Not a Bad Year: Sgt. Pepper & I

You Belong in 1967

1967 If you scored... 1950 - 1959: You're fun loving, romantic, and more than a little innocent. See you at the drive in! 1960 - 1969: You are a free spirit with a huge heart. Love, peace, and happiness rule - oh, and drugs too. 1970 - 1979: Bold and brash, you take life by the horns. Whether you're partying or protesting, you give it your all! 1980 - 1989: Wild, over the top, and just a little bit cheesy. You're colorful at night - and successful during the day. 1990 - 1999: With you anything goes! You're grunge one day, ghetto fabulous the next. It's all good!

What Year Do You Belong In?

intersubjectivity, a poem

     rain is the parts of the universe
     that got too heavy to look at. every problem you've ever had has been the result of too little mind chasing too much universe.
     the universe
holds a reality that can never be understood by the mind, art, cinema, literature. the present is the only knowable thing in the universe
     that is necessary and certain--one 3-dimensional slice of a 4-dimensional ball of yarn. the rest of the universe,
     belonging to the room behind you (past) and the room in front of you (future), is all in darkness. i can't stand looking at anything in this universe,
     how can you? the mind has memory, the mind has dreams, these transcend the space-time paradigm, the nature of thought and consciousness transcends the space-time paradigm, perhaps the mind is the only thing that is actual reality in and of itself, the only thing that truly exists in the universe?
     but everything we know of the universe
is colored by our minds, collectively and individually--or perhaps only individually--perhaps everything the human race knows about the universe
     is colored entirely by only my own mind (is solipsism that bad? it must be useful for something.)

     time + place + reflection = a moment.
time + space + mind = the universe.

     is this god? am i god?

Sad

I try to join one or two new Facebook groups every day. Sad.

Happy Birthday Blawg

The 1 year birthday of this blog is officially today. Isn't that special?

The Transcendent Beauty of Rocking Out

I like the oldie pop sound of the Beatles. I like the sweeping, introspective sonicscape of Radiohead. I like the folky whimsy of Bob Dylan. I like the nervous, paranoid distortion of the Walkmen. I like the smoky, jazzy voice of Norah Jones (I'd have sex with that voice if such a thing were possible).

But today, I rediscovered something I had forgotten about since, mmm, 8th grade: ROCKING OUT. I listened to Tyrannosaurus Hives by the Hives today, and it was an intense half-hour of songs that all rocked my face. The first track comes in with the momentum of a fifty bullet firestorm, and never lets up, the drums and the bassline and the guitar and the vocals all coming together in an electrifying, energetic, dynamic, and fun powerhouse, with songs clocking in at a breakneck two-minute clip. This music makes you want to jump up and down, headbang, tap your feet, DO SOMETHING. It moves you in a more literal way than the first artists I mentioned above. But it moves you. I highly recommend.

Rear Window, Psychosexual Deviance, And The Computer Age

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is about a voyeuristic action photographer who suffers a leg injury and is forced to stare out of his window all day and night for recreation; he begins to assume details of his neighbors' lives, and concocts a conspiracy theory that one of them has murdered his wife and buried her body parts. On a metaphorical level, this film is about the character's fetishistic, psychosexually morbid scopophilia, in which he derives a sick, diseased pleasure from his voyeurism, and is aroused by his own psychotic imagination when he tries to solve this self-invented murder mystery. His desires also represent his inability to settle down and be married, instead always on the look-out from his window for new encounters. The large, long telephoto lens Jimmy Stewart attaches to his camera to better view his neighbors is a phallic symbol, an optical erection signifying the pleasure he derives from viewing people from his distant window. As he sits in his wheelchair, powerless to move, impotent really, his spying activities with the telephoto lens become almost masturbatory. When the supposed murderer finds out he's been watching him, and breaks the safety of space and distance, coming into the photographer's apartment and therefore his reality, the film reaches its climax, as does Jimmy Stewart's psychotic morbid fantasy; he blinds his approaching attacker with flashbulb after flashbulb from his camera, representing white flashes of orgasmic fulfillment, ejaculations derived from the physical materialization and realization of his fetishistic obsession which he previously could only view at a distance, as if through a movie screen. It is only after this last psychosexual encounter that he's willing to settle down and abandon his deviant and perverse desires for the relatively "normal" institution of marriage.

Further explorations can be made about the sexually deviant nature of metacinematic desires addressed in Rear Window; it seems every moment a character "breaks through the screen" and invades another spatiotemporal paradigm, it is a moment of climactic excitement for Stewart's character, who can do nothing but watch with morbid fascination from his masturbatory audience-seat. Thus, the question may be raised: do we as viewers of cinema share the same voyeuristic sexual deviance, especially when we desire metacinematic breakage and invasion of the hymen/movie screen to invade the reality of the film?

SO, I am now forced to comment on today's modern society. "We've become a race of peeping toms" is a comment, I believe, even more applicable today than in Hitchcock's time. With the arrival of the information age has come things like blogs, Xangas, LiveJournals, Facebook profiles, online photo albums, Geocities personal webpages, and hiding behind the "Invisible" feature on AOL Instant Messenger, and it has become increasingly easier to satiate one's psychosexual voyeurism digitally. I do believe that the computer screen has become the new "rear window," the channel through which people can fulfill their cyber-scopophilia. So what does that make this blog? What does that make you right now? I'm breaking the computer screen right now to address you and this problem in general, an act of meta-blogging, if you will. How does that make you feel?

Summer Plans

I'm very excited about the possibilities this summer. I have many goals to meet and avenues of opportunity to look into. It'll be an exciting time. Things will happen in earnest for the first time. I never really decided on a strategy before, but now I'm ready; no I'm prepared. I know what angle to approach from, and it's very comforting to have that reassurance that there is a plan in place. I finally know what I'm about. This is me. Welcome to me.

All-Nighter

5:00 PM
Waiting for Eric to finish talking to girl. See Vimarth, tell him we're going to New York right now, for the fuck of it. Ask him if he wants to come. He says sure, goes to ATM, still wearing backpack.

5:55 PM
Waiting for R7 Regional Rail train to Trenton, NJ.

6:50 PM
"I was drooling. Djya see that?"

9:00 PM
Eric asks for light from really hot German girl in Times Square and we chat for 5 minutes.

9:58 PM
"This is like a movie. I can feel the air is open. Like I'm in the Matrix."

10:07 PM
"Excuse me, I'm his existential detective. Do you mind if I shoot this?"

"If there was one thing you'd wanna change, what would it be?"

"I studied it for 7 years."

A guy from Wharton getting had by a street peddler.

10:24 PM
Black man with cane does Vaudeville jig on subway. "I've got sunshine on a cloudy day."

10:50 PM
Drug dealer trying to sell us drugs in Washington Square Park. Gave a pretty good deal too. Oh well.

10:59 PM
"Fucking serpent tried to sell you that book."

11:49 PM
We just met some guys from Jersey at a McDonald's. We hung out with them at Washington Square Park.

12:08 AM
Encountered French people.

1:26 AM
HOOKAH BAR

2:28 AM
Time is not of the essence. It's just a desire. The essence is much bigger than that.

2:37 AM
Diner/coffee shop: Moonstruck on 2nd.

2:40 AM
For Eric, the theist, it's like fate. The fun we have in New York is fate, is destiny. For me, the existentialist, it's all randomness, all coincidence. There's the dichotomy within the unified idea of "fun in New York."

2:51 AM
"I like my coffee like I like my women: autistic."

2:55 AM
We came to New York for a temporary existence.

3:00 AM
We may not know what's up, but we know what's down.

3:56 AM
At McDonald's. Almost at Times Square. Girl on phone keeps looking at me. Trying to smile and make a 4 AM connection. Vanessa Carlton playing on the speakers. "If I can just hold you... tonight."

4:06 AM
Threw pennies into a fountain on 42nd Street.

4:54 AM
Missed it by half an hour. Oh well, little bit late.

5:08 AM
Why are so many people just giving me a hard time?

5:53 AM
Got rejected by girl for sitting next to her at the NJ Transit part of Penn Station. Bitch.

6:19 AM
NE Corridor Line: It's getting light outside. We gotta get to Trenton.

7:37 AM
"How wild was tonight?"

Little Black Book

gas station, very dirty/shitty, illuminated by extremely bright, stark white light - high contrast of image and emotional states

Chapter 2 Influences: A Widow for One Year, John Irving

Well hello, ladies!

Mmmbop.

Woerth goes trough electroshock treatment & gets new shiny personality

- Kates over Caitlins

- Stiffness of spring

"The smell of lipstick would always remind me of my mother. Even after smelling it in association with all the lovers I've had in my life--and there have been a lot, mind you!--it always still reminds me of my mom."

"That's fuckin' weird, man."

Crystal lattice of my heart
Vibrations lead to heat
Angels fall without you there
Leeds to London to America
We will battle till extinction
Puddle of liquid metal

essential singularity

I was born on Christmas Day. Do you know how hard that is?

On emo: When every song is about a girl, that makes me sick.

Philip Marlowe's cat vs. The rest of the world's Doberman

wet
lab
job

"We are more master of our thoughts in the morning than in the evening."
- David Hume

Let's pretend it's a work of art
Let's pretend it's not my heart
I'm sorry I love you
It's a phase I'm going through
There's nothing that I can do
I'm sorry that I love you

"Since man is his own arbiter, he literally creates good and evil."
- Porfirio

"My sins are that I wasn't tough enough. I wasn't low or dirty enough. I should have trusted no one; never loved a girl. I should have smashed the other guy first. That's the way the world is."
- Shubanka

Love is dancing.

Dancing is love.

I feel alone.

I am happy.

I call myself an anarchist, and there are some misunderstandings that anarchism means not believing in anything. It means believeing in everything. It's not that I don't hold things sacred. I think that everything is sacred. "Anarchist" means "without hierarchy" and "atheist" means "without deity." I don't believe in hierarchial deities but I do believe that life is sacred. I think being able to see beauty is being able to learn the private language of meaning that each individual's life is written in. Questions of morality and ethics are very important to me. I don't necessarily think that there is a tablet of rules carved in the sky that we have to abide by. I think that we are all individually responsible for coming up with the values that we live by and believe in. Even if you claim that those values are proceeding from a supreme being, you're still responsible yourself for the decision to abide by them. I take the question of what is sacred, what is holy, very seriously. Being able to be in the world in a way that connects you to what is beautiful is really important to me. I prefer to look at the cosmos itself without distinctions of what is higher or lower. So I see God in all things.
- Brian Dee, Anarchist/Atheist

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Rainbow Hypocrisy

You wear your cause on your wrist
And your politics on your sleeve
And your heart's in a cage
That it can never leave

That's all I have to say.

The Hope Of Spring

The hope of spring. It's only going to get warmer. It's only going to get better. More fun. Happier. The pig breaks out of the cage and goes on a wild, indulgent rampage! It is the era of the id. Get out of the way!

Generic Spring Break Post #11

Tonight was the most fun I've had all spring break. Jit, Niraj, my new friend Usama, and I spent an evening behind the Wal-Mart on Coit and Spring Creek riding shopping carts down a hill. It's the best one can manage in a town like Plano. It really is.

Good times!

And tomorrow I go back to Philadelphia. So I guess this is the last Generic Spring Break Post. I'll have to start writing fucked up stories and unintelligible poetry again.

Generic Spring Break Post #10

I just realized I have 50 Gmail invites I can give away. So... please let me know if you want one. I don't even have to know you. Just take them, please. I feel so wasteful with them just sitting there.

Generic Spring Break Post #9

Nothing. I bought Jurassic Park on DVD. This is one of my favorite movies, ever. I have seen this movie the most times out of all the movies I've ever seen. The count is something like 23 times or so. I used to be obsessed with dinosaurs. I knew the names of about 100 different species of dinosaurs. I was like the annoying kid in the movie who keeps asking Dr. Grant about dinosaurs. But then the kid got electrocuted and after that he just shut the fuck up, hahaha. Loser kid. Yep. Pointless post. Like I said before. Nothing. I'm on vacation, man.

Oh yeah, listening to lots of Rancid. Probably not good for my mental health. Oi oi oi!

Generic Spring Break Post #8

Today was beautiful again. My parents and I drove to Ray Roberts Lake State Park and we rode our bikes around a lot. I never knew how to ride a bike when I was kid. I didn't learn until I was already in high school, at which point I never really had the opportunity to indulge in the childhood bliss of riding my red bicycle. The feeling, thankfully, can still be captured at my age: as I was speeding down a hill and careening around a turn, I hit a stretch of straight path, with the wind in my hair and sun on my brow and trees whizzing by, and I caught an inflating feeling in my chest underneath this big beautiful blue sky that could only be described as sublime. For three seconds I was Buddha on a two-wheeler. May the world know this happiness.

Generic Spring Break Post #7

I just watched The Pianist. It was slightly more understated than Schindler's List, I suppose, but that's not saying much. There were definitely moments were I could have used a little more subtlety. Then again, some of the shots were extremely poignant. One nerdy technical effect I appreciated very much was when a shell blasts Adrien Brody's room, Polanski immediately muffles all sounds, and puts a high-pitched ringing in the background, to imitate his sudden loss of hearing from the explosion. That little trick was extremely realistic and put me right into the frenetic energy of the moment. Props to the sound editing crew! Or is it sound mixing? I never know.

In other news, I like my parents. They bought me beer today.

Generic Spring Break Post #6

I'm developing a slight obsession with alternative/underground bands that died in the 90s. The Pixies are the newest addition.

I also bought new sunglasses. They cost me $1.

I also went to Willow Bend Mall with my mom. I bought, or rather, to absolve myself of some of the blame, she bought me... uh... um... well... uh... uh...

*coughmumblemumblefivefashionablecollaredlongsleeveshirtsmumblecough*

Hey, I live in Consumerwhoresville. It couldn't be helped. Plus every single one was on sale and cost between $10-15. *sigh* I still feel like such a metrosexual fashion whore though!

Generic Spring Break Post #5

Pitchfork Media is pretty funny:

Keely complained that music lovers consume songs without actually listening to them. He claimed we reduce albums to genre, and artists to their influences, uninterested in finding a song's meaning and unwilling to appreciate their unique human nuances. One such manifesto came packaged with promo copies of Worlds Apart, in fact, as if Keely could convince us to ignore the fact that "The Summer of '91" sounds like the Counting Crows, "Let It Drive" sounds like the Gin Blossoms, "The Rest Will Follow" sounds like Bright Eyes, "All White" sounds like Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, and the verse melody of "Caterwaul" is the band's most soluble MBV-meets-Sonic Youth rip yet. Much of Worlds Apart plays like a boring mid-90s alt-rock radio mixtape--so why sit through this shit just to get the band's "jokes"?

I just noticed that this is the third post this spring break that makes reference to My Bloody Valentine (see posts #4 and #2). My bad. I swear I'm listening to more than just obscure indie music from the 90's. [nods head to Pavement's Wowee Zowee, r. 1995]

Generic Spring Break Post #4

Today is a beautiful day. There is literally not a cloud in the sky, the entire expanse is completely blue. The temperature is a balmy 70 degrees, with a nice, cooling breeze. The sun is bright. I need a new pair of sunglasses.

I love distortion. It masks the fact that I suck at guitar and makes me sound like some mix of My Bloody Valentine, Pavement, and Sonic Youth. No skill involved at all. Just maintain the "wall of sound." Whoo!

Generic Spring Break Post #3

I like my electric guitar. I named her today. Annabella. Hardcore Everclear fans will understand that one.

I also got a really retarded haircut. I look like I just escaped from an insane asylum. Put me in a clinical white robe and I could be Billy Bibbit's best friend in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

My mom patched my jeans today. There was big hole on the right knee. Now there is a big red patch. Sweet.

Watched Fargo last night on my computer. Violently quirky. Margie is a great protagonist/hero. Steve Buscemi is "a little guy, funny-lookin' in a general kind of way." Hahaha. Another funny quote, spoken with an accent that is some weird mix of Midwest "Minnesoter" and Japanese: "You were such a super lady... and I'm, I'm so lonely!" HEEHEEFUNNY!

OK. Incredibly bored again.

Generic Spring Break Post #2

Here is the music I've been listening to and liking recently, although most of it is actually not very recent at all; I'm just "slow on the uptake," to use an annoying cliché. I've also included a one-word reason why I like them:

Hot Fuss - The Killers [Fun]
The Strangest Things - Longwave [Dream-like]
The Moon & Antarctica - Modest Mouse [Cosmic]
Then & Now: The Best of the Monkees - The Monkees [Cheesy]
Loveless - My Bloody Valentine [Enveloping]
On Avery Island and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel [Weird]

Generic Spring Break Post #1

Home is extremely boring. I woke up today and I was immediately back in high school. Same room. Same feeling. Same memories.

five knocks

five knocks on the door
that i completely ignore
except of course for
the noise of the roar
as i begin to soar
and the air thins more
the sound hits my core
like nothing before

is love a bore?
so that's the score

emporium of delirium serum

wake me when it's over
i can't think when i'm sober
i float off into the night sky
surrounded by brilliant white lights
like i'm flying in a dream
that's just how it seems
your face has no form or shape
light and shadow flirt and play
like faceless memories in a cloud
an old photograph with the faces rubbed out
i can only remember the places
the time but not the faces
i'll always be waiting for your call
your beck never did me at all
i'm tied to the past by an invisible string
and you're always looking for something
wal-marts and swimming pools
making hot and staying cool
your laugh came so hard and fast
that i knew it would never last
i knew it was coming
i knew you were running
but i just look out my window
and the world dissolves like snow
collapses like a falling roof
leaving me so aloof

but you can meet me at the bottom
it's a room that's always autumn