|
[23 Oct 2015|01:32am] |
mostly 
vaguerant
|
|
|
[19 Sep 2007|10:15pm] |
Right, so physicists, still in search of a unified theory of everything, are currently working on fleshing out something called Membrane Theory. M-theory stipulates that there are 11 dimensions; the 11th dimension is located somewhere upward of one trillionth of a millimeter from every point in the universe, is infinitely long, yet a small distance across. It is upon this dimension that the membrane of reality floats, with infinite parallel universes nested as rippling membranes, obeying different laws of physics, inside of this 11th dimension. Gravity leaks into our reality from here, which explains why gravity is so weak in contrast to other forces. Also, contact between the ripples of colliding parallel dimensions apparently might have created what we know as matter.
How anyone could ever come up with this using the language of mathematics is so far beyond me that I am pregnant with rage and ecstasy. I am going to read food porn recipes instead, and take comfort in the fact that there is a parallel universe where I can't read at all, where I did not write this post, and where I don't exist. At the same time.
What can I make with beets. Beets and cream cheese.
|
|
| Ode to a Cockroach in a Grecian Neighborhood |
[03 Sep 2007|12:08pm] |
I'm thankful that the cockroaches in this apartment appear to be dumber than those in my previous places. I hadn't seen one of those horrifying creatures until I lived in Beijing, which is surprising since I lived out in the styx for eighteen years. I suppose neither subsequent university in England or California captured the right mixture of climate and urban compression to foster an infestation either. But once I moved into that spot at BeiKeDa, my love affair with the cockroach began. I would step into the kitchen at 4 AM to boil some water, when my usual insomnia would kick into gear, and as many as five of them would scurry away into obscure corners, where I'm sure they were doing elaborate dance routines on my eating surfaces. Thus, I discovered the friendly German cockroach: light brown, often with dark spots on the back of the thorax, with nymphs that would often be dark with light stripes across their backs. These were the same kind as the ones in my last two places in Manhattan.
Chen Meijuan, the foreign affairs head at the university where I was teaching, informed me that roaches never existed in China until foreigners arrived in China (slight accusatory tone was noted). It's amazing how an entire insect epidemic can spring from trading ports alone. At any rate, every night I'd go on a rampage, and every night they'd return. I'm not sure what it is about these things that makes them so terrifying, as opposed to ladybugs, silverfish, ants, etc. Maybe it's something buried in evolutionary psychology, or perhaps it's the semblance of responsive intelligence in their behavior, unlike the blind mechanical routines of other insects.
The last place on the 107th had a particularly wily breed of roach. They never ventured away from the kitchen and shelves, and they always vanished within a second of the lights turning on. For some reason there's another variety in this part of Queens that is slightly more round, black, and remarkably stupid. For instance, the German cockroach, when startled, bolts and keeps running until it finds a place to hide. The current residents frantically describe a half circle, every single time they are startled, before they make a mad dash for the wall. They also freeze every now and then when you shake them up, and seem less responsive to light. This makes them much easier targets.
Since I live on the first floor and have the first unit near the door in an older building where the trash is deposited outside, these beasts just waltz right in under the front door. There's little I can really do to fend them off, outside of insomniac vigilance. Luckily they don't appear very often or in as large a number. Plus, they don't seem to go near the kitchen.
I don't know what awful thing one would have to do to be reincarnated as a cockroach that ventures into my living spaces. Ever since I read The Passion According to G.H., I've always wanted to stop and ask one if I've known it at a previous time, or will know it as a person in the future (assuming reincarnation does not function in linear time -- not like I actually believe in reincarnation anyway, but, you know). I imagine someone like Rick Santorum or Rush Limbaugh would be an ideal candidate for this flavor of punishmet. I suppose it'd be just that I come back as a roach in my own apartment, given my zeal for roach genocide; this thought always makes me pause when unleashing a fragrant stream of Raid on a panicked insect. Could it be me that I am destroying? 0_o
Perhaps I should become a Jainist while I live in an urban environment.
|
|
| Mallarmé |
[13 Jun 2007|05:02pm] |
Toute l’âme résumée
Quand lente nous l’expirons
Dans plusieurs ronds de fumée
Abolis en autres ronds
Atteste quelque cigare
Brûlant savamment pour peu
Que la cendre se sépare
De son clair baiser de feu
Ainsi le chœur des romances
À la lèvre vole-t-il
Exclus-en si tu commences
Le réel parce que vil
Le sens trop précis rature
Ta vague littérature.
~~
We express our whole soul
When we slowly exhale
Those several rings of smoke
Driven out by other rings
That attest to some cigar
Briefly, brilliantly smoldering
Separated by an ash
From the clear kiss of fire
Thus the choir of romances
Rises to your lips—
If you begin, begin by
Excluding reality. It is vile.
Too much precision of sense erases
Your vague literature.
[friend's translation]
Also, as mentioned elsewhere, au revoir, Rorty
|
|
|
[05 Apr 2007|01:42am] |
If 2006 were a fish, I would have thrown it back long ago, and this year has also not been kind so far. It's been an emotionally grueling few months. Something large and immobile inside is trying to shake free, and I wish I could better prod it along in its efforts. I went back to my old journals from college when I was going through a similar period of depression and could trace the same lines leading up to this point. It's disorienting to see how I was asking the same enormous questions without seeing the pattern.
The problem is that I am rudderless, drifting in circles. Without something greater to commit to and believe in, the world shrinks into a tight web of unnecessary concerns. I think that first became clear to me after speaking at length with a former roommate and his girlfriend, both of whom work to unionize low wage workers and reform sweat shops. They had an ideal of progress that they were realizing in tangible increments, and the work they did was valuable. That reinforces a view where there's something greater than the self and its endless needs that could provide some meaning. It's important to dissolve a little into that, every now and then.
I'm probably going to aim for grad school. I've been looking into the SIPA program at Columbia, particularly the concentrations in international development, and it seems absolutely terrific. If I commit to this course, however, I close off the other avenues I had originally hoped to pursue. But at this point a change has to be made, and the chips will fall where they may.
Anyway, I apologize for vanishing in usual form, especially to those people who picked up on the signs and tried to reach out a little. I've been fortunate to know a lot of terrific people, not least of whom came through the magical LJ window. I still need to work this out for awhile in my own way, as these things go. Still dealing with the after-effects of my nervous system staging a four-month coup, and these things move at their own pace. That part of me will not change, as I cannot heft these kinds of problems onto people I care about. We really can't understand the deeper kernels of each others' pain in the end, outside of a certain mode of semblance, and sometimes there's a danger in seeking too much intimacy from others as a solution. Better to "be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." I'll be around again in time.
|
|
|
[03 Jan 2007|10:37pm] |
So upon returning to NYC, I discover it's time to go right back up again as my uncle takes a bow and leaves the stage. Since every family seems to have a few dusty, half-apocryphal ghost stories hanging around, my aunt chalked another one up when she heard "Old Susannah" playing in her house at the moment he passed away, apparently before she had been told he had died, while on the phone with my mother.
She claims to have had similar auditory encounters in the past, like hearing her name spoken in her house and receiving calls on her cell from her vacant home. Says it's some remnant of my other uncle, Russ, who offed himself at 25 after informing her of his suicidal plans and forcing her to keep it a secret (thus subjecting her to many decades of guilt). "Old Susannah", nice choice Russ. I would have went with something a bit more classy myself, but I'll save that for later. I'm sure everyone would be more entertained if I played a Tupac track while acting as the DJ for my own funeral. Heaven got a somewhat tolerable place in Queens?
I don't put too much credence in ghost stories, but it's family. Weird shit happens as we're riding on this grand buffalo we call Life. Who really needs an explanation at this point.
So it's time to go back up to be with the family as they go through yet another one of these times. My mother tells me that it becomes a habit at a certain point to worry that you haven't said enough or shown enough that you care. After this I will go on a 0-morbidity posting regimen for this year. For 2007 I will only talk about ceilings, bizarre deep-sea creatures, Suharto, flamenco dancing, proper body-hair removal, Daniel Day Lewis' habit of going off the deep end when studying roles, shapeshifters in fairy-tales, and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) st_ranger. No more banjos on the knee.
|
|
| Butter. |
[08 Dec 2006|02:00am] |
Sometimes it seems like all those elaborately woven nets of goals and duties are designed to catch everything on the outside and keep it all from seeping in, where it could smear up your guts and turn you into a zombie.
So much about the way things are disturbs me. My mother tells me my uncle's so far gone that he can't even tell where the bathroom is in his own house, and can't explain to his wife that he's looking for it. When she figures it out and brings him there, he can't even remember that you've gotta sit down to defecate. Doug, if you have to go, you've gotta go to the bathroom. And he becomes enraged and screams he can't fucking find it. She says he's headed for a semi-comatose state. So cancer migrates from one lobe to the other, changing you into someone else entirely along its journey. It makes me wonder if he is still in there somewhere, looking out, confused at the complete disconnect between his thoughts and the murky swamp of sensation and perception -- perhaps the kind of alien feeling you get when experiencing sleep paralysis for the first time. Or maybe he is just the sum total of his neuron configuration. Take away the hardwired memories and all that's left in that space is awareness of some strange absence that can't be filled. Old men delivering letters to a house that has suddenly vanished in a nuclear blast.
I am not close to my uncle. Never was. Nor was the rest of the family. I admit I just feel terror when hearing about him. I can't tell if there's guilt in that or not, though I can see that feeling of guilt in my mother. It just reinforces a slightly more tragic condition: that we can only go so far inside to be with someone else.
I remember the first time I saw the effects of a brain tumor. The neighbor across the street had breast cancer that metastasized. She'd wail all day with the windows open. I remember her crying about how her beautiful handwriting was dissolving into wordless scribbles.
I really am tired of thinking about mortality and identity, by the way. At some point it should take the back burner, rather than periodically looping back every few months to remind you that, HEY, guess what: life's not really designed to be just, equitable, serene for some people. It just is, and you just are, and everything good and bad you feel is just an evolutionary adaption to enable you to adhere to this reality enough to pass on the genes. Death is no different whined at than withstood, as Phillip Larkin says. But death matters just as much as the next lover, the next finished art work, the next terrific meal, the next conversation, the next shared moment of intimacy. And yet, that's what seems to move me to write here. Some day that's gonna have to go back outside and start mowing the lawn or something, rather than jumping on the bed. Yeah I hear you, got the point. Got stuff to do.
|
|
| aesthetic heuristics |
[02 Oct 2006|06:16am] |
So. Jose, one of my last roommates, had a tattoo on his lower leg of a gear with crosshairs in the center. It was solid and black, with rigid angles inscribed in a perfect circle. When I asked him about it, he said it represented a certain time after college when he became driven and focused, honing in on certain goals he wanted to achieve. He was an interesting character because the thought process that went into that tattoo and its concrete representation very much reflected him as a person -- an architecture/design student with precise, delineated tastes and ideals -- and I found that particularly visual, aesthetic heuristic quite interesting. There was a harmony between his preferred signifiers and his life that became productive for him, and to me that unique kind of harmony is one of the most attractive characteristics a person can have. I also think it's fitting, without going too far, that his grandfather helped write the fascists' manifesto during the Spanish Civil War, and that Jose had a half-ironic fascination with Nazism.
Nothing is more unnatural or unreal than hierarchies, linearity, categories, axes, laws; yet like with quantum behavior they snap into focus and become fixtures of reality when under observation. On certain levels, the metaphors we use to structure or inspire inquiry become more meaningful than the data derived from that inquiry. The methods by which the human mind imprints itself onto the world in order to draw utility from it are often equal parts interesting (like Futurist art is interesting), effective, and tyrannical.
I know I have an aesthetic attraction to concepts like symmetry, vectors, fibonacci spirals, fractals (fib ratios and fractals evident in market behavior even), etc. -- metaphysical abstractions that cut the meaty particulars away from the cold, glistening universal. The promise of that reified perfection underpins my appreciation for art like Peter Greenaway's cinematic design or paintings by artists like Mondrian or Rothko. Or... this awesome thing I recently came across called Metatron's cube, which I'll have to put up on this LJ somewhere because it's so cool. Three cheers for sacred geometry! Ah here we go:
Baudrillard's cosmology is both aesthetically compelling as a heuristic and nauseating as a philosophy for the same reasons. On a much deeper level however I am more compelled by randomness, error, unpredictability, chaos; philosophically that could translate well to concepts like paradox or paraconsistent logic, or disciplines like pragmatism or post-structuralism. Aesthetically speaking, I think the most interesting products are those where patterns arise from randomness then disappear, where creative thought is construed as finding non-linear connections between concepts, the irreverently flawed, ugly, carnivalesque, or techno-hippy stuff like this, ad infinitum. All of this dovetails with why I'd like to eventually pursue a more Eastern direction in my reading as I mentioned recently -- the insights from the continental, post-Heideggerean tradition open up a lot to Zen or Daoist ideas, which seem a lot more satisfying on some levels. And trying to really read Heidegger is like getting a root canal without novacain because you have nothing to do on a Saturday night.
A lot this hit me on a conscious level years ago when I read a passage near the end of Tropic of Cancer and then read a quote from Derrida the Movie soon after. I don't have the book so I can't dig it up, but it had something to do with time encoded in flows of substances like visceral fluids: blood, spit, semen. Anais Nin and Henry Miller both annoy me in many many ways, but their similar aesthetic approaches to living by negating those cold, disembodied, beautiful, transcendent obsessions in Western thought from Plato to Descartes to Augustine to god knows who else (Ludwig von Mises? Francis Fukuyama? Benny Hinn?) is right on. I think I can find the Derrida quote somewhere. Ah here it is:
In general, I try and distinguish between what one calls the Future and “l’avenir” [the ‘to come]. The future is that which – tomorrow, later, next century – will be. There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future, beyond the other known future, it is l’avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.
Google is amazing. Anyway, I was going somewhere with this but that's enough for now. I could only write this because I can't sleep again.
Hi.
|
|
|
[20 Sep 2006|11:22pm] |
You have to wonder about the aesthetic savvy of some London chefs.
If you're going to make a bone salad, you must garnish it with something other than plebian sprigs of parsley. You need something that subtly comments on the sheer ridiculousness of a human dressing up for a fancy meal and chomping on a bone, like Hello Kitty ice cream sprinkles.
exeunt
|
|
| Welcome to vaguerant, have a seat. |
[18 Aug 2006|06:26pm] |
I long someday to sail far out into the ocean, dig a hole in the water, and mold a warm, comfortable place to sleep. I will take Satie and Sibelius records with me and watch the sun go down from inside a translucent cocoon. Beckett was convinced that he retained memories of his time in the womb and the shock of birth. Perhaps that is what led him to characterise life in this world in such absurd, Sisyphean terms. In the womb you are a being experiencing non-being intimately. Time, self, subject and object are all one, passively connected to the flows and currents of a universe you cannot, and do not need to, understand. And then you are launched into the world with its stars and trumpets with a nice whack on the ass. Everything becomes tinged with the urgency of our genetic imperative, which is paradoxical on all levels unless you are looking down with divine eyesight, seeing everything melt together in one grand mosaic of species and natural systems. We most likely retain knowledge of our earlier existence in the womb, especially if all memory is stored somewhere in our brains. The experience is probably the marrow in the bone of Freud's Thanatos drive, and one unique source of pleasure that comes from sleep.
I've come to see my depression as simply an unnatural sensitivity to pain. I know what it's like to be normal, as I have known myself when times are good, and that person is capable of living life as it should be lived. It is better to leave deep concern for oneself behind and instead care for and be close to others. It only takes a certain kind of pain to push me into a place where this neurophysical state is all too easy to turn on. I feel guilty when my depression takes over and I withdraw so far into myself that others become confused or hurt, feeling responsible, as if they should say or do something to change the circumstances. I'm old enough to know that when you hurt yourself, it inevitably passes and you can forget. Not so when you hurt someone else; hence the lengths to which I must go to shape my life in the way I see fit: in solitude, ideally outside of this country, with seasons and thunderstorms at night over the ocean, with all of its sea cucumbers. And an easel and lots and lots of books.
Frankly, I am just tired of my focus being on my own mental state. It bars me from access to real communion with others and the world around me. It no longer retains any meaning or value, outside of providing me with a mindset that can occasionally be ripe for creativity and a basis for empathising with others, but I would gladly, gladly do without it if there were a pill to swallow that actually worked. Anyway, I'll be around again, in time. Circumstances will just have to change first for me to be more comfortable in my own skin.
|
|
| Civilians massacred in Haditha |
[28 May 2006|05:32pm] |
One witness, Aws Fahmi, heard his neighbour, Yunis Salim Khafif, plead for his life in English, shouting: “I am a friend, I am good.”
“But they killed him, his wife and daughters,” Fahmi said.
...
The Sunday Times has reconstructed the events with the help of Abdul Rahman al-Mashandani, of the Hammourabi human rights group in Iraq. It appears the first killings took place when a taxi carrying four students pulled up at a checkpoint set up by the marines.
Abu Makram, 50, had been awakened by the roadside bomb and watched from his window as the terror unfolded. The car’s occupants were all ordered out and shot.
The marines then stormed three nearby houses. “They blew open the front door of the first house,” Makram recalled, “Once they were inside, we heard another explosion followed by a hail of gunfire.”
It was the home of 76-year-old Abdul Hameed Ali Hassan, whose leg had been amputated because of diabetes. “He was a blind old man in a wheelchair,” Makram said.
Hassan’s granddaughter, Iman Waleed, 10, was in her nightclothes. “About 10 marines entered the house,” she said. “They threw hand grenades and began firing in all directions. Grandpa was sitting close to the hall and they shot him dead.”
In a nearby room, her father was reading the Koran. “The American soldiers went into the room and killed him too,” Iman said. “They gathered all of us into one room — my grandma, my mama, my brothers and my uncles. They threw in two handgrenades and started shooting at us.”
The adults tried to protect the children with their bodies, but were slain. When Iman dared to look, she saw that “everyone was dead around me except for my brother and my uncle”.
Both were injured and Iman was hurt in the leg. The rest of the family, including her brother, Abdullah, 4, died.
...
The marines paid $2,500 (£1,350) in compensation for each of the 15 victims who were shot in their homes. They refused to pay for the four brothers and five occupants of the taxi, claiming they were insurgents. Officials now say those men were innocent.
from Times Online
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-- Voltaire
|
|
|
[04 May 2006|03:26am] |
It's time for a smattering of anonymous diatribe. A few years ago I asked people to anonymously post their cell phone numbers so I could call them at 4 AM and say random things on their voice mail, but I know half of you by now and that wouldn't be as interesting. Plus someone picked up the phone. You see, it's already 5 AM and I have a few things I have to watch in the market tomorrow, but as usual I can't sleep, and when I can't sleep I come up with the most random nonsense. Also there has been no word re: what I mentioned two posts ago, though realistically that means little, so I will while away the hours coming up with haphazard questions to divert my restless mind.
There is no time limit, all questions are optional, and write anonymously if you please. I realize some of the answers might give you away, like if you say a Palahniuk or Bret Easton Ellis book in answer to #8, or what you put for #7, but try as hard as you can to not be too obvious. Some answers might still be revealing to a good extent. But whatever. Mix up random crap if you like.
Scores will be posted at the end of the quarter. Which, if it's on my time, will come about eight years later.
1. Describe the first person you fell in love with, without giving away identifying characteristics.
2. Describe the perfect place in the world in which you could settle down.
3. Tell me a character in a novel/film with whom you most identify.
4. Which of the following would bother you most: irreparably hurting a cherished loved one, intractable solitude/isolation, being considered a failure by your own standards, never having children, dying at age 50?
5. Which was invented first: cured meat, skillets, or sheltered outhouses?
6. If you went on a pilgrimage, what monument, statue, building or animal would you consecrate with your mortal tears?
7. What do you seek to accomplish within the next ten years?
8. What are the three books, if you were forced to choose, that have given you the most pleasure to read?
9. Post an image of a little-known obsession you have (if you don't know how to make an img tag, you have lost the internet).
10. What's the most important characteristic for maintaining a love relationship: the ability to listen without judgment, the ability to forgive hurts both big and small, the ability to sacrifice your needs for the other person, the shared ability to laugh, other?
11. If there were a transporter machine that could eradicate your entire body and replicate it out of new matter to absolute perfection at a distant place, down to the last cellular detail, would you step inside if you had to get there? Would you still exist if you did?
12. Describe your anima if you are a male, and your animus if you are a female.
Extra credit
13. If you were to write a novel about ricecricket writing a novel about you,
a. what character, fictional or otherwise, would appear in ricecricket's novel that would be your foil?
b. would you: set it in the past, present, or future?
c. who would you blame if it didn't sell?
14. Who is taller, Ralph Fiennes or vaguerant?
15. Are you skeptical of, or do you affirm, the correspondence theory of truth?
16. Would you think I'm cool if I wore this shirt to a party you hosted?
( Yes... )
|
|
|
[19 Mar 2006|12:12am] |
As an addendum to that, I think instead of subletting I'll emtpy out the room and project this image on one wall, with a soundtrack looping the following tracks:
- 1 -
- 2 -
- 3 -
Finished Magnolia upon returning home (I haven't seen that since I was like nineteen or something), which still is a gratuitously depressing film, though well-written and executed, about some universal teleology of guilt in spite of the semblance of randomness. Like, every single thing that happens has dire consequences, such as cancer and peeing your pants. So in light of that I'll unravel the thread I mentioned before re: Stoppard's screenplay for Brazil by quoting this fab dialogue between the clowns in Travesties, also by Stoppard.
TZARA: But, my dear Henry, causality, is no longer fashionable owing to the war.
CARR: How illogical, since the war itself had causes. I forgot what they were, but it was all in the papers at the time. Something about brave little Belgium, wasn't it?
TZARA: Was it? I thought it was Serbia...
CARR: Brave little Serbia...? No, I don't think so. The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succint alliteration.
TZARA: Oh, what nonsense you talk!
CARR: It may be nonense, but at least it is clever nonsense.
TZARA: I am sick of cleverness. The clever people try to impose a design on the world and when it goes calamitously wrong they call it fate. In point of fact, everything is Chance, including design.
CARR: That sounds awfully clever. What does it mean? Not that it has to mean anything, of course.
TZARA: It means, my dear Henry, that the causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about. And it is the duty of the artist to jeer and howl and belch at the delusion that infinite generations of real effects can be inferred from the gross expression of apparent cause.
CARR: It is the duty of the artist to beautify existence.
TZARA: (articulately) Dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada.
CARR: (slight pause) Oh, what nonsense you talk!
TZARA: It may be nonsense, but at least it's not clever nonsense. Cleverness has been exploded, along with so much else, by the war.
One last thing: The Last Trumpet by Lyrics Born, feat. Lateef the Truthspeaker. Simply because it is awesome.
Hi.
|
|
|
[06 Sep 2005|08:50pm] |
Something just occured to me in replying to Alexia. I was sorta serious about the implications of randomness in forming our identities (cause one of my annoying traits is that I look for significance everywhere) and following that reflexive line of thought after writing the post, I traced the events that led me to watch that movie, which brought me to the random event of her finding my LJ, like 5 years ago, while we were at the same college (but we didn't meet until years later). I don't know how that happened, but it all has had an effect.
I'm listening to Calexico right now, which is one of the groups I've found recently that sorta excites me, and I'm reading The Master and Margarita (unbelievably fascinating) and Globalization and its Discontents -- both of which have nested stories that point to very important relationships I've had with people, that, ultimately, came about through random events.
We tend to define ourselves according to our good taste in the arts which forges the layers and lenses through which we parse the world, but ultimately that good taste is a call to others within a certain community, and our presence in that community is largely the result of our reaction to random, formative events. I know this is sorta resonating with Rortian implications, but bear with me.
So tell me something:
1. What song are you listening to right now, or will you want to listen to soon, and who/what introduced you to the music?
2. What book are you reading and who led you to take an interest in it?
3. What's the last movie you saw and what, ultimately, led you to have an interest in seeing it?
4. How did you and I find each other?
Looking for emphasis on ultimately. I'm fine with a few responses since I know it's asking a lot. I just find some of you people interesting and am a little curious as to the nets you weave.
|
|
|
[03 Sep 2005|08:42pm] |
I just watched Waking Life by Linklater on IFC. I remember Alexia extolling Linklater and now I can see why (in addition to the bittersweet romances of the Sunset movies). It's basically about a man who *spoiler* after being dropped off at an intersection, who then *spoiler* *spoiler* *spoiler* *spoiler* and can't *spoiler*. I particularly like the very intriguing pontification that goes on in this film, which kinda reminded me of when I was simultaneously experimenting with lucid dreaming and reading all of these cognitive psych and philosophy texts. A quote in the movie that I found interesting was along the lines of, "Sartre had said he never experienced a day of despair in his life."
A key tenet of Sartre's existentialism and his notion of "bad faith" was a declaration that man is condemned to freedom--basically that a person is free to choose at any moment how to live her life, to break former associative ties, to choose new patterns of belief and from that new modes of action. A certain existential despair issues from the enormous burden of that responsibility to "make" oneself, coupled with the awareness of an inevitable death that limits the meaning of life. Hence me finding the anti-despair quote kinda interesting.
I remember when I was reading that stuff that I found such a theory of freedom to be be a little unhelpful and even excessively demanding. Partly because I believe in something called the unconscious and in its enormous determinate power, partly other reasons, but ultimately I think he is right within a certain domain. To agree with that though is to trivialize a universe of chaotic, random events that are entirely outside our control, which is a small narrative element in the Linklater film. I don't just mean in terms of picking our parents, country, language, class, etc. I mean at every second of the day of our lives when we are living under the impression that we are choosing to create ourselves in reaction to the stimuli that the world provides.
We may shed every cell in our body by every seven year cycle, but, in my opinion, who we are is actually not material but a set of probabilities associated with the firing of neurons. Like Neurath's boat, we're sorta an ever-changing template of "boat." But if it's come down to probabilities, you can't isolate internal probabilities from the immense universe of ones and zeros over which we have no control.
Why destroying the environment leads to torture at the hands of a former colleague. Also viral metaphors.
Tom Stoppard was the screenwriter for Terry Gilliam's film, Brazil ("braZIIIILL da da da da da da da da"). In the opening scene of his original version of the script, Stoppard honed in on a brightly colored beetle resting on a leaf in an idyllic rainforest. In the backdrop, an enormous machine appears, mowing down trees and reducing them to grist which then is transported to a paper mill. The beetle takes flight at the moment that this machine swallows its home and drifts past the mill, past the sprawling concrete dystopia that forms the macrocosm of the film, and into the Ministry of Information where it lands on the ceiling. A young bureaucrat sitting before a typewriter sees the beetle, climbs on his chair, and smashes it with a rolled up magazine. The carcass of the beetle falls onto the printing machine and jams the type set for a moment, causing a single document that should have printed the name of a wanted terrorist (Tuttle), to print the name of an innocent man (Buttle). This initiates the incredibly creative drama of the film. Stoppard probably was running on that chaos theory metaphor about a butterfly spreading its wings in Asia.
That man is all action but no theory. We're all theory but no action.
So, an example. Take a moment in the life of a girl, let's make up a name like JC for the sake of brevity. One day JC at age thirteen is walking from school, decidedly not wearing pink, to catch the bus at James St. that will take her back home. At the moment she arrives at the intersection a cloud drifts away from the sun and a warm shaft of light, 20 feet in diameter, gracefully illuminates the asphalt at her feet, where she spies a tiny green caterpillar that would one day grow up to be a moth, in Asia, if she never touched it. But JC knows a boy next door named Bill who loves caterpillars, so she decides to take this tiny green worm to her friend. Now Bill's father owns this old Canon AE-1 that he once used and Bill, being the proto-technophile that he is, spends a lot of time toying with it in the hopes of opening up a new world of creative experimentation. When JC brings him the caterpillar, he takes it to a bridge on the Mohawk river and shoots a rather artful photograph for a fifteen year old.
Flash forward years down the road to college, where Bill is entertaining a friend from Yonkers in his dorm room. His friend has a keen interest in photography as well, and while browsing his collection of Dune novels, she notices Bill's photograph of the caterpillar. His friend points out that the mosaic on the bridge resembles a bridge in Central Park, which has been the backdrop to many other photographs of famous individuals and has appeared in the occasional Woody Allen film or what not. Bill takes the comment in passing and, plied by her charm and a few glasses of Sam Adams, is coerced into doing a photo shoot where he re-enacts Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.
Flash forward years down the road when Bill lives in New York and he is walking through Central Park at 7 AM with his camera, looking for something to shoot. Turning the corner along the lake, he spies the Bow Bridge and feels a vague, inexplicable sense of familiarity mixed with a strange feeling of embarrassment. A cloud made up of the same condensed water particles as those that formed the cloud above James St. on September 14th, 1993, after having evaporated and condensed exactly a trillion times since then, passes away from the sun. The light is perfect, the water is as placid as a French impressionist painting, so he snaps the picture.
Now, on his website, Bill posts this shimmering photograph of which he is quite proud, and he sells a print to a wealthy individual who asks to meet him in person for delivery. At a cafe on 9th St. between 2nd and 1st, this wealthy patron offers Bill a job as a photographer's assistant for a modeling agency, on the condition that he present to her a portfolio of models shot in an urban setting by Friday afternoon. Bill eagerly accepts. Not knowing many photogenic models, he calls his old friend JC and invites her to come to the city for a shoot. The shoot goes all wrong. It's raining that day so Bill has to choose a less appropriate scene, JC's makeup is running, and to top it all off, Bill loads the film incorrectly and the entire roll is lost. Bill and JC go to a local bar on the LES to have a few drinks and plan the next shoot. At this bar, the bartender, Hortense, notices JC's subtle, unique beauty and offers to wipe away some of the smeared mascara. Their eyes meet and in that moment a thousand possibilities of romance and heartbreak play themselves out to their potential conclusions. But the significance of that moment is not lost. The relationship moves from friendship to a faithful and enduring romance, and in 2012 JC and Hortense decide to adopt a Cambodian child who was the descendant of a French-educated intellectual who helped form the Khmer Rouge. In 25 years, their child finishes her PhD at Yale and publishes her research on the subject of nullifying existing nuclear devices by emitting the amplified soundwaves of Nigerian vampire bats. China and the U.S., long at war over hegemonic control of a new oil reserves discovered in the Taiwan Strait, are forced to negotiating table due to the confusing new balance of power that has resulted from the end of the nuclear era.
In the Lower East Side, now a glossy beehive of skyrises, robotic pet factories, and vegetable juice franchises, Bill and JC sit at a bar in their wheelchairs and sip fortified beet juice cocktails. After a moment of reflective lucidity Bill declares, "You know, if I never took that job back in 2004, we both might still be single." They laugh at the accuracy of this observation. In reality, with the clarity that comes from the omniscient narration that would never be sanctioned in postmodern journaling, we know that their friendship and the security we all feel from impending nuclear doom is due to one, single benevolent unity of polarized water particles. We chuckle at the heavy handed irony and then click on the window with the baby blue box icon to respond to ninjalicious' ICQ message.
Note: Any resemblance in this narrative to people, real or imaginary, is entirely coincidental and the opinions expressed therewith are not the necessarily opinions of vaguerant, ninjalicious, Tom Stoppard, or their subsidiaries.
|
|
|
[02 Sep 2005|10:54pm] |
Had a great conversation with a certain musician tonight. Made sure she included "bastard" (decided opiated baboons and sleepwalking ESL teachers would be a bit weird for a first impression) in signing the CD to the southern gentleman who introduced me to her band, after extolling his taste in music and literature. Although she told me I owe her a drink and $10 for the extra CD, since I only had enough for one to send out west, so I promised to come to her next show in October. Not much of a chance I'll be missing that--she was terrific.
That was all then punctuated by a call from my boss, who told me our legal issues didn't work out as planned. This frustration does not end, all the while it is ending.
More extensive review later as promised, in the spirit of French avant-garde pornographic literature. I've been up for two and a half days straight and I think my body is staging a coup.
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
|
|
|
|
