Death as an unkind way of saying "Change"

Death as an unkind way of saying "Change"

Out of desperation, I've reinstalled earthlink 56k dialup for a month while I try to get broadband... The pages load incredibly slow, and I'm afraid there will be no pretty pictures to look at as the load time on the server will probably take all night.
I saw a few movies over the weekend that I'm a month behind seeing ("A Long Engagement" and "Closer")... Per the latter, it was a subconsciously violent movie (where as the former was a subconscious love story amid a violent wartime movie)... Something occured to me today as I was walking to work was how interchangeable London and New York were. Given that both the female and male leads were probably adapted from the british stage and that Mike Nicholls probably added a cross-atlantic flair to it (I'm just guessing - I haven't really seen the play that it's based on, just making assumptions)... But it got me thinking about the similarities - per some similar rants on some blogs I've read - how materialistic both cities have gotten (loss of that fabled struggling creative spirit that everyone moved there for in return for high-end chain stores and status items)... I then started on the warpath - how did we get to be so materialistic? Why are people willing to forgoe a housing payment for designer denim (which invariably looks like shit no matter how you try to wear it)... Why do we think that our notoriety will be seen in our iPods? I then realized the source of all our anguish - Marketers and the fact they let GenerationY dictate what was "street", which is stuff you could not afford in the ghetto or suburbs, but dreamt about regardless. Labels became again the new gods, and Hip Hop moguls could design BMW's and sell the twentyset, but GenX was a lost cause because of our abundance of irony and trying to keep up with it all. I shouldn't go after GenY, however... As much as I'd like to see them as doey-eyed pawns of a bigger game, we're as much to blame for pushing the "New Sincerity" agenda of indie-rawwwch. Ok - this is complete shit and I hate articles like this. I really do... Slow on the take and years behind schedule, the NYT gives us this tripe on Conor Oberst, 24yroldwunderkind with a shaky voice and soft melodies that we've not heard before (uhh, Galaxy500, any twee band from the mid90's). I guess I hate the fact that it's plugged on bling-concsious shows like the OC and One Tree Hill where they use it to bridge poorly written dialogue spoken by teenagers portrayed by people in their 20's. I also hate that a long standing tradition of Keep-it-Simple-Stupid has been touted as the new strategy to sell (and sell out). No wonder the indie kids are running to intentionally bad hip-hop parodies (Har Mar Superstar, etc) and baroque karakoe buttroque... I guess it's all labels baby. Oh - I show my age, bitter and old, clutching at my out of print vinyl and staring out to sea...
Speaking of - I started to think of death as I walked home in the rain (to change the tone/subject). I was feeling the ghosts move around the city... Change, Transformation... Histories as small as microrevolutions that won't be seen for centuries until someone finds a document somewhere. Death is a harsher way of saying change... Change is a kinder way of saying Death. Regimes come in and out of power... Yet things stay in the picture, Ghosts hide behind buildings and won't let you look away. I think that I should go easy on my contempt for changes, it's invariable and inevitable and leaves me no contemporaries. Plus I'm as much a slave to ridiculous vehicles (as a friend once put it) as the next kid (of any age), so bring on silly details that make us feel woefully inadequate and unwilling to sit still.

Blink, Blink

Titan Springs

Everyone's inner 5-grade astronomy-geek hit a collective glee note when we heard that the Cassini-Huygens Space probe had landed and had indeed noticed some water on the landscape. It is good to know that the solar system isn't an entirely dry county, but still - the glamour shot from space came back looking a bit like Nebraska at this time of year:

Ok, it's admittedly blurry and in black and white, but we did want some kind of impressive drama from a planet that's supposed to describe the origins of life... I mean, Titan doesn't have to get all "2001" on our ass and make a huge production, but it could try to live up to it's artist renderings:

Now that's what I'm talking about. We want the kind of Saturnset you can only get while watching big-budgeted sci-fi films... We want alien shores with a Thomas Kincaid sumptuousness to them... We want a potential vacation hotspot called "Titan Springs" where the rich can shuttle to when the Hamptons finally become unbearable...

Jeepster

Speaking of the unbearable, at the Detroit Auto Show today, we witness yet another marriage of technology and homicidal paranoia in The Ford SYN Concept SUV, complete with bulletproof casing and a video camera for the back window:

Of course it's concept (which means pie-in-the-sky "because-we-can" designer smugness), but if these babies get in vogue with the avid automobile warrior, we could have a self-fufilling Mad-Max kind of prophesy (everyone on the road as your enemy, trust has become limited and thus public transportation is outlawed, people warring for gas = hmmm, I think we're already here).

Film Club

Spent last night at Rehab (no not that rehab... I mean this rehab)... I snuck in during the last 5 minutes of their drunken puppets show (which was finishing), and caught the "house band" for said puppets - a really entertaining 3 peice jug band. Wish I could remember what their names were... In any case - a few minutes prior, I was in an unnamed bookstore and had spied a copy of this month's McSweeny's offshoot journal "The Believer" - which focused on visual art's, artists, etc... and comes with a free DVD with short films... I was hella impressed with this effort as interactive media really hasn't become all that it was cracked up to be -- yet they made it work by having a few shorts by Guy Maddin and Mike Mills.

In any case - had a sudden burst of inspiration while I was talking to Kelly and Allen about it that it would be really cool to have a film club that focuses on films as quick and easy documents. Something that's like a film, but is not trapped in the confines of "film", but more immediate and fun... Something creative where you pick a topic, everyone would go and shoot a subject and then edit and preview it the following week. Kind of like any film club - but the idea is that it's focused on the "immediate" and not the technology and process.... Am I making sense? I have been in film theory mode lately -- perhaps it's the recent death of Susan Sontag that is bringing out my more visceral side, but I'm also about wanting to have fun and be creative with the equipment i have...

Who knows - maybe this is finally reason to get a dvd-burner for my mac?

Future Regained

Whole Lotta stuff over the past 24 hours...

Future Regained

I spent last night at an undisclosed location with fabulous un-named people watching the (soon-to-be released, shhhh!) 2046, and on their tricked out projection screen to boot! It was, as is all his work, a beautiful meditation on human relationships that predictably fall apart... I think his forte is not telling love stories, but rather the "in-between" times when you're questioning everything. His characters strike me as limited and not having to live in "time" itself, but rather hanging in a suspended animation (or slow, luxurious pan across a reflective surface) of sadness and memory. This particular film was just that. The futuristic plot seemed to take a backseat to the drama in 1960's (and thus continuing his stories w/characters such as Tony)... I would have liked to have seen more, but in a way - the simplicity and artistry of what he does well (2 people falling out of love) plays out better in a more simple setting (HK of the past vs the future). The rest becomes an array of arresting images. Check out the website here.

Pancake Mountain

Another crazy thing I discovered today was this site for a children's show called "Pancake Mountain" which has a roster of indie musicians in support of it. I watched one of the segments with "Fiery Furnaces" (Do the Moose) and it completely makes sense -- these enthusiastic youthful bands with creativity and enough zaniness for the wee-set, yet some how can keep it low-fi and cool for older kids of all ages (like me)...

Also - check out (under clips) the short films, like "M is for Mom". Original, arty and almost something you would see in the Whitney (projected on a wall no less)... I'm impressed - I wished they had something designed this way for adults (which in a way, this is designed for both Punk rock parents and the offspring of), but alas - we're too jaded... Still, the proof will be in how the primary audience (the kids) take to it...

Snowed in

Yesterday, I awoke to snow covering the top of Beacon hill. It was one of those rare moments where I realize that I really do love my place - the apartment quiet, a blanket of stillness keeping out the chaos and gridlock of the freeways and people angry with commerce and the Seahawks game. I curled up and read the sunday times... wishing it would not end, that maybe the world would be coming to a temporary halt (again) and that we would be immobile... Alas, it was all gone by noon.

Evidence and Narrative

Evidence and Narritive

If something happens to you, how do you put into a convenient 3 paragraph description of what went down? I read what I write and see it flailing on a page - I want to go back and correct my sentence structure in my first post of the year and remove the runons (where-as I fragement like drunk driver, barely missing a sentence to link the other sentence together neatly). I've never been into details... Me be a writer... (insert audible disdain here from the million or so writers).
An article in NYT about the banning of photographs in subways. I used to Fotoblog quite a bit and there was one controversial fotoblogger took all sorts of incredulous shots on the subway. People would leave their protests in the comments section - the artist defending themselves by saying "they do not see what's so bad"... I hate to say it - but I get some of my best shots with random crowds sometimes... There's such an intrusion in doing that however...

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a
narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly
selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all
photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do
is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth.
Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are
still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted
members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late
1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would
take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until
satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise
expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty,
light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture
should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always
imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the
camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as
much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those
occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating,
promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole
enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is
photography's "message," its aggression.

So sayeth Susan Sontag. Yes, there is whole lotta violence in that fstop because you are the person who is imposing the idea on us. Ever notice when you take pictures how people wince just prior to the flash going off?

Speaking of the recent death of Susan Sontag, my thoughts turn to camp, the language of my people. I've been watching alot of KITH from netflix and loving every minute of it... It's no longer knee-slapping funny, I find. But it is still highly literate and innovative to watch. Comedy-as-tragedy-turned-on-it's-thong-wearing-keister. Maybe taking pictures of people unknowingly will become renegade and thus comic? I don't know why I felt the need to push this into the path of Sontag's "On Photography"... Perhaps it's because I'm looking for a strange new comic vehicle...

Pop Obsessives Paid Weekly!

The promise of the new... After the new year, potentials and possibilities seem endless for some weird reason. After seeing a writing course offered in Salon, I went directly to their source (Mediabistro.com) and saw that they had offered a beginning online course for writing for Magazines beginning tomorrow. It’s strange – but I’ve always courted the idea of going back into the news business (even though I was always at the technical edges while working in T.V. and not technically “in” journalism, but I did technically graduate from the J-school at UO). Alas – a short lived dream however. The class was full and also expensive (plus, I’ve been hearing some horror stories of distance-learning where the feedback channels were less than optimal…), so I decided to forgo that, but I might look into a future course (in real-time somewhere) and/or just find some small-time gigs that would take submissions. Why the sudden interest in writing? The world is already full of would-be authors and bloggers and people who maintain their presence as a mini-“news authority”. Friends who are in the biz caution against it and those who do it usually give up after a while. I don’t know – I think it came about while I was distracted the other day chasing down facts on an obscure 1970’s musician named John Howard. I somehow stumbled across him on Amazon and a whole other universe opened up. I wanted to know more – but being that I should be working, I had to put my search aside. I’m always obsessed with minutia – 15minutes of fame, trivia and/or footnotes in history that actually have a larger ripple than we might realize. moment). My pop obsessions outweigh other tragedies and terrible histories, so I figure it has to be good for something.
In any case – I ended up purchasing the John Howard CD, and will look for stimulus perhaps through Seattle central, or a small group. In the meantime - I'm cultivating my obsessions with sad-eyed singer-songwriters from 40-30 years ago with continental flair and style, who were courted as the potentially next big thing and then didn't quite make it...



And also my other fave I saw today was Terry Reid, the man-who-would-be-Robert Plant. Dig the mod hair and bedroom eyes...

Checking Out 2005

I'm writing what is an eternity - a good year and a half. Readership is probably zero at this point and I'm barely managing any blips in cyberspace, but i've no other journal at the moment and my life has been a series of unfinished notebooks (pages at the end that go to nowhere). Besides, this blog has seen me through 2 NY's resolutions and minor transitions.
What makes this year so different?
A few things... Everything.
I started the New Year with one of those near-death experiences that define you by defining a moment that's pretty hard to erase when the moment itself is the very act of being erased in front of you. If I can reclarify -- it was an ambulance, and my head on the pavement oozing blood, while I checked out. Checked out meaning -- a feeling of going... Time slowed down immensely and what I could only feel were still shots of my being as if filmed by Michel Gondry, or perhaps it felt more like stop motion animation - time was fractured and moving in frames into blackness. Rattling and descriptions of what had happened "He drank too much... He was drinking too much... He Fell... He hit his head on the pavement..." Moist and wet blood, Ice... A trickle. Panic. Blackness - Is this it? Am I dying? I hear the sounds of EMT's giving up, turning offi monitors... Am I going "out" of existence -- and {moment of existential dread} is this what really happens? What follows is a replay - 12:40am, I had stumbled out of the party to catch a cab, but being completely inhibriated I fell into a wall and cracked my skull open, lost some blood. Friends called 911, had me blanketed, iced and elevated. Within minutes, and after some much needed vomiting, Joe and the EMT's carted me off in the meatwagon to Swedish where I was undressed, had tubes shoved into every orifice and my bodily fluids drained and replaced with fluids that were a bit more, well, helpful. This is where I regained consciousness and saw Joe waiting (I don't think I've ever been more thankful of anyone than to see him)... Time caught up to me, brought me into the moment. I was in a hospital gown, had tubes going in and out of every orifice. I was too tired to be ashamed of how this escalated and was focused on survival at that point (and the fact that I was vomiting out more fluid)... They patched me up with a staple in my noggin, and had me walking to make sure my blood pressure would raise, my most graceful moments again - me walking down the halls of Swedish, a medic holding the back of my gown closed and I'm weaving and bobbing. By 5:30am, I'm announced alive and at risk of concussion.
I'm not ashamed of this happening - it brought some good forces back in my life (namely Joe [who is my guardian angel at this point] and the will to live and not do stupid things like this again). It also clarified my resolutions at this point:

1. Be a better person
2. Quit "out" drinking everyone.

I'm not a candidate for AA, but I binge drink like a foolish coed, especially at milestone occassions (birthday's, holidays, bad elected officials taking office). I'm not sure why I still do this at age 35, but I'm usually 1-2 jiggers up on most of my peers and I get "crunked" as a means of what I probably think as a means of malcontent bohemian revelry adopted in late teens/early 20's (I remember polishing off a 5th of voddy with 2 housemates in an evening in order to instigate the insane things we tried to goad each other into doing while sober). I think the infectious self-destructiveness was fine as long as there was little or no actual destruction occuring. But it's recently occured to me the dumb choices that I'm not immune to -- even death -- are carried in shot-glassess placed on checkerboard. I somehow make it a mission to get messed up, and then magically maintain. This has to stop... I'm older fer chrissakes... People look at old trolls vomitting in the corners of dive bars with pity and disgust, and I'm not wanting either at this point.

I think somewhere in the pain and flurry, I heard an EMT say (or shout) "Your gonna be fine"... Oh.... I gotta be good.

Voice of the Beehive

I am having my life controlled by a deadly scourge... Yellowjackets have made a nest in my kitchen porthole and are looking to expand their empire into my already roasting apartment. The queen wants my open mouth for her throne while her drones go off and bully the other insects and people trying to keep cool. I want to buy pesticide and be very environmentally unfriendly. Yes, I want to kill some of God's precious little critters that are actually not doing me any harm yet. They just repulse me. If you look at the hive - you will see their pelvises rocking back and forth in an effort to mate or do something terrible. Very shades of Matthew Barney cremaster 2. Ewww.

However, let's skip those pesky bee's. I am sooo excited - I just got my friend Anna Oxygen's CD in the mail from Amazon!! Aside from being hella talented as well as my fave New Wave Mary Poppins by way of Neneh Cherry, this grrls gonna be a star - so grab em now!! ....