brief lull between my reading The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain (née Sodom and Gomorrah). i will still reference Proust, but more in a general, relative way than in my patented I-wasn't-even-listening-to-you-because-I-was-thinking-about-Marcel way.
-- today, because my mouth was already open (yeah, when isn't it?, har har) talking to Talya, this girl walked out of the public library and mid-sentence I just gawped "WHAAAT?" while she was like a yard away, because she was wearing lime green hotpants and a tank-top and pretty much nothing else. If I had not been talking at the time, I imagine this would have been solely mental. Talya suggested I could find her again at any MisShapes party.
-- the stupid village voice has such a crush on MisShapes and Brooklyn lofts, it is so embarassing. i mean, the voice is usually embarassing, but they should change their address to myspace.com/soooolastyear
-- girls: why do they make them so TALL? (the answer may involve hotpants)
-- the new Fucked Up is really good, i hope you guys all got it
-- and, also related to Fucked Up, I'm sure I'm the last person to know about Henry Darger, but if you haven't, please do!
-- i know you guys think that we hang out because we enjoy each other's company, and that's all well and good, but from now on an extra dimension will be in playing the game: Did I Just Flirt with That Person and its counterpart Were You Just Flirting with that Person?
-- what is behind my undissuadable tendency to make analogies about "the fat kid" and his analogous tribulations? perhaps, that i am thinking like a book. and this book is prone to homeric similes like WHAT. (cf: Milton, Proust, Tolstoy, Homer, who are to analogies what Gary Larson is to fat kids)
-- please enjoy this brief lull between my reading The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain (née Sodom and Gomorrah). i will still reference Proust, but more in a general, relative way than in my patented I-wasn't-even-listening-to-you-because-I-was-thinking-about-Marcel way.
-- today, because my mouth was already open (yeah, when isn't it?, har har) talking to Talya, this girl walked out of the public library and mid-sentence I just gawped "WHAAAT?" while she was like a yard away, because she was wearing lime green hotpants and a tank-top and pretty much nothing else. If I had not been talking at the time, I imagine this would have been solely mental. Talya suggested I could find her again at any MisShapes party.
-- the stupid village voice has such a crush on MisShapes and Brooklyn lofts, it is so embarassing. i mean, the voice is usually embarassing, but they should change their address to myspace.com/soooolastyear
-- girls: why do they make them so TALL? (the answer may involve hotpants)
-- the new Fucked Up is really good, i hope you guys all got it
-- and, also related to Fucked Up, I'm sure I'm the last person to know about Henry Darger, but if you haven't, please do!
Monday, July 17, 2006
some news
--- The new reissue of the classic KORO "700 Club" EP is out now. You can get a limited blue/white swirl vinyl for $4 here
--- I am getting A/C tomorrow. Come hang out in your underwear at my house.
--- Does reading Freud on the subway make me look like a perv? I think, probably "yes".
--- I was looking at myspace today and came across this in someone's blog:
--- I am probably going to move to Brooklyn, AKA "girlville"
--- Is the second Television album ("adventure") good? considering that I never want to hear "marquee moon" again, but am not averse to listening to Television...
--- I am getting A/C tomorrow. Come hang out in your underwear at my house.
--- Does reading Freud on the subway make me look like a perv? I think, probably "yes".
--- I was looking at myspace today and came across this in someone's blog:
Life has its ups and downs.
I used to weigh 250 pounds when I was a teen. I used to be teased by the boys and girls at school because I was ugly and useless. You wouldn't guess if I was a boy or a girl. I looked definitely sexless, a slow-moving, slow-witted, slothful creature with thick, horn-rimmed glasses and ghastly bellbottom corduroy trousers. I was a troll with a faint mustache and hardly any breasts. Nay, I was the Ur-Medusa.
To add fuel to the fire, I began hating myself because I believed they were right-- deep down inside-- I was as monstrous inside as I was outside. I hated myself. I hated everybody. If there was a god, I blamed her for producing a life as mediocre as mine was. I wanted to kill everyone.
I led a life that continually looked inward. I escaped by shunning my parents and siblings. I joined a coven of witches and warlocks and I went goth. In order to feel happy, I continually sought solace in food and sex. Let me just say that there was a steady supply of partners from the coven, though I'm sure they looked at me with disgust. But I felt the first stirrings of love from the affection I'd receive from the male and female members of the set. I was loved because I gave them attention. In time, I became the high priestess, the leader of the coven.
But I soon woke up from that NEVER NEVER LAND. Like Alice waking up to find herself home in Kansas, I deliberately shook off my allegiance with the coven, joined a born-again charismatic choir and headed off to country revival seminars every week. I was followed by my former comrades everywhere I went. The witches boldly went as far as hanging a pitbull's carcass on my front door. But I was protected by my new friends in the born-again charismatic group, especially by the young pastor who took a liking towards me.
But what had really turned me away from that former life of food, sex and witchcraft?
I realized that I shouldn't be used by anybody. Of course, eventually, I also realized that the born-again group was also using me. The pastor was, in fact, beginning to seduce me. He wanted us to have an illicit affair. I knew it was time to leave this group as well...
So I decided to swallow my pride and I returned home to my parents. My mom and dad welcomed me home with no questions asked. Thankfully my paternal grandmother bequeathed me a sizeable sum for my college kitty fund.
I enrolled at SUNY and in seven years I lost a lot of weight and I graduated with a bachelor's degree in architecture.
Now I'm FREE, SINGLE and HAPPILY HAPPY in NYC.
That's the story of my life. Let's party!
--- I think I can count on one hand the people whom I have ever made a good first impression upon.--- I am probably going to move to Brooklyn, AKA "girlville"
--- Is the second Television album ("adventure") good? considering that I never want to hear "marquee moon" again, but am not averse to listening to Television...
Friday, July 14, 2006
More on Proust:
Although probably the *least* cinematic of writers, in that it would be impossible to film 50 pages of him reflecting on tea, the beach, bedtime, etc., there is an incredible moment in The Guermantes Way where he has been at this party for like 80 pages, and is listening to the aristocrats talking about lineages (going back to Joan of Arc, natch), and then he kind of "lowers the volume" of the conversation going on around him, and his voice "comes on" and starts reflecting on the evening, but over the conversation, as it were--- as if, what precisely it isn't at anywhere else, the novel were unfolding in real time, and so any reflection has to be superimposed over the scene we are "watching".
But this is all done without any cues, any cinematic directions; in-fucking-credible.
Although probably the *least* cinematic of writers, in that it would be impossible to film 50 pages of him reflecting on tea, the beach, bedtime, etc., there is an incredible moment in The Guermantes Way where he has been at this party for like 80 pages, and is listening to the aristocrats talking about lineages (going back to Joan of Arc, natch), and then he kind of "lowers the volume" of the conversation going on around him, and his voice "comes on" and starts reflecting on the evening, but over the conversation, as it were--- as if, what precisely it isn't at anywhere else, the novel were unfolding in real time, and so any reflection has to be superimposed over the scene we are "watching".
But this is all done without any cues, any cinematic directions; in-fucking-credible.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
more reasons that I am not an adult
-- I make jokes in class
-- I have a favorite brand of sour candies that I buy (dorval sour power straws)
-- I have a favorite flavor (strawberry-banana)
-- Taking the subway with people who are 29 and 24 made me feel like I was fifteen
-- I carry a backpack
-- I met someone at the bar tonight who was engaged and totally my age
-- Her fiance was busy talking to someone and I made a pun about how he was "engaged" too
-- I eat Cookie Crisp cereal (peanut butter flavor)
-- I don't read literary journals
-- I have a blog
-- I haven't been dating the same person for 4+ years
-- I don't read contemporary fiction
-- I listen to punk music
-- I can't eat at sidewalk cafes and I can't afford to drink downtown
-- I have pants that aren't jeans and shoes that aren't sneakers, but I haven't yet brought myself to wear them
-- I don't intern at a magazine (dear readers: I have like 10 friends who work at magazines, so don't think this is "about you")
-- I cut my own hair or have a friend do it
yo, my only goal tomorrow is to finish The Guermantes Way because I've been reading it forever, and so that I can then knock out a bunch of Freud, Lacan, Marx stuff that I have been reading 100 pages of and then putting down. And then the novel I'm going to read is Street of Crocodiles or Tender is the Night, or something else if they are in boxes that I can't get to.
-- I have a favorite brand of sour candies that I buy (dorval sour power straws)
-- I have a favorite flavor (strawberry-banana)
-- Taking the subway with people who are 29 and 24 made me feel like I was fifteen
-- I carry a backpack
-- I met someone at the bar tonight who was engaged and totally my age
-- Her fiance was busy talking to someone and I made a pun about how he was "engaged" too
-- I eat Cookie Crisp cereal (peanut butter flavor)
-- I don't read literary journals
-- I have a blog
-- I haven't been dating the same person for 4+ years
-- I don't read contemporary fiction
-- I listen to punk music
-- I can't eat at sidewalk cafes and I can't afford to drink downtown
-- I have pants that aren't jeans and shoes that aren't sneakers, but I haven't yet brought myself to wear them
-- I don't intern at a magazine (dear readers: I have like 10 friends who work at magazines, so don't think this is "about you")
-- I cut my own hair or have a friend do it
yo, my only goal tomorrow is to finish The Guermantes Way because I've been reading it forever, and so that I can then knock out a bunch of Freud, Lacan, Marx stuff that I have been reading 100 pages of and then putting down. And then the novel I'm going to read is Street of Crocodiles or Tender is the Night, or something else if they are in boxes that I can't get to.
Proust:
-- Although I have probably spent more time with Proust (days on end) than 90% of my friends, I'm not really sure that I would want to "hang out" with Proust, or even that I "like" him.
-- Although I think Proust is undoubtedly the greatest writer of the century, I am in *constant* fear that he will write about something embarassing or make a really bone-headed analogy. Like, I have zero confidence in him.
Language:
-- Talya's old roommates had a Fugazi poster in their kitchen, and at the bottom was one line of lyrics from each song on the album (ex:"I'm not your reason to crack and divide," "Sugar made it easy, ice made it cold," "I'm not waiting around for the kiss-off.") Every line was totally embarassing, because essentially they were all in this emo-lyric speech that I recently noticed had been transported to myspace, only now more thugged-out. It's basically the same, but with all these vague threats and "bitches" scattered throughout. This girl I knew in high school changed her email to "breakingheartsbreakingnecks@____.com" and besides being unacceptably clumsy as a working email address, this is a perfect example of this maddening vibe people have found as the new ideal.
-- There is an equally obnoxious (but less violent) twee version of this language, too.
-- The best example of any of this is any lyrics inciting or discussing "dancing."
Like:
"candle wax and dried up flowers; everyone was dancing" (goth; this is an actual lyric)
"dance dance dance dance to the radio" (post-punk; this is an actual lyric)
"dance dance dance we're falling apart to half time" (pop-punk; this is an actual lyric)
"dance to the sound of america's best-dressed fakeout" (screamo; this is an actual lyric)
or:
(these are ALL song titles by a band called Panic! At the Disco) (disco=dancing? get it?)
"nails for breakfast, tacks for snacks" (tough!)
"lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off" (misogyny! tough!)
"time to dance" (hahahaha)
I guess the easiest solution is not to wear the Che hat or a white belt, and instantly you will feel the desire to 'dance' (or to sing about it) slipping away; maybe I'm too widely read to feel that the trope of "dance dance revolution" is still fresh, but I am frankly surprised at everyone's tolerance and continued ecstatic embrace of such stale tropes. I guess my point is just, "why are people so lame?", but gosh...why ARE they?
Like...ugh!
-- Although I have probably spent more time with Proust (days on end) than 90% of my friends, I'm not really sure that I would want to "hang out" with Proust, or even that I "like" him.
-- Although I think Proust is undoubtedly the greatest writer of the century, I am in *constant* fear that he will write about something embarassing or make a really bone-headed analogy. Like, I have zero confidence in him.
Language:
-- Talya's old roommates had a Fugazi poster in their kitchen, and at the bottom was one line of lyrics from each song on the album (ex:"I'm not your reason to crack and divide," "Sugar made it easy, ice made it cold," "I'm not waiting around for the kiss-off.") Every line was totally embarassing, because essentially they were all in this emo-lyric speech that I recently noticed had been transported to myspace, only now more thugged-out. It's basically the same, but with all these vague threats and "bitches" scattered throughout. This girl I knew in high school changed her email to "breakingheartsbreakingnecks@____.com" and besides being unacceptably clumsy as a working email address, this is a perfect example of this maddening vibe people have found as the new ideal.
-- There is an equally obnoxious (but less violent) twee version of this language, too.
-- The best example of any of this is any lyrics inciting or discussing "dancing."
Like:
"candle wax and dried up flowers; everyone was dancing" (goth; this is an actual lyric)
"dance dance dance dance to the radio" (post-punk; this is an actual lyric)
"dance dance dance we're falling apart to half time" (pop-punk; this is an actual lyric)
"dance to the sound of america's best-dressed fakeout" (screamo; this is an actual lyric)
or:
(these are ALL song titles by a band called Panic! At the Disco) (disco=dancing? get it?)
"nails for breakfast, tacks for snacks" (tough!)
"lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off" (misogyny! tough!)
"time to dance" (hahahaha)
I guess the easiest solution is not to wear the Che hat or a white belt, and instantly you will feel the desire to 'dance' (or to sing about it) slipping away; maybe I'm too widely read to feel that the trope of "dance dance revolution" is still fresh, but I am frankly surprised at everyone's tolerance and continued ecstatic embrace of such stale tropes. I guess my point is just, "why are people so lame?", but gosh...why ARE they?
Like...ugh!
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
from surly to sultry
Meth users are not a pretty sight
Yo, how bummed out would you be to be this woman's daughter? I mean, sure, identity theft and its limitless riches just bought your ice-cream (which is melting quickly away, like all your other happiness), but your mom permanently looks like she is receiving instructions from some voice out-of-frame. Like, "Hey fellow playgrounders, this is my mom; yeah, right now she's listening to that dog across the street, but she is taking me to get my ears pierced. Rad!"
The best thing about this article is the descriptions of night-time meth users, which makes them sound like raccoons ("the wolverines of the garbage"), but also has that wonderfully Dantean irony (contrapasso) in which one's use of a drug is repaid in all its *reverse* attributes: like, you start taking meth so that you can do all the things you don't have time to do in this workaday world, lose weight, pick your face-- you know, all the glamour of meth. But THEN, in whatever circle of hell this would be, you end up staying up all night going through people's mail looking for credit card numbers.
Like Scientology, then, meth is this total bait-and-switch where, if you knew what you were getting into at first, no one would ever get into it. Like, "Hey man, wanna spend 86 straight hours awake looking at strings of numbers on the internet?! It'll be ILL!"
Thus ends my comparison of Scientology, Dante's Inferno, and meth use.
--- A while ago, I went to apply for a room transfer at the University housing office, and when the woman told me I couldn't until October, I guess I made a frowny face and was told something to the effect of "that won't work here" or "you best stop that." Lesson: adults don't make frowny faces.
--- Let's go see The Apartment, Sabrina, and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes this week/end. It promises to show what Holmes and Watson were "really like," if you know what I'm sayin'. Also, I'm siked for Sabrina b/c I bet they call that doe-eyed waif "that dopey kid" a bunch of times.
--- Please leave comments if you know of any more bait-and-switch schemes. However, please do not post the entire text of Faust.
--- Never believe anything but Fucked Up LP leak
Yo, how bummed out would you be to be this woman's daughter? I mean, sure, identity theft and its limitless riches just bought your ice-cream (which is melting quickly away, like all your other happiness), but your mom permanently looks like she is receiving instructions from some voice out-of-frame. Like, "Hey fellow playgrounders, this is my mom; yeah, right now she's listening to that dog across the street, but she is taking me to get my ears pierced. Rad!"
The best thing about this article is the descriptions of night-time meth users, which makes them sound like raccoons ("the wolverines of the garbage"), but also has that wonderfully Dantean irony (contrapasso) in which one's use of a drug is repaid in all its *reverse* attributes: like, you start taking meth so that you can do all the things you don't have time to do in this workaday world, lose weight, pick your face-- you know, all the glamour of meth. But THEN, in whatever circle of hell this would be, you end up staying up all night going through people's mail looking for credit card numbers.
Like Scientology, then, meth is this total bait-and-switch where, if you knew what you were getting into at first, no one would ever get into it. Like, "Hey man, wanna spend 86 straight hours awake looking at strings of numbers on the internet?! It'll be ILL!"
Thus ends my comparison of Scientology, Dante's Inferno, and meth use.
--- A while ago, I went to apply for a room transfer at the University housing office, and when the woman told me I couldn't until October, I guess I made a frowny face and was told something to the effect of "that won't work here" or "you best stop that." Lesson: adults don't make frowny faces.
--- Let's go see The Apartment, Sabrina, and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes this week/end. It promises to show what Holmes and Watson were "really like," if you know what I'm sayin'. Also, I'm siked for Sabrina b/c I bet they call that doe-eyed waif "that dopey kid" a bunch of times.
--- Please leave comments if you know of any more bait-and-switch schemes. However, please do not post the entire text of Faust.
--- Never believe anything but Fucked Up LP leak
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
a few comments regarding taste in music
Part I:
Walter Pater says, "all art aspires to the condition of music": in our modern world, this means to be constantly sampled in car commercials, rap songs, summarized in cursory greatest hits collections, butchered in covers, and turned off at parties in favor of reggaeton.
Yet music does hold an unique position. Music, after TV, is the most quickly consumed form of art. It takes thirty minutes to watch a TV show, and thirty minutes to listen to an album, but you don't really take it all in on the first listen, whereas you are supposed to have taken in an entire episode of, say, Drew Carey, in order to follow his zany adventures next week.
However, there is so little TV (would that this were true!) that it would be hard to really define oneself by the TV one watches. The most die-hard fan of Lost probably has not seen any more episodes than someone with nothing better to do most nights and catches the missed episodes in reruns. Moreover, the mass audience and mass appeal of popular TV prevent differentiation (from others) and intimate relation (to the show), respectively. Even being a huge fan of The Simpsons and Law and Order, I find not only little in common with most other fans, but I'm not even sure what it would mean to identify with these shows.
In literature, the moral conceptions, plots, and style of a given author are so unique (the opposite of TV's condition) that there can be no identical relation to an ouevre.
Films simply take too long to watch to meet our criteria here. Even among my favorite movies, there are few that I have seen even a dozen times. In a sense, one *moves on* from a movie after far less contact than with a record. (This could also be said of books, although it is not the main objection).
Art is too expensive. I would possibly allow that an art "movement" could work here, though, were one involved.
Poetry almost succeeds, but how many times can one read a poem?
Exceptions:
1) Trekkies
2) Tolkien fans
3) anyone leading some sort of expatriate, drunk "poetic" lifestyle (warning: you are a cliche!)
Which leaves music as the easiest art form with which to form a social bond-- and therefore a defining one.
Part II:
Walter Pater says, "all art aspires to the condition of music": in our modern world, this means to be constantly sampled in car commercials, rap songs, summarized in cursory greatest hits collections, butchered in covers, and turned off at parties in favor of reggaeton.
However, what interests me is the dialectic of taste. The other day, I was (half) joking when I said that I wanted to get into jazz because I wanted my music to be more dialectical. However, one's taste is already dialectical. What is taste, but a winding, mistake-filled dialectic which finds itself in the end through tribulation and identification?
In this sense, it is hard to argue with *and* hard to credit someone with really shitty taste in music. No one is born liking shitty music. This is something that must be arrived at. In the same way, however, liking shitty music is inherently valid. [Although, I should say that I once heard someone say, "I don't like the music that I like," and I suppose their earlier taste had not been constructed on firm ground.]
However, this process is essentially a reductive one. To wit, what people LIKE about the music they like is not a good guarantor of what they will like about the music they don't already like. We imagine that we have "cornered" our tastes from a really wide field, but the ordering of the points where one approaches each genre is colored by the previous instance. I know a lot of people approach black metal from the noise or hardcore scenes (for instance), and want to hear in that music what they already like, but this normally ends up with the WORST taste in black metal. What happens is that people decide "i don't like that kind of vocals" or "i don't like the production on this", but at the same time they listen to Modernlifeiswar is something, which is hardly the music an infant would choose at the outset, from the entire field of creative endeavor.
I do think that someone can simply "suck at listening to music." Old people, for instance, who insist that a distorted guitar is "angry" while the exact same notes, played acoustically, are "happy". Or people who insist that a particular form of pop-rock, with different inflections of instrumentation, somehow constitutes a new genre.
In short, (and to be honest I have to go eat some potato chips right now and can't continue this until later) musical taste should reproduce the wise words of Mr. Eliot: We shall not cease from exploration: And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.
Which is just to say, not that one should "taste every flavor" or "understand the history of a music before he forms his opinion"--nothing so trite--but that with each new song we hear, we simultaneously have to bring every song we've ever heard into the headphones with us, and to forget them at the same time. I do not believe there is such a thing as "being open-minded," nor that all music is equally valid, etc., but I would like to start thinking about (good) taste not as something one "has" or arrives at, but as maybe this other thing outlined above.
---i am staying up all night in order to touch my mousepad every hour so that my computer does not shut down, so that my download of the new Fucked Up album will continue without incident
---today I wore blue suede shoes; there were no remarks.
---if you convince me to buy an expensive reissue and i don't like it, we have beef [b33f]
---the construction "which" as a relative possessive pronoun is so egregious that it does not even occur as an "erroneous" usage in the OED--- and yet I snuck it by in my senior thesis. oops!
---no one likes being told they should go listen to "the teddy bears' picnic"
--- generate your own (meaningless) graduate paper
---text message distro updates=the future is here
---"veering towards solipsism"= the definition of my life/method
---all complaints about the content of this blog should be directed to the fact that I spend all day in the library
Walter Pater says, "all art aspires to the condition of music": in our modern world, this means to be constantly sampled in car commercials, rap songs, summarized in cursory greatest hits collections, butchered in covers, and turned off at parties in favor of reggaeton.
Yet music does hold an unique position. Music, after TV, is the most quickly consumed form of art. It takes thirty minutes to watch a TV show, and thirty minutes to listen to an album, but you don't really take it all in on the first listen, whereas you are supposed to have taken in an entire episode of, say, Drew Carey, in order to follow his zany adventures next week.
However, there is so little TV (would that this were true!) that it would be hard to really define oneself by the TV one watches. The most die-hard fan of Lost probably has not seen any more episodes than someone with nothing better to do most nights and catches the missed episodes in reruns. Moreover, the mass audience and mass appeal of popular TV prevent differentiation (from others) and intimate relation (to the show), respectively. Even being a huge fan of The Simpsons and Law and Order, I find not only little in common with most other fans, but I'm not even sure what it would mean to identify with these shows.
In literature, the moral conceptions, plots, and style of a given author are so unique (the opposite of TV's condition) that there can be no identical relation to an ouevre.
Films simply take too long to watch to meet our criteria here. Even among my favorite movies, there are few that I have seen even a dozen times. In a sense, one *moves on* from a movie after far less contact than with a record. (This could also be said of books, although it is not the main objection).
Art is too expensive. I would possibly allow that an art "movement" could work here, though, were one involved.
Poetry almost succeeds, but how many times can one read a poem?
Exceptions:
1) Trekkies
2) Tolkien fans
3) anyone leading some sort of expatriate, drunk "poetic" lifestyle (warning: you are a cliche!)
Which leaves music as the easiest art form with which to form a social bond-- and therefore a defining one.
Part II:
Walter Pater says, "all art aspires to the condition of music": in our modern world, this means to be constantly sampled in car commercials, rap songs, summarized in cursory greatest hits collections, butchered in covers, and turned off at parties in favor of reggaeton.
However, what interests me is the dialectic of taste. The other day, I was (half) joking when I said that I wanted to get into jazz because I wanted my music to be more dialectical. However, one's taste is already dialectical. What is taste, but a winding, mistake-filled dialectic which finds itself in the end through tribulation and identification?
In this sense, it is hard to argue with *and* hard to credit someone with really shitty taste in music. No one is born liking shitty music. This is something that must be arrived at. In the same way, however, liking shitty music is inherently valid. [Although, I should say that I once heard someone say, "I don't like the music that I like," and I suppose their earlier taste had not been constructed on firm ground.]
However, this process is essentially a reductive one. To wit, what people LIKE about the music they like is not a good guarantor of what they will like about the music they don't already like. We imagine that we have "cornered" our tastes from a really wide field, but the ordering of the points where one approaches each genre is colored by the previous instance. I know a lot of people approach black metal from the noise or hardcore scenes (for instance), and want to hear in that music what they already like, but this normally ends up with the WORST taste in black metal. What happens is that people decide "i don't like that kind of vocals" or "i don't like the production on this", but at the same time they listen to Modernlifeiswar is something, which is hardly the music an infant would choose at the outset, from the entire field of creative endeavor.
I do think that someone can simply "suck at listening to music." Old people, for instance, who insist that a distorted guitar is "angry" while the exact same notes, played acoustically, are "happy". Or people who insist that a particular form of pop-rock, with different inflections of instrumentation, somehow constitutes a new genre.
In short, (and to be honest I have to go eat some potato chips right now and can't continue this until later) musical taste should reproduce the wise words of Mr. Eliot: We shall not cease from exploration: And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.
Which is just to say, not that one should "taste every flavor" or "understand the history of a music before he forms his opinion"--nothing so trite--but that with each new song we hear, we simultaneously have to bring every song we've ever heard into the headphones with us, and to forget them at the same time. I do not believe there is such a thing as "being open-minded," nor that all music is equally valid, etc., but I would like to start thinking about (good) taste not as something one "has" or arrives at, but as maybe this other thing outlined above.
---i am staying up all night in order to touch my mousepad every hour so that my computer does not shut down, so that my download of the new Fucked Up album will continue without incident
---today I wore blue suede shoes; there were no remarks.
---if you convince me to buy an expensive reissue and i don't like it, we have beef [b33f]
---the construction "which" as a relative possessive pronoun is so egregious that it does not even occur as an "erroneous" usage in the OED--- and yet I snuck it by in my senior thesis. oops!
---no one likes being told they should go listen to "the teddy bears' picnic"
--- generate your own (meaningless) graduate paper
---text message distro updates=the future is here
---"veering towards solipsism"= the definition of my life/method
---all complaints about the content of this blog should be directed to the fact that I spend all day in the library
Vicious 12" review
Now that this band has a newer record out, I probably won't publish this in any zine, so I thought it could see the light of day here.
Vicious 12" (Wasted Sounds)
Not to pull a Jerry Maguire, but this EP “had me” at the Static Age album art, and even the cheesy band photos on the back cover (arms crossed, in coffins) was excusable because the guitarist is the cutest girl in punk. Actually, the vocalist is probably the most striking babe on the circuit, too; when I saw the Regulations (in which he plays bass), his ultra-tight jeans made *me* feel fat. With all these good-looking kids in the band, it is perhaps appropriate that their music is sexy as hell, but the lyrics are completely vapid: “I need somebody to destroy this generations, let’s invent our own” sounds so 2001.
Oh shit, did I forget to introduce this band? This is members of DS 13, Tristess, Regulations, and the International Noise Conspiracy playing basic punk rock in the vein of current Swedish bands, but more punk and less pop than, say, Knugen Faller. Their debut EP was widely praised for its authentic Bloodstains Across Wherever sound, and this record has elsewhere garnered comparisons to The Adverts. I’m really into this stuff, which probably means I shouldn’t have sold my Adverts CD the week after I first heard Skitsystem, but whatever.
The first thing you notice about this record (after their pants) is how *good* they are at doing this thing we think we are all tired of already. These six songs are all really memorable, the vocals (and lyrical tropes) threaten to get old immediately but never do, and the whole affair is punk as fuck. The singer should copyright his awesome way of saying the same thing once, and then saying “the SAME thing” “the same THING” “THE same THING” and making it really catchy. So, while this music could never be accused of complexity or depth, I listen to it all the time and it never gets old. They never deliver on the Misfits-promise of the album art, but I get the feeling this band is getting laid nonstop, so maybe they meant to and just forgot.
Monday, July 10, 2006
dada @ moma
First off, let me apologize to Talya, because I basically narrated my viewpoints on the exhibit to her at MoMA, except when she was pretending she didn't know me so that I could vibe this one girl. Sorry, Talya: you've heard all this before. Of course, if anyone has known me for long enough, they probably know what I'm going to say at all times anyways.
For the most part, I enjoyed the exhibit, but that statement comes with such a bundle of qualifications that maybe "enjoy" is not the right verb. In the history of Art, or my selective appreciation thereof, dada strikes me as definitively "Important" but extremely dated, like the first Jeff Beck album, or The Jazz Singer.
Seemingly a large part of the art was based on the ideas like "automatic writing," primitivism, and accessing a "random" and inspired mental state, where I suppose one would be closer to inspiration. How much this has to do with Freud, it is hard to say, but it seems ironic and unnecessary to me to attempt to replicate the aesthetic of the unconscious/primitive/childlike by a conscious disavowal of one's higher faculties, because we are never without our unconscious in the first place. Making art by trying to ape the unconscious, or "reach" the unconscious, misses the insight that all art is *already* a partial product of unconscious processes, sublimations, and displacements.
Actually, though, "automatic writing" and leaving art "to the laws of chance" (as one canvas boldly proclaims) is almost an evasion of the unconscious mind, because, as anyone who has played Ouija knows, there is no such thing as a completely uninformed movement. In this way, dada repeats the mistakes of prior art, which only thought it was about mimesis/representation, and actually was betraying unconscious impulses--- by proclaiming to be random, dada leaves itself open to the same unintentional (here, we could take a Freudian or Jungian tack) concepts which determined previous art, while presuming to avoid those traps.
Additionally, Dada comes across as especially cliquey and mannered, which is always "liberating" in a mass culture, but is not especially endearing in retrospect.
Mostly, though, it is hard for me to get excited about those moments in the unfolding of any art's dialectic, when someone realizes that some convention of the art has become meaningless, or can be transcended or done away with. For example, putting a toilet in an art gallery was, at one point, a bold stroke that questioned the authority of the definition of art, called out the bourgeois standards of taste, manufacturedness, etc... however, no piece in the entire exhibit felt more like an artifact. Moreover, there would then be no *second urinal*. To now put a urinal in an art gallery would be laughable. The idea, as a crucial manifestation of a moment in Art's unfolding, obliterates its own value in-itself, remaining a contribution only as concept, not as a piece of art.
Another example of this is the facile juxtapositions which comprised most of the collages: the sense of the absurd stops being interesting or clever after surprisingly little time. Putting John Rockefeller's head on top of the body of a woman in a bathing suit is fine, but what else? It just doesn't endure as a mode of thought, especially given the more complicated modulations the Absurd Juxtaposition has gone through in the intervening decades. It seems so quaint. Yet an important realization about the content of art, which would be of value to later movements, had been arrived at.
My favorite pieces were nearly all of the Max Ernsts, the Marcel Duchamp glass, the George Grosz paintings, all of the films, some of the simple colored-squares in the Zurich room (Jean Arp and Sophie someone-or-other), and the Hausmann paintings (but not his collages). I feel like these had more of the quality of the aesthetic than of the prank or envelope-pushing.
I mean, surely someone has to push the envelope, but it is often the fate of the pioneer to be eclipsed in his/her own radicalism, and to become a figure or thumbnail on a timeline, rather than to endure.
For the most part, I enjoyed the exhibit, but that statement comes with such a bundle of qualifications that maybe "enjoy" is not the right verb. In the history of Art, or my selective appreciation thereof, dada strikes me as definitively "Important" but extremely dated, like the first Jeff Beck album, or The Jazz Singer.
Seemingly a large part of the art was based on the ideas like "automatic writing," primitivism, and accessing a "random" and inspired mental state, where I suppose one would be closer to inspiration. How much this has to do with Freud, it is hard to say, but it seems ironic and unnecessary to me to attempt to replicate the aesthetic of the unconscious/primitive/childlike by a conscious disavowal of one's higher faculties, because we are never without our unconscious in the first place. Making art by trying to ape the unconscious, or "reach" the unconscious, misses the insight that all art is *already* a partial product of unconscious processes, sublimations, and displacements.
Actually, though, "automatic writing" and leaving art "to the laws of chance" (as one canvas boldly proclaims) is almost an evasion of the unconscious mind, because, as anyone who has played Ouija knows, there is no such thing as a completely uninformed movement. In this way, dada repeats the mistakes of prior art, which only thought it was about mimesis/representation, and actually was betraying unconscious impulses--- by proclaiming to be random, dada leaves itself open to the same unintentional (here, we could take a Freudian or Jungian tack) concepts which determined previous art, while presuming to avoid those traps.
Additionally, Dada comes across as especially cliquey and mannered, which is always "liberating" in a mass culture, but is not especially endearing in retrospect.
Mostly, though, it is hard for me to get excited about those moments in the unfolding of any art's dialectic, when someone realizes that some convention of the art has become meaningless, or can be transcended or done away with. For example, putting a toilet in an art gallery was, at one point, a bold stroke that questioned the authority of the definition of art, called out the bourgeois standards of taste, manufacturedness, etc... however, no piece in the entire exhibit felt more like an artifact. Moreover, there would then be no *second urinal*. To now put a urinal in an art gallery would be laughable. The idea, as a crucial manifestation of a moment in Art's unfolding, obliterates its own value in-itself, remaining a contribution only as concept, not as a piece of art.
Another example of this is the facile juxtapositions which comprised most of the collages: the sense of the absurd stops being interesting or clever after surprisingly little time. Putting John Rockefeller's head on top of the body of a woman in a bathing suit is fine, but what else? It just doesn't endure as a mode of thought, especially given the more complicated modulations the Absurd Juxtaposition has gone through in the intervening decades. It seems so quaint. Yet an important realization about the content of art, which would be of value to later movements, had been arrived at.
My favorite pieces were nearly all of the Max Ernsts, the Marcel Duchamp glass, the George Grosz paintings, all of the films, some of the simple colored-squares in the Zurich room (Jean Arp and Sophie someone-or-other), and the Hausmann paintings (but not his collages). I feel like these had more of the quality of the aesthetic than of the prank or envelope-pushing.
I mean, surely someone has to push the envelope, but it is often the fate of the pioneer to be eclipsed in his/her own radicalism, and to become a figure or thumbnail on a timeline, rather than to endure.
internet vs. "real life"
Last night, Mike was telling me that some e-observers have been wondering aloud whether the blog is "the death of the novel." A topic about which I have some thoughts.
--It seems the novel is fated to die many deaths, like God. I am of course only pretending not to understand the above statement, because Proust, by ushering in the era of the autobiographical memoir-novel, may have confused the lines between the two in a way not helped by Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, etc. While I can fully imagine Henry Miller having a blog, can you imagine the Proust blog (madeleine.blogspot.net)? Of course not, except to imagine the hilarious (for me) absurdity of it. Because novels thankfully are NOT just streams of observations about Stephin Merritt [sic] and WMDs-- do you think a blog would have gotten in the way of Finnegan's Wake or The Fall? No, because that's not how things work. Sure, people will continue to confuse the parade of anecdotes of their own life as some parade of insights, and to misunderstand the novel as a catalog of such, but really, I wouldn't be worried, on two accounts. 1) People with the ambition of a grand construction will still write novels. 2) Wouldn't Tropic of Cancer be *just* as good if it were a blog?
--When I was working at Book People, which is this giant indy bookstore in Austin, there were book signings nearly every night. And, except for Jane Fonda, John McCain, and other Baby Boomer idols, the authors had a universally poor draw. Two authors who were supposed to be a big deal had had the following ideas: "I'll write a novel about blogging," and "I'll write a novel about myspace." Now, the girl who wrote the novel about blogging is really cute, but bless her heart, writing about political-blog romances in Washington, DC (let's dub this genre the "punditroman") is at best an exercise in post-Trollopean ignorance, and at worst a cutesy mishap which suggests that blogs will be the birth of many a shitty novel. The book about myspace also involved blogging, and was misguided in its belief that people would want to read about "other people's lives" on the internet VIA this crappy novel. Like, dude, that's what the internet is FOR.
--It seems the novel is fated to die many deaths, like God. I am of course only pretending not to understand the above statement, because Proust, by ushering in the era of the autobiographical memoir-novel, may have confused the lines between the two in a way not helped by Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, etc. While I can fully imagine Henry Miller having a blog, can you imagine the Proust blog (madeleine.blogspot.net)? Of course not, except to imagine the hilarious (for me) absurdity of it. Because novels thankfully are NOT just streams of observations about Stephin Merritt [sic] and WMDs-- do you think a blog would have gotten in the way of Finnegan's Wake or The Fall? No, because that's not how things work. Sure, people will continue to confuse the parade of anecdotes of their own life as some parade of insights, and to misunderstand the novel as a catalog of such, but really, I wouldn't be worried, on two accounts. 1) People with the ambition of a grand construction will still write novels. 2) Wouldn't Tropic of Cancer be *just* as good if it were a blog?
--When I was working at Book People, which is this giant indy bookstore in Austin, there were book signings nearly every night. And, except for Jane Fonda, John McCain, and other Baby Boomer idols, the authors had a universally poor draw. Two authors who were supposed to be a big deal had had the following ideas: "I'll write a novel about blogging," and "I'll write a novel about myspace." Now, the girl who wrote the novel about blogging is really cute, but bless her heart, writing about political-blog romances in Washington, DC (let's dub this genre the "punditroman") is at best an exercise in post-Trollopean ignorance, and at worst a cutesy mishap which suggests that blogs will be the birth of many a shitty novel. The book about myspace also involved blogging, and was misguided in its belief that people would want to read about "other people's lives" on the internet VIA this crappy novel. Like, dude, that's what the internet is FOR.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
something for you to do at work
Hi. We'll see how this works out.
Has anyone been to my apartment? Every day, I come across some new aspect of my roommates' bafflingly "bachelor-esque" lifestyle, and because I don't actually speak to these people, most of my anthropological investigations of my roommates are mediated by the groceries they buy. However, I can safely say: one of them definitely subscribes to GQ, which he kindly leaves in the bathroom. The weird thing about this is, and correct me if I'm wrong, but GQ is one of the few men's magazines that has not gone the FHM/Stuff/Maxim route, and *is* primarily interviews and male fashion and cologne sample-strips. Right? This issue has Will Ferrel on the cover, but I think every other issue from the past two years has had Barack Obama on the cover.
So, aside from their literature of choice, the main characteristics of my roommates is that they seem constitutionally unable to combine foods on their own. Unless one of them has a toddler stowed away in his room somewhere, WHY IS THERE CHOCOLATE MILK IN THE FRIDGE? Even worse, but almost endearing, is the peanut-butter-and-jelly-in-one-jar "Goobers" in the fridge. Or the $18 worth of bulk Gatorade sitting on the coffee table. Or the lifetime supply of Ritz Crackers and canned tuna fish in the pantry.
Ben, why are you hatin' on Chocolate milk so much? I thought you were all about "preschoolin," whatever that is?--- I hear ya, but the stupid thing about Chocolate milk is, if for some sick reason, you want to drink a nice tall glass of milk without getting acne, you're shit out of luck. You can't put it in your coffee, or cereal (unless you are gross)---- but if you have regular milk, and Bosco/Quix/Hershey, etc, you can CONJURE UP THIS DELICACY at any time, without putting yourself out in any way. Fuck, I mean, I wouldn't personally do this to myself, but there's even Ovaltine--- and you know you're in a bad way if *Ovaltine* is a step on the way to adulthood and responsible grocery-buying. Anyways, thanks for making me feel like I'm more of a normal person than you freaks, dudes. That's not an everyday.
Highlights of today:
--saying "I want to get into jazz because I want my music to be more dialectical" and not getting made fun of
--my idea for a Lacan "S/s" tattoo getting vetoed by Si
--watching two girls outside of a vintage store on Ludlow play with their own hair for like, an hour--- if this is NOT what "avant garde cinema" is, I don't wanna know about it.
--re-reading the Meth information pamphlet I took from the Barnard anti-substance-abuse display; move over, Henry James!
--now that I am doing a blog, Matt Smith has to do one called "Stage Potato" or something equally brilliant
Has anyone been to my apartment? Every day, I come across some new aspect of my roommates' bafflingly "bachelor-esque" lifestyle, and because I don't actually speak to these people, most of my anthropological investigations of my roommates are mediated by the groceries they buy. However, I can safely say: one of them definitely subscribes to GQ, which he kindly leaves in the bathroom. The weird thing about this is, and correct me if I'm wrong, but GQ is one of the few men's magazines that has not gone the FHM/Stuff/Maxim route, and *is* primarily interviews and male fashion and cologne sample-strips. Right? This issue has Will Ferrel on the cover, but I think every other issue from the past two years has had Barack Obama on the cover.
So, aside from their literature of choice, the main characteristics of my roommates is that they seem constitutionally unable to combine foods on their own. Unless one of them has a toddler stowed away in his room somewhere, WHY IS THERE CHOCOLATE MILK IN THE FRIDGE? Even worse, but almost endearing, is the peanut-butter-and-jelly-in-one-jar "Goobers" in the fridge. Or the $18 worth of bulk Gatorade sitting on the coffee table. Or the lifetime supply of Ritz Crackers and canned tuna fish in the pantry.
Ben, why are you hatin' on Chocolate milk so much? I thought you were all about "preschoolin," whatever that is?--- I hear ya, but the stupid thing about Chocolate milk is, if for some sick reason, you want to drink a nice tall glass of milk without getting acne, you're shit out of luck. You can't put it in your coffee, or cereal (unless you are gross)---- but if you have regular milk, and Bosco/Quix/Hershey, etc, you can CONJURE UP THIS DELICACY at any time, without putting yourself out in any way. Fuck, I mean, I wouldn't personally do this to myself, but there's even Ovaltine--- and you know you're in a bad way if *Ovaltine* is a step on the way to adulthood and responsible grocery-buying. Anyways, thanks for making me feel like I'm more of a normal person than you freaks, dudes. That's not an everyday.
Highlights of today:
--saying "I want to get into jazz because I want my music to be more dialectical" and not getting made fun of
--my idea for a Lacan "S/s" tattoo getting vetoed by Si
--watching two girls outside of a vintage store on Ludlow play with their own hair for like, an hour--- if this is NOT what "avant garde cinema" is, I don't wanna know about it.
--re-reading the Meth information pamphlet I took from the Barnard anti-substance-abuse display; move over, Henry James!
--now that I am doing a blog, Matt Smith has to do one called "Stage Potato" or something equally brilliant
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