tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17606250861573393182024-03-05T05:20:10.314-08:00Structure, Seinfeld, and PlayPost-Structuralist Adventures in a Post-Seinfeld WorldASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.comBlogger91125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-88506991346365352622016-01-28T08:02:00.002-08:002016-01-28T13:44:50.495-08:00Seinfeld and Time or sooner of later we all become GeorgeEach day that passes <i>Seinfeld </i>becomes a little more dated. Its relevance becomes more historical and its present-day legacy becomes less relevant. The continued contributions of Larry David to culture present his '90s sitcom as a kind of joke, his character in <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm </i>speaking under his breath when he needs to impress someone, "You ever see the <i>Seinfeld </i>show? ... I did the <i>Seinfeld </i>show...." Jerry Seinfeld, the macguffin center of the show, has yet to create anything better or even in the same league as <i>Seinfeld</i>, and he increasingly alienates himself from a place of relevance by denying the need for a more, or at all, inclusive world of comedy. After all, why would there be any flaws in the system if it put him at the top? He is an exceptional comedian, and worked hard to produce the most popular show ever. Capitalism is a meritocracy and we have a black president, so can we move on and film ourselves driving fancy cars now?<br />
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I started this writing project eight years ago, finished a draft 5 years ago, and published it as a book 3 years ago. Analogies between the personas it analyzes and myself are inevitable, or at least from this perspective. This past week an article entitled <a href="https://www.academia.edu/20138846/ON_THE_RADICAL_SELF-REFERENTIALITY_OF_CONSCIOUSNESS" target="_blank">"On the Radical Self-Referentiality of Consciousness"</a> came my way and I couldn't help but eat it up. Michel Bitbol begins his essay with a 1964 quote from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, describing philosophy as "the set of questions in which the one who questions is himself implicated in the question."<br />
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From where I'm sitting now certain questions about <i>Seinfeld </i>are immensely prescient to my own situation. When is work to be done, and when instead is the work already done to be documented or promoted? When one has created something--whether a joke, a 10-minute set of jokes, a pilot episode or whole series of a show, a critical essay, or a whole book of them--what do they do next? Do they dedicate themselves to finding that joke an audience or to making more jokes? A few overlapping spectra develop through this questioning: to what extent is a creator successful at promoting their work? To what extent do they try to do so? To what extent is their work even marketable?<br />
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In my book I've developed a sort of amalgam of identity. I've described how the character of Jerry carries traits held by real-life Larry David. His dad's name is Morty. His neighbor's name is Kramer, etc. But more, considering time past, and how time then passed, what strikes me is that the character of Jerry on tv is in his mid-thirties and has not successfully graduated from stand-up comedy to television, while Jerry in real life is very much successfully on tv, as that is where we are watching this character. The subject and creator of the material of the show, the reality behind this illusion, is therefore first and foremost the 7-years older Larry David who was already 40 before the two considered making a pilot.<br />
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In this way Larry David found a collaborator who could translate his life story into a palatable joke for mainstream audiences, in a sense publishing David's real life behavior as a kind series of performance art pieces, or social experiments. In this 2011 acceptance speech for the Laurel Award from the Writer's Guild, David describes his life pre-<i>Seinfeld </i>life in New York, after he decided to become a comedian, scouting out potential spots where he could sleep outside one day should it come to that. A back up plan essentially. He thanks Seinfeld, "of course," in the gracious finale of the speech, saying "without whom I'd probably be sitting on that steam vent on 44th Street, screaming obscenities at passersby. Everything I wrote he improved." And the cast of show saying, "It's unbelievable. When I did these things in real life I was scorned, mocked, and shunned. They did it on the show people laughed and loved them."<br />
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Seinfeld himself of course was also struggling to make a career, and started off his 30s without a secure place in show business, his own tv show, nor the cozy ability to justify his life choices to anyone who questioned his adulthood. However, David has already lived several lives, trying on a variety of white-collar careers, writing and starring in a Friday night failed challenge to <i>SNL</i>, writing for one of the notoriously worst seasons of <i>SNL</i>, with only one of his skits reaching the air. The version of that life we see in <i>Seinfeld </i>is via George Costanza, played by a not-yet-30 Jason Alexander, in effect the age of David in 1977 when he was in between working as a historian and selling brassieres. We see George reenact David's fabled, first, quitting from <i>Saturday Night Live</i>, and, second, returning to work the next day pretending like nothing happened. We see George attempt to sell bras. We see George fantasize about being a history buff, an architect, some respectable career that seems just out of grasp. In the later seasons of the show this failure is explained by laziness, but it begins simply because he is Larry David, and it's hard to commit yourself to a career if you're already working full time trying to make it as a creator of comedic material you consider to be art.<br />
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And so Larry is Jerry is George is Jason. They exist on a spectrum of success that is not centered on a single timeline. Jason Alexander found success a decade younger than Larry David did by acting out the hysterical failures of Larry. He did it so well that the public could only perceive Alexander as this lovable fuck up. Success is by no means an incremental line upwards through time. Alexander has been so typecast by this role that one might wonder if he would have chosen not to have done it. This regret is sublimely expressed in an episode of <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm </i>in which Alexander (playing himself) complains to Larry (playing himself) that he is forever associated with "the jackass role," eating eclairs out of a trashcan, to which Larry angrily proclaims "I ate an eclair out of the trashcan!"<br />
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Larry David, a man who was unable to market himself, whose work was not readily marketable to begin with, has staged a decades-long coup and placed himself at the top of culture by convincing everyone that he is an uncompromising artist--just look at how consistently he quit or failed or in general chose to make another joke as opposed to selling the last one.<br />
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I find myself on that same end of the spectrum. I'm terrible at marketing my own work, demanding a readership, or otherwise choosing not to continue to read, write, and create as I'm inclined to do on a day-to-day basis. This book was always going to be a failure because it was supposed to mimic a show that was ultimately not picked up by the network. The story needs to be real. And maybe, like <i>Prognosis Negative</i>, the script David wrote in the '80s that was ... not ... picked up, this will become myth that is retold in a timeless and marketable masterpiece of intersectional identities. We'll watch ourselves watching ourselves watch ourselves and it might suddenly become clear.<br />
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I've described this process as a refutation of logocentrism as Derrida describes it. The show does not romanticize an origin or privilege prior moments as more original or of greater priority. Instead it consistently takes to task the genre and tradition that are working in, undermining the very idea that a situation comedy can be of any worth at all. One could argue that <i>Seinfeld </i>then aims instead toward a <i>telos </i>instead of emerging from a <i>logos</i>. Does the show not intend to destroy the genre of the sitcom, to reduce it to nothing? Is this not an ultimate goal that every element of the show amounts to?<br />
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However, its deconstruction of logocentrism doubles as a critique of teleological thinking, or viewing reality and existence to amount to an ultimate and knowable purpose. This is the last thing the show could be described to attempt. The sitcom is a contradiction of purpose, both the ultimate goal and an imperfect means. A stand-up comedian in the moment they land a sitcom has both reached an apex in their career, and sold out everything that once made them interesting. They cease to be a <i>real </i>comedian and instead become a fleshy cog in a money-making machine. For this reason <i>Seinfeld </i>aggressively fights the assumption that the ultimate goal of its protagonist is to have a show on television.<br />
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John Steinbeck developed with his friend, mentor, and co-author Ed Ricketts the idea of non-teleological thinking, counter to the purpose-driven Christian mainstream thinking that dominates western thought. "Non-teleological thinking concerns itself primarily not with what should be, or could be, or might be, but rather with what actually 'is'--attempting at most to answer the already sufficiently difficult questions what or how, instead of why." Instead of telling a story trying to justify <i>why </i>they have made they show, the creators of <i>Seinfeld </i>describe what it is to make a sitcom, how one goes about, without judgements, instead descriptions.<br />
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It is not a singular timeline that begins in obscure toil and amounts to wealthy success, but rather a series of different timelines, Larry David's 30s spent fucking up and failing in the New York comedy world, Jerry Seinfeld's 30s spent in a meteoric rise to the height of stand-up and then televisual comedy, Jerry the character's 30s spent in a surreal soundstaged world in which he tries to catch a break but fucks up and fails in ways that mirror David's life the previous decade, and George Costanza's 30s in which he finds himself unemployed, living at his parents' house, and generally fucking up and failing again like David. None of these situations is prioritized. There is no ultimate choice. There is just life and a series of observations about it. The reason for going to the mall is not important for the whole episode takes place in the parking garage. The reason for going to the Chinese restaurant doesn't matter because the whole episode is spent waiting for a table. These were the episodes that they were not initially allowed to make, but the ones that made the more generic episodes worth doing.<br />
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They wanted neither to destroy the genre nor sell out by embracing it. They wanted to tell jokes and cut out the bullshit--whether that bullshit is the tedium and struggle of working as a stand-up, or the creative concessions required in submitting to the genres of mainstream network television--and I wanted to tell you that, and now I have and we can all move on with our lives.<br />
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<span class="a" style="left: 815px; top: 4030px; word-spacing: 70px;"></span>ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-21762831507979353922016-01-13T11:46:00.002-08:002016-01-13T11:46:28.876-08:00Read the bookThe Bingo Books (3366 SE Powell) Book Club will be reading <em>Structure, Seinfeld and Play</em> and talking about it the last Thursday of this month, 1/28 at 7pm. I will also prepare a few words, but am also looking forward to a discussion. I'm posting <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5_mv5jdHpgieHhWdUE0ZHZHYm8/view" target="_blank">a link to a free pdf of the book</a> for anyone who wants to read it. I'm really looking forward to what everyone thinks. Happy reading, everybody!<br />
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<br />ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-7264516512857107392015-03-17T07:44:00.000-07:002020-01-28T22:56:23.975-08:00Seinfeld is a self-conscious reinforcement of the capitalist patriarchy: Not that there's anything wrong with that<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14pt;">On Thursday morning I
presented this paper at the 34th annual Gender Studies Symposium at Lewis &
Clark College (where I went to school)—Material Conditions: Gender, Sexuality,
Capitalism. This represented the culmination of my third phase of scholarship
on <i>Seinfeld</i>, which amounted to watching whatever was available on
crackle.com for the last couple of months, reading late '70s to early '90s
feminist applications to ''70s-era theories of deconstruction, and, of course,
thinking really hard about <i>Seinfeld</i>. The first era (watching every
episode at least twice between 1995 and 2001) amounted to a book report on <i>The
Entire Domain</i>, </span><!--EndFragment--><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">the second (watching every episode at least once between 2008 and
2010) led to this blog and its companion book <i><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/andrew-shaw-kitch/structure-seinfeld-and-play/ebook/product-21017844.html"><span style="color: blue;">Structure, Seinfeld, and Play</span></a></i>, the early
timeframe of which may be <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2009/05/seinfeld-chronicles.html"><span style="color: blue;">summed up here</span></a>. It may by now be apparent that I
made a powerpoint, and here include the highlights of its slides.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Out of curiosity, and the need to communicate effectively with the audience, I asked how many had never seen an episode of the show—AND HALF OF THE AUDIENCE RAISED THEIR HANDS! As this is the internet, anyone reading this who has never seen the show does not need me to explain it here in this space—I release you to discover it through your own devices! Be free!</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Additionally, much of the preamble for the paper I was presenting
is on this very blog—I have been writing about <i>Seinfeld</i>'s
self-parodic modes of production for years, and I invite you <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/p/table-of-contents.html"><span style="color: blue;">to explore</span></a> how it conceivably could work
that a show makes fun of itself making fun of itself and still retains a hint
of verisimilitude. But back to the paper at hand, as I summed up early Thursday
morning:</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> I am here to
discuss why these catch phrases and tropes persist within present-day American
culture, while their subversive power passes largely unperceived and
unacknowledged, and why this represents a powerful means of subverting static
binary conceptions of identity and representation.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><!--EndFragment--></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIjSGNdGKogzHdyQeHkJpPU0gQFT3XXWT5sRdB8GhcYWTsjTxlzZQSCclKsyjGXTsr8yvy6ZvgDBrF7LhNekZ9nyyKl7nzfgYHGohbSq8sWflA87HKr29Nr5t81ZE6zr4t_wdSJHZbrHY/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-17+at+7.09.52+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIjSGNdGKogzHdyQeHkJpPU0gQFT3XXWT5sRdB8GhcYWTsjTxlzZQSCclKsyjGXTsr8yvy6ZvgDBrF7LhNekZ9nyyKl7nzfgYHGohbSq8sWflA87HKr29Nr5t81ZE6zr4t_wdSJHZbrHY/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-17+at+7.09.52+AM.png" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Seinfeld</span></i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> simultaneously
deconstructs the production of a situation comedy and the day-to-day
performance of identity, most poignantly that of gender. By doing so it allows
the viewer to see the generic rules of a sitcom as a metaphor for larger
societal rules about behavior, and how one is expected to perform a given
identity within that framework. The show follows the structure of this
fifty-year-old genre that reinforces traditional gender roles, originating in
1950s suburban family narratives, and constantly parodies this context. In this
sense the show exists both as critique and expression of the modes of sitcom
production, and thereby functions as an institutional reinforcement of
capitalist, patriarchal expectations of identity and behavior. <i>Seinfeld </i>is
not celebrated as a subversion of gender/capitalist norms because of a
complicated paradox: its star received unprecedented economic validation and a
huge position of power precisely by subverting those norms.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Ultimately the show’s contribution to making television more
representative of life unmediated by commerce and sexism can be summed up in
one word: nothing—its purpose was not activist, but satiric, to show how
heartless, anti-social, and vapid a protagonist can be and still remain more or
less likable, granted of course that he is white, male, earning a comfortable
living, and explicitly heterosexual. Network television isn't designed to
instigate deep intellectual thought about levels of representation, the
slipperiness of identity, the relationship between lived experience and the
creation of fiction, whether any experience is really real or if any fiction is
really false. But <i>Seinfeld</i> does ask this of its viewers—though
it let them get away with utter satisfaction in the storylines, the dialogue and
the catch phrases that came out of it—like a high school English teacher
satisfied that their students read the book and could reproduce a few passages,
without delving too deep into rhetorical analysis. The episodes are fast-paced,
intelligent and original, and it's easy to flatter yourself for following along
and getting it, even if you don't appreciate the larger commentaries on itself,
sitcoms in general, and consumer culture as a whole. The complicated mechanisms
behind the show’s creation slip by unperceived, yet still somehow carried by
the viewer.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps I am simply a slightly more paranoid viewer than the
average <i>Seinfeld </i>fan that I think the show is constantly
making fun of the fact that I am watching it, as opposed to giving me the pure
and simple pleasure of laughter as lovers of the <i>Seinfeld </i>universe
enjoy, which they celebrate by memorizing its minutiae, and reciting its catch
phrases, but the passage of time has only made it increasingly obvious, at
least to me, that the show is in fact doing this, that its creator is ashamed
to be producing mainstream television and is therefore making fun of the
charade, using Jerry Seinfeld as the affable front for an avant-garde project
to bridge the gap between high and low culture, the way Kurt Vonnegut convinced
the ‘60s literati that literary merit could exist in genre fiction, or the way
Woody Allen made space for stand-up comedy in critically acclaimed cinema—there
is high art in a sitcom if it is not made for strictly commercial purposes, if
instead the joke comes first and the convention is recast to fit the joke. The
way that <i>Mad Men</i> for example is able to describe the influence
of capitalism, marketing, creativity, and gender upon each other is at play in <i>Seinfeld</i>,
except in the sitcom's case the way that creativity has been co-opted by the
market is not the historic context of Madison Avenue in the '60s—it is the way
that Hollywood turns comics into sitcom stars. In other words, <i>Seinfeld</i> is
an extended commentary on itself.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Creativity and comedy involve play and fluidity, transgression
and subversion, while capitalism requires stratification and opposition, the
reinforcement of the system and the policing of its norms. Becoming successful
in a creative field therefore becomes a kind of paradox: a successful comic may
be judged by his (there are no female comedian characters in Seinfeld, only
comic actresses playing non-comedian characters) economic success, but that
success necessitates a compromise, such as that with the heteronormative, white
supremacist, anti-cosmopolitan tool of post-World War II America's social power
structure: the situation comedy.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The show in this viewing—as a self-aware commentary on itself—is
conceived in order to draw attention to the conventions of commercial TV and
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Verisimilitude is replaced with a tongue-in-cheek
re-presentation of the show’s production because its ultimate purpose is to
allow this group of comedians and writers the opportunity to turn their
performances and material into money, everything else is superfluous, and
therefore every effort was made to avoid doing precisely what they were
doing—producing a marketable, accessible sitcom. In 1989, this was the choice
for comics and comic writers and actors, and through the production of 9
seasons, the first seven executively produced by David, this team of comics,
writers, and actors turned Jerry’s jokes about airports into ridiculous amounts
of money, and allowed Larry to win an Emmy for writing an episode about a
contest he once participated in whose purpose was to see which participant could
refrain from masturbating the longest.</span><span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The writing of this paper has been complicated in the last week
by the debut of Larry David’s debut broadway play, which he claims he was
coerced into being the star of. It made 14 million dollars in advanced sales, a
record, and he has been talking about his career in detail for the first time,
recording a <i>Fresh Air </i>interview last week, and, quite
surreally, doing a one hour Charlie Rose appearance on Monday, in which David
turns into his onscreen persona when Charlie Rose tries to get him to open up
about his relationship issues and proclaims, “that’s why I didn’t want to do
this interview in the first place… I had to be talked into doing 60 minutes. Do
you think I wanted to do this? I didn’t want to do it because I knew you’d be
asking me questions like this.” They also visit the Brooklyn apartment he grew
up in, dropping in on its current residents, and ignoring them as David
dismisses questions about feelings he might be feeling visiting what should be
a sentimental location. It’s uncomfortable and bizarre to say the least.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYX9QlV9a_mhq1_aeNBfRf4QJwIw3TswCIavaW61bkrSY55p6FUja3PVRA-jve4Qw0uddVtWP0tbw0Rt8iFmrr5ldbKvGw_EjvyVYm4key5Hi8UxH0v5_LfH1n42cnQpVRcZWxs2z3HYQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-17+at+7.09.59+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYX9QlV9a_mhq1_aeNBfRf4QJwIw3TswCIavaW61bkrSY55p6FUja3PVRA-jve4Qw0uddVtWP0tbw0Rt8iFmrr5ldbKvGw_EjvyVYm4key5Hi8UxH0v5_LfH1n42cnQpVRcZWxs2z3HYQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-17+at+7.09.59+AM.png" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 28px;">David turned <i>Seinfeld </i>into a means of escaping despair, obscurity, and poverty to starring in a Broadway hit he wrote, conceiving, producing, writing, and starring in an acclaimed HBO series for 8 seasons, starring in a Woody Allen movie, in addition to, of course, being responsible for the most successful TV show of all time, as popular as it was critically acclaimed. He has essentially become the high art genius in the vein of Neil Simon that he always imagined himself to be, and he used a mainstream, commercial mode to accomplish that.</span><span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 28px;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 24px;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 28px;">Seinfeld on the other hand has produced and starred in a children’s cartoon, made occasional American Express commercials, along with a 2002 documentary that is essentially a not funny version of a fake documentary that David made in 2000, which became David’s successful HBO show <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i>. It has become clear that Seinfeld’s apathetic material about nothing only functions to satisfy individuals entirely uninterested in the way the real world functions given that they enjoy silently benefiting from privilege, or are children. A year ago he dismissed that his newest show almost exclusively features white men because he is only interested in what is funny—social context has nothing to do with it—it’s essentially a coincidence in his mind that they all happen to be white men. Seinfeld always dismissed issues of representation and diversity in his work by citing Bill Cosby as his comic hero a tactic he will now inevitably shy away from.</span><span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 28px;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 24px; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 28px;">Seinfeld</span></i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 28px;">, the show, has reemerged in the popular consciousness in the present moment on twitter as an account called <a href="https://twitter.com/seinfeldtoday"><span style="color: blue;">Modern Seinfeld</span></a> takes the face-value interpretation of the show, and imagines <i>Seinfeld</i>-esque scenarios in which the internet exists. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 24px; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 28px; text-indent: 0.5in;">A parody account called <a href="https://twitter.com/seinfeld2000"><span style="color: blue;">Seinfeld Current Day</span></a> in turn makes fun of it, providing the David-influenced iconoclastic version: not readily comprehensible, reducible, or commodifiable, and generally absurd.</span><span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 28px; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 26.6666641235352px; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></span>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj51QcoI38f6BZduFRhDKMaVT-A5B5loe4DfnJ1oBBxFkDM5tUoQzF_isuKjg9E7B4xTuiWBF2luaHaZl9kCRSdD-fD8h27RMyAGS_lyh2m9GwqlhjgMuLlu9L7EDxd1J4yk2IEdbr8bAE/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-17+at+7.10.06+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj51QcoI38f6BZduFRhDKMaVT-A5B5loe4DfnJ1oBBxFkDM5tUoQzF_isuKjg9E7B4xTuiWBF2luaHaZl9kCRSdD-fD8h27RMyAGS_lyh2m9GwqlhjgMuLlu9L7EDxd1J4yk2IEdbr8bAE/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-17+at+7.10.06+AM.png" width="400" /></a><span style="clear: left; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px;"></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">As our mutual understanding of the show
developed and changed, the Puffy Shirt has remained in the Smithsonian, and,
like the shirt, the means of a complicated understanding of the show has been
here all along, and the fact that the its tropes remain institutionalized in
mainstream culture represents a great opportunity to use them in the discussion
of the fluidity of gender, identity, and representation in popular
culture. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 18.6666660308838px; line-height: 28px;">Everything regressive, anti-social, sexist, derogatory, and commercial about the show represents what has allowed its satire to endure. In the example of “the Outing,” Elaine makes a joke for the benefit of an eavesdropper that Jerry and (Larry David’s stand-in character) George are a closeted gay couple. To George this is a fun premise for conversational play, but, to Jerry, an uncomfortable idea even to entertain. This is the episode’s set-up—the eavesdropper is a reporter—and now Jerry, a public figure, has to eliminate the existence of this joke, pleading to her, “there's been a big misunderstanding here! We did that whole thing for your benefit. We knew you were eavesdropping. That's why my friend said all that. It was on purpose! We're not gay! Not that there's anything wrong with that... I mean that's fine if that's who you are...” Jerry is thereby sufficiently progressive for ‘90s America, yet also sufficiently homophobic to be popularly embraced. His heterosexuality, in the words of Judith Butler, is “compulsory.” By the end of the episode Jerry has successfully convinced the reporter of his heterosexuality and seduced her—an NYU undergraduate, by the way, he is in his mid-thirties—George bursts in with a woman he is trying to break up with and performs love and affection for Jerry for the benefit of convincing his girlfriend of the lie, sending the NYU reporter from the scene convinced that Jerry was performing false heterosexual desire for her. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">I ended with this series of images:</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0ZD1MoZViMClNwFmemcx-4nERru9w-MEqLDWhGNHzdiiFI9JRD6gCQZAbkL6Q29WbhzQWoXLknq-Nf7IiGnjkU2fhtV1e79TXeBUKpGh5K_RKaiaxI0-te1x-DN60-7ixJ-ZSNgWY_os/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-17+at+7.10.11+AM.png" width="400" /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In the first, the cover image of <i>Gender Trouble</i>, a
boy wears and dress and looks directly at the camera, aware that the viewer
lives in a world in which this is unnatural, as though there were a natural,
inevitable way for a human to dress. In the second is Jerry in the puffy shirt.
He looks uncomfortable. He has been tricked into wearing this shirt because a
woman, a “low talker” asked him to for his appearance on the <i>Today Show</i>,
he couldn’t hear her, and nodded out of politeness. He is aware that the viewer
will judge him, he will judge himself, and his performance will be askew—and
indeed Bryant Gumbel, the host, cannot get past the shirt, though he does not
address its androgynous characteristics, instead calling it a pirate shirt, as
it is referred to by the other characters as well, creating the further
absurdity that a comic expression of masculinity—being a pirate—in our present
milieu resembles a comic expression of femininity. Of course, Prince, in the
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he knows what straight culture thinks and he could give a fuck, and that’s
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Paradoxically, Jerry also draws his power by wearing the shirt, albeit
uncomfortably, just as he does by parodying the way a woman wears a purse, or
complains in “the Boyfriend” that a man he went on a friend date hasn’t called
him again. When he does his stand up routine he wears a blazer and tie in his
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<br />ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-20539798426360063662014-01-03T13:03:00.001-08:002014-01-03T13:03:26.780-08:00Notes on a unifying thread between Klaus Kinski and Kanye West<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;"><img alt="image" height="341" src="http://images.dangerousminds.net/uploads/images/1233616918KINSKI_Presse_02.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 15px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" width="465" /></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">She told the magazine that she had never been able to watch any of her father's films in which he typically played tyrants, criminals and outlaws. "When I did catch a glimpse of one I always thought: 'he's precisely like he is at home'." </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">—Pola Kinski on her father</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">Are you willing to sacrifice your life?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">—Kanye West, "Monster"</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">In 1971 Klaus Kinski embarked on a series of performances of the confrontational monologue <i>Jesus Christus Erlöser (Jesus Christ Savior)</i>, which included lines like "I am not the official Jesus, the one that is tolerated by policemen, bankers, judges, hangmen, officers, church bosses, politicians, and other powerful people. I am not your superstar." As replayed in Werner Herzog's <i>My Best Fiend</i>, we see the performance degenerate into shouting, insults, tantrums and, most of all, diabolical scowls. The way he returns to the stage and rips the microphone from the hand of the man he replaces makes Kanye West's interruption of Taylor Swift look like exactly what it is: tame and inconsequential.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">Also, <i>Jesus</i>, pronounced in German, is <i>Yeezus</i>.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">Werner Herzog paraphrasing Kinski's attitude toward awards and prizes:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">Klaus Kinski was an intense method actor who saw the promotional value in appearing insane, that the cult of genius necessitates unhealthy commitment, megalomania, otherworldliness. But we know he is an actor and that Herzog is a director. <i>My Best Fiend </i>is directed by Herzog and stars Kinski just as the 5 other movies were. Why would we acknowledge those are fictions manipulated by men and that this is not? The legacy of Herzog depends on Kinski which in turn depends on his transgressions. Herzog needs him to be a monster for the success of his films and the glow of their aura.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">Kanye is actor and director, writer and producer, dancer and set designer. He can stop and appear as Herzog—calm, yet intense director—but the public cannot separate him from Kinski, an outsider shouting on a televised stage about how phony our entire civilization is and, especially, how impoverished our saviour has become, manipulated by power, unrecognizable.</span></div>
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ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-6687657915584417552013-05-13T18:28:00.001-07:002013-05-13T18:28:24.140-07:00Structure, Seinfeld & Play: a non-coffee-table book not about coffee tables<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">THE <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/andrew-shaw-kitch/structure-seinfeld-and-play/paperback/product-21017814.html" target="_blank">BOOK</a> IS PUBLISHED ON THE INTERNET!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">THE <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/andrew-shaw-kitch/structure-seinfeld-and-play/ebook/product-21017844.html" target="_blank">EBOOK</a> IS ALSO PUBLISHED ON THE INTERNET!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">IT IS NOT A COFFEE TABLE BOOK NOR IS IT ABOUT COFFEE TABLES OR COFFEE TABLE BOOKS!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">IT IS ABOUT <i>SEINFELD</i>!</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiihrX6BPfdRTQMD-7QOadwP6-Xp2l_th6gwZMQW2EcRMdGNJIcUF-Dy04NPcyBzfp0d58ML9uU0cPQYNI_rl7E1S8ApbeW90XJK8wUnPyGr1JntRNAXZUYaxLmAAcvDrtkLnJn9Ws8J00/s1600/coffee_tables_15_68179312.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiihrX6BPfdRTQMD-7QOadwP6-Xp2l_th6gwZMQW2EcRMdGNJIcUF-Dy04NPcyBzfp0d58ML9uU0cPQYNI_rl7E1S8ApbeW90XJK8wUnPyGr1JntRNAXZUYaxLmAAcvDrtkLnJn9Ws8J00/s320/coffee_tables_15_68179312.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">IT DOES NOT TURN INTO A COFFEE TABLE!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">IT IS JUST A BOOK!</span>ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-27023768841211088262013-05-11T21:41:00.002-07:002014-05-31T17:18:30.869-07:00Watching Seinfeld 15 years after its finale<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<i>Seinfeld</i>, since the age that I started to think of the show as made by real people and not its own real world that the television presented me, has been a kind of riddle to me. Up until a certain age—somewhere between 9 and 13, let's say—disbelief is not suspended as much as it just does not exist, but once the charade, the theater of the event, is revealed, it is hard to get lost in a weekly situation comedy unless you are getting lost in the brilliance and intricacy of the jokes, the way the charade is constructed and seems to hold together. Yet Jerry-Seinfeld-the-character, who was a stand-up comedian and even created and produced an episode of a situation comedy, remained Jerry-Seinfeld-the-person, seemingly, and there lay the riddle—if the show flirts with autobiography and thus a certain level of verisimilitude, how much does it intend to accurately describe reality, especially since the non-thespian lead rarely seems actually to be acting?</div>
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Now that we have fifteen years between the present moment and the airing of the series finale, longer than the show was actually on the air, and twice as long as Larry David's tenure as executive producer, we can read the respective post-<i>Seinfeld </i>careers of Seinfeld and David as a means of understanding the sensibilities that each brought to the show, or, at least, I will presently argue that we may, and, if you disagree, you may presently suspend the aforementioned disbelief. The most instructive moments from the televisual, new millennium work of the co-creators of <i>Seinfeld</i> are those in which Seinfeld (or another actor from <i>Seinfeld</i>) enters the Davidian universe of HBO's faux-reality-TV, improvised avant-garde post-sitcom <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i>,<i> </i>or when David appears in one of Seinfeld's post-<i>Seinfeld </i>projects, and we will start with an example of the latter, which is the most recent, in which Jerry invites Larry out for coffee, which is actually breakfast, on Seinfeld's self-explanatory web series <i>Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee</i>, the first episode entitled "Larry Eats a Pancake."</div>
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"It's a miracle we ever got any work done because nobody can waste time like you and me," Jerry says to Larry as they get out of the 1952 Volkswagen Beetle that Jerry has taken out on the town for the purpose of this episode.</div>
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"I agree—it's a miracle." Larry says, "I always wanted the show to get canceled so I wouldn't have to work."</div>
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For someone who enjoys <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm </i>as much as I do, and particularly the Larry character played by David, it is gratifying to see the "real" version of the man, not too different from his fictional self yet entirely sociable, yielding and not despicable, though this Larry is of course just a different kind of fictional version of David, an improvised television self, acting natural, so to speak in a showbiz context, but he is warmer and kinder, someone seriously preoccupied with the consumption of chicken, for example (we learn after Jerry asks "What the hell is wrong with chicken"), "it's a lot of cholesterol... and if it's not free range chicken there's a lot wrong with it," and generally concerned with his diet and the environment, as evidenced by the first piece of writing I read by him, written as the Larry David outside of his TV show, about a decade ago in <i>Rolling Stone </i>about the alarming rates of mercury in tuna, arguing that we need to look after the health of the oceans so he could remain a happy frequent consumer of tuna fish sandwiches, otherwise the world as he knows it would collapse. Jerry makes a joke about the idea of "free range," that it's a myth involving chickens in cowboy hats, "Home on the Range," etc.</div>
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This is a trivial moment—and thus quintessentially Seinfeld (and <i>Seinfeld</i>)—but an important one in understanding the dynamics of these comedy greats: Larry has a slightly ironic, for the sake of not seeming preachy, moralizing streak; and Jerry is amoral—he is nice, he does not curse, his comedy is inclusive and commercially viable, but it is unpolitical and oblivious to any real notion of ethics that goes past the etiquette of tipping to, for example, the socioeconomic implications of a tip-based income.</div>
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"You're like a young king, aren't you," Ricky Gervais says to Jerry in the second episode—"Mad Man in a Death Machine"—after Jerry asks in the restaurant to where he has driven them, "Can I have two yellow eggs and two egg whites?" Gervais' comedic proposition is the best moment of the whole series, in my humble opinion, because it rings so true as it simultaneously takes to task the whole premise of the show.</div>
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"Things are kept from you, but...you wanna do stuff... 'He wants to drive around in a car,' and someone says 'well, just let him go around in a car.'"</div>
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"'But he wants to do it with celebrities,'" Jerry adds.</div>
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"'He wants to do it with some of his friends he's seen on the tele.' 'We'll get their number.'"</div>
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Jerry's material is based on his celebration of never having grown up, inhabiting a world based around cereal, Superman and inconsequential foibles. I remember watching one of his big returns to TV, a <i>Tonight Show</i> appearance about five years ago, and the five minutes of new—I should note <i>killer</i>—material from the fiftysomething legend were all about eating cookies in the middle of the night. He has nothing but money and time, like a "young king" who doesn't quite grasp the responsibilities of his role, instead telling cookie jokes, collecting vintage cars as an extension of the common boyhood dream, and he has his people arrange play dates for him with other people who understand the lifestyle of having nothing but money and time, and, instead of a privilege bestowed at birth, comedic talent. Another great moment is Alec Baldwin's deadpan summation of Jerry that gives the episode—"Just a Lazy Shiftless Bastard"—its title and us the line, "Your life has been one unbroken boulevard of green lights, hasn't it?" They drove in a 1970 Mercedes 280 SL in signal red. They park it in a garage and, like the rest of the help that appear in the back- and foregrounds of the show, the attendant is seen and not heard.</div>
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I once saw Jerry Seinfeld in person. I had just finished sixth grade and Jerry had just finished the most successful situation comedy of all time, as people like to say. My English uncle, a captain of industry and then collector of Aston Martins, took me and my brother to the Concourse d'Elegance in Pebble Beach, paying fifty dollars for the each of us—to my shock and horror (the things I could have done with fifty dollars!)—at the improvised ticket desk erected on the 18th hole of the Pebble Beach Golf Links. We spent the afternoon looking at beautiful antique cars arranged in and out of tents along the fairways, and at one point I turned around and there was Jerry Seinfeld, surrounded, of course, by half a dozen people. I wanted to be one of them, but I didn't want to bother him, nor did I have anything to say. I just stared for a bit and kicked myself for not having a Pez dispenser and Sharpie on my person.</div>
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I followed everything he did after <i>Seinfeld</i>. I taped <i>I'm Telling You for the Last Time </i>off of HBO onto the VCR and watched him literally bury (or at least simulate the burial of) and perform all of his material once before my dad recorded over it with a soccer game which, needless to say, was, in hindsight, very disappointing, and, in the moment, really upsetting. When I discovered Napster a year or so later I downloaded the album and listened to it on headphones and roared with laughter as I discovered the internet. I saw <i>Comedian</i>—the <i>cinéma vérité</i> documentary of Seinfeld, the biggest name of his generation, start awkwardly from scratch in small New York basement comedy clubs along with an obnoxious youngster who spends the movie complaining that he his not famous—the day it came out with my dad after he picked me up from high school.</div>
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It was a perfect myth—man of integrity climbs to the top of show business, walks off stage on the most perfect note imaginable, and starts from scratch in obscurity, toiling for love of the craft, suffering for jokes. A moment in the movie perpetuates this myth and describes the timelessness of it when the other comedian complains to Jerry that he's not famous yet and Jerry, the seasoned guru of show business, says "you got something else you'd rather have been doing?" and tells him his "favorite story about show business."</div>
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Glen Miller and his orchestra they were doing some gig somewhere. They can't land where they're supposed to land 'cause it's a winter snowy night, so they have to land like in this field and walk to the gig and they're dressed in their suits, they're ready to play, they're carrying their instruments. So they're walking through the snow and it's wet and slushy and in the distance they see this little house and there's lights on in the inside and there's a curl of smoke coming out through the chimney and they go up to the house, they look in the window they see this, this family. And there's a guy and his wife and she's beautiful, and two kids they're all sitting around the table and they're smiling, they're laughing and they're eating, and there's a fire in the fireplace and these guys are standing there in their suits, and they're wet and they're shivering and they're holding their instruments and they're watching this incredible Norman Rockwell scene, and one guy turns to the other guy and goes "How do people live like that?" That's what it's about.</blockquote>
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I was sold on this myth. Jerry Seinfeld was my hero and, though I had watched Larry David's special and subsequent series on HBO and I knew he had something to do with <i>Seinfeld</i>, though I didn't really understand what, I believed Seinfeld was the heart of <i>Seinfeld</i>, the proletarian toiler whose work ethic flourished from the need to selflessly make people happy through some amalgam of truth, intergrity and jokes. I was so devoted that when I heard rumor of Jerry returning to TV I was there for the big debut, even though it was just an American Express commercial. And this moment when he returned to TV was the moment the myth began to fade because, of course, it was just an American Express commercial, and in the ten years that have passed since that moment, the episodes of <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm </i>that had already aired and the ones that would be steadily produced became better and better. The riddle of <i>Seinfeld </i>became clearer and ultimately obvious: Larry David hijacked Jerry's mainstream appeal, his formulaic accessibility, near universality, commercial viability—the man could create hype for <i>commercials</i>, for god's sake—and used it to produce the most interesting television ever to be consumed by such a large audience, recursive and self-referential jokes whose punchlines cannot even be properly identified, seamless ripped-from-the-headlines parodies that never break the verisimilitude of the episode, and a constant undercutting and near shame of the form in which they worked, an embarrassment so severe he quit at the show's peak after killing off Susan with cheap envelope adhesive. This was two years before everyone else supposedly quit at the show's peak, mind you, not before demanding a million dollars an episode for the final season. David's was an embarrassment so severe that he quit the most successful show of my lifetime to write and direct a somewhat difficult-to-watch moralizing film, 1998's <i>Sour Grapes</i>, and cast himself as the obnoxious producer of a show not unidentical to <i>Friends</i>, an artless, sentimental <i>Seinfeld </i>rip off that nobody could accuse <i>Seinfeld </i>of resembling. But, for Larry, the resemblance was too close. </div>
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Seinfeld's post-<i>Seinfeld </i>work, especially the second era that begins with that American Express commercial, is not in the same category as that of David. Each season of <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i>, it seems, surpasses the glory achieved by its precedent, even the <i>Seinfeld</i>-reunion season, which brought Seinfeld back to form playing the straight foil to the mad creative genius of David's writing, a season that felt like the inevitable peak of the series, was trumped by Larry's subsequent Season 8 sojourn in New York. Jerry made a blasé children's cartoon in which he voices a bee (<i>Bee Movie</i>), an interesting reality TV show, by reality TV standards (<i>The Marriage Ref</i>), and now a rip-off of the British program <i>Carpool</i>, a debt which goes unacknowledged I should note, a seemingly minimalist literal vehicle for jokes that is instead propaganda for himself and his friends, an advertisement for the bourgeois lifestyle, cars, and coffee. Or, as Larry sums it up in the first episode, "You've finally done a show about nothing."</div>
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ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-44275961516208790032013-04-16T22:36:00.002-07:002013-05-11T22:08:27.979-07:00April is National Poetry Month and this is the 4 year anniversary of this blog, roughlyApril is the cruelest month breeding blogposts out of the dead land about how April is National Poetry Month. This month is the 18th we've shared as a nation since 1996 that has involved poetry.<br />
<br />
There are many 21st-century phenomena that strike me as arbitrary, sinister or generally just a bad idea, and, while I am still out on whether the internet as a whole has been a complete catastrophe for our culture, I am certain that it has bestowed upon us a whole new genres of arbitrary, sinister and generally just bad ideas. <br />
<br />
And perhaps it has been a trope of print media for decades to decide the time is right to re-evaluate a work due to an anniversary, or a national <i>x </i>month, and perhaps it's even less sinister than retroactive analysis in honor of a re-issue or new edition or some other commerce-related decision (though much poetry is released in April to capitalize on the hubbub) to reappraise a piece of writing, cinema, music, television, etc. but a critical mass has been reached of essays beginning "Does <i>y </i>hold up after <i>z </i>years" or "April is National Poetry Month," and thus the writing something that will be as irrelevant as poetry come May, or when it is no longer 25 years to the day after—somehow attaching the writing to a past moment when quality media actually mattered to its culture and thus gaining a gravitas that otherwise is not found in today's internet-print culture that is designed like an off-the-wall calendar, a factoid a day that can easily fit into cubicle culture, in this case that can be linked to a friend's facebook page who likes, for example, poetry—and it's his month, after all, so let's celebrate. It may be a ludicrous and cynical conclusion to make, but I shall make it—anything that has a specific month to celebrate "its vital place in American culture" does not have a vital place in American culture, for it is a culture dominated by everything we know we are not supposed to celebrate, a list too depressing to produce in this moment.<br />
<br />
It is no longer the writer's priority to write something because the thought occurred and developed a month, or however long, before, just as we don't communally watch the Beatles debut on <i>the Ed Sullivan Show</i> anymore, we watch gimmicky karaoke programs that promise talented people the possibility of being chosen to join the schlock machine. We publish for the anniversaries, we post in time for our pieces to be cherry-picked and linked cubicle to cubicle, in honor of whatever arbitrary subculture or past text we are told to celebrate in that moment, to give our meaningless laptop interactions some vague feeling of significance.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, I stopped writing poems every day as part of <a href="http://postpoetry.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">a project</a> that began in September, just at the beginning of April. I could have really cashed in on this gimmick.<br />
<br />
I am pleased to announce, however, that the <i>Seinfeld</i>-related material of this blog will become available in book form on May 14th, the 15th anniversary of the series finale.<br />
<br />
I am slightly vindicated to have found this quite eloquent anti-Poetry Month poem by Charles Bernstein: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html<br />
<br />
It seems this subject is quite popular, and most blogs, apparently, begin as mine has:<br />
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2004/04/08/the-cruelest-and-coolest-month.html<br />
<br />
http://paxamericana.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/its-national-poetry-month-and-richard-howard-doesnt-care/<br />
<br />
http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/127408/april-the-poetry-month-some-highlights/<br />
<br />
etc.ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-6934721749510736312013-04-14T20:51:00.002-07:002013-04-14T20:51:45.458-07:00Structure, Seinfeld and Play—the book<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWDbY3RVnVyftb5rOIEgvPdI3V_1IVIF9R1Aw6EKW6VmvPhYdr_TVunrSYmssydET3tdA2OK2VKMjWNQNtYzdJhHnmgqcGiLJWP8Qf409LZCUJMlp2CJaXqOoXTp5mpxUZUFkTDs6r9ng/s1600/structure,+seinfeld+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWDbY3RVnVyftb5rOIEgvPdI3V_1IVIF9R1Aw6EKW6VmvPhYdr_TVunrSYmssydET3tdA2OK2VKMjWNQNtYzdJhHnmgqcGiLJWP8Qf409LZCUJMlp2CJaXqOoXTp5mpxUZUFkTDs6r9ng/s400/structure,+seinfeld+cover.jpg" width="317" /></a></div>
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Structure, Seinfeld and Play—the book, available May 14th, 2013. </div>
ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-11897134501400555902013-04-12T22:44:00.000-07:002013-04-19T12:29:59.170-07:00Listening to Being There for the First time in a long time really loud on my ipod camera phone<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiJEqYXHqdkGXS-Ed-mubH27Sib8NHKWrN1tmnAhTVDlV-5SJa2fQ8eekH67jUtlmPX8SGSr5ajMtZYj7ODq9xJa6TYrNDEJZxcFJcHZWv_1GQQrrMljqD_y9ar1yErx1qf1S-XhtrjCM/s1600/being+there1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="159" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiJEqYXHqdkGXS-Ed-mubH27Sib8NHKWrN1tmnAhTVDlV-5SJa2fQ8eekH67jUtlmPX8SGSr5ajMtZYj7ODq9xJa6TYrNDEJZxcFJcHZWv_1GQQrrMljqD_y9ar1yErx1qf1S-XhtrjCM/s320/being+there1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
DISC TWO OF WILCO'S <i>BEING THERE</i><br />
This morning I taught the first two thirds of a day of Kindergarten—actually it was yesterday when, in the morning, I also taught two thirds of a day of kindergarten—and, as I walked down Bardin Road to the strip mall at the corner with Williams for lunch, checked my cell phone and got a message from my brother—<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Do yourself a favor and listen to Being There! Loud!</span>—and I responded at this A.M. enthusiasm (this is an unintentional reference [I swear!] to, <i>A.M.</i>, the first Wilco album that preceded <i>Being There</i>): <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the morning time? </span>and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What will the neighbors think! </span>and he text messaged back (which doesn't sound quite right to me because "text messaging" to me means hitting actual keys over and over again to turn an a to b to a c, etc. and my brother has a new touch screen kind of device that Mike Daisey told us certain inaccurate truths about last year that we were able to ignore because there were certain inaccuracies about the truths) <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">anytime! </span>and then <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">fuck em</span>. And then I "wrote" back (because I also now have one of those devices that doesn't old-fashioned-ly text message) <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also I could put it on my new iPod camera phone and blare it whenever </span>and then, because he usually works at this time, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Have you been blessed w/ a day off? </span>and he said <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No </span>and messaged me a smily face that was not smiling but instead screaming with eyes closed and waterfalls of tears streaming down its yellow circle non-smily face. <br />
<br />
Since I have begun this "essay" (or account of a brief text exchange between my brother and me while he was at work and I was on my lunch break substitute teaching kindergarten for the first of two days in a row) I have listened to the first five songs on the second disc of a copy of <i>Being There </i>that my friend Jaymee found and removed from the area with the CDs and stereo in Campagno's Market & Deli in Monterey, California where she made sandwiches for active members of the military and civilians who like really big sandwiches, off and on, from 2001 until 2006. The CD was removed in 2002 (due to some quick wikipedia fact-checking, and some consequent serious pinwheeling issues, track seven is finishing and I fear time is slipping away), when I got super-excited about <i>Yankee Hotel Foxtrot</i>, the fourth Wilco album, and couldn't stop talking about it (an album I was so partial to—one of the few payoffs for the half-decade <i>Rolling Stone </i>subscription I devoured from age 13 on until I had grown [word choice very intentional] to dismiss and resent it—that I insisted that what I do the first time I smoked pot by myself was to listen to that <i>really loud</i>, which is interesting because, as wikipedia informs us [pinwheeling...] <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">The first conceptions of material for the album came during a particularly stressful time in Tweedy's life. Tweedy had recently quit smoking </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0645ad; text-decoration: none;" title="Marijuana">marijuana</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">,...</span>also I made a great friend who has the same name as me because I saw <i>I am trying to break your heart</i>, the movie about that album at the independent movie theater he worked at)—because it didn't seem like it belonged to anybody and had been in the CD/stereo area of the sandwich shop "forever," and for some reason it was a cardboard "CD advance" version, which turned out to not be at all different. I listened to it all the fucking time. And why this classic of '90s post-Parsons country rock psychedelia—and a "CD advance" version at that—ended up abandoned at the Compagno's Market and Deli just outside the Taylor Gate entrance to the Defense Language Institute of Monterey, and why I happened to have a best friend who lived down the street and for some reason got a job at the age of 15 making sandwiches who decided to pilfer me this bit of media remains to me one of the great minor miracles that have made my life worth living.<br />
<br />
Another wikipedia fact, one that seems slightly incongruous and wholly depressing: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0645ad; text-decoration: underline;" title="Valve Corporation">Valve Corporation</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"> used </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><i>Someone Else's Song</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"> as a basis for one of the opening themes in their </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-person_shooter" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0645ad; text-decoration: none;" title="First-person shooter">first-person shooter</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"> game </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0645ad; text-decoration: none;" title="Team Fortress 2">Team Fortress 2</a></i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">* * *</span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">I am in, what I am deciding to be, a moment of indecision. The second CD of the album has finished and the first one did not work in the CD player—above my desk in my parents' garage—that for all of my adolescence was in my room, on which I played, I am estimating right now, between the first five albums—my friend Vicky bought me <i>A.M. </i>and the third, <i>Summerteeth, </i>to continue this theme that the benevolent forces of reality put Wilco's music into my life; and <i>A Ghost is Born</i>, which I bought the day it came out, was essentially the soundtrack of the end of my childhood—in excess of three non-stop month's worth of Wilco, a conservative estimate. I have chosen simply just to replay CD two as I think about this and the first song has ended. Its title comes from the notion that "there is no sunken treasure, rumored to be," a weird sort of non-teleological thinking that, in our forward motion into the past, there is no reward beyond that of the journey. "</span></span>Music is my saviour, but I was maimed by rock and roll," the song ends. "I was tamed by rock and roll." <br />
<br />
And then a reprise, a reprise that always haunted me, the less commercial more abstract version of the single that I didn't really remember, but I remember in the background of a non-existent memory somewhere in the nineties, sometime after I turned 11 and before the 20th century ended. It was two minutes and thirty-five seconds of their biggest hit. I just googled <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcaGlJGijj0" target="_blank">the video</a>...pinwheeling...youtube-geico ad...and they take their instruments on a plane as Jeff Tweedy lip-syncs the song and carries a snowboard used for skydiving purposes (I just read it is called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skysurfing" target="_blank">"skysurfing"</a>), and then they pretend to play their instruments on the plane, and then in mid-air, as Jeff Tweedy continues to lip-sync, and I can't really tell if there are doubles or if there is a green screen involved it just looks like they are falling through air with guitars, a snare drum, etc. Although it is incredibly late-'90s-<i>Dawson's Creek</i>-cheesy I am having a hard time not liking it a lot, but I never saw it, I can safely say. The mystery remains...when did I hear this song?<br />
<br />
Question: though the record is very loose, most songs produced in a day, the band is at the top its game—why do betray their professionalism with the inclusion of bits of studio banter, laughter, etc.? Why does genius seemingly reside in the ability to capture feeling before rehearsal squeezes out the realness, and why does it fall apart at a certain point when it seems <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2013/04/listening-to-being-there-for-first-time.html" target="_blank"><i>too </i>improvised</a> and off the cuff? Why does it seem to serve the artist in this moment more than the listener/viewer/reader? I think it has something to do with dreams. I want to hear songs about dreams as a concept, about people's actual dreams, about life influenced by dreams, about dreams as a metaphor for aspirations. But never do I want to hear a slick, overly-produced, written for pop singer of the moment song about dreams. There are two songs with "Dreams" in the title on this record, and one is called "Dreamer in My Dreams," and the album is a huge discussion of longing and hoping and aspiring, songs directed towards successful singers, or about aspiring singers, and the lyrics, otherwise, are surreal and the abstract instrumentation floats, and one song's words read like a haiku with the lines repeated centered around the quadrupled line "Why would you wanna live in this world," with a variation in its last phrasing, "Why wouldn't you wanna live in this world?" Maybe at a certain point, when you've been playing music and smoking weed for what feels like forever, and you have your first kid and your band gets kind of successful, but not really, you realize you don't need your cannabinoid shortcut to surrealism anymore and it becomes even weirder to stop smoking pot. I wouldn't know. I don't mean to answer the question. "I've got blisters on my fingers!" is the best moment of "Helter Skelter" in this aesthetic I am describing, which is that of a double album which the Beatles' "white" album is, btw.<br />
<br />
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I am back to the last song, a free-for-all barnburner, as much as a Wilco song can be, and Jeff Tweedy sings one about himself in the third person, the aforementioned "dreamer in my dreams":</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There's a blister on his brain<br />
that's driving him insane<br />
'cause all good things gotta go<br />
well there's a child on the way<br />
it could be any day,<br />
but how his life will change him, that we don't know.</blockquote>
The song ends with, I think, Jay Bennett saying "That's it" and then slamming a piano shut with lots of giggles. <br />
<br />
I am going to get a beer and figure out how to listen to the first CD. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCSMWwu4Na_roVs_Jr4-4BrVRBKa-DLGRlwQ1zccaRl8SUka3n4fIAelgzIVI17nQASI0Z6OSPiZfOmwOZzNU9h_nTUMnQUV5wrMfqjg6BgS89XRzWExGNMkMW4L9NseRUSDyXmX49T3w/s1600/being+there2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="158" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCSMWwu4Na_roVs_Jr4-4BrVRBKa-DLGRlwQ1zccaRl8SUka3n4fIAelgzIVI17nQASI0Z6OSPiZfOmwOZzNU9h_nTUMnQUV5wrMfqjg6BgS89XRzWExGNMkMW4L9NseRUSDyXmX49T3w/s320/being+there2.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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<br />
DISC TWO OF WILCO'S <i>BEING THERE</i><br />
While I just listened to disc two twice in a row and could probably listen to it again, I always found the first half more captivating, putting "Misunderstood" on half a dozen mixtapes, and "Hotel Arizona" on half a dozen more. And the actual single and not its reprise is on it. And this time when I put it in my teenage bedroom's CD player it played, and I turned it up loud and wrote the next paragraph.<br />
<br />
I just had a minor epiphany while listening to "Misunderstood," the album's first song about why this song is so captivating still, or, more interestingly, why it is more captivating than it ever was: Jeff Tweedy was me and my brother's age, just a couple years older than I am now, when he wrote the album, more specifically he was my age when he started writing songs for it and my brother's age (actually two months older) when it came out, and—while it is about all of those important rock and roll anti-authoritarian the world is not what it seems messages that one so easily falls in love with at the age of 16—it is more accurately about being on the verge of 30 and not knowing what exactly to do with all of these truths that were taught to us by a culture that gave more virtue to drug use and drinking than churchgoing and just about everything else that one is quote unquote supposed to do. I just thought he was kidding when he sang in "Monday": "Well, I cut class, in school, yeah, but now I know I made a mistake, I made a big mistake," because it just sounds so hokey and <i>Jeff Tweedy </i>couldn't have made a mistake, he made some of the most important albums of my generation, or, I guess, his generation, or whatever. I just finished a biography of David Foster Wallace and he cynically refers to a famous artist's occupation as "polishing the statue," which, if the statue is of a drug addict, or a genius, or a mentally unstable person, can be a harrowing, and literally unhealthy, image to maintain. But if that's what the kids want it's what the kids want. <br />
<br />
But "Monday" is a weak song, it's back to back with the single version of the single, which seem out of place on an album the rest of which sounds like a later Wilco album—abstract, cohesive, artistic, often really dissonant and borderline self-serving, but never quite. For the first time during this experience I am going stop typing and actually just listen and think, a good idea, for a change...<br />
<br />
"What's the world got in store for you now" is a rhetorical question on several levels.<br />
<br />
I think Wilco played "Hotel Arizona" when I saw them in 2005 when they played with Jim O'Rourke, still in support of <i>A Ghost is Born</i>, I don't quite remember. It would have tied a lot together for me if they did. But then not really cause this epic number's post-crescendo conclusion is<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I guess, all this history's just a mystery to me<br />
One more worried whisper right in my ear.</blockquote>
* * *<br />
(That would be a great way to end an album, or this essay, but it goes on with an on the road missing you love song, because the band was still a country-based pop band, accessible, on the brink of the avant-garde. The work with Billy Bragg finishing unfinished Woody Guthrie songs solidified their place as rock and roll intellectuals, and <i>Summerteeth </i>went backwards a little bit with songs that were a little too bubblegum, and studio production that was too traditional and safe, though the songs were good. The sonic surrealism reaches a new peak with <i>Yankee Hotel Foxtrot </i>and the band as it was, as it began with <i>Being There</i> [with Jay Bennett], ceased to be, which is right when I caught on and watched the documentary of that band falling apart and losing its label only to have a subsidiary of that label rebuy the album that its parent company already paid for, and my friend who has the same name as me got the movie poster from his work when the film left and gave it to me and it hung on my wall for the rest of my adolescence.)ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-51673027476194860582012-11-12T10:06:00.001-08:002013-04-19T12:26:56.031-07:00Living to Live<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I have Seth Cohen (The O.C.) to thank for introducing me to
Chuck Klosterman. I spotted him reading Sex, Drugs and Cocoa
Puffs during an episode of The O.C., and the title of the book intrigued
me so much that I had to hunt it down.</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
—<a href="http://www.revish.com/reviews/0743264460/deargreenplace/">Review by
deargreenplace</a> of <i>Killing Yourself to Live</i>, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
by Chuck Klosterman, on the revish.com<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have been on a trip for over ten days and have done little
writing beyond that done on postcards, and I have been reading personal
essays/autobiographical novellas with near exclusivity. For example, I
began <i>Consider the Lobster </i>by David Foster Wallace on the
train stretch between Reno, Nevada and Salt Lake City, Utah, read 200 pages on
flights from St. Louis to Chicago and from Chicago to Helsinki and from
Helsinki to Berlin, and I have one essay remaining as I sit backward facing in
a train <i>en route</i>—from Berlin—to Amsterdam, in a seat that may
belong to a disgruntled Dutchman across the aisle. My
girlfriend/traveling companion is not sure of the meaning of an encounter that
transpired while I was asleep involving the Dutchman's arrival, glance at his
ticket and then my seat, and subsequent perpetual scowl.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* * *<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I began this trip with a personalized variety of
self-psychoanalysis by which I aimed to make it a journey of emotional healing
and self-understanding, which, I suppose, with the rare intentionally
self-destructive benders (Nicholas Cage in <i>Leaving Las Vegas</i> comes
to mind), is how most people, if pressed, would describe a trip of their
own making—I read William Styron's <i>Darkness Visible</i>, subtitled
"A Memoir of Madness," from the origin of the <i>California
Zephyr </i>in Emeryville on the San Francisco Bay east through Sacramento,
finishing in Gold Country. It was reassuring to have the symptoms of a
long-developing depression—much due to the logistical anxieties of this
trip—validated, and therefore to be cognizant of them through this validation,
and to know what I experienced, was experiencing, and habitually experience is
a minute shade of the debilitating effects of Styron's illness, and the
depression afflicting so many others, and that whatever was pre-trip nerves
was, so to speak, left behind. Awareness with movement with anticipation
with honest eloquent writing shuttled me like a train to a healthier place.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* * *<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A month before I left, my father and I caught up on what we
respectively had read while he was on a road trip with my mom for over a month.
In the months before that trip I had shared with him two collections of
pop culture essays by Chuck Klosterman that I had enjoyed, inspiring my father
to raid amazon of another book of essays, two Klosterman novels—which didn't
particularly interest me—and a road trip memoir that he insisted I read, to
"let [him] know what [I] think," but that I should wait to read it on
the train, in transit as he had done, for reasons that one may consider
appropriate, dismiss as "cute," or may ascribe to the stoner
synchronicity of playing <i>Dark Side of the Moon </i>while
watching <i>the Wizard of Oz </i>muted, or throwing the radio in the
bath when "White Rabbit" peaks, for examples. He was also going
to postpone lending me <i>Consider the Lobster</i>, in this case just
to spend more time with it—he seemed particularly taken by DFW's ingenious
explication of the famously impossible to understand Wittgenstein in a footnote
to an essay about a new dictionary of English usage. I believe in
synchronicity—as you can tell my father does as well—and I will constantly plan
and interpret the media I consume in relation to its consumption, and the
contexts that circle that consumption. The process is constantly
edifying and—at my most idealistic—the key to accidental insight, the sort of
left-field logic or unexpected parallel that creates new and constructive
ideas. At my most cynical such "insight" is the deluded
justification of a constant no-attention-span need to be doing at least two
things at once, the consequence of too much self-indulgent art and too much <i>cannabis
sativa</i> taken in—sometimes—at once. Needless to say the project
of this reading appealed to me greatly: CK drives around the country visiting
memorials to rock and roll deaths as I take the train across these great
states. He mentions, as a detail that my dad thought I would enjoy, that
he narrows down his CD collection to 600 essentials he would need for the
drive. I brought my walkman and emptied out my 16-cassette book of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_Roberts" target="_blank">Oral Roberts</a> reading <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb_hqexKkw8" target="_blank"><i>The Old Testament</i> </a>and filled it with 16
essential tapes. Surely this was to be a positive experience for
everything involved, textual, human, and otherwise. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* * *<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
About a month has passed since I first began this essay on
that train in my notebook, and I have yet to break my streak in autobiography consumption.
I have visited a friend in <st1:country-region>Spain</st1:country-region>
and read Hemingway's great non-fiction tome on bullfighting, <i>Death in
the Afternoon</i>, and re-connected with my father's side of the family in <st1:country-region>England</st1:country-region>,
and borrowed from my youngest cousin and read Orwell's memoir of an
over-educated jobless tramp, <i>Down and Out in Paris and London</i>.
I have just returned from visiting the middle cousin in <st1:city>London</st1:city>
(though Orwell was still in <st1:city>Paris</st1:city>
in the book) and am at my aunt's country house outside of Droitwich as I write
this. It is actually being shown to a prospective buyer presently and I am forced to conclude
that I have not contributed to the property value as I type away in the dining
room, and try to finish the story begun a month ago, lived a week before that.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* * *<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The first parallel between these three books—just to clarify <i>Darkness
Visible</i> by William Styron, <i>Consider the Lobster </i>by
David Foster Wallace, and the Klosterman book—is, well, I guess I should start
with the presence of the narrator/author as character in the story, but also,
stand-in for the reader. We are to trust our author as we would our own
selves in a given situation. This is perhaps the difficulty in switching
from the radically empathetic authors Styron and Wallace to the unflinchingly
unfeeling narrative persona of Klosterman, which brings me to the parallel I
initially intended to address at the start of this paragraph (a paragraph which
saw the return of my aunt, the realtor, the prospective buyer and her son back
into the room, a moment of eye contact with the 4-year old little English boy
who proceeded to sprint out of the room): the treatment of the superficiality of
Los Angeles. David Foster Wallace begins the book (or the editor of the book opted to begin) with a 50-page, exhaustive account of—simultaneously—the
Adult Video News Awards for achievement in pornography, the pornography
industry, the media surrounding the pornography industry, and what it
entails to be a member of the media covering the AVN awards. The depth
of Wallace's humanity is not explicit, but rather a visceral flip-side to the
frank objectification and commodification of the greatest expression of love
and intimacy humans have. DFW treats his subjects fairly, quotes them
accurately, backs up any detail with facts and context, with such rigor that
what is initially just superficial (porn and its stars) becomes hideous in the
extent to which the culture surrounding it has become autonomous with its own
bureaucracy, media and logic. Nowhere is judgment ever cast; nowhere
does DFW take an implied position of superiority (I am composing this in the
blogger platform which does not seem to have a means to footnote certain phrasings
that need clarification, unfortunately, which I have let slide until the
present moment when I feel the need to note that I do not have a copy of the
essay in front of me [I left it in Berlin to collect at the end of my trip], I
did not take notes on it as I read it, and I generally concede it is poor
practice to use words like "nowhere" in serious literary discussion—
I am thus admitting to and partaking in a particular brand of writing that
values feelings and memories over the scholastic church of close reading
and citation).<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I read this essay in the hours before arriving in <st1:city>Salt
Lake City</st1:city> in the middle of the night, anticipating a
quick visit with two friends who agreed to stop at the train station, and the
morning after, when it turned out the train was 3 hours late. At a
certain point I read Klosterman's discussion of why he did not want to go to LA
in his trip (he is visiting the sites of famous deaths in the history of
American rock and roll, or, as he puts it in perhaps the most cringe-inducing
line I have read in a book, "going to get his death on"), although it
has some notable rock and roll deaths, which I can't presently share because he
did not end up going there and you can google them just as well as I can.
Instead he presents a scene out of an imaginary screenplay that typifies
his feelings about the failings of Los Angeles, its culture, and its people
(again, I do not have my father's copy in front of me [this time it is in St.
Louis to be collected further along the return stage of the hero's journey] and
I am more or less describing the memories of my feelings about the work in
question. Abysmal scholarship, I know). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* * *<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Klosterman and DFW essentially get to the same point: LA is
superficial and the people who live there and buy into it suffer from a certain
lack of humanity as a consequence; both pieces of writing (the bit of
screenplay dialogue and the DFW essay, which is titled, by the way, in the
book, "Big Red Son," and, in <i>Premier </i>magazine in
1998, "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment") have a slightly detached
outsider view on the situation and present it as ridiculous. The
difference is Klosterman has invented this unbelievable and absurd situation as
an exaggeration of stereotypes, whereas DFW is documenting an unbelievable and
absurd situation that is a greater exaggeration of stereotypes than one can
imagine who is not privy to the <st1:city>San Fernando</st1:city>
world of pornography. The waiter trying to get into the media world of LA
is a flat invention of Klosterman, and we believe in the authenticity of
Klosterman because he finds conversing with the stereotype trying, so trying that the scene ends as he
"jams a steak knife into his own heart...twice...not unlike
singer-songwriter Elliott Smith."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* * *<o:p></o:p></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Despite depression’s eclectic reach, it has demonstrated
with fair convincingness that artistic types (especially poets) are
particularly vulnerable to the disorder—which in its graver, clinical
manifestation takes upward of 20 percent of its victims by way of suicide. Just
a few of these fallen artists, all modern, make up a sad but scintillant roll
call: Hart Crane, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Arshile Gorky, Cesare
Pavese, Romain Gary, Sylvia Plath, Mark Rothko, John Berryman, Jack London,
Ernest Hemingway, Diane Arbus, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Anne Sexton,
Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky—the list goes on. </blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
—William Styron, <i>Darkness Visible</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The sets of circumstances that make me feel the way I do
about the conclusion of Klosterman's self-satisfied SoCal commentary are very
particular to me, so I shouldn't suppose everybody should shudder as deeply as
I did upon first reading it (which is different from the cringing at the
tackiness of "going to get my death on" or the treatise that follows
in the next chapter on why Radiohead's <i>Kid A </i>predicted
September 11th). I found myself on the train restraining myself from
querying aloud if he really thought his character, sitting beside a pool
sipping on a coke, having lost patience with the waiter was really equatable
with the pain that Elliott Smith was confronting in the moments before he
killed himself. I was getting over-excited obviously. This disjoint
is the source of the humor of the passage, the same disjoint that runs through
the entire book: Klosterman voyages to and stands on the graves of people who
felt and expressed feeling in art and he proceeds to fail to feel and express feeling about
it in the book; and that's what passes for clever; and if I complain about it I
don't get it? He generally doesn't take the thing very seriously.
He prefers to put his thought and feeling into diatribes, for example,
comparing the great loves of his life to members of KISS. The eye-rolling
you may be able sense in my words is anticipated by Klosterman and he seems to
prefer to relish in his superficiality and his chauvinism as opposed to
rationalize it, or take a critical, self-aware approach to it, and he even
references someone like myself, a member of the blog community, buying his book
and taking the piss out of it, again a paraphrase: the book and I remain an
ocean a part.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
* * *<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I heard the news that Elliott Smith died at recess, between
2nd and 3rd periods, toward the end of my last year of high school when my
friend Amy asked if I had heard. I said I had not and she informed me
"he stabbed himself in the fucking chest." It was an intense
image, to say the least, to carry with you for the rest of the school day, but
I happened also to have an intense affinity for the man. <i>Either/Or </i>was
one of my favorite albums; and I came of age to a mix tape that had
"Miss Misery" as an emotional highlight—I brought this mix tape on
the train, as it turned out. I first understood Existentialism, roughly,
through his line "You can do what you want to whenever you want to / you
know it doesn't mean a thing: big nothing." <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Celebrities die. It is always sad, but not always
unexpected. It was amazing that Johnny Cash lived as long as he did.
I hadn't studied Derrida before he died, so I wasn't as deeply affected.
It was, of course, very sad when George died. However, suicide is
an unfathomable atrocity and the pain that leads to it and the pain it causes,
while incomparable to each other, are each indescribable. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When David Foster Wallace killed himself I was finishing my last semester of college. I heard the news while listening to <i>Fresh
Air</i> and heard his voice for the first time in a replayed interview.
I didn't really know who he was. I checked out <i>Brief Interviews
with Hideous Men </i>and read it in my free time. I graduated
in December and the ceremony was cancelled due to a sudden snow storm which, in
<st1:place><st1:city>Portland</st1:city>, <st1:state>Oregon</st1:state></st1:place>,
has a tendency to halt things like graduation ceremonies. What became
known as "This is Water," DFW's commencement speech in 2005 at Kenyon
College became my own <i>de facto</i> commencement speech, and he has
since been a focal point of my post-academic life, and a source of a great
melancholy in that every profound identification I make with his work and with
the author behind it makes me feel the loss more. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After high school I lived at my parents' house and saved
money for an extensive trip: I was to drive my grandmother's car to Whidbey
Island, Washington from Salinas, California, visiting my brother and a dozen
friends along the way, leave it there for her, return to Oregon, somehow, fly
to visit a friend in Massachusetts, fly to London to spend Christmas with my
family, and then travel with my brother to Madrid and back. On <st1:date day="19" month="10" year="2004">October 19, 2004</st1:date> Elliott Smith's
unfinished album about all of the deep dark places his soul was when he died
was posthumously released, and I bought it that day while visiting my brother
in Arcata and listened to it over and over. I made a tape of the CD to
play in the tape deck I had velcroed to the dashboard. I made a great
friend based in part on the shared enthusiasm we had for the album.
Interestingly, bear with me, Joanna Bolme helped finish the album after
Smith's death, and she was on tour with Stephen Malkmus in 2005 when DFW spoke
to Kenyon college, when I saw her in person (with my new friend and my brother)
at the Fillmore and my brother shouted and got her attention. And, on the
off chance you find that interesting, it might interest you to know that the
friend I was visiting in <st1:state>Massachusetts</st1:state>
went to <st1:place><st1:placename>Hampshire</st1:placename> <st1:placetype>College</st1:placetype></st1:place>,
Elliott Smith's alma mater. By the way, I have never seen <i>Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas</i>, I have just had the scene paraphrased for me
about throwing the radio into the bathtub when "White Rabbit" peaks.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* * *<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Consider the Lobster," the essay from which the
book gets its name, is, in essence, about tourism. I am, in essence, a
tourist. While I am staying with friends and family, travelling at a
leisurely pace, and trying to participate in real things, the label is not easy
to escape, however much I would like to. The essay describes a lobster
festival in <st1:state>Maine</st1:state>, though, as is
his wont, DFW comes from a compassionate perspective. It becomes fairly
disgusting to center a massive celebration around the act of boiling hundreds
of creatures alive. I am easier to persuade of the morals or this, as I
am a vegetarian; but it is undeniable to deny the fact of it. The biggest
grain of truth comes, in true DFW fashion, in a footnote, really, in a metaphor
at the end of a footnote. What is said is that attending such phenomena,
which the locals leave to the tourists to do, is like pouncing on something
that is already dead, killing it further. I am from <st1:place><st1:city>Monterey</st1:city>,
<st1:state>California</st1:state></st1:place>, and around the time of my birth
<st1:city>Monterey</st1:city> declared itself dead, put
the bell jar on, and invited the world to witness what it was. I can
empathize with DFW's point, and the metaphor is that we flock as tourists to
prey on the dead thing at the shore as a lobster bottomfeeds (the book is still
in <st1:state>Berlin</st1:state>!) on the dead protein
scattered on the beach, though of course on the water side of the beach. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I believe everything I have endeavored to say has been said,
apart from the conclusion about why I find Chuck Klosterman's work so
offensive, which I still don't care to do because, like I said, it is so tautological,
he describes it himself in his book, but, in his mind, transcends it by doing
so. The question for me is how do I tell my own story, taking a trip 8
years later, on the other side of my twenties, which has such similar contours,
with not just Elliott Smith's unfinished, haunting swan song as its soundtrack,
but the entirety of my past, and how do I continue to take this trip as both an
empathetic human and a consuming tourist, and where do I end up at the end of
it? What has changed, if anything, in eight years, besides receiving a
bachelor's degree, and what solace can I find in the credo that This Is Water,
when it wasn't enough for David Foster Wallace? And why should I have
spent five hours typing up this essay on my vacation between lunch and teatime
instead of, what, drinking cocoa and watching the rain come down? There
are, of course, many positive answers to this, deeply personal to me, but it is
teatime and I have typed enough for a day of vacation.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</blockquote>
ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-81651888928005201042012-09-27T21:31:00.003-07:002013-04-19T12:26:56.033-07:00Should Mr. Shaw-Kitch Shave his Mustache?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-56203497777627113292012-09-14T17:25:00.000-07:002013-04-19T12:26:56.032-07:00An M&MsI turned on the television today and there was<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9FPqqrf3Xs" target="_blank"> an M&Ms commercial </a>on. It featured Ms. Brown, the bespectacled attractive all-chocolate M&M, on a lunch al fresco date with a handsome man with, what seems like, a generic European accent. The narrative of the commercial seems to suggest he is younger, but how old does an M&M get? A man in his twenties is, I assume, ancient to the average M&M. They were having a fight about the superficiality of his love for her because he said that she looked "delicious today." She rolls her eyes and says "Honestly. Sometimes I think you only like me because I'm and M&M's." I always thought that a bag of M&M's contained M&M after delicious M&M, and that's still what makes linguistic sense to me. As in, "try at least one coconut M&M. You will be pleasantly surprised." And plural: "I just ate a whole bag of peanut M&Ms for lunch." Would the plural of an M&Ms be pronounced em-an-em-zis?<br />
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%26M's" target="_blank">I now know</a> that Forrest Mars, Sr. patented the candy coated chocolates after "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica;"><a href="http://www.virtualnewarknj.com/memories/newark/bodianmm.htm" target="_blank">a visit to Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. He'd encountered soldiers eating pellets of chocolate encased in a hard sugary coating which prevented them from melting.</a> </span>And I know that Mars teamed up with the son of the president of Hershey's (a strategic move in chocolate ration World War Two America), Bruce Murrie, and that M. & M.'s pill-sized taste explosions were given exclusively to the military during the war. My apologies to anybody who read the wikipedia page and realizes how much uncited direct quotation was involved there. But aren't I just using the agreed upon best descriptors for the fact of the matter if its from wikipedia? Wikipedia called them pellets after citing the <a href="http://www.virtualnewarknj.com/memories/newark/bodianmm.htm" target="_blank">Old Newark Memories</a> site without quotes <i>because pellets is the perfect word. </i><br />
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This notion, however, goes contrary to the point I am trying to make: it is, obviously, in fact "an M&M's,"however, that sounds fucking ridiculous and, no matter how much I learn facts about the candy-covered chocolate pellets I will never say that.ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-13010762152586180232012-08-30T15:20:00.002-07:002013-04-19T12:26:56.028-07:00John Stewart<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>California Bloodlines Side A</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If you google “John Stewart” to find out more about the recording artist after you purchase one of his records secondhand for 89 cents because it’s called “California Bloodlines” and you are Californian, google will give you results relating to the host of<i> the Daily Show with Jon Stewart</i>, assuming that you were misspelling his name and meaning to look him up, and that you did not care about the prolific folk singer-songwriter. I did google "John Stewart" which showed results instead for "Jon Stewart." I did not ask to search instead, as I had initially intended, for "John Stewart," so I have grown acquainted with the recording artist exclusively through record stores.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I am moving out of my house a week from tomorrow and one of my projects has been to listen to all of the John Stewart records I have acquired and decide which I want to keep.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I certainly shall keep <i>California Bloodlines </i>for I find it to be a generally listenable record with moments of originality and excellence. For this reason I bought <i>The Phoenix Concerts </i>(1974), a double live LP, when I saw it for $1.89 at the same record store, and why I bought respective 1970, ’72, and ’73 recordings <i>Willard</i>, <i>Sunstorm</i>, and <i>Cannons in the Rain</i>, all of which I have listened to in passing no more than once.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Looking through my other records, deciding which ones to keep, I noticed that John Stewart was the third that made the Kingston Trio one more than a duo. He was the one without a cleft chin.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>California Bloodlines Side B</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The lyrics and ambience of the songs on <i>California Bloodlines</i> describe a rich connection between the history of western settlement and the present (or at least <i>then </i>present) American reality. The eponymous first song on the record tells of a state’s identity as the veins and arteries of the singer, a history literally pulsing through his flesh. “Mother Country” is a spoken storytold song about a newspaper article in the <i>San Francisco Chronicle </i>and the reanimation through Stewart’s imagination of turn of the 20th century life—”Why, they were just a lot of people doing the best they could,” he put it simply.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What interests me about this mode of research, and accessing of media in general, is that it is unmediated by present-day modes of either media or commerce—all five of my LPs, all six records, cost less than a beer at the bar, either in the local record store bargain bin or from the not-for-profit thrift store; and I listed to them without the internet, cable, subscribing only to electricity. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I googled “John Stewart” I did not clarify that I had <i>meant </i>John Stewart, that I did not misspell the name of my intended search result. If I did clarify I don’t remember, because all I know—or at least consciously remember—I just know from these records, and at a certain point I decided I would leave it at that, I would comprehend him exclusively through the mode of his early ‘70s hey-day—I would set them on the turn table, plop a needle on them, and tap my toe while reading the inserts. And, as you may have guessed, catalogue the experience as it happened in a vaguely avant-garde personal essay about the privilege and power of certain modes of media over others.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Willard A</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“And this song is a lie.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">—John Stewart, “Never Goin’ Back”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I started with <i>California Bloodlines </i>because I could not find a date on it, and I bought it first, so I assumed this coincidence to mean enough that I should listen to it first. At least the familiarity I had with it would lend to an accessible introduction, perhaps. Perhaps the sentimentality that I hold for my state and all croons directed towards it would shine through the opening words. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the insert to <i>Willard </i>John Stewart looks like a bohemian boyscott, his hair 1965 Beatles length, neckerchiefed, in the studio, in one photo contemplating, in another laughing, then mugging, next boyishly smiling, strumming, a talent plucked from the glow of the campfire, or perhaps the festival at harvest, entertaining the dust bowl era farmers seen in the old photograph on the back of the record.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A degree of theatricality—perhaps even schtick—is in the music and performances of the Kingston Trio and their era (not as bad as their contemporary Lawrence Welk and his kitschfest variety show), an artificiality that Christopher Guest and company made great light of in <i>A Mighty Wind</i>. John Stewart does not put on voices or play characters in his songs; instead he is an era-less, eternal troubadour, passing through the world of the West and its railroad tracks and highways, through its fields and mountains, and telling its story as though it could be either 1972 or 1892.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“The Dakota sky made me feel like the river / runnin’ free, runnin’ free,” and he has a “belly full of Tennessee” just two songs before, and before the side is over he is “back in Pomona,” a song dedicated to the iconography of blacksmithing and the county fair—the LA County Fair, as it turns out. We also learn in an astericks that “Ginny us slang for racehorse groom.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Willard B</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Just as <i>California Bloodlines </i>starts its first side with “California Bloodlines,” <i>Willard </i>starts side B with “Willard,” a song that—while not bad—tries way too hard. PErhaps it is impossible write a good song that begins, “Willard, he’s a loner / living by the railroad track.” However, there lies a great virtue in singing a ballad with complete sincerity, and indeed I quite enjoy the schmaltz of the chorus because it is so unpretentious with none of the self-satisfaction with which you can hear Paul McCartney sing his 3rd person ballads.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And his mamma knows that he was once a child.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Mamma she was the first one to hear us cry.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And my mamma knows that I was once a child.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Could it be we’re all just Willard in disguise?</span></blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was struggling to imprint ink into my notebook while sitting on the sofa, listening to Side 1, so I grabbed John Stewart’s double live album to write on, thus solving the problem.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“All American Girl,” Side 2, track 3, hints at the potentially fascist message of John Stewart’s music—the “All American Girl” is “a blue-eyed blonde,” queen of our country’s history, a white history narrated by Stewart and populated by his ancestors—a simpler, old-fashioned, bucolic world that seems to resemble the vision of Thomas Kinkade more than my own. The song that just finished declared “that across the hill from Placerville the wind sure can set you free.” Thomas Kinkade is from Placerville; those same winds that bore him into this world and set him free.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The song playing now is called “Great White Cathedrals” and begins, “Was it you all along, good Jesus?” Has pop culture justly blacklisted a retrograde songwriter who ignored the revolutions of the ‘60s and instead embodied a conservative persona based on Woody Guthrie, the great troubadour leftist of the 20th Century? His songs don’t have outright political messages like Guthrie’s or an actual conservative songwriter like George Jones (whose record <i>Good Ol’ Bible</i> I did decide to get rid of). The resolution of “All American Girl” is “she knows she has changed from the dreams that haunt her in her bed.” That is unsettling in a timeless way, and interesting beyond most of whatever dated anachronism pop culture considers to be the great <i>ouvre </i>of American music.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Marshall Wind” brings me all the way back. It speaks to me directly and personally, he shouts out “‘Get back, JoJo,’ that’s what Paul said,” in a climax self-consciously evoking that of “Hey, Jude,” for the geography is mine—Paul knows nothing about Tucson, much less California grass—the song is mine; it is not New York’s, not England’s, not Nashville’s. Highway 1 runs through my hometown, and “Til the day was done on highway one / Dancing off the bottle was the Sunday sun.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Sunstorm Side B*</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Spoken word, “this was a story about Haley’s Comet,” increasing crescendo as a man tells of going on the roof of his parents’ motel in Lexington, Kentucky to see Haley’s Comet, it hung over the neighbor’s barn, the same song form as “Mother Country,” storytelling with repetitive background music as verse to the sung chorus, in this case, to a tune that is reminiscent to the theme from “Reading Rainbow”:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Kentucky lightshine</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">well it fall from the sky</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Kentucky lightshine</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Stranger in the sky.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now that I suddenly find myself to be a John Stewart scholar, I find this song engrossing—Haley’s Comet represents the decades that pass between each generation’s great flares, and makes us think of the first great frontier writer Mark Twain who came and went with the comet. While “Mother Country” is charmingly cheesy in its hopeless nostalgia, “An Account of Haley’s Comet” is not good, though admirable its unique vision and originality of form.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Inside the record is a photo of John Stewart with his family, his son wearing a San Francisco ‘49ers shirt that says “I’m a niner.” Here follows a series of rhetorical questions based on what, to me, is an obvious duplicity in being both a literal ‘49ers football fan and being an actual inhabitant in a society created by literal ‘49ers:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Did he realize that years later a budding California scholar would analyze that his father has made a living appropriating an aesthetic born of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill and the rush of 1849 and the millions of people that followed in the coming century, and that he had inherited that tradition like the affinities for the local football team? Did it occur to those who made the record? And, if so, was it on purpose?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is also a picture of John S. Stewart, John Stewart’s dad, smoking a pipe. It turns out the “Account of Haley’s Comet” was his dad’s story, recorded in San Rafael on a Sony TC-110 stereo cassette machine.” I feel like a jerk now for panning it as a terrible song to start a record because it’s actually a great, touching tribute to his father, and the first song on Side B.</span></div>
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*When looking for the name of the song I realized I had started with side B, which is also where “Mother Country” lands on <i>California Bloodlines</i>, which leads me to believe that it was released around the same time as <i>Sunstorm</i>.</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Sunstorm Side A</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My oh my how times does fly</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Makes you want to lay right down and die.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">John Stewart has written a song called “Big Joe” about a truck driver, and “Joe” about a songwriter whose unnamed girl shines for him. I am listening to a song called “Cheyenne” right now. “Big Joe” was on an album called <i>Willard</i>, which features the song “Willard.” John Stewart, the singer of the proper noun. I just learned the song/album “Sunstorm”/<i>Sunstorm </i>comes from the line “Livin’ in an Oklahoma loner’s sunstorm.” Filling out a fictional song with “real” people’s names and the names of real places can lend specificity to abstract concepts, personality to fictional people, like coloring in the lines with something familiar. This is a trope immortalized also in near-contemporaries Paul McCartney and Jimmy Buffet, “Eleanor Rigby” and “Margaritaville,” for example.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The side finishes with “Arkansas Breakout.” It’s a fucking barnburner. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Like the Wheels of a train </span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">you must run run run from the rain.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Like the Wheels of a train </span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">you must run run run from the pain.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Cannons in the Rain Side A</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As I take my first bathroom break, still listening through the walls, it strikes me that I am enacting a fairly disrespectful piece of pseudo-literary criticism—writing about a work as I experience it—all consideration, perception, and appreciation occurring as I describe my own interaction with half a dozen circles of plastic I saved from the trash. Better than nothing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">John Stewart is divided in time on <i>Cannons in the Rain</i>—on the cover is Stewart as a maroon/sepia-hued wheat-chaff-chewing civil war era young man, and the back shows a window with two curtains, one slightly pulled and attached to the peeling wallpapered wall, revealing hints of foliage outside, an arcadian scene abandoned by time. Inside the record in the third “center photo” he is a 1970s Aviator-bespectacled country crooner at an outdoor concert, labelled by a badge on his breast pocket that reads “performer.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The first song is another in the genre of romanticizing a frontier local and its rough and tumble past. Now it is “Durango.” Without a doubt “Take me down to Mexico” is a worthless cliché; but, unlike the James Taylor version (“Mexico”), the song is listenable. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Cannons in the Rain B</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Each song on the record is dedicated to a different person or group of persons. Most intriguingly “Anna on a Memory” is “for Coyote.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Armstrong,” which begins side B, is the first song not about (mid)western white folks doin’ what they do:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Black boy in Chicago</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Playing in the street</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not enough to wear</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">not enough to eat.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s a song, as it turns out, about not-white people around the world watching the moon landing on TV, that is observing white people occupying a space that is not theirs, much like westward expansion and the flag plantings in Texas, California, etc. Glorious government-funded destiny. This song is “for Scott Carpenter and John Glenn.” Neil Armstrong died last night. Lance Armstrong stopped lying about his steroid use.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The last verse of the song ties the moon to Eden:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And I wonder if a long time ago</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Somewhere in the universe</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They watched a man named Adam</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In terms of topicality, droughts on the plains are certainly timeless, here is this great line from “Wind dies down”: </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">How’s your river flowin’ this week?</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s as dry as the scar on a cowboys cheek.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Title track is dedicated to Mom and Dad. I don’t get it:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">How could you go, Virginia</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And play that drifter’s game</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He sold to you the thunder</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">was cannons in the rain.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Is Virginia the state, or a woman? Is it about the Civil War, or just getting duped by a man? Is it simply an elegant abstraction of the hopeless quixotic visions ( “Your Don Quixote’s windmills / were giants in his eyes.”), falling into the romantic trap of aggrandizing your situation and falling for the liars who play into your fantasy? Is that not what is happening here right now with myself? I am re-experiencing nostalgia through old vinyl records, living in Monterey in an insulated past-worshipping void; but John Stewart makes it noble, he reinforces my romanticized black hole, because if there was thunder, if there were windmills, they would be something else—all that remains are the stories of our history that echo through my living room like cannons in the rain.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>The Phoenix Concerts Side A</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A live album can help with context when you don’t know a group very well. We learn which songs were most relevant to the audience at the time, and which hold special significance to the creator of the song. Comparing the tracks to those of the records to which I have just listened it is apparent that some songs I have not heard; I do not own the complete John Stewart <i>ouvre</i>, I am afraid. Also I do not know if any are old Kingston Trio hits, though I doubt it, as he is the sole songwriter in the credits.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“You Can’t Look Back” sounds like an accidental retelling of the Orpheus myth.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For “the Pirates of Stone County Road” he creates the quintessential post WWII family room image of listening to <i>I Love a Mystery! </i>et al and getting lost in your imagination’s play with the sounds of the radio—which is exactly what the radio renaissance is about, what I am saying with this essay! An ever-accelerating proliferation of media is destroying personal imagination, individual experience with a work of art, the popular consciousness, everybody’s lowest common denominator first reaction becomes our mediator with art, politics reality. The world and its media cloak interest me not. Life is elsewhere.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“All of the characters in the shows can come to life in your mind exactly as you wanted them. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is 2012 and I am listened to a 1974 live record in which the singer brings people back to 1950 to sing a song about pirates. I wrote down from <i>Walden</i> today</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools!</span></blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>The Phoenix Concerts Side B</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I don’t understand why double albums have A/D and B/C records instead of A/B and C/D records, because you have to switch records twice to listen in order; but that is how they make records.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Today I went to my friend Chad’s English class. They had prepared questions on sustainability and were split into 3 groups who rotated between conversations with myself and two other experts in English. I was hungover and the day was a surreal struggle. I rode my bicycle, brought my copy of <i>Walden</i>, and wore my best thrift store outfit. I brought a package of cookies that I realized had “kosher fish gelatin,” as both an offering and a prop for my vegetarianism. “10 dollar outfit!” one student exclaimed when I told the thrift story of my jacket, trousers and shoes.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I wanted to explain the instability of American consumption for consumption’s sake, not for the sake of sustainability—consumption as reuse, as elections to maintain sustainable infrastructure, consuming to sustain, not to waste.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>The Phoenix Concerts Side C</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For me it is greater than just physical—I believe in ideas that last, that withstand the passage of generations with their integrity. The capitalist power structures dictate a process of fad and rejection, a burst of commerce and a run-off of waste. The sixties did something exciting because the youth-marketed commodity of rock and roll was appropriated by musicians with integrity, and commerce and art became one—anything more commercial eventually became waste (for a comprehensive Linda Ronstadt collection of half a dozen LPs find 10 dollars and visit a few places that sell used records), and anything more art becomes a fetish object (one time I saw a copy of <i>Two Virgins</i> and, needless to say, I was very excited). The Kingston Trio is not very interesting, nor is Judy Collins, nor is John Denver, nor are all the other boring mainstream folk acts of the ‘60s. But is it possible that there, in that trio, contributing the baritone notes to the harmony, the one without a baby’s bottom chin, was the most important and quintessentially Californian singer-songwriter of the 20th century?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As I listen to John Stewart sing “California Bloodlines” live in Phoenix in 1974 on my record player a week before I move out of my house, I cannot help but feel a little sentimental. I am making the great transition between country music tropes, leaving home for the road—instead of being in my place, I am that place, carrying it with me, and sharing it with whoever cares to ask.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There’s California Bloodlines in my heart</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And a California heartbeat in my soul.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s inevitable getting nostalgic for what you still have when you are going through the conscious acts of preparing to let it go. It’s a process of deciding what of this life you have lived is and will remain you—what you decide to keep and what must be let go.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>The Phoenix Concerts Side D</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I have decided I am going to keep all of the records.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I know a man name E.A. Stewart</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He spelled it S-T-U-A-R-T</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And he had some of the finest horses you’ve ever seen</span></blockquote>
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Today on Science Friday they did a Neil Armstrong tribute and played a version of "Armstrong" different than the one I had heard. When I just googled "Armstrong John Stewart" this cover version was the first result:</div>
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This was the third: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-december-2-2009/lance-armstrong</div>
ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-33195914159841432932012-08-20T14:17:00.001-07:002013-04-19T12:26:56.029-07:00To anyone who has never commuted by bicycleI should first note that I have not ridden my bicycle for exactly a week since its chain snapped at the top of the hill between Nepenthe and Big Sur. A spoke also snapped and it should be fixed within the week. I have since come into control of a car that I borrowed a few days later that I needed for a commute to Salinas. Its owner is legally not allowed to drive so it is indefinitely in front of my house. A few days later I began my one month borrowing of my father's Prius while he is on vacation with my mom. <br />
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I am sharing this information to show that I am not sanctimonious nor completely averse to driving cars.<br />
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That said, I get a greater understanding of car drivers when I am driving a car, which brings me to the first issue I would like to address in this PSA:<br />
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1. When you accelerate into a red light it triples the number of times that I have to ride my bike with a death machine inches to my left. You pass me as you accelerate into a red light, I pass you as you stop at the red light, and then you pass me again as you accelerate into the next red light.<br />
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Last night I remember thinking while watching the Beatles Anthology 1 that I had an important thought for an essay that I wanted to write, but that it was such a big breakthrough I would remember it when I sat down to write the essay. Today I tried to remember what it was.<br />
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I decided it was one of two possibilities:<br />
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Possibility a (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb_hqexKkw8" target="_blank">for an essay on the Beatles</a>)—That the Beatles embody a positive interpretation of <i>the Metamorphosis</i>, that Gregor Samsa flies in the end from his room and becomes an existentialist beat hero, joins with the man on the flying pie who tells John that they should become the Beatles with an A. I had listened to the David Rakoff tribute <i>This American Life </i>3 times over the weekend and had been thinking of <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/470/transcript" target="_blank">the Dr. Seuss/Gregor Samsa piece</a>.<br />
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Possibility b (for this essay)—That the one time that I bussed a table that had 5 full water glasses and brought them back to the kitchen and said "¿Porque piden más aqua si lo quieren?" frustrated that not only was water wasted, but that I had to carry 5 full glasses of water on a tray, and Carlos said, in slight jest, "hay que proteger el medio ambiente," and I asked if that's why he rides a bike. Obviously, he has no driver's license and can't afford a car if he did.<br />
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The second possibility reached greater development as I went to sleep and formed it into a metaphor for the entitled mindset that goes into not refusing water you will not drink and also accelerating into red lights: you are not responsible for what goes on around you: you are not responsible for the energy that makes your car go: you do not pour or bus the water: you can go days without serving yourself anything or using your own energy for locomotion, so why take responsibility for it?<br />
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I am sure I am very frustrating to other cars, especially to all of the sports car-driving tourists who have been in town for Concourse d'elegance this week because I do not accelerate into red lights while driving my father's Prius. I can see the consumption in the car's control panel so I know if I go 0-60 on a slight hill in 5 seconds I will get 30 miles to the gallon. However, if I do it in 15 seconds and accelerate using the hill I will get 100 miles to the gallon. So I do that latter, the Porsche passes me, merges in front of me, and I meet it at the stop light 10 seconds later. <br />
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Accelerating into red lights is a metaphor for the mass dependence upon machines that I witness on the roads; it is also bothersome to myself as a bicyclist concerned for his saftey.<br />
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2. When you arrive at a stop sign before I do please go first. I don't want to come to a full stop at a stop sign, but I have to if a car is there. You are not doing me a favor by letting me go first. You are forcing me to lose all my momentum, put my foot down, and start from a stop with you, the good fucking samaritan spectating.<br />
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3. When you, I hope, check to see if a car is coming before opening your door, consider that a bicycle is another possible object traveling 25 miles an hour a foot from your car.<br />
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4. Please don't shout out your window "get a car." I do not want a car.ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-58193566148727818902012-07-31T19:26:00.002-07:002012-09-07T22:08:56.724-07:00My Scholastic Failure<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">a photo I found in </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">a book of photos of Australia. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">I have since framed it,</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">and scanned it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">In a sense my application to graduate school was the inevitable culmination of my life’s narrative. </span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">As all toddlers do </span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">I developed the basic skills of a scholar, allowing me to thrive in kindergarten and elementary school. I read </span><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Goosebumps</span></i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"> instead of playing outside for all of 3rd grade. I applied to the Monterey Academy of Oceanographic Sciences in 8th grade, putting me on a successful academic track, and I graduated with a 4.17 weighted GPA and acceptance into several fine institutions. I received a BA in English four odd years later. And three years later I applied to the PhD programs in English Literature at UCs Berkeley and Santa Cruz. What is inevitable cannot always happen by itself; often what’s inevitable can never actually occur.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">In another sense, however, applying to to go back to school was the final ritual in a massive institutional timeline of distraction after distraction from what I ultimately have decided to be my life; and by that ("my life") I mean a process managed on my own terms, based on my own goals, directed by my own affinities, accelerated by my own talents, tapered by my own inabilities. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">For the last three years I have worked in elementary schools, first as a substitute teacher, and met dozens and dozens of 6-year-old inmates fresh into society’s citizen-making system. In my interaction with these uncompromised individuals, walled fountains of idiosyncrasy, I have learned much about school, childhood, and where the two meet, those 17 academic years that tie my recently-graduated self to these kindergartners.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">I recently remembered in 1st grade when we put on a play about the pilgrim’s arrival in America, I was given the task during the stormy passage of the </span><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Mayflower </span></i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">to flip the lights on and off to simulate lightning. As I came to know classes I realized that there would only be 1 or 2 students that I would give permission to flip the lights on and off; and I therefore learned what it meant to be that kid—as I child I was the quietest most obedient kid in the class. I sort of always knew this, but I guess I never thought about what that objectively entailed, that why I acted why I did and what I did was so definitely this. I was the kid who liked school, did well, and was rewarded.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">On the last day of 3rd grade I was the second kid in class to get ice cream because I read in excess of 2 hours a day after school. My brother would come into my room and beg me to play outside with him and the neighbor children and I would continue to sit on by bed throne across the room from my desk opting for continued dominion over my own reality. By some incomprehensible feat of dedication Priscilla Yen succeeding in reading twice as much as me. The reading logs of the 30-student class in sum did not even equal mine. She may have tripled my log. As</span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"> I remember i</span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">t wasn’t even close.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">My second job in primary education was as a proctor for the mandatory English test for students whose parents marked that Spanish was spoken at home, even if English was also checked. I interviewed 5 year olds two weeks into kindergarten asking them to point to (I am not allowed to discuss the specifics of the test; I do not know how binding this is 3 years later; but just conjure typical testing imagery and you’ll have the idea). One young man said simply to me, in response to the first question, </span><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">pero, Señor, yo no hablo inglés</span></i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">. Luckily I was allowed to call off the test at that point. However, when a student managed a single correct response in English we had to go through the whole painful charade. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">I could tell already some of them would not like school, and they had in excess of a decade left. I worked the month of May two years later with a group of 60 young scholars about to enter kindergarten. One mother asked me if I had any suggestions on the first moment that she and her daughter would be separated, how to</span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"> create it,</span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"> manage it, make it something that would happen for the first time and then happen nearly every day of the rest of their lives. I did not pretend to have any advice. I was an expert on the alphabet, but not this.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">I qualified my post-graduate education-industry experience as a learning experience for my Statement of History Statement for UC Berkeley, so as to justify just what exactly I’ve been doing with myself since I graduated, how working with marginalized youngsters gave me a meaningful perspective on the world:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">These lessons have infused all reading that I now do; I approach situations with a new empathy and appreciation for what I may contribute; I see movies differently, seeking to understand how the film critiques or contributes to the current power structure; I wonder how an article or a billboard closes or opens opportunities for the struggling. And such lessons always bring me back to the Steinbeck books I have been reading my whole life. I always could quote, “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can’t eat, I’ll be there,” but I never really understood it, because I was never really there. But now I have been and I do not plan to drop out like the preacher of </span><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Grapes of Wrath </span></i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">and reappear as an instigator in times of injustice. I aspire to contribute to UC Berkeley’s institutionalization of social justice and profound questioning of the ways we have been living, describing and studying our world and its literature. </span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">As I reread these paragraphs now I can pick apart all the mistakes: how can I see the same thing in one situation in a situation that is completely different, and why tie it to the biggest and easiest cliche to come from Steinbeck's pen? What bullshit was I attending to instead of committing myself to applying to graduate school, applying myself to commit to graduate school? Part of me believes that I set myself up to fail. I didn’t really want to go and I dropped clues in my Statements of Purpose, hinting that I wanted to deconstruct writing so broadly and in so many contexts that this very application was both literary theory and literature at the same time. As I read it now it sounds like a sick joke on myself and anyone else who decided—and failed—to live in the world of letters. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">At the end of my second year of college I seemed to be radiating literary inquiry to the point where a stranger asked me in all sincerity to co-author his memoir. Within a nine-month period I had taken five literature classes, to the detriment of my general education performance, and found myself wholly immersed in literary theory and works from Chaucer to Dostoyevsky to Billy Collins, often in the same moment. I presented a paper at my first conference, 2007’s Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature at the University of Portland, and won fifty dollars and a certificate for best all-around essay. It was at this moment, the beginning of summer vacation, that a homeless man named Ed made my acquaintance and enlisted me in his project. I often felt I was assisting Ed with nothing more than a glass of water or a brief respite on the porch, yet we both played into each others' myths. I was the young scholar who could see the literary depth in our dialogue; and he was Jack Kerouac, the spontaneous, drunken storyteller, whose language dripped with experience. By the time the work reached a sort of conclusion, through layering my first-person account of our process with his stories told from memory and transcribed by me, Ed was evicted from the park where we would meet and I had moved from the neighborhood. I never saw him again. </span> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Reading Walter Ong’s <i>Orality and Literacy </i>at the suggestion of my adviser at the time, during a summer meeting on this project, gave me first-hand insight into the relationship between power and storytelling. It put into all-too-real clarity the work of Roland Barthes and other theorists that I had read all semester long in my Literary Theory class. This experience inspired me to reach a point where my research, my writing, and my influence could affect the way we conceive phenomena as natural instead of historical. Ed’s predicament is not an inevitable result of civilization moving forward; it is the consequence of an imperfect and usury development. I could see so clearly the interrelationship between the language of our humble experiment and the larger social phenomenon of Native American disenfranchisement in Portland, Oregon, but I could not share it; I was not able to make others see. I still apply my rigorous academic training to the social facts around me. Presently, I am writing on the uneasy relationship between the history of Pacific Grove and its “Feast of Lanterns” summer celebration. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Even now I don’t really know what I am proposing—expanding literature and its study to the most everyday, unliterary narrative phenomena that appears, from a homeless man’s stream of conscious recollections to a small town yellowface pageant in the place where I presently live. Literary anthropology? I then go into this surreal high school beauty pageant: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">In 1906—the year after the first “Feast”—an act of probable arson drove out Pacific Grove’s Chinese population. Meanwhile, the yearly ceremony continues to appropriate much of Chinese culture, presenting a fascinating disjunction between these two stories that says much about power and storytelling. Gerry Low-Sabado, an outspoken activist and direct descendent of the Chinese fishing village, with whom I have been communicating, only recently learned of her heritage, as her family’s story and language was lost in the process of assimilation. The “Feast” revolves around a dramatized tableau, a “Chinese myth” (that actually has English origins), begging literary study in the way Roland Barthes’ <i>Mythologies</i> did. Such collisions of literature and cultural mythmaking are precisely what interest me. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The “modes of writing, or of representations,” that may “serve as a support of mythical speech” extend past the “written discourse…photography, cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity” of Barthes’ <i>Mythologies</i>. New “modes of writing” and “representation” continuously appear, with languages distinct to each; sit-coms, tweets, stories on <i>This American Life</i>, and small town festivals are composed of literary tropes and will continue to influence literary thought. I am thrilled to be a student of language, and its most literarily significant manifestations, at such an exciting time; and I am especially eager to apply to a program that explores the relationship between the evolutions of literary technology and form.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">Application statements of purpose are a very phony genre of writing; at the same time they are the most direct and sincere account of exactly what we think, believe and desire to accomplish at our most idealistic and positive. I have taken out a bit here because it is very specific about why this department would suit my ambitions and hopes; so it is both boring and sad.</span> <br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I recently had the fortuitous experience of reading Frederick Tuten's <i>Tin Tin in the New World </i>and Tom McCarthy's <i>Tin Tin and the Secret of Literature.</i> The former is an imaginative collision of the characters of Thomas Mann's <i>The Magic Mountain </i>with those of Hergé's <i>Tin Tin </i>universe, and what transpires when they meet in Machu Pichu; and the latter is a rigorous study of the literariness of the comic strip, and its expression of the concurrent ideas occurring in the 20th-century literary theory. The only thing that would excite me more than to study the overlap of all of the texts involved would be to design and teach a class on the accomplishments of Mann, Hergé, Tuten, and McCarthy individually and in conjunction. Such a contextualization would shed insight on the extent to which a work critiques and discusses its narrative, or the extent to which it is “the type of speech chosen by history,” as Roland Barthes refers to myth, a formed charged with “giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency seem eternal.” Hergé and the “Feast of Lanterns,” by means of comic strip and theater, make history “natural” and “eternal.” Hergé’s fascist tendencies in his earlier strips and his collaboration with the Nazis during occupation are forgiven and forgotten as he re-writes <i>Tin Tin </i>as an allegory for liberalism; and “Feast of Lanterns” updates itself, phases out full Chinese make-up, and ignores explicit reference to a Chinese presence in the town’s history.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The work with Ed, however, was never able to interact dynamically with society’s language of mythmaking. I shared the text we created with my creative fiction professor Pauls Toutonghi and we tweaked it to some sort of clarity. Ultimately, he said, it was too short for a book and too long for an article. After I graduated I self-published <i>Tom and I</i>—what Ed always wanted to call it, Tom was his brother—as a contribution to my friend’s art space. With the help of UC Santa Cruz, my future contributions will be more focused and have more of an impact.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I went to UC Santa Cruz in December, not to get to know the department, or stroll the grounds, or pick the brains of current graduate students. To apply to Berkeley (but not Santa Cruz) I had to take the subject test of the GRE for English. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;">The September before I had to take the general exam at a testing agency in San Jose. I had </span><span style="font-size: small;">been to one already to qualify to substitute teach, in a strip mall office building off the 101, I think. I did fantastic on the math section, but just barely passed the writing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;">From the beginning I resented the GRE with an intensity that often manifested itself physically. I was taking the general test the week after my girlfriend moved to Los Angeles; and therefore any preparation I did for the test was time I was not spending with her, also not working, also not relaxing, also not imagining, etc. Helping her move while working full-time and not having a car and worrying about a test I knew I was not prepared for was, simply put, very stressful for me. On the weekday I woke up at my parent’s house (so I could borrow my father’s Prius to drive to San Jose to take the GRE) my mother woke up early to make me coffee so I could be on my way by 6:15 to make it there by 8:30. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When I plan to drive to the airport in San Jose I allow an hour. But this was morning weekday rush hour, a place I'd never been to, and <i>important to my future</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">. I gave myself over 2 hours. It was like I was 17 again waking up early for the SATs. My life depended on four hours spent in a classroom where I was to learn only the stress and fear that standardized tests can create, especially when admission is based upon them.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">There's a dreadful ironic circle about realizing that the exact terribleness about the thing is exactly why you don't really want to be doing it, having to do it anyway for the bigger reasons, and then dealing with the terribleness in question, repeat. Needless to say when I was on California 85 not moving in 5 lanes of traffic, still an unknown distance from the testing center at 8:20—when I could not reach anybody on the phone number given to me on my official testing center print out, when I began crying and literally shouting out of desperation, frustration, failure, and deep sadness all at once, alone in my father's prius—I was not going through the pre-test morning rituals they drill into your head from 3rd grade.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">That November I, again, borrowed my fathers' prius to drive early one Saturday to UC Santa Cruz. The radio spoke of the first Penn State football game without Joe Pa, the first game after the wake of the now-revealed abuse, the first game in the least innocent time for higher education that I have known in my lifetime. It was early for a Saturday, but I was able to dedicate my full attention to the day's Saturday's Weekend Edition on NPR. I had a lot of perspective on this football game.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Eventually I found what was literally named "Classroom Unit 2," after some arbitrary tooling through the forest. I just looked for all of the other people who looked like they were just a little bit too old to be in college. There was an ant line of them going to and from the building, for apparently, unbeknownst to us, cellular phones were not allowed in the testing room. I luckily learned this in the parking lot and was not forced to walk all the way there with my phone and walk all the way back. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">I sat and waited in Classroom Unit 1 with everyone else who did what they were told, that is to arrive half an hour early for no reason and wait for the last person to show up, nearly an hour later, before we could begin to begin. Of course we were not allowed to have anything, so I had nothing. I sat there and overheard conversations between people who knew each other. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">I heard a conversation between Mathematics students, current UCSC students talking about the statistics of the situation. How many people were taking the Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology test (it turns out mostly everyone), how many the Psychology (a few), how many Literature in English (this of course I was curious about—which of these strangers were both my colleagues and competition? Who was going for one of the 30 spots I had applied to in two schools? There turned out to be three others), how many were Biology students? How many people would end up going to graduate school?, etc.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">I started to wonder how each discipline would approach this situation. Would the psychology student think of social psychology studies on behavior and control? Were they studying the factors that make us pay to be in this situation where we submit our time, money, and selves to strangers for no immediately obvious reason? Like the Stanford prison experiment we were new to these roles, the proctors had other jobs 99.9 percent of the time, and I did not take standardized tests 99.9 percent of the time, yet here we were, fulfilling these strange duties that are scripted for us.</span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Did the biologists think about their breakfast and the play between nutrition and synapses? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">The answer to what a literature student would think about this scene, what author encapsulates the literary meaning present, is obvious: Kafka. I was not Andrew Shaw-Kitch; I was ASK, going from one surreal bureaucratic nightmare to the next because I am vaguely aware that this will make me happy, that this is what I need to do. I needed to go to Classroom Unit 2 at UCSC to take the GRE subject test, and wait in Classroom Unit 1 until I was called to wait in line, wait in line, go to my assigned seat segregated from the other English students, open my test booklet at the designated moment, etc.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Toward the end of my undergraduate experience I went to an information session about graduate school. Several professors gave advice, anecdotes, and information about the applications and the experience itself. One professor who spent 9 years on her PhD spoke of a woman with whom she studied who was still working on her dissertation. The professor had worked for 5 years at my school after finishing her program. I did the math: 14 years and counting <i>as a graduate student</i>. 4 years undergraduate. 6 years secondary. 7 years elementary. 31 years as a student. That is a lot of faith that institutional scholasticism is the thing that will fulfill you, through which you will be the person you want to be.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">It took me three years away from school to have the brick and ivy illusion seep back into my consciousness. This inaction, statistically, already invalidated my seriousness. I was not committed. I was not a candidate willing to give all of myself to their institution, trusting them to reward me with a new tweed-coated self that could gesticulate passionately while discussing Keats, and change young lives for the better. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Anyway, I already had a tweed coat. I already gesticulated passionately while discussing Keats. And when <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Star_(film)" target="_blank">Bright Star</a> </i>opened at the movie theater I worked at, and I stood at the door waiting for the theater to be cleaned, I happily gave context to the folks waiting at the front of the line about which letters to Fannie Braun or Keats' sister were being referenced in the film, how the film played with his life and poetry and poetical theories to form a unique mold of the three. I quoted Keats and changed their viewing experience for the better. And then I tore their tickets. And then I would clean the theaters at the next cycle because nobody should be forced to do door twice in one shift.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span>ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-61268603056210424972012-07-30T12:05:00.001-07:002012-08-07T01:22:40.176-07:00This is just to sayOn Monday when I went to Grocery Outlet I bought two Gatorades for 59 cents each thinking that in the near future I might really want a cold Gatorade in my refrigerator. <br />
<br />
I was right, and on Tuesday, a warm day, I drank one of the two (Strawberry/Watermelon) that had at that point been in the fridge long enough to reach that special alchemy that = refreshing.<br />
<br />
On Wednesday, another warm day, I developed a thirst and knew that I had another refreshing experience awaiting me in the ice box. I went to the kitchen, popped open the fridge door, and looked, and looked, but there was no second Strawberry/Watermelon Gatorade. Had I enjoyed the first so much that I immediately drank the second and completely forgot due to an electrolyte/sugar-induced pleasure coma? Did I sleepGatorade-drink while dreaming of a desert? I was late to work and left the mystery at that.<br />
<br />
On Thursday I found a note on the refrigerator, which may have been there the day before without my noticing:<br />
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You can see some coffee stains on the top left of the post-it from its brief visit to the trash can (I was its impulsive tour guide). Once the reptilian reactionary Republican depths of my brain calmed down I realized my roommate had refracted—in a peculiarly late-20th/early-21st century way—one of the most important poems of American literature:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I have eaten<br />
the plums<br />
that were in<br />
the icebox </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
and which<br />
you were probably<br />
saving<br />
for breakfast </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Forgive me<br />
they were delicious<br />
so sweet<br />
and so cold</blockquote>
I got out my William Carlos Williams Reader and left it out for my roommate congratulating him on the bravery of his selfishness—unafraid to be quintessentially human, and even more so in his sincere owning up to it, to being "thirsty and weak."<br />
<br />
When I saw him I asked him if he saw my note, if he saw the book, if he, also a student of English literature, made the connection between the fruit of WCW's ice box and the chilled Gatorades. He had not, but he had saved three plums from a dozen given to him from a friend's back yard to give to me to make amends.<br />
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they were delicious</blockquote>
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<br /></blockquote>ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-2033206642648703132012-07-25T10:29:00.000-07:002012-08-07T01:22:40.162-07:00Reflections on 3 Months of Having a facebook account<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Alone... for some reason the word seems to be synonymous with tragedy. Perhaps we're preconditioned from the crib to think being by ourselves means being <i>left out</i>. The preacher tells us "man was not meant to live alone." Our families drill into our heads the importance of meeting someone nice down the block. In school, in the army, even in the neighborhood, the so-called "loner" is the outcast. The key word to getting through life, then, is apparently <i>join</i>. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
—Rod McKuen from the back of his record <i>Alone... </i>picked up from the back of a box of records behind Recycled Records a few hours before the dawn of the 90th day I had a facebook account</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
The neighbor that blessed the air around our house with its linksys wireless internet has made a change. This change occurred around the 40th day I had a facebook account. This neighbor could have moved, perhaps decided to require password access to the household wifi, or maybe just stopped paying for the internet and—as I was forced to do—found it free elsewhere.<br />
<br />
Around this time I committed to a facebook group "40 Days of Writing" which was beginning its second round on the 46th day I had a facebook account. I acquired a flash drive (thanks, Dad!) and made a habit of typing at home and then going to the library with some text nuggets encoded on my new 11th finger. I could not use my external hard drive for some reason I did not entirely understand: the male librarian said it was illegal to give me the access needed to make it work. Therefore the more secret agent-style flash drive. My external hard drive does look like the device which John Connor uses to make the ATM spit out money in <i>Terminator 2</i>, and which also gives him access at the crucial moment in the end (I don't want to spoil the film for those who have not seen it with specifics). It made me feel like I was a discontent with a brilliant freedom-fighting plan, uploading anarchistic dispatches covertly on the government's dime. <br />
<br />
It also made me feel like an asshole for going to the Pacific Grove Public Library to check my facebook. Seriously, what the fuck I had I become in such short months? In the minds of those citizens passing by my computer in the library and seeing the blue-topped iconography of present day superficial society, I wasn't participating in a meaningful writer's challenge, nor was I using facebook as the subject of the writing to which I was challenged. I was just a kid hooked on social networking with insufficient technology to get his fix in private.<br />
<br />
Also, I kind of was. Days would pass without internet access and I would wonder...<br />
<br />
Are people interacting with me right now?<br />
<br />
Is someone trying to get my attention right now?<br />
<br />
Am I social networking right now?<br />
<br />
And I would squeeze in 30 minutes of library internet access on my way to work, upload an essay on the <i>Terminator </i>movies, check my facebook, and get to work late, not satisfied, needing to go again the next day.<br />
<br />
I remember years ago in college when I would go to the library between classes to access the internet for half an hour and I would write my friend Brendan a 6-or-so paragraph email describing the significant thoughts and emotions of a few days' span, and I would be done with time for a cigarette before class.<br />
<br />
What happened to that kind of writing every day? The kind that came natural and easy?<br />
<br />
Yesterday morning Brendan woke me up with a phone call, first apologizing for not responding to an earlier phone call, and then (still being asleep I don't think I was in the presence of mind to necessarily judge it a non sequitur) asked me how I remained motivated in my writing.<br />
<br />
Though I know this is not what Brendan had in mind (while, again admittedly, I was asleep, I know his warm personality well), this could be construed as a cruel joke—it was 9:30 and I was not writing, I was sleeping. The day before I did not do any writing, and it was my second day off from work in a row (on the 1st I also did no writing), which followed a week where I did no writing (I edited something).<br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Am I motivated in my writing? I am alseep. </i> I mumbled something about facebook and we chatted about something else and he got another phone call. Isn't not writing an important part of the writing cycle? If writing is to be natural and relevant it cannot be forced. It must therefore lie (lay?) fallow. It must not be to show that it was and will be again.<br />
<br />
It was becoming clear a certain phase of my life was ending, and that I needed to get real to that. Death was overwhelmingly present in all that I encountered. And the existential cliché that the only truth was death followed me around like an angsty adolescent sidekick.<br />
<br />
On the 79th day I had facebook our house was gifted two massive boxes of VHS tapes. On the 90th day I finished the last episode of the second season of <i>the Sopranos</i>. I watched every episode by myself. I posted nothing related to<i> the Sopranos</i> on facebook. Death is very real, life is quite absurd, and Anthony, Jr. pronounces Nietzche "niche."<br />
<br />
On the 86th day I had a facebook I bought—for 50 cents at my favorite Salinas thrift store—a 1962 anthology on "Alienation in Modern Society" called <i>Man Alone</i>, which is filled with quotes like this (respectively from <i>The Transformations of Man</i>, by Lewis Mumford and "Alienation Under Capitalism," by Erich Fromm):<br />
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modern man has already depersonalized himself so effectively that he is no longer man enough to stand up to his own machines... By perfection of the automaton man will become completely alienated from his world and reduced to nullity—the kingdom and the power and the glory now belong to the machine. </blockquote>
and<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished "thing," dependent on powers outside of himself, unto whom he has projected his living substance.</i> </blockquote>
The 86th day I had a facebook was also the 40th and last day of the "40 days of Writing," a day I earlier considered an appropriate last day for my facebook account, its midnight ripe for a symbolic termination. I neither wrote anything nor deleted my facebook account. I did go to a pool party which produced a photo (myself in a bath robe with no shirt, a beer and unkempt hair) that instigated a brief spat between myself and my mother who posted a snarky comment not realizing the context for my appearance. We reconciled over the phone.<br />
<br />
On the 89th day (well really the morning of the next day) I had a facebook I found, among half a dozen other records I took home, a copy of Rod McKuen's <i>Alone </i>in a free box in the parking lot behind Recycled Records. A few hours earlier a man dressed in all black entered a midnight showing of the new Batman movie opened fire 20 miles away from Columbine High School.<br />
<br />
On the 92nd day I had a facebook I saw La Sera play in Seaside. They were asked to play an encore, an obvious moment for the appearance of a meaningful sign, and they played <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZU81HlZrdo&feature=bf_prev&list=ALYL4kY05133rbjq4UqBnSW3ynRCsHiEBr" target="_blank">"I'm Alone"</a>. After the show I asked Katy Kickball Goodman if I could purchase a record that had that song on it, as I have been encountering, experiencing, and reflecting upon themes of loneliness, and that I had been experimenting with a facebook account, trying to decide if it makes me feel more or less alone. I bought two of her tapes and have listened to them on loop, infatuated.<br />
<br />
On the 91st day I had a facebook I cut my own hair while watching the 3rd and 4th installments in the Beatles Anthology, trying to pinpoint the replacement of Paul McCartney by Billy Shears. I had been watching them backward and experienced the story in the frame of mind that the only truth about the Beatles was that the Beatles had to end. A few weeks before a friend had post(ulat)ed on facebook that the Beatles stopped being good at the release of <i>Rubber Soul</i>. Another agreed it was around that time they stopped wearing suits and therefore stopped being the Beatles. They also stopped touring. And it was also around this time that Paul died.<br />
<br />
Considering this, the narration of the anthology is a bizarre tapestry of death—John's side of the story is presented by audio and video interviews in the decade after the Beatles and before his shooting, George is interviewed in the last decade of his life, and Paul—if we read Billy Shears as BS, as in at a certain point Paul became full of shit and ostensibly (if not really) dead—is interviewed while captaining a boat, stoking a fire, wearing a vest with a white t-shirt underneath, in the recording studio, etc. talking about how a moment of recorded feedback in "I Feel Fine" was responsible for the experimentations of Jimi Hendrix (who interestingly had performed a cover "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band" before the record had coming out, allowing himself "to introduce to you the one and only Billy Shears." He got the joke. Paul is BS. Jimi is also dead.<br />
<br />
On the 94th day I had a facebook I went to a baby shower at a vineyard on top of mountain, shaved my beard and commented at work that I felt born again. I fell asleep listening to the new episode of Radio Lab, "<a href="http://www.radiolab.org/2009/jul/27/" target="_blank">After Life."</a> There was a segment describing the life of people after they pass, as they exist in the minds of those on whom they had made an impression. Even if I deleted my facebook, I would still exist in a real way on the facebooks on whom I had made an impression. I had always been on facebook, after all. I just could not be labeled in photos, like a ghost can't be clearly identified.<br />
<br />
Just as I had woken up with a brief conversation with Brendan that morning, and with a certain clarity—writing, existence, and my actions in perspective, in balance—I fell asleep with everything making vague, satisfactory sense, with Radio Lab creating a soundtrack to passing on to the other side.<br />
<br />
I remember a man describing his attempted suicide, his jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. And I thought about the man describing my relationship to the termination of my facebook account.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It's time to do it. You've got to this. I really believed that everybody would be better off without me. That everybody would just get on with their lives feeling better about me being gone than me being here.... And the last things I saw leave the bridge were my hands, and that moment, that very moment, I said "Oh, my god...this is a mistake."</blockquote>
He was one of rare exceptions to survive the jump, but among the overwhelming many who, in those four seconds between the bridge and the water, decided they wanted to live. He tried to kill himself and survived on August 20, 1985, 10 days before I was born. From the violent forces of the universe and the great waters of the Pacific we found land, existence, and meaning as Indian Summer set in on the west coast of California.<br />
<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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...If I'm alone<br />
by now it's by design.<br />
I only own myself<br />
but all of me is mine </blockquote>
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—Rod McKuen,<br />
from the back of <i>The Loner and 13 other Rod McKuen songs</i> <i>of love and loneliness</i></blockquote>
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</blockquote>
</div>ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-75852295501502098522012-07-14T14:56:00.000-07:002012-08-07T01:22:40.179-07:00Places I Clip My Nails<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">First off let me just say filmmaker/artist Carey Baldwin's couple-month-old tumblr <i><a href="http://placesiclipmynails.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Places I Clip My Nails</a> </i>is brilliant and speaks for itself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Now back to the essay already in progress:</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[The other night
after work while taking a break from watching a VHS I wrote in my notebook]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Here’s a thesis:
an artist is a flesh and blood conduit of time, place, and circumstance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[I was excited:
this was how I would start my critical appreciation of Carey Baldwin’s </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i><a href="http://placesiclipmynails.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Places I Clip My Nails</a></i></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and I would explain Baldwin’s fulfillment and explication of this thesis. I composed a little more in my head and did
not write the essay, instead finishing the movie, or<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Sopranos </i>episode or the Beatles’ Anthology, or whatever it was I
was watching.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I then decided,
further mentally composing, the next day, after work, taking a break from
watching a VHS, that I should explain this thesis by qualifying my “critical
appreciation” to include myself, that I am likewise an artist, that I am a
flesh and blood conduit of time (specifically: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">after</i>
deciding I would write an essay, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">during</i>
a VHS viewing, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before</i> writing the
essay), place (my living room in New Monterey, periodically at a library that gives
me internet access to all places touched by the www), and circumstance (wanting
to write this essay to explicate and further certain ideas about life, art,
narrative, and the internet). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I wrote in a
different notebook, the one that happened to be right next to me:]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And an artist
insists on context, qualification of objectivity, i.e. subjectivity, the natural involuntary forces that push things forward, change us, make us grow, unwittingly. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[I am not a
journalist nor am I interested in pretending to be one and creating Baldwin’s
story out of a mix of assumptions, perceptions, abstractions, etc. Instead, I would start with a thesis that
would apply to us both, Baldwin in the pursuit of expressing the narrative of
life (action/experience=clipping of nails/growth of nails=voluntary/involuntary) in relation to the
time, place, and circumstance in which that narrative (physical movement, the
movement of time) passes; myself in the pursuit of expressing the narrative of
life (action/experience=writing/thinking).
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">What interests
me are theoretical abstractions that may be tied to very specific things, in
turn abstracted, and again applied to something else, in this case a single
thesis that may tie writing, nail-clipping, autobiographical tumblr posting, art, and maybe the universe and everything. Isn't there a famous quote about the universe existing in a fingernail? Anything else sounds to me like
a small-town paper cute profile on local artist youth.]</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Furthermore, an
artist uses hands to do something to transmit this moment, the passage of time
surrounding the moment, and the humanity and geography of its context.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[The problem,
however, is that context is infinite.
Here’s a short list of things at play in the piece: the journals of
Marcel Duchamp, the history and social politics of hygiene, the manufacture of
trimmers, the use of the body in conceptual art, TSA carry-on policy, the psychology of nail-biters, the
stoner-staring-at-hand-in-amazement-at-human-evolution stereotype, the
geography of Los Angeles, Baldwin's travel plans, his career plans, his ethos, his work situation, life and death in the abstract
and the particular, etc.</span> </div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Today, I went to
write this essay/manifesto. I had a “to
google” list for the library: “tumblr (as) narrative” and “tumblr (as) conceptual
photo series.” I first went to check my
email and found two from Carey, the first a promise to reply to the questions I
sent a month ago, and the second, a series of thoughtful responses.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">ok so i answered
all but the first because the only thing i could think to say about hand
turkeys is that in 2008 i wrote a letter to barack obama on a hand turkey that
i made but i forgot to send it to him. feel free to use proper capitalization
if you end up using anything.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">They banged a
gong at the library at about this point, 5:45, 15 minutes until the closing of
the library, and I packed up my area and returned my library-loaned laptop to
the circulation desk, not before saving my document to a flash drive. Today, right now, before work, I inserted my
flash drive into my ancient disconnected desktop computer and continued typing,
naked after a shower, laying in bed:]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And finally, an
artist's integrity depends on critiquing and understanding all influence on
this transmission, and otherwise avoiding all influence </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">(commercial, political, social, etc.)</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> that may compromise the
truth of the situation </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Carey Baldwin exemplifies these theses in
a minimalist tumblr project that resembles 1960s California conceptual art more
than what one expects to find posted to facebook.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[I don't use the internet enough to know
really if that is true, and right now, in lieu of the internet, I must rely on
Carey's thoughts on instagram/tumblr/posting on the internet, that I copied and
pasted into the document yesterday when I had the internet]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">looking at a
photo is always interesting to me, even if it's not my taste aesthetically.
it's fun to see what kinds of things people obsess over; people's pets and
breakfasts are pretty common material but i follow one friend who takes a screen
shot of his phone every day at 3:33 and another friend who posts a new photo of
the same location under the freeway nearly every day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">(Ed Ruscha's
photographic catalogue of <a href="http://www.steidlville.com/books/124-THEN-NOW.html" target="_blank">every building on the Sunset Strip</a> comes to mind. Also, California now is not only the center
of movie culture, it is the center of internet culture (though, by design, the internet
does not have a center, there are real people really in California that design
and innovate what instagramly becomes used by people around the world. Facebook, for example, became relevant when
it moved to California.)]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Technology and
the internet have allowed individuals a certain autonomy, instantly
self-publishing and potentially, in a second, reaching as many people as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hunger Games </i>in its opening
weekend. Clipping one's nails in
Hollywood—not in one's apartment, but on location, if you like—and cataloguing
it is a stark contrast to the dream factory notion of creating fantasy and
escape. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[2. Your first
post is at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. What is your relationship to the
iconography of Hollywood as someone who lives in LA? Are you interested in the
difference between flesh and blood mortal people and their superficial
celebrity personas? Is there something inherently morbid in cutting your nails?
Do rich people cut their nails?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">i think about
celebrities about as much as your average person living in la. i get a little
excited when i see one, especially a good one, but i try to remember that
they're just another human who acts. during the summers, they play movies every
weekend at the hollywood forever cemetery. so you go there and wait in line
with your ticket, walk in past all the headstones to the back of the grounds,
sit on the grass, and watch a movie. the only one i've seen there was bringing
up baby - one of my personal favorites - starring cary grant and katharine
hepburn. i guess the exciting thing about being a celebrity or hollywood icon
is that every person and animal in that movie is dead now but they still get a
round of applause, and some whistles and hoots while they're just another part
of the earth. as for rich people cutting their nails - some do, some don't.
just like us poors.]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is real in
subject matter, theory and execution. It
epitomizes the emancipation of conceptual art, the freedom that comes to a
person who realizes commercial art—movies, essays, photography—is
bullshit, illegitimate for every thing that makes it "legitimate." Baldwin's hands are the subject
of the piece and the creator's of the piece; it is a loop of involuntary (nail
growth) and voluntary (nail-clipping) action.
The cerebral elements—where he is, why he stopped there, how the
picture is taken—is beside the point, and the art theory belongs to the viewer; it
is an invisible interaction between yourself and the out of frame artist we
know is there, thinking about something, nail-clipping.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[I "finished" this essay a few days later, again at the library, leaving the remaining questions answered at the bottom. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">3. Did the
project begin because you found yourself clipping your nails in interesting
locations, or because you decided to go clip your nails in interesting places.
For example, why trim your nails on the side of the road by an abandoned
Christmas tree?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">i found myself
clipping my nails in public places: while i waited for my friends outside their
apartments, in the cemetery during a break from a bike ride, etc. i joked with
some friends that i ought to start a blog about it, then i just went ahead and
did it. now i feel obliged to clip my nails in interesting places. for example,
when i knew i was going to new york i timed my clipping so that they'd be the
right length while i was there. once i got there, though, i didn't choose a
particularly exciting place to do it - just did it when i noticed they'd gotten
long and remembered to do it. i rarely clip my fingernails into a trash can or
sink anymore, even when i'm home and realize they need a trim. that would bore
my followers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">4. Is it just me
or would bourgeois society consider it anti-social to publicly clip one's
nails?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">i think
bourgeois society would consider it gross to publicly clip one's nails. in
fact, i've gotten quite a few responses from people who are not so thrilled with
the idea. my mom told me not to blog about my toenails. another friend
cautioned me not to do it on the subway. for the record, i don't plan to clip
my nails in any indoor public spaces. only in the grass, dirt, or concrete.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">5. How do you
feel about instagram and photographic aesthetics, tumblr, etc.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">i think
instagram is fun. it's my go-to thing to look at when i have a minute of
downtime at work. i used to look at twitter every day but i got bored reading
little inside jokes and insights that weren't particularly interesting to me.
looking at a photo is always interesting to me, even if it's not my taste
aesthetically. it's fun to see what kinds of things people obsess over;
people's pets and breakfasts are pretty common material but i follow one friend
who takes a screen shot of his phone every day at 3:33 and another friend who
posts a new photo of the same location under the freeway nearly every day. i
guess the people who follow me have probably noticed i post photos of my
fingernails once every couple of weeks. i like instagram better than tumblr
because it encourages people to create something unique out of their own
experience rather than sit at their computer and reblog images they had nothing
to do with creating - often with an unknown or uncredited source.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">6. How does an
artist decide when experience, place, and perception become the material for
art?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">i can only speak
for myself on this one. some things just give me the itch, some things don't. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">7. what do
different perspectives on nail trimming have to do which gender assumptions?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">here's what i
have to say about gender assumption/presentation and nail clipping: girls file,
boys clip. just kidding. as someone who was assigned female at birth but
consider myself much more on the boy end of the spectrum, i find that i'm
pretty aware of how i present my hands when i take a photo for my journal.
someone once told me that feminine girls hold their hands straight out in front
of them, fingers curled back when they look at their nails whereas boys and
butch girls turn their palms toward in, making a loose fist, to scope out their
sitch. i keep it varied.]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-44961801297072380612012-07-09T16:46:00.000-07:002012-08-13T19:35:59.326-07:00Choco, Chepe, Tia y yo<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">At work on Saturday Ramiro invited me to La Farandula the next day, now yesterday. I said I was interested but that I had never been to La Farandula. In the ensuing Saturday night pinballing between the front of the restaurant and the kitchen I asked others if they knew La Farandula. I misunderstood it was in Seaside. People said that there was no place in Seaside where they did shows, much less one named "La Farandula." It turns out a </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">farandula</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;"> is, as Victor explained to me, the venue where all the big stars perform, the performance. On Sunday it was to be in Gilroy. I gave Ramiro, henceforth known as a Choco, my phone number when I left the restaurant as he was plastic-sealing fish for </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">sous vide</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;"> preparation. I would be in Seaside where I host an open mic on Sundays, ready about ten. He would pick me up and then we'd get José, henceforth known as Chepe, and then we'd go to el show in Gilroy. I was excited.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">I had also planned to play bocce with Kyle on Sunday, in the afternoon, before the open mic. We worked out the logistics on Saturday when Kyle was working as a food runner. I gave him my phone number on the other half of the paper that I gave to Choco. Kyle would come to the open mic as well, taking advantage of his night off. We met at 4 and played to 12 points, with Kyle winning. Then we decided to go to 15, and I won. We called it a tie. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">During the game I was anticipating a phone call from Victor who would be getting off from his other dishwasher job at a family establishment downtown that is generally known as the place with really big cakes. I gave him my phone number on a scrap of paper weeks before on a similar Saturday at the restaurant so he could start some English lessons with me. It has been hella busy on Sundays at the family establishment downtown that is generally known as the place with really big cakes, and he has not been able to call me before six when I have to be at the café to set up the open mic. I stopped by the place with really big cakes and luckily a server was out the side employee entrance finishing a cigarette. I caught her before she went back in and asked if Victor was still working. She said she didn't know all their names as there are so many (that work in the kitchen). She went down the stairs to inquire and I heard "a </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">guero</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;"> is outside looking for Victor," and a nice man came out who I addressed in Spanish and who informed me that Victor left at 3 and was coming back again at 6. He gave a bemused smile when I said something like "but this is impossible!" Of the two nights he doesn't work at his other job he has to come back to work again on the same day for his day job? OK, thank you, I said, and got on my bicycle to go to Seaside to host the open mic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Halfway there, at the bottleneck created by the Naval Postgraduate School where only Del Monte Avenue, the bike path and the beach run between the ocean and the barbed-wire fenced military academic institution, I recognized Victor coming the other way in his FOX hat (yellow and white double spotlight logo, black material) and I flagged him down, turned my bike around and rode with him a little bit. He did not look happy. Did you get to take a nap at least? I tried to ask. </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Just enough time to clean up and turn back around</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">, I am presently paraphrasing and translating. </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">It sucks because I want to learn English</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">, I am flagrantly translating emotion and my perception of it into the very colloquial speech that is the thwarted goal in question. We calculated a future moment to host a future lesson. I said goodbye and turned around.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCZfb8XHjI9T2v6XiTCa4BO7nLhi6tLCTbcRPkTVgm5-kR-MgdlFwNChk7I-rMhMfrNYu2sq20hdXSqZ8e0Loep7_O34Xfslp2pQIVnAypHAhyEaz523szixUGTxv0WV1JUk3B8nUk64k/s1600/DSCN3955.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" mda="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCZfb8XHjI9T2v6XiTCa4BO7nLhi6tLCTbcRPkTVgm5-kR-MgdlFwNChk7I-rMhMfrNYu2sq20hdXSqZ8e0Loep7_O34Xfslp2pQIVnAypHAhyEaz523szixUGTxv0WV1JUk3B8nUk64k/s320/DSCN3955.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">I brought a bottle of rosé from Grocery Outlet to the bocce game, along with two mugs. When I got to the lake on the other side of the freeway I poured another mugful and paused to watch a few dozen small black birds dive at the surface of the water and fly back up into the air over and over with the 6 lanes of freeway merging traffic on the other side. There was sour apple on the nose, unripe strawberry on the front and a lemonade tartness lingering at the back of the taste. Really it just tasted like unsweet lemonade. It was 4 dollars. Whatever.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Though I don't really want to get into it right now, an open mic could be a fantastic vehicle for a story. Diverse contingents coming together sincerely expressing themselves, making friends, hurting each other's feelings, etc. I once wrote a story that centered on a night of karaoke at Chopsticks 2: the How Can Be Lounge, a place I would go to all the time in Portland. It was called "Singing the Song of Someone Else." It sounds like a joke title for a </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">New Yorker </span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">story. Perhaps I am giving myself too much credit. It sounds like a headline for a small town newspaper profile on the local karaoke bar. Whatever.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Seaside has a resident francophonic socialist rambler that mumbles loudly, always has a cane and a scarf, and attends the open mic with impeccable regularity. I appreciate his enthusiasm and respect his politics, and I even let him speechify for five minutes or so when he asks me nicely beforehand. His politics are much in line with the occupy movement and he calls our present political climate a "Mickey Mouse democracy." Is that a cliché already? I will google that at the next possible internet situation (I now have the internet and “Mickey Mouse Democracy” is not a cliché). Point is that Claude did not come to the open mic this week. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">I got a phone call from Choco at 10:05 and said goodnight to the show, which by the end was everyone left following Tiffany, who began a "Goodbye, Andrew" song as I took my bike out the back door, to lock it across the street in front of La Tortuga where Ramiro was to pick me up. I left one mug and the empty bottle of rosé in my basket, not worried about either. I sent my friend Jaymee a text message referring to an <a href="http://artandobjecthood.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/on-seeing-alex-bill-for-the-first-time-in-a-long-time/" target="_blank">art project she did 5 years ago</a> where she agreed to be taken anywhere an acquaintance decided would be meaningful. The only person who took her up on the project was our friend Bill who made her climb a water tower. I asked her what the philosophical implications are of such a project. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Choco's 4 Runner pulled up and I got in the back—his tía was up front—coming with us to </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">la farandula</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">. We picked up Chepe, who I'd never seen out of his busser uniform, and we went to a gas station to get something to drink. I got a coffee in the mug I kept. Chepe bought it for me, another for himself, and 2 red bulls for Choco and tia. When we got back out to the car Choco gave me the keys and told me I was driving. Alright, I said in Spanish. Tía held my coffee.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">This was the first time I had a particular mix of feelings since I was in the Dominican Republic, those of an outsider who, with a sense of irony, is being accepted. This irony is palpable in my speech, the stuffiness and awkwardness of my Spanish. The patience and respect showed to me and my bumbling along in Spanish is a special kind of love for which I am eternally grateful. To the people of the Dominican Republic: thank you for your kindness. This is not to say that the way that people treated me was not the patronizing maternal supervision that an adult would bestow upon a wayward child. I was respected, but also I was a cute foreigner with the vocabulary of a 7 year old. In other words, I frequently did not know exactly what was happening because I did not understand everything, but also because, out of pragmatism, I was not informed of everything, and I never knew exactly which it was—if I misunderstood, nodded to something I did not agree to, or if I was not consulted, figuring it would be best simply to show me what was happening as opposed to trying to explain it. Any independent action I took was always the subject of scrutiny, and not without good reason.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">My point is, I don't know if I agreed unwittingly to being the designated driver for the evening, or if that was why I was enlisted in the journey, or how to say "designated driver" or if that's even in the lexicon. These were my thoughts, not "I drank a beer watching the European Championship final game with my folks this afternoon, then I had the greater half of a bottle of wine between 4 and 6 while playing bocce and commuting to Seaside, and then I had a beer while hosting the open mic. Honestly I had two, as is my compensation for hosting the thing, an allowance of 2 beers. It was now 11 PM.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">I was merging on that same section of freeway when they were asking me about my job, and explained I got paid in beers and only then, when Chepe asked if I had a beer earlier, did I think, "shit! I have been drinking all day and now I am driving someone else's 4 Runner to Gilroy." ¿</span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Estás bien? </span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Chepe asked. I said I just had one. That I was fine, which I did believe, which anybody believes, which is another story. The point here has to do with the need to be accepted, to pretend like communicating in Spanish is easy, natural, not a constructed identity, a painful, embarrassing process of pretending. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Jaymee texted back to me at 10:30, </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">I think the appeal is Surrender, Reliquishing control (& the freedom that can be paradoxically found by doing so). Gilroy!</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">I safely guided us across the Salinas River, through Castroville, over to Prunedale and onto the 101. I established with Choco that the steering wheel shaking was normal. I said it was like a massage for my hands. Chepe said that's good after the guitar playing. Agreed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Passing San Juan Bautista the highway gets dark. I slowed down and pulled the stick that I turned on the lights with, thinking it was the brights. The music flickered and the car started acting funny. We crossed the Pajaro river and ended up in the Santa Clara Valley a few miles out of town, not yet the cherry stands that mark Gilroy's periphery. The pedal was responding strangely and I said so as best as I could. I was understood and Choco told me to pull over, so I did. He popped the hood and messed with some things with Chepe. I realized that the battery he said he had installed that day was in this car. I asked tía, still sitting next to me, where he learned about cars. He taught himself. The engine cut out and Choco and Chepe pushed us to a better spot further on. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Tía and I sat up front while Chepe and Choco called and texted people already at the show and others back in Monterey. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Jaymee had sent me another text, </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Our culture mandates that we always be on top of everything/have our shit together all the time. Letting go of that responsibility & giving it over to someone else could very well be considered a subversive act.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">The humor in the situation was apparent. We talked to el viejo from work, a lovely and strange man always happy to riff with me at the restaurant, usually in English. He calls me </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Andrecito</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">, the diminutive that the kitchen uses for the most part. I said to Choco to say hello for me. </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">¡</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">¿</span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Andrés está con ustedes?! </span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">he asked incredulously, like it was a joke. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Choco starting joking that this </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">farandula</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">, this event that he kept telling me he was going to take me to, was this. This was </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">el show</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">—the four of us parked next to the highway that divides the rolling dark hills between us and the ocean from the unseen fields of what is known as the Silicon Valley.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Andrés va a escribir en su diario...</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Choco began imagining, </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">¿Andrés tienes un diario? </span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">I said that I did in fact have a notebook that I had in my bag from the day before when I was getting ready to cover an event for the local paper that it turns out is not for another 3 weeks. </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Andrés va a escribir en su diario "este día yo fuí al show</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">." This was hilarious to me, of course, because I try to write every day, generally about my own perceptions, and I vaguely had decided I would write about whatever happened this night, on this adventure to Gilroy, a town I only knew because you had to get through it to get to Morgan Hill which you have to get through to get to San Jose which you have to get to to get on a plane or go through to get to San Francisco or Oakland or anywhere really, a town that Joan Didion described as an agricultural town now "vanished...having reinvented itself as a sprawl of commuter subdivisions for San Jose and the tech industry.” Last 4th of July I drove there with friends to see fireworks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Andrew is going to write in his diary, </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">this day I went to the show</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Chepe got through to a friend who agreed to pick us up. He would be there in half an hour. It was already getting on midnight. The show would go to 1, maybe 1:30. As it turned out he had been working all day so we just piled into his car and went back. Choco would be back tomorrow with a new battery or transmission or whatever to pick up his 4 Runner. Chepe sat up front and chatted with his friend, and Choco and tía napped next to me in the back. They got dropped off first, then me at my bike in front of La Tortuga. I had to insist that I would be alright riding my bike alone late at night in the cold. </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">It's like a car to me</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">. I didn't want to leave it overnight, but was touched at their preoccupation for my wellbeing. Chepe gave me his sweatervest to wear for extra warmth. I would give it back Wednesday at work. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">They watched me unlock my bike and put on the sweatervest and my helmet. They drove off, I got on my bike, and noticed that the mug was gone. </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Why would someone take a mug from my bike basket? </span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The empty bottle of rosé was still there. I rode down the street and noticed a man walking with a cane and scarf. He sat down on a red bus stop bench. I stopped and said hello to Claude, asked why he didn't go to the open mic. He asked if I wanted a mug, looking guilty. </span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">You took my mug, Claude! Right out of my bike basket?</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">This is America! You can't just leave something and expect somebody not to take it!</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">I know, I don't really need it. Do you want the mug, Claude? You can have it if you want it, no hard feelings.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">I want the mug.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Alright, it's yours, Claude. Enjoy. </span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">The mug has lots of animals anthropomorphized as young children at school, crawling over desks like the classroom is a jungle gym. </span><i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">The joys of teaching are without number, </span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia;">the mug says. Looked at cynically (kids=misbehavior=headache), it is a stupid mug. When one decides, however, that to really learn is to let yourself go entirely into the world of your teacher, and create a new one together, it is rather the opposite.</span></div>
ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-58311862334523392802012-07-07T16:21:00.001-07:002012-08-07T01:22:40.172-07:00Terminator<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">On the 34th day
I had a facebook account (a week after facebook went public) I watched <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Terminator</i>. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">On the 35th day I
had a facebook account I watched <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
Terminator 2: Judgment Day</i>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">When I was a
child I was not allowed to watch <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
Terminator</i> movies, what with the gratuitous sex and violence and lack of
redeeming intellectual or emotional qualities. My parents to this date
have never and, I assume, will never see them. I will ask my brother
right now if he has. (he has not)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">When I was a
teenager I learned about Monsanto's terminator seeds, those that produce crops
that cannot reproduce seeds. Third-world farmers have to rebuy seeds
every year from Monsanto. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wayne's World</i>. At some point I
understood that the motorcycle cop from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wayne's
World </i>was T1000 from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">T2</i>. I also
knew that at some point in the movie Arnold S. said "I'll be back." I
figured they knew there'd be a sequel and so the first movie would end with
that line to assure us of a second.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">When I turned 18
I voted in my first election to not recall Governor Gray Davis and, in case the
assholes did prematurately terminate his term (so to speak), to put in the
Green Party candidate. Davis was recalled and the people of California
put Arnold Schwarzenegger in his place. (I just googled my spelling
of his name assuming I had spelled it wrong. I had not. That is how
you spell it. Schwarzenegger) I found this hilarious and the people of
California confirmed my snobbish adolescent I'm-smarter-than-everyone
worldview. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In other words,
I did not rush to the video story to rent the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terminator</i> movies out of state pride. I watched French new
wave movies and ignored politics.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I had suddenly
become an intellectual and I inhabited a world distinct from AS, that had its
own movies and its own actors. It was epitomized in a moment of Bob Dylan
throwing illustrated cue cards in black and white in front of Alan Ginsburg
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Another moment: "Don't follow leaders /
watch your parking meters."</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I didn't forsee a day when I would watch an AS
movie ever again. The terminator was a seed that assholes maliciously
sold to impoverished farmers so they would have to rebuy them; Schwarzenegger
was a symbol of the idiocy that surrounded, inhabited and was my culture. I
lived in Oregon for the remainder of his term.
It was as though I had somehow forseen the future and I knew the human
race was going to destroy itself, but I was powerless to do anything about it,
while vaguely knowing I had an important, related destiny to fulfill.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In 2009, now 23
years young, I was in San Francisco with my friend Brendan. We went to a
bar on the upper Haight and drank beer. There was a TV playing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terminator 2</i> with the sound off.
It was the end of the movie, beginning with, what I know now to be, the 3rd
chase scene. There was a lot of industrial props and action, and the
motorcycle cop from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wayne's World. </i>Brendan,
a University of Wisconsin film graduate, told me they would watch movies muted
in class as a way of understanding the editing better, seeing the cuts without
being emotionally guided by the music, or something like that.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He stuck up for
the films, as I recall, and explained the gyst of the 2 movies. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terminator 2</i> is one of his favorites, I
have established, and was covered in his first film class. Brendan, via email desired to "throw in
something in—I saw the 2nd terminator film when i was really young, like six
years old. And watching it terrified me so much that I had to call my grandpa
who assured me that the events of the film weren't real and would never happen
(my dad was out of town on business)."
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I have great
respect for the way the first <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terminator</i>
film tells the epic narrative of what is happening across time in this crazy
world that seems to resemble our own. It
blends the pulp detective genius of Raymond Chandler with the far-out '60s sci
fi of Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison.
I therefore feel obliged to place a spoiler alert in this essay, for
those who don't yet understand why it is such a dangerous thing to be in Los
Angeles in 1984 and be named Sarah Connor.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Here is a quick
paraphrase, from my roomates double <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terminator
Collection</i>, of the plot for those who have seen it and those who have not
and don't care about the potentially moving cinematic experience he or she may
have with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Terminator</i>:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In 1984,
writer/director James Cameron brought two warriors from a nuclear war-ravaged
future to battle over the life of a young woman whose yet-unborn son will
become the savior of mankind. Sarah
Connor is the target of a killer cyborg from the year 2029 that has been sent
to win a war against humanity by destroying her.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The genre of
this movie is a particular brand of science fiction that is deeply soaked both
in the hard-boiled pulp detective tradition and the psychedelic '60s Los
Angeles counterculture that it starts to resemble its own genre, like that of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blade Runner</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Total Recall </i>(both based on Philip K. Dick novels), or the heady
episode of<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Star Trek</i> "The City
on the Edge of Forever," written by Harlan Ellison (to whom James Cameron
pays vague tribute in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terminator</i>),
heavily edited by Gene Roddenbury, where we see Spock and Kirk in 1930s
Chicago, for the most part immune to Sci Fi clichés in that they are
desperately attempting to fit in as native dwellers to a reality we already
know (that of 1930's Chicago, or rather the clichés that compoe it to the
people who did not live it, such as myself).
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">To this genre it
is irony and paradox that wins out over imagination and gimmick. Technology is suspect, it saps our humanity;
yet the films rely on the very technology it finds suspect to express the
suspicion, flirting with the thing that will destroy us to make the warning
convincing. They are films dedicated to
humanity, its necessary prevelance over machine,; yet they are emotionally
flat, poorly acted, and completely lacking a sense of humor, unlike all of the
writing of Dick and Ellison.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Just as I was
wondering <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what is this genre?! </i>as I
was loving the insanely heavy, 10-ton weight handed Christ stuff, the deapan
detective stuff, the Nike commercial moments, the 1984 slice-of-life build-up
of Sarah Connor's waitress life, the time travel android science fiction, the
heady art film real-truck-runs-over-toy-truck references to simulation, Sarah
Connor goes into a club to use a phone and call the cops, my question was
answered: the club was called, in futuristic white lights, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">TECH NOIR</i>. The name is as
pretentious and simultaneously braindead as the movie itself, and the only
logical way to describe the brilliance of what is going on. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">More than ever
at the time of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">T1</i> a movie was a
commodity; in the post <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars </i>cinema
sci fi and schmaltz emptied the public's wallets, packed the theaters and the
wallets of producers. To keep people
interested the premises had to get headier and simpler at the same time; and
the execution had to lack originality, replacing it with '50s sit com clichés.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Boy finds alien. Alien needs to go home. </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Done:
biggest fucking thing to ever hit theaters.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Interestingly,
once the premise is removed from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terminator
</i>films, the plots are exactly the same (and not unidentical from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Matrix</i>, which, when I saw it in the
late '90s, I did not realize was entirely a rip off of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">T2</i>.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Context/credits</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">2 people from the
future crouch nude and then steal clothes from someone</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The 2 people
search for the person that one was sent to kill the other to protect</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chase scene</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The protector
finds the subject before the terminator and says "come with me if you want
to live."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chase scene</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Regroup period,
moment of storytelling, reentrance into conflict.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chase scene</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Showdown with
terminator</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">"death"
of terminator</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">resurrection of
terminator</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">chase scene</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">death of
terminator</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">monologue from
Sarah Connor</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">credits</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">considering the
context of this essay, "Reflections on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">x
</i>days of having a facebook acoount," certain parallels between the
films and my own life seem inevitable:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">facebook goes
public (May 18, 2012) / I watch <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terminator</i>s
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1</i> & <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">2 </i>( May 25-26, 2012)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">facebook is the
advancement that leads to the decline of humanity and the rise of the machines;
Mark Zuckerburg is the guy from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">T2</i>
who creates the great historical advancement.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arnold S is the
catalyst that leads me to get a facebook (April 22) and to destroy it
(undetermined)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sarah Conner is
Alexandra (I watched the movies with her, she chose them instead of other fine
VHS selections I had at my house; I had recently found <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scent of a Woman </i>at a thrift store and was curious to watch it; I
did eventually and was unimpressed, though I loved the moment at the end of his
speech where, that's another spoiler, and this is besides the point, anyway)
who got me on facebook inadvertently.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">John Conner is
my facebook account.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I am Reese from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">T1</i> who impregnates SC. I am also
JC, and AS (Andrew Shaw-zen-Kitch)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is some
pretty far-out logic, granted. The way
things match up already has the virgin birth thing happening, which creates an
interesting, farly blasphemous interpretation of holy trinity: Sarah Connor is
the Virgin Mary, a real woman impregnated by Reese, a real man, though subject
to God, and present in 1984, is from the future, the holy ghost being time travel and other kinds of man-made technological magic. John Connor (JC) is, obviously, Jesus (JC). </span><br />
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">OR</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">facebook is NOT
the advancement that leads to the decline of humanity and the rise of the
machines;</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">the stock
immediately faltered, big shots were given refunds.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">the
movies are not good, visionary; it is a zeitgeist imaginative re-filtering
of extinct cinema cliche.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Goy cinema
better have a fantastic reason for appropriating the iconography of the
holocaust. Does Terminator 1 merit that—who am I to say?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">notes on technology v. humanity:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Amanda's call-in
response to a discussion of the human element in sports calls and bringing
technology into refereeing on 6/13's Talk of the Nation—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I know that
there's technology everywhere, in fact I'm sitting here on my laptop while I'm
listening...I don't think that just because technology's available in any
particular venue, that we have to use it simply because it's available.
Aren't there some things that are pleasant just because they're human,
and their us. Going to the ballpark, I remember the first time I went
time I went into a stadium, it was Busch Stadium in St. Louis and I'd never
seen anything like it, it was magical, and I can't, you know I think I was 10,
so there wasn't an inundation of technology like there is today. But I
think there's an interruption in our lives, and maybe even a little distancing
from our humanity, when we include these things we've created, these tools in
everything we do, I don't we have to have—I mean who cares if the ball was 2
seconds...who cares? The human eye is part—I mean, we are human beings.
If a judge makes a call in a boxing match, who cares? It's sports.... I
don't want to see Futurama acted out in real life where there are robot
umpires, and robot baseball players, and robot boxers, and robot
everywhere. We are human beings and we still have a contribution to make
to human things outside of computers and technology.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">From D.T.
Suzuki's introduction to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zen Buddhism and
Psychoanalysis</i>, found 6/12 at the St. Vincent de Paul, "a story which
splendidly illustrates Chuang-tze's philosophy of work, of a farmer who refused
to use the shadoof to raise water from his well"—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A farmer dug a
well and was using the water for irrigating his farm. He used an ordinary
bucket to draw water from the well, as most primitive people do. A
passerby, seeing this, asked him why he did not use a shadoof for the purpose;
it is a labor-saving device and can do more work than the primitive method.
The farmer said, "I know it is labor-saving and it is for this very
reason that I do not use the device. What I am afraid of is this. That
the use of such a contrivance makes one machine-minded.
Machine-mindedness leads one to the habit of indolence and
laziness."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Appropriately, I
just painstakingly re-listened to that phone call on the computer and typed out
Amanda's thoughts before realizing NPR had already typed out the transcript.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"></span></div>ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-86913197024847517022012-06-24T15:12:00.000-07:002012-08-07T01:22:40.188-07:00Moonrise Kingdom, notes, part 1The themes of Wes Anderson, part 1<br />
<br />
—Infidelity<br />
(<i>Royal Tennenbaums</i>=Royal and Margot; <i>Rushmore</i>=Bill Murray’s wife, Bill Murray, the teacher; <i>The Darjeeling Limited</i>=the woman on the train; <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i>=Frances McDormant)<br />
<br />
—Cinema or theatricality occurring within the world of the film<br />
• Plays within the movie (<i>Rushmore</i>, <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i>)<br />
• Things that look like props in a musical (<i>Rushmore</i>=besides actual stage props, construction imagery, club imagery [Max Fisher posing as president of various clubs, archery, kite flying, etc.]; <i>RT</i>=tennis imagery, track suits, outfits in general<br />
•Static shots of flyers and announcements of the event that is essentially the next scene<br />
<br />
—Depression, non-emotive hyper-sad individuals<br />
(Bill Murray in <i>Rushmore</i>, <i>RT</i>, <i>The Life Aquatic</i>, briefly <i>DL</i>, and <i>MK</i>; Margot in <i>RT</i>; just about everybody at one point or another in MK)<br />
<br />
[Side note: I have seen <i>Rushmore</i> maybe 10 times, <i>the Royal Tennenbaums</i> maybe 4, and <i>Bottle Rocket</i> maybe 3. I have never watched, to my memory, <i>The Life Aquatic</i> all the way through, I watched the <i>Darjeeling Limited</i> in the theater, and I watched <i>Fantastic Mr. Fox</i> at my house a few months ago. <i>FMF</i> was supposed to play at the movie theater I worked for, but it got swooped up by the mall at the last minute, which certainly changed the fate of my relationship with the film. I watched <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> (the independent cinema got it this time) and liked it more than any of his movies since <i>Rushmore</i>, with which I feel <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> has much in common. In the notes I am here preparing I have developed a kind of thesis: <br />
<br />
Max Fischer and the runaways (the boy and girl of <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i>) represent a primordial nostalgia for an ultimately romantic plane where all that is real is love, death and the essential truths of existence. The connection between Max Fischer and the runaways is immediate and eerie when we learn that it is Jason Schwartzman (no longer the teenage actor, but still, essentially, MF) that will guide them to the completion of their journey (I personally was waiting the whole movie for this scene which I heard when Teri Gross interviewed Wes Anderson on <i>Fresh Air</i>), and we see Max Fischer 15 years later running the supplies building at the Khaki Scout HQ. He agrees to marry the couple, but admits that practically it will mean nothing. However, it is the most important decision of their lives. He makes them spit out their gum and go over by the trampoline to talk about it. The shot is way out so we can see a boy on the structure above the trampoline, the trampoline and the runaways in the center.<br />
<br />
This next detail is the detail that makes me love the movie as opposed to simply liking it: the boy jumps onto the trampoline and goes straight back up, goes back down, goes back up and does a back flip, goes back down, goes back up, goes back down, and does a front flip, and the runaways inaudibly make the biggest decision of their lives. This scene, to the Wes Anderson detractor, proves a certain refusal to stick to emotion, to scene, to whatever manipulative arc keeps a moviegoer's attention and tells him or her what to think and feel. It’s too cute to be meaningful, you are thinking too actively about how clever or pretty it is to stay in the story. It’s the same kind of logic that a hipster is too busy looking cool to do or say or be anything meaningful. This is certainly another discussion to maintain after some research about what detractors actually say, as opposed to what they say in my mind, or what I have said in less appreciative viewings.]<br />
<br />
The themes of Wes Anderson, part 2<br />
—Nautica<br />
(I don’t have the internet and my dictionary says it is not a word, but I feel that it should be, the imagery and ethos of sailing and exploring the sea? Jacques Cousteau book in <i>Rushmore</i>; <i>The Life Aquatic</i>; sailing, canoeing in <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i>; Luke Wilson's boat excursion in <i>RT</i>)<br />
<br />
—Moments of unbelievable courage<br />
(unfortunately, the thing that made the<i> DL</i> not just a self-involved-J.D.-Salinger-privileged-family-on-a-train story was the scene where there was an incident on a river and the three brothers rescue from drowning three Indian boys, and it felt rather forced and non-sequitor; lots of <i>Fantastic Mr. Fox</i> acrobatics; a fairly surreal stop-motion rescue scene in <i>MK</i>)<br />
<br />
—Anachronism<br />
•Calligraphy, Latin, binoculars, easels, and everything else could be from the 1960s, and purposely in <i>MK</i>, which takes place in 1965; <i>FMF</i> same, except storybook England<br />
•Record players, late ‘60s Kinks, the Who, Rolling Stones soundtrack<br />
<br />
<br />
[Side note: on Sunday I got out my Hank Williams record because my roommate’s friend made jumbalaya (the night before I saw <i>MK</i>, which heavily features Hank's recordings) and brought it over and I was singing “Son of a gun we’ll have big fun” right as he was thinking the same lines. I just put it on. What does it mean to listen to records in 2012? <br />
<br />
Positive reason / negative interpretation:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
An appreciation, preservation of the past / an unhealthy nostalgia for a time and<br />
place I never knew </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A fondness for listening to my parents records as a kid / an infantile refusal to grow<br />
up and change </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Sticking up for the timeless when it falls out of fashion / purposely being contrary<br />
for whatever reasons people think “hipsters” dislike everything that everybody else likes </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Slowing down the rushed button-pressing reality that dominates everything around<br />
me / failing to conform to reality</blockquote>
In <i>the Royal Tennenbaums</i> two adult siblings (though one is adopted) are in love. They have a romantic exchange in a red tent while listening to “Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones on a portable record player. The tent and the record player resemble those on the beach later named “Moonrise Kingdom” to where the runaways escape. Both are lovers devoted to a taboo impossible love—siblings and 10 years olds. The world would never understand. The world could never understand. Max Fischer, 15 years old, and the teacher. Everybody wants to save the boy from Social Services, because they are convinced he will get shock treatment. How far can a heart go unchecked before society sets some rules? Not sure if this is what this essay should be about]<br />
<br />
The themes Wes Anderson, part 3<br />
<br />
—Entertained fantasies<br />
•<i>Rushmore</i>, upper class (brain doctor, fencing)<br />
•<i>Bottlerocket</i>, bandits (heist, hiding out)<br />
•<i>RT</i>, whole movie is the depiction of depression after the actualization of fantasy (playwriting, professional tennis circuit, literary success)<br />
•<i>LA</i>, being a part of Cousteau's crew<br />
•<i>DL</i>, bonding with brothers spiritually on a trip to India;<br />
•<i>FMF</i>, being a fox<br />
•<i>MK</i>, escaping civilization (camping, fleeing, freedom from the authority of normalcy).<br />
<br />
[I watched Rushmore the night of the initial notes, and fell asleep, did not take notes. I mentally noted that it is "Max Fischer" with a C.<br />
<br />
I projected <i>The Red Balloon</i> a few days later onto the back of my house (balloon=creativity, freedom, dreams, individuality, etc.; peers (status quo representation of mass society) out of jealousy, boredom, frustration, etc. succeed in deflating and destroying it; all of the balloons in the city come to lift subject off the ground and carry him through the sky); toward the end of our second film (<i>Frog and Toad are Friends</i>) the police arrived and we were asked to stop watching the film, just as it was ending. When we brought everything back inside I saw the dozens films I had left out, colorful 3D circles that later would bring me joy when projected before 10pm at a reasonable volume.]ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-2124751338902536852012-06-17T14:56:00.000-07:002012-08-07T01:22:03.116-07:00Notes on further discussion of humanity and technologyAmanda's call-in response to a discussion of the human element in sports calls and bringing technology into refereeing on 6/13's Talk of the Nation—<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I know that there's technology everywhere, in fact I'm sitting here on my laptop while I'm listening...I don't think that just because technology's available in any particular venue, that we have to use it simply because it's available. Aren't there some things that are pleasant just because they're human, and their us. Going to the ballpark, I remember the first time I went time I went into a stadium, it was Busch Stadium in St. Louis and I'd never seen anything like it, it was magical, and I can't, you know I think I was 10, so there wasn't an inundation of technology like there is today. But I think there's an interruption in our lives, and maybe even a little distancing from our humanity, when we include these things we've created, these tools in everything we do, I don't we have to have—I mean who cares if the ball was 2 seconds...who cares? The human eye is part—I mean, we are human beings. If a judge makes a call in a boxing match, who cares? It's sports.... I don't want to see Futurama acted out in real life where there are robot umpires, and robot baseball players, and robot boxers, and robot everywhere. We are human beings and we still have a contribution to make to human things outside of computers and technology.</blockquote>
<br />
From D.T. Suzuki's introduction to <i>Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis</i>, found 6/12 at the St. Vincent de Paul, "a story which splendidly illustrates Chuang-tze's philosophy of work, of a farmer who refused to use the shadoof to raise water from his well"—<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A farmer dug a well and was using the water for irrigating his farm. He used an ordinary bucket to draw water from the well, as most primitive people do. A passerby, seeing this, asked him why he did not use a shadoof for the purpose; it is a labor-saving device and can do more work than the primitive method. The farmer said, "I know it is labor-saving and it is for this very reason that I do not use the device. What I am afraid of is this. That the use of such a contrivance makes one machine-minded. Machine-mindedness leads one to the habit of indolence and laziness."</blockquote>
Appropriately, I just painstakingly re-listened to that phone call on the computer and typed out Amanda's thoughts before realizing NPR had already typed out the transcript.<br />
<br />
Notes for essays on <i>Terminator</i>s<i> 1 </i>and <i>2</i>.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
facebook goes public (May 18, 2012) / I watch <em>Terminator</em>s <em>1</em> & <em>2 </em>( May 25-26, 2012)<br />
<br />
facebook is the advancement that leads to the decline of humanity and the rise of the machines; Mark Zuckerburg is the black guy from <em>T2</em> who creates the great historical advancement.<br />
<br />
Arnold S is the catalyst that leads me to get a facebook (April 22) and to destroy it (undetermined)<br />
<br />
Sarah Conner is Alexandra (I watched the movies with her, she chose them instead of other fine VHS selections I had at my house) who got me on facebook inadvertently.<br />
<br />
John Conner is my facebook account.<br />
<br />
I am the guy from T1 who impregnates SC. I am also JC, and AS (Andrew Shaw-zen-Kitch)</blockquote>
OR<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
facebook is NOT the advancement that leads to the decline of humanity and the rise of the machines;<br />
<br />
the stock immediately faltered, big shots were given refunds.<br />
<br />
the movies are not good, visionary; it is a zeitgeist imaginative re-filtering of extinct cinema cliche.</blockquote>ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-69354341526095304772012-06-15T15:47:00.000-07:002012-06-24T11:41:47.813-07:0016 days before getting a facebook account<br />
<br />
<div style="font: normal normal normal 11px/normal Georgia; line-height: 19.2px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On April 14th, 8 days before I got a facebook account, I performed two songs at a local youth arts center, one I had written about the death of Thomas Kinkade. This picture was posted of me last week by a friend on facebook:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was my alter-ego Hank Pennyfox for the evening. After the the two songs I talked to many people about the bizarre non-discussion of his passing. The population of his devotees tastefully remembered the man with light-themed passages from the Bible; the anti-Kinkade crowd relentlessly gloated. It was ridiculous and disgusting to read the dozens of comments that fell below the articles published on the internet in the days following his death.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was proposing <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/04/commercial-artist-dies-at-54.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px color: #003366;">an affirmative meaning to the situation</span></a>, that Kinkade exemplified everything that art is to most of America (coffee mugs, calendars, prints, masculinity, alcoholism, etc.) in such a stark way with what art should be (non-commercialism, creativity, innovation, ambiguity, etc.) that to see his era suddenly cease at a moment we all are attempting to define a new art for California sheds an infinite potential on our common goal.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What is strange is that I stopped not drinking on the night that Thomas Kinkade drank himself to death. I did not make this connection by the time I was Hank Pennyfox a week later. Nor did I make the connection at that point that the morning he died on was the same day that Jesus was crucified: Good Friday. He was found dead by his girlfriend on the morning that I woke up, Friday, with that strange vibrance that comes from drinking a fair amount and emerging unscathed, like I'd gotten away with something. I didn't hear the news until the day after that, Saturday. I walked down the hill with Alexandra to get some lunch, and turned down Lighthouse to pay respects to the Thomas Kinkade National Archive. However, they had whited out "Thomas Kinkade" so it said "The [ ] National Archive." There was a circle of white over the former TKNA seal at the top of the sign. Did that just happen that day? Because he died they just white out his name? Did he have a falling out with the owners, as he had had with so many others, and they modified it weeks ago without my noticing?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If there is indeed an important connection between myself and Thomas Kinkade it would be helpful to share why I had <i>stopped</i> drinking and therefore why it means something that I stopped <i>not </i>drinking on this fateful evening.<br />
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In February I watched <i>Twin Peaks </i>and decided that drinking had become an habitual distraction from my ability to confront truth with the effectiveness possessed by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. This may sound crazy—it may be crazy—but there is a strange cosmic logic to why this made sense to me:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1. When I began the job I presently hold in August, Kyle McLachlan came in with a party of 6 we were expecting because it included the wine writer of the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, and I showed them to their table. The wine writer drew several quick sketches of KM on the sheet of butcher paper, and, when I cleared the table, I tore it off and saved it.</span></div>
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2. In February I locked the front door the Saturday of the AT&T Pro-Am and flipped the sign "closed" and went to eat my dinner in the back. Five minutes later I noticed someone had come in the door as someone else was leaving and that my colleague was explaining we were closed. He was making this comically sincere devestated look of disappointment that only an actor like Bill Murray could pull off. As it turned out, it was Bill Murray.<br />
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"We've been closed 5 minutes and Bill Murray is here. Can I seat him?" I asked my boss.<br />
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"Go seat Bill Murray, Andrew," my boss said. </span></div>
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My colleague did not recognize him, or know who he was when we explained later, and she listened to his pleas patiently, "I've been working since 5 in the morning today. I'm really tired. I'm really hungry—"</span></div>
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"Excuse me, sir," I interrupted. "We do make exceptions. Did I happen to hear you say you've been working since 5 this morning?" </span></div>
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"Well, yes," he said, and I showed him the 2 others he was with to A2 which was available by the window. </span></div>
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The lady the two men were with knew another co-worker of mine and stopped at the front to talk to him. I asked where they thought she would sit so I would know which setting to remove from the 4-top. Bill Murray gestured to the setting in front of him, but qualified his supposed full-hearty knowledge of where another person would like to sit by saying, "But sometimes you just don't know, you know."</span></div>
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I also happened to watch <i>The Razor's Edge </i>in the ensuing weeks (a VHS I had picked up months before, but had ignored due to the terrible review it got from the nice man dressed as a woman at the St. Vincent de Paul store). Then I read the book. Bill Murray plays the main character of the book, Larry Darrell (there is no Somerset Maughm-stand-in narrator in the movie), the loafing soul-searcher who drops out of American bourgeois expectations, a film BM co-wrote on a road trip across the country at a moment he was vainly trying to drop out of Hollywood. The film was produced by the studio because he and his cronies gave <i>Ghostbusters</i> to this studio. He also inserts a eulogy for John Belushi into the script addressed t a character played by his real-life brother Brian Doyle-Murray.</span></div>
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3. One night I went to a bar with friends and drank and smoked cigarettes (something I had quit doing) and the next day I went to a taco place on the same block as the bar with a friend and my parents, slightly hungover, wearing a <i>Cheers </i>t-shirt. Afterwards I saw three people that I saw the night before at the bar. They saw my <i>Cheers </i>shirt and told me they just watched an episode of the show. </span></div>
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"Season 1. Episode 10," one of them chimed in. </span></div>
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We parted ways and my parents drove me home. I talked excitedly about <i>Twin Peaks </i>and interpreting synchronicity for 4 very excited minutes, calling the detail "Season 1. Episode 10" very Lynchian in that it seemed simultaneously to be meaningless—absurdly so—and yet like some kind of clue to a greater meaning as of yet unclear; it makes the mystery richer, yet more potentially comprehensible. I referred to it in my journal a few days as the “collision of media celebrating synchronicity with my life functioning as a kaleidescope of that very uncanniness.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A few days later I was with an old friend and, again as described in my journal, “I free-associated to the fact that Twin Peaks was once on in the same timeslot as Cheers, and that I started watching Twin Peaks on the day that Laura Palmer calls ‘Day 1’ in her diary.”</span></div>
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AND THEN, a week after this other Friday I was to go to this bar again (Don't you want to go!), but it was too busy (it was a Friday night and I finish at the restaurant around 10:30). I went for a walk and met my friends at a quieter bar down the street a little later. They talked about <i>Cheers</i>, and I had no idea that they <i>also </i>were watching <i>Cheers</i>. I left to see a movie that my projectionist friend was playing at his work (the fantastic dance documentary <i>Pina</i>), and then rode bikes with him back to his house to find our other friends there watching <i>Cheers</i>. We sat down, finished an episode (S1E9), and then started the next—S1E10.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was excited because I had not revisited <i>Cheers </i>since I watched it in its entirety two years before, by myself, while living at my parents' house, and because IT WAS THE SAME EPISODE THAT THREE OTHER PEOPLE WATCHED AFTER GOING TO SEGOVIA'S, A LOCAL BAR WHERE EVERYONE KNOWS YOUR NAME, A WEEK AGO, AND WHO I SAW, WHILE WEARING A <i>CHEERS </i>SHIRT RIGHT AFTER THEY WATCHED IT.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I will transition over to what I wrote in my journal a few days later.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A very young Shooter McGavin—the nemesis to Adam Sandler's <i>Happy Gilmore</i>—plays a Red Sox pitcher who has been of late choking badly. So of course he seeks out the king of blowing it as a Red Sox pitcher (LAUGHTER) Sam "Mayday" Malone for advice. He catches Sam flipping a lucky bottlecap, insists on borrowing it, and disappears, leaving Sam flustered and consistently a little more off his game, so to speak.</span></div>
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Levity comes in numbers in <i>Cheers</i>. That is, the more people in the bar, the less serious the scene. That's why we go to bars, levity and company that we can’t find at home. Sincerity, ultimata, break-ups, romance, etc. always occur in the office, or when the bar is closed. Occasionally a sideplot will occur in the back room of the bar with pool table. Season 1 episode 10 beautifully illustrates the light to heavy spectrum of the show, starting with a comic lucky charm plot and dozens of actors, and ending with dark themes and strong character and two people:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[Sam & Diane + regulars + nameless background patrons + guest star] are present when the humorous premise begins, thus giving Sam an audience when he slides his signature curved beer slide down the bar, as instigated by Cliff the mailman who bet a non-regular that it could be done. Shooter McGavin takes Sam’s good luck bottlecap</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[Sam & Diane + regulars + nameless background patrons] are present as Sam’s luck fades, as he psychs himself out for days, anticipating tragedy at every turn.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[Sam & Diane + regulars] remain in the bar on the night he asks for it back. Sam can’t get through to Shooter at the ball park until the game is over. And, just his luck (LAUGHTER), the game ends up going 16 innings. Cast members peel away until at the end it is just</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[Sam & Diane] when Sam calls and learns the lucky bottlecap was lost days before in Kansas City—Shooter was ashamed to say—and Sam realizes it’s gone for good, hangs up and invites the full depth a sitcom is capable of to fill the now empty bar.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“You see, Diane...”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The bottlecap keeps him from drinking.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s the cap to the last beer he ever had.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He’s lost it and now he’s going to get drunk.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He cracks a beer, pours it into a glass, stares it down, and</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">(APPLAUSE)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">slides it to the other end of the bar where Diane is sitting in the perfect curve that Cliff bet on at the beginning of the episode, and he pockets his new lucky bottlecap and smirks a witty arrogant line (LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At a certain point I recalled the episode but I had forgotten the Sam-is-a-recovering-alcoholic twist and it hit me like an epiphany. I pocketed the aluminum tab from the can of Pabst I had finished, and I donated the three others that I had brought and put in the refrigerator, and I stopped drinking for almost two months. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So why did I decide finally to once again start saying, “Well, yes, thank you, I would love a beer” on the night that Thomas Kinkade drank his last? As I seem to deal with nothing other than tautologies of late, the answer would seem to be I started drinking when Kinkade stopped because I started drinking when Kinkade stopped, just as I am always writing about writing about writing, and now am posting on facebook about posting on facebook. </span></div>
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</div>ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-25466945133203396682012-06-07T15:39:00.001-07:002012-06-24T21:03:07.768-07:00Throwing PapersMy roommate Mario delivers newspapers in Pacific Grove, California. I have wanted to go on the route with him since he moved in in December. Today I finally did.<br />
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4:00—Wake up with NPR's Morning Edition already playing. The adage "the news never sleeps" comes to mind. A piece of dock drifted ashore near Newport off the Oregon coast. It was ripped from a fishing port in northern Japan by the tsunami of 2011.<br />
4:15—Head out. I sit in the back seat as Mario has removed the passenger seat from his car to more efficiently wrap up and throw his papers. Mario asks if I want to listen to jazz or tango. He only listens to vintage Big Band recordings and early 20th century tangos. I choose tangos. The recently full moon has halved itself in the past week and the last of the stars begin to disappear.<br />
4:20—We stop at the 7-11 at the bottom of the hill to get coffee. There are four cars in the parking lot, which strikes me as insanely busy for 4 in the morning. Mario says Good Morning to two women in a van. "She's a carrier," he explains to me. "She's an early riser. She's already been to the plant." That is where we are headed—the plant—a facility in Ryan Ranch by the airport where all of the papers await the carriers. We have to go there, get the papers, wrap them up, come back to P.G., and deliver all 300 or so before 6, or, more importantly, before people start complaining. Mario explains to me he knows who needs their papers early and he delivers them first. There is only one coffee brewed and I unload the last drops into my cup as the attendent hits the start button above it to start the next batch, of which I get the first drips percolated through the empty caraff.<br />
4:3—"La Cumparsita," what most would identify as the classic tango composition, comes on as we pass the lake and get on the freeway inland toward the airport. I had just seen <i>Scent of a Woman </i>for the first time the night before. I was not too impressed by the supposedly infamous tango scene in which Al Pacino's blind character pushes and pulls the very young woman from <i>Burn Notice</i> around on the dance floor. It strikes me as an unconvincing justification of misogyny. Perhaps having seen Elaine Benes mock "Hoo-Ah! Hooh-ah!" a dozen times before seeing the film ruined it for me. Mario explains the song is about a masked mysterious women. The title means "the little parade." The first lines in the original, "la cumparsa / de miserias sin fin desfila," translate: "the parade of endless miseries lines up."<br />
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4:45—We need gas before we really get started. We stop at the 7-11 between the airport and Ryan Ranch.<br />
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4:55—Arriving at the plant we park by our section of newspapers. I get out to help pile them in the car, upside-down with the spine toward Mario. Another couple arrives to pick up their section of newspapers as we head out, with the 200 hundred or so <i>Monterey County Herald</i>s in place of his passenger seat, half a dozen <i>New York Times</i> on his dashboard, and a handful of others <i>Californian</i>s, <i>Chronicle</i>s, <i>Mercury News</i>, <i>Wall Street Journal</i>s, <i>Financial Times</i> and one paper in Korean on the seat next to me. Ray Bradbury is memorialized on the front of most.<br />
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5:15—We emerge from the tunnel onto one of the best views of Monterey Bay, with Fisherman's Wharf and the boats of the harbor in the foreground before the rippling expanse between us and Seaside and the mountains and Salinas Valley beyond, slowly illuminated by a developing orange glow casting purple up through the sky. "One of the perks," Mario says. "10 minutes from now it'll be different. Another ten minutes it'll be different."<br />
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5:20—At the threshold of the first route we stop to wrap and prepare for the first throws. The odd out-of-town papers are the ones that need the most attention. And, because it is Thursday, the day of the weekend culture insert, the <i>Herald</i> is in two piles, the paper and the GO! section. Mario has a fluid movement of grabbing one of each with one hand folding and wrapping them, and placing them in the bags hanging from his dashboard. In one block that does not require any throwing I count him do this 5 times in about as many seconds leaving the prepared papers in a pile at the foot of the ever-diminishing two stacks.<br />
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5:25—I ask Mario many questions (he was not good at the first-generation Nintendo classic<i> Paper Boy</i>) and he responds thoughtfully and completely about the drop-off of newspapers in 2008-9 while hurling papers out the passenger window, gracefully veering into the oncoming lane to throw a paper into the courtyard of First Awakenings, or suddenly stopping the car, placing the handbrake, running full speed into an apartment complex and tossing a paper a story up, perfectly landing on a balcony.<br />
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5:35—I get many explanations about certain throws he needs to make, due to complaints—that if it doesn't clear the front fence it will be stolen from the driveway—and explains certain difficult shots. "This one's a 60% shot," he explains on a more difficult throw, "it was 10 when I started." He doesn't even mention others that completely amaze me. Before I realize why he has suddenly slowed down the car the paper has already cleared the window and arced through a 4-foot wide trellis and bounced a foot to the right of the door to land perfectly onto the doorstep.<br />
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5:50—Mario runs all the way up the stairs to place a paper on the porch's bench. The disabled woman who lives there fell once, when Mario had just started, trying to pick up the paper from the top step where he had thrown it. Now he runs it up every day.<br />
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5:55—The sun rises fully above the mountains and through the streets, where the woman from Pavel's gets the bakery ready for the day, I see orange ripples glimmering on the bay. The view from Pine and Eardley is breathtaking, the ripples diminishing half a dozen miles across the bay.<br />
6:00—Tearing up 2nd from Lighthouse we inadvertantly disperse a mom and two baby deer out looking for the town's choicest roses.<br />
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6:09—Mario explains that he is giving a house a courtesy paper because 4 years ago he broke a window in the front door and the man did not charge him for it. Three months ago he broke it again. This reminds him that he needs to pay another customer for the porch light he broke last month.<br />
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6:15—I learn that "porch" is a verb, and an important one, in the paper-throwing game. To throw a paper and have it land on the porch. Ex. "I porch the paper at this house 80% of the time."<br />
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6:20—Mario hears a sound that unsettles him. He turns off his car at the intersection of Maple and Cedar. It does not restart. This has never happened to him and I feel responsible (naturally?). He puts the car in neutral and we push it backward into a space, delivering it, as it were, to the side of the road. He calls his manager to come and help him finish the route. We grab a dozen or so <i>Herald</i>s, one <i>NY Times</i>, and walk around the block. I am told where I can toss the few that I am carrying. I hit one walkway, one lawn, and one driveway. I am an amateur.<br />
6:35—The manager shows up in his truck, gives Mario a plastic tub to put his remaining already-wrapped papers in and I wait in the car until there's more room in the cab to ride along. I read the<i> Santa Cruz Sentinel</i> that was left over at the plant. I read a Ray Bradbury obituary. A carnival magician urged a young Ray to "Live forever!" The AP story quotes Bradbury in regards to his decision to do so by being a writer, "I decided that was the greatest idea I ever heard." From that moment he "started writing every day," he said. "I never stopped."<br />
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6:55—They come back and I sit in the middle of the truck's cab with Mario next to me with one last <i>San Jose Mercury News</i>. He forgot to throw it at the beginning of the route and we hadn't yet cycled back to it before the car died. We get there he passes it over me to the manager and tells him "the yellow house" and the manager throws it at the front porch.<br />
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7:15—We are dropped back at the house by the manager. I try to go back to sleep. <br />
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8:00—The two hour newscycle starts again on my radio. The piece of dock washes ashore in Oregon once again, like a really big piece of news arriving at your doorstop over a year late. I finally fall back asleep.ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1760625086157339318.post-32753326607951694442012-06-06T22:36:00.002-07:002012-08-08T00:43:22.521-07:0040 Days of Writing Statement of PurposeOne of the primary galvanizing
forces behind the conception of my facebook account was my inability to
participate directly in a group that challenged writers to 40 straight days
writing. Everyday. I did, however,
vicariously contribute, which made me aware of the group as I otherwise would
not have been. The servers at the restaurant at which I am a host prepared for
the Pebble Beach Food and Wine Festival by versifying, illustrating, and, in
general, lyrically encapsulating wines, grapes and appellations, and posting,
through the restaurant’s facebook, the choices results on the 40 Days of
Writing page.<br />
<br />
Since
those first 40 days the couple behind the idea, on their honeymoon, came to our
restaurant to interview us—the servers, hosts, and our general manager who
first presented us with the idea—and to film our conversation; I have opened a
facebook account; my duties as a substitute teacher, with the school year, have
ended; I have begun writing pro bono for the local free first and third
Wednesday <i>Hometown Bulletin; </i>and a
second series of forty days, beginning the day after the last day of school,
has been initiated. This is my writing for the first day.<br />
<br />
Last
year at this time I, likewise finished with school, began to write a book about
a two-week trip taken in January (<i><a href="http://bocceballing.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Bocce Balling on the West Coast</a></i>). This past January I re-took the trip in
promotion/celebration of the book/initial trip. There will be a second book
(tentatively <i>Bocce Balling on the West
Coast 2: Bocce for Blood) </i>that shall be primarily composed within the next
40 days. Notions of community and
co-authorship uncannily flourish in what I want(ed) the books to be about and
what the 40 days are (were) about. <br />
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In
no particular order the essays and subjects I hope to tackle will ultimately number
40. The letters following the essays in parentheses indicate whether they will
fall into the category of F (an on going discussion of the influence of
facebook on myself, society and writing), B (the sequel to <i>Bocce Balling on the West Coast</i>), H (a story intended for the <i>Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin</i>), or
O(ther). <br />
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Day 1. statement of purpose (F) <br />
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Day 2. <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/06/throwing-papers.html" target="_blank">an account</a> of riding along on a newspaper delivery route (H)<br />
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Day 3. "<a href="http://bocceballing.blogspot.com/2012/06/prelude-to-argument-for-literary.html" target="_blank">Prelude to an Argument for Literary Authenticity Via Natural Winemaking</a>," the beginning of the typing up of <i>BBOTWC 2 </i>(B)<br />
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Day 4. A song written in honor of my mother's retirement, composed with my brother's girlfriend at her party.<br />
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Day 5. A day of planning, performing, discussing<br />
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Day 6. A <a href="http://bocceballing.blogspot.com/2012/06/13-13-13.html" target="_blank">discussion of collaborative writing</a> via Richard Brautigan's story "1/3, 1/3, 1/3" (B)<br />
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Day 7. Typing up Day 2's story for the paper. (H)<br />
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Day 8. Writing <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/06/16-days-before-getting-facebook-account.html" target="_blank">"16 days before having a facebook account"</a> in my notebook. (F)<br />
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Day 9. Typing up <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/06/16-days-before-getting-facebook-account.html" target="_blank">"16 days before having a facebook account"</a> and uploading it at the library before going to work. (F)<br />
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Day 10. Editing <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/06/16-days-before-getting-facebook-account.html" target="_blank">"16 days before having a facebook account"</a> at the library moments before going to work and not actually being able to save the 30 minutes of work put in. (F)<br />
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Day 11. No writing. Editing rejection letters at work. Bocce after work. <br />
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Day 12: Realizing that nothing was saved on Day 10. redoing Day 10. <br />
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Day 13: A poem written upon visiting San Francisco (written in blank verse, you'll note)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">On Monday in San Francisco</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">/ on the</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> cusp of Dolores Park's expanse of grass / </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Alexandra tells me I should lean back</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> / </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">with her on the grass and look at the clouds.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> / I do and see a cloud above swirl</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> / into a question mark before swirling / </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">further into nothing like an epiphany.</span></blockquote>
Day 14: A brainstorm-as-essay about Wes Anderson movies, specifically <i><a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/06/moonrise-kingdom-notes-part-1.html" target="_blank">Moonrise Kingdom</a></i><br />
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Day 15: Blackberry picking in the parking lot behind the St. Vincent de Paul and La Tortuga in Seaside as a metaphor for literary integrity on the first day of summer.<br />
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Day 16: A song about hanging out laundry on the longest day of the year<br />
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Day 17: Notes on the <i><a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/06/notes-on-further-discussion-of-humanity.html" target="_blank">Terminator</a></i> essays, Wes Anderson, etc.<br />
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Day 18: Polishing and posting various things thanks to internet access<br />
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Day 19: important email to my friend Jake re: taking shit seriously and getting it done.<br />
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Day 20: letter to my friend Emily<br />
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Day 21: letter to my friend Kimberly<br />
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Day 22: began <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/07/my-scholastic-failure.html" target="_blank">“my scholastic failure”</a> about my unfruitful application to
graduate school (O)<br />
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Day 23: re-watched the <i>Terminator </i>movies and took extensive notes, began <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/07/terminator.html" target="_blank">essay</a>.<br />
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Day 24: Watched, <i>Wine from Here</i>, a film about the California natural wine movement; extensive notes taken, thoughts for future bocce essay.<br />
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Day 25: Tying up loose ends with internet access<br />
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Day 26: <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/07/choco-chepe-tia-y-yo.html" target="_blank">a day of adventures</a>, written about on day 27<br />
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Day 27: An <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/07/choco-chepe-tia-y-yo.html" target="_blank">essay</a> about my day off<br />
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Day 28: Notes on the Beatles Anthologies, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SdnEXY6PUo" target="_blank">video improvised</a><br />
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Day 29: my story "Throwing Papers" comes out in the Hometown Bulletin, 4th of July, no internet access.<br />
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Day 30: Another day off, editing at the library, music-making at my house, reading my friend Jaymee Martin's handmade book delivered in the mail; finishing a five page letter in response at 3 AM.<br />
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Day 31: Writing and editing at home, no available computers before work, mailing the letter<br />
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Day 32: internet access before work, catch-up, etc.watching <i>Mondovino</i>, clarifying where wine, bocce, and writing intersect, how <i>terroir </i>applies to literary meaning.<br />
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Day 33: playing bocce at the beach, swimming in the ocean for the first time in 2012.<br />
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Day 34: Caught up at the library with what I have been doing on the days, briefly connecting with the world beyond me; philosophically finding myself distanced from facebook, not sure where to go. Trying my best to write as much as I can.<br />
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Days 35-38: <a href="http://structureseinplay.blogspot.com/2012/07/places-i-clip-my-nails.html" target="_blank">A critical appreciation</a> of Carey Baldwin's <a href="http://placesiclipmynails.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">http://placesiclipmynails.tumblr.com/ </a>(O)<br />
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Essays unwritten in the 40 days...<br />
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<i>Pump up the Volume</i>
as the <i>ars poetica </i>early 90s
counter-culture (O)</div>
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at least a dozen chapters of <i>BBOTWC 2</i> (B)</div>
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regular contributions to the ongoing “reflection of <i>x</i> days of having a facebook account” (F)
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the music of John Stewart (O) </div>
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living in Carmel and Yardening (F)</div>ASKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17642331711068099913noreply@blogger.com0