In the Future, Everyone Will Have Their Own TV Show

2007-06-04T22:36:00.000-07:00

This blog has been permanently relocated to:

2007-03-23T01:24:00.000-07:00

Dolores Park, San Francisco, 3.23.07

Today was the kind of day that exists for the sole purpose of changing everything. Words only indulge approximations, plagiarizing the experience, threatening to abduct its residence. Tonight, I am an unsentimental believer. I am resucitated. I am in unanimty. I am at home.

2007-03-02T00:38:00.000-08:00

This is the trailer for the Showtime transfer of NPR's incomporably brilliant radio program "This American Life". The thought struck me originally as completely impossible and atrocious. But watching this clip has converted me into a believer that this could possibly turn out to be, like, the best thing ever.

And it's THAT GIRL FROM THE WEINER CIRCLE!!!! (Anyone from Chicago will know what I'm talking about.)

--

EDIT: Sorry that I haven't actually posted substantial update these days. Things in my life have been all-consuming and in various states of metamorphasis. Trust me. Wait for a later date. There will be plenty to tell.

2007-01-05T06:10:00.000-08:00

1. When you looked at yourself in the mirror today, what was the first thing you thought?
"Young alcoholics need the sun."

2. How much cash do you have on you?
Probably around $15-20.

3. What's a word that rhymes with "DOOR?"
Oriental sore.

4. Favorite planet?
Mars -- planet of fire and fertility.

5. Who is the 4th person on your missed call list on your cell phone?
Forrest, sometime earlier yesterday morning.

6. What is your favorite ring on your phone?
"Black Satin" by Miles Davis.

7. What shirt are you wearing?
Grey/red polyester zip-up from the bargain bin at Sears.

8. Do you "label" yourself?
I deconstruct. Labels would make life easier, though. So would Jesus.

9. Name the brand of your shoes you're currently wearing?
No shoes! No pants either!

10. Bright or Dark Room?
Bright.

11. What do you think about the person who took this survey before you?
Jenny is always first place.

13. What were you doing at midnight last night?
Actually? Sleeping. I know. Wow.

14. What did your last text message you received on your cell say?
"Your GMail Code is: 253@$%"

15. Where is your nearest 7-11?
Somewhere on Factoria Boulevard.

16. What's a word that you say a lot?
More like a concessive repair. I mean is used pretty frequently.

17. Who told you he/she loved you last?
Probably my mother.

18. Last furry thing you touched?
Bubba, my black pomeranian.

19. How many drugs have you done in the last three days?
None, unless you count certain medications.

20. How many rolls of film do you need developed?
I don't take pictures. I rely on theoretical memory.

21. Favorite age you have been so far?
Twenty.

22. Your worst enemy?
El Duce/The Prince of Panic/Me, Myself and I.

23. What is your current desktop picture?
A Dystopian sex propaganda from second world war.

24. What was the last thing you said to someone?
"I can't believe it's not butter. No, I really can't believe it's not butter."

25. If you had to choose between a million bucks or to be able to fly what would it be?
I'd blow through million dollars so fast that Lindsay Lohan would shit herself. Flying would definitely be convinient. I really can't handle sitting in traffic.

26. Do you like someone?
Not at the moment, unfortunately.

27. The last song you listened to?
"Is You Is Or Isn't You My Baby" by Anita O'Day

Answering to the Countdown

2006-12-31T02:58:00.000-08:00

2006 = Waking up from the nightmare that was 2005. It took awhile, but the light is back on. And I have faith in 2007. Let's go.

TOP 10 FILMS
1) House of Sand
2) Dreamgirls
3) Pan's Labyrinth
4) Volver
5) Little Miss Sunshine
6) Shortbus
7) Cache
8) Borat
9) Children of Men / V for Vendetta
10) Stranger Than Fiction

TOP 10 ALBUMS
1) Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury
2) Bob Dylan - Modern Times
3) Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
4) Yo La Tengo - I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass
5) Viva Voce - Get Yr Blood Sucked Out
6) Original Soundtrack to "Dreamgirls"
7) The Knife - Self-Titled
8) The Twilight Singers - Powder Burns
9) Asobi Sesku - Citrus
10) The Decemberists - The Crane Wife 3

TOP 10 MOMENTS
1) Doing the Locomotion Under the Brooklyn Bridge at Dusk
2) My Last Night In Chicago With Adam / Protest At Millenium Park
3) Opera Date With The Window Dresser
4) 22nd Birthday Dinner in New York
5) Blaring Trumpet Out of Front Window of Car on Clark St.
6) Singing "Lust for Life" At Howl at the Moon
7) Taking Down The Parking Lot Gate With Bare Hands At 4 AM
8) Winning $150 Singing Kareoke At Louie's Pub
9) Acid Trip On Alkai Beach
10) Caught By The Cops With My Pants Down On Halloween

NEW YEARS RESOLUTION
Greatly reduce my use of the word like.

*

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

XO,

Trystan

2006-12-31T02:54:00.000-08:00

Young@Heart sing Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia".

The Please Catalogue, December 2006

2006-12-07T04:48:00.000-08:00

I’M READING...

Watchmen
by Alan Moore

I Feel Bad About My Neck
by Nora Ephron

Underground
by Haruki Murakami

Special Topics In Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl

I’M LISTENING TO...

Clipse
Hell Hath No Fury

Camille Saint-Saents
Carnival des Animaux

The Knife
Deep Cuts

I’M WATCHING...

Strangers With Candy

Lady Vengeance

Army of Shadows

Calling Collect from the Holiday Inn

2006-11-30T05:22:00.000-08:00

UN. The weather currently being experienced in Seattle is like one of those amazing pie pranks where you get hit with the first, laugh, get hit with another, laugh some more, then start wondering what you did to get the person mad at you. It has long passed the realm of being absolutely hilarious, and now all anyone really wants out of life is to get home without stitches, eat greasy Oriental leftovers and watch Lo-Definition episodes of ‘Lost’. I’m speaking only for myself, of course – although I hope not. I can’t do this anymore. Sit here like some paraplegic in some retirement community far from the baits of civilization. I don’t have four-wheel drive and I need to get down my fucking hill.

DEUX. Due to Thanksgiving, the weather psychoses and the instructor’s perpetual series of ‘girl troubles’, the original schedule for bartending school has been nipped-and-tucked to the point where I don’t know which day is Christmas. (Just for the record, I wouldn't in any other circumstance either) Anyhow, I should have my certificate in the next two weeks. I still haven’t decided what kind of bartender I should be. I mean, the people who make the best tips tend to have very unambiguous personas like ‘Rob the Hot Ex-Marine” or ‘Nina the Tattoo Nymph’ or ‘Jeremy the Guy Who Can’t Do Math But Who Can Make My Grey Goose Martini Out Of This Five Dollar Bill". If you can help me make any specific choices as to what bartender I should be, I would appreciate it very much.

TROIS. Okay, I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice, Foo'ZZ, it’s already December! (Well, a day away from it, but really, what’s the difference?) God-oh-God-oh-God. How the hell did this happen? Where am I? Why am I not rich and having recurring three-way sex with Fredric Michalak and his Belgian waffleboy? And why is my hairline all the way back there? (REPEAT X 12)

QUATRE. I would have liked to have finished at least one substantial project this year. Like Woody Allen. (Who manages to pull it off successfully by being Woody Allen, even when the rest of us say: “Stop making movies where you lie in bed with girls that you'll never get to spread in a hundred years.”) But I mean, going back as far as childhood, I could always trust myself to meet certain goals at the end of each year. Goals that gave something to show for the passing of time. A year well spent. Whether it was a popsicle-stick fortress or a forged attempt at heterosexuality or reading a three-decker volume of poetry that I only pretended to understand, I finished it. Yes, back then, my ass had ambition! (It still does, I think. It just doesn’t like to look in the mirror.) So when the ball drops, we will call 2006 by its name: The Year of Attempted Wisdom and Other Inconveniences. Until then, we still have thirty-one days to go.

CINQ. Well, at the beginning of next year, I begin recording a song cycle I started back in April called Blind Bastard’s Banquet. As it stands, the songs I have finished thus far contain, I think, some of the most musically and lyrically successful work I’ve ever done. The songs are radical, introspective, funny, chromatic, sexy, social, subterranean, etc. I am very proud of what I’ve done and it’ll be very excited to see what comes of this. The objective, ultimately, is to perform them either as a standard ten-song repertoire or with an incidental character-driven narrative. I’m performing these songs on my own, or with a band, should the opportunity present itself. Now as I write this, I just realize how incongruous this is with the paragraph that came before. I should really stop undermining the work that I put into the things that are supposed to give my life any value. In fact, I should stop undermining any of the other attempts I have made this year with the purest of intentions. This will be my new half-baked New Years Resolution. To stop this. Or at the very least, cut back. Because when all the hair is finally pulled out, you realize that the undermining is a strategy to stop moving. My insurance won’t cover its victory.

It’s 3:52 and I’m so feeling the crowding of wishes and static.

A speech that Faulkner gave upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Stockholm on December 10, 1950.

2006-11-09T22:24:00.000-08:00

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

2006-10-29T05:01:00.000-08:00

Avoided Halloween weekend this year. Halloween. The only holiday of the year really worthy of celebrating. God, what is wrong with me?

2006-10-26T07:46:00.000-07:00

Jatasya hi dhruvo mrityur
Dhruvam janma mrtasya ca

1) The Call of Jury
The last two weeks have been spent beneath the florescent lights of the King County Courtroom. As is the nature of such democratic rites of passage, I'm not allowed to speak on the nature of the trial until it's over. The deliberation looks like it'll be slated for Wednesday of next week. Transportation/time sacrifices aside, it's a relatively simple commitment and if nothing else, an experience I can add to the long list of I Survived It. All right, maybe that's a bit cynical. But truth be told, I have no idea what I'm actually going to get out of the experience once it's through. I'm imagining one of those long, soul-searching coffeehouse conversations where we weigh the pros and cons of the legal system and conclude that justice is the Mother of Suspicion. Or a Pink Ostrich.

2) Halloween
I'm going as Waldo. Trying desperately not to be mistaken for Rivers Cuomo.

3) The Autumn of Our Disposition
The leaves are crimson now. I am an animal of deficiency. I need food. I need music. I need literature. I need Yerba Mate. I need casual sex. I need new socks.

4) It's 7:37 AM and I'm so feeling the quantum slip.

Don't Dance at Our Carnival

2006-10-22T05:44:00.000-07:00

We dedicate this feast
To all the gypsy beast and bandits;
To the rough of heart who couldn’t stand it
In the sands of war;
To all the vexed, betrayed and sex-crazed;
Roaring voices reprimanded;
Here’s our chorus side-winding up
Through the palace floor.
We dedicate this feast
To fallen priests and foiled rivals,
Learn our faces from your children,
You are our warriors no more.
For today, we are the wild, tyrannic
We’ve captured your Prince of Panic
Don’t dance at our carnival.

And to the rest of you, awake, now,
From the windows where you wait now,
Tell the Prince we’re taking over from today.
Tell him: “You’ll hear us, you will see us,
“You will fear us, you’ll believe us”
“When we say you’re meter’s up
“And the time has - come to pay.
“So don’t dance at our carnival.
“Don’t dance at our carnival.
“Don’t dance at our carnival.”

The ground beneath your feet is lifting,
Everybody shift it down,
Before we ain’t got no more days
Around to celebrate.
Years from now, they’ll dig our memorandums
And our ancient tantrums
Sing them to their sons
As the Euphrades hibernates.
And when our seeds of legacy
Rise up to form their paradise,
We’ll guard the gates where they all
Fold their hands to speak and pray.
For today’s the day we rise volcanic,
Singing to our Prince of Panic:
“Don’t dance at our carnival.”

Operator, standby:
Weatherman’s in high-tide;
Tell the nineteen networks
Armageddon’s got an alibi;
The boy in the angel wings
Says that he is seeing things:
Flood in the aquarium;
Fire in the city streets.
Come quarter-to-eleven,
Napalm wagon’s gone to heaven,
And the sky is gonna freeze us,
Quick – ‘Say cheese’ for Jesus.
Party’s in the arboretum,
Tarot frauds and shorts for freedom;
Orphans, inside - curtain down
On Dr. Sousa’s suicide.
No, we ain’t never gonna see the year
Two-thousand-sixty-nine…
We ain’t never gonna see the year
Two-thousand-sixty-nine…

Beasts and bandits, will you wake now?
From the windows where you wait now?
Tell the Prince we’re taking over for the day.
Tell him: “You’ll hear us, you will see us,
“You will fear us, you’ll believe us
“When we say you’re meter’s up
“And the time has - come to pay.
“No, you won’t dance at our carnival.
“Don’t dance at our carnival.
“Don’t dance at our carnival.”

2006-09-29T01:44:00.000-07:00

I'M LISTENING TO:

CITIZEN COPE - Every Waking Moment

YO LA TENGO - I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass

SAM COOKE - At the Copa

THE ROOTS - Game Theory

---

I'M WATCHING:

MATADOR - dir. Pedro Almodovar

SUSPIRA - dir. Dario Argentio

SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY - dir. Sydney Pollack

---

I'M READING

ON BEAUTY by Zadie Smith

MY MISPENT YOUTH by Meagan Dauhm

THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy

Your Money Is My Money Too (Vol. II)

2006-09-17T05:24:00.000-07:00

ABRIDGED LIST OF THINGS PEOPLE HAVE NEVER RETURNED
(Arranged by initials)

AK
- Italian wristband
- Jar of 64 Buttons
- This American Life – Guatanomo Bay Transcript
- Jules et Jim - Criterion Edition (DVD)
- Vertically striped navy blue/white handerkchief
- Brian Eno – Music for Airports (Vinyl record)
- My Former Soul

CC
- Brass knuckle and matching dog collar
- Ivory cigarette holder
- Tibetan Book of the Dead (The Irreverent Version)
- Hedwig and the Angry Inch (DVD)

LS
- Everything acquired from high school to freshman year of college (Cunt)

NJ
- Egon Schiele Poster
- AM/FM headphones
- $175

OF
- Portable tiki torch
- War Against the Kitchen Sink by John Guare
- Dumb & Dumber (DVD)

RG
- 3 red and yellow tinted martini glasses
- Sexual Revolution (Various essays)
Strobe lightbulb

XL
Middlesex by Jeffery Euginides
Dress your family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

Everything You Owe You Owe To Me
(Please notify if missing something)

AK
- Beige Driving gloves

EC
- Amadeus by Peter Shaffer
- Things Acquired In The Sea

IN
- Living Terrorism (by ?)
- Nostradamus – The Antithetical Comic Book Series
- The Beatles - White Album

JB
- Casablanca (DVD)

JG
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- The Best Erotica of 2004 (Various)
- Cyberculture Textbook
- Elizabeth (VHS)

RG
- Ali: Fear Eats the Soul – Criterion Edition (DVD)

XL
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Everybody get nekkid...

2006-09-08T16:15:00.000-07:00

'Cause today's my 22nd birthday.

BICHEZ.

2006-08-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

"If age was measured in consciousness, I might probably be close to a hundred… but a hundred what?"

I thought this picture was funny.

This is another one of those "don’t-expect-this-to-make-sense-because-I’m-drunk" posts. Sorry. Actually, I’m not really all that drunk anymore, but I am currently fighting a killer vodka and red bull hangover. This is so – what’s the word? – gay. Without the obligatory after-sex. I mean, this has very quickly become The Season of Piling Addictions: thumbtack thievery, reality TV shows about the fashion industry, Stud Horse poker and some other things we won’t mention. And as if my sleep habits weren’t erratic enough, now caffeine has found its way back to the top of the heap. I tried to scavenge my Dad’s video closet to find a golf tournament he may have taped back in 1989. (This is a fail safe cure for insomnia.) Low and behold, it wasn’t there. Now it’s 5:30 AM. I’m going to temple in five hours. I surrender.

I have a hard time knowing what to write in here these days. Something to do with being unable to commit to paragraphs. Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe I’m embarrassed by state of my life and have outgrown the urge to complain about it. I mean, you get to a point when it’s no longer introspection and it just becomes repetitive narcissism. The fact of the matter is that it’s nobody’s fucking business unless I say it is. The only reason I bring this up in the first place is that a few people I’ve lost touch with since I moved out of Chicago seem to be using this as a resource for what’s going on in my life. It hasn’t been that for quite awhile. If you know me beyond mere proximity, chances are that I will tell you what’s up. No need to assume I’ve been shipped off to an asylum or developed some crystal meth habit.

Having said all of that, I would like to try to write more often. I figure if I can’t finish paragraphs, I can revive the 1-5 list, though this morning it’ll be 1-3--- since I just took an Excedrin PM.

---

une. Lloyd and I went down to the Diplo party at Neumos. Everyone was wearing orange. Not that I have anything against the color per se (Okay. I don't like the color orange) but it was everywhere. I found this creepy. Like a surprise Florida State pep rally. And I’m not even going to try to analyze this. The night itself though turned out to be a lot of fun. It reminded me of some of the nights out with The Doom Troopers back in Chicago. Also, I think bourbon has just become my drink, and I’m not even sure that I like it.

deux I have vague plans to move out to Capitol Hill at the end of the month. That if I find a job in the next couple of weeks that will take care of the rent. And to cover an even further prospect, I’ve decided I’d like to move back to New York when the timing’s right. I thought about leaving in the fall, but frankly, I just don’t have the wherewithal to pursue it at the moment.

trois. On Friday, I went to R Place with Paul. It wasn’t the first time I’ve been there, but I could only stay for about a half-an-hour before I actually started to feel physically ill. They weren’t wearing orange exactly, although they did more or less all look the same. (Smell a theme?) You either had your aging bald grease monkeys or your spraytanned-striped-polo-shirted-I-swear-I’m-not-a-Republican-retail zombies. When did gay men go white trash? And how are gay men supposed to be arbiters of good taste when they’re all wearing the same haircut? We will elaborate on this later.

Time to take my superficial ass to bed.

Fortuituous Return - An Overture

2006-07-17T19:14:00.000-07:00

So this is the opening to OCCAM'S RAZOR, a short story collective I'm developing with my friend Xiaochang. It's rare that I share my writing publicly over the internet, so savor the occassion....

----

Fortuitous Return

An Overture

You’re not supposed to believe it could happen like this.

Time has crept behind you like a pantomime. There’s no use speaking back. There’s an enormity in your walk these days that leaves a loitered specter on every street you walked before. Your hands and feet are on loan, shaking frantic with a lack of recognition. Gone are the days when you used them as your vehicle for expression, an exit from the caged, hissing enmity of your bones. Gone are the days where you lay on the beach with your arms cast up, reaching out into that bedlam of distant stars and jets, receiving a strange transmission that coils through the maze of your fingerprints and shoots straight into your heart, whipping you into a monster, chiseling you into a man.

You hear them coming from more than five blocks away. One ambulance, then another. You back up into a dilapidated brick wall you didn’t see coming, your shoulders crashing in perfect alignment with a pair of electric pink graffiti wings. You find yourself face-to-face with the traffic of this three-point intersection on the Chicago Northside. The “six corners”, as it’s referred to in this particular neighborhood.

Like so many of the intersections in this city, there’s a fatalistic perplexity to them; an intergalactic convergence of past, present, future. A danger from below. They are places that bring the entire world down to a single tether. Places with a perennial, almost menacing déjà vu. Places where people have been known to have strokes from simply waiting at the corner. Places where people plan to meet, then never find one another. Places where people clear out during storms, for fear of an increased probability of getting struck by lightning. Places where people are afraid of looking up; where tourists forget their maps; where senses merge and explode—where accidents wait.

The traffic shifts out onto the sidewalk. They come now in spectacular blur. (One ambulance, then another.) You study the unfazed pedestrian jowls, the willfully deaf marching up the train platforms in the same narcoleptic cadences, the eight foot transvestite in the bright red fright wig spitting into her paper bag, tossing it over her shoulder and crossing the street with a lax neglect. She misses the ambulance by a mere gasp of a second, then proceeds to strut into the revolving doors of the Wells Fargo, her ass jouncing like a hopped up mare, before and after everyone. She is spitting into the face of death, you decide. She has become supernatural without knowing. She is dancing with dinosaurs, reborn to herself. She can see the future in a way that you can’t.

You close your eyes and slam your wrists against the wall, hanging there like a decrepit crucifix ornament. You stretch your arms out to the of your graffiti wings, pleading them to take you up and dissolve you into a gas. But when you open your eyes again, you are back; back into barbaric concert of the streets, where the pneumatic bodies have filled them up, where they spin and shake around like sand, swayed by the sounds of domestic belligerence and nervous jazz. Back into the hypocrisy of the living, who forgot they weren’t dreaming, too stranded in the tremors of solitude to walk in accord. You swing your hands back into your pockets and watch the sirens shrink into the avenue and get swallowed up by the evening before you can insist that it take you along with it. You wonder where it must be going and force a scenario under pressure.

They’re headed west down Fullerton. Toward Logan Square. The building is above a liquor store and ear, nose and throat clinic. Typical story, really. A Puerto Rican landlady eaten alive by her canaries. The granddaughter has climbed halfway up a fire escape and is spitting out the gnawed off ear of her stuffed polar bear. She screams holy murder as the paramedics take her by the arms and pull her into a police van. (This is how her father was taken from her back in December.) They’ll assure her that she’s not in any trouble and unsuccessfully attempt to reach her Aunt Lucia, who is supposed to be working at the CTA booth at LeSalle and Van Buren, but fell asleep in the furniture department at Sears during her lunch break. Turkey and red onion. She should have known better. She will curse herself for being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” as so many others do. She will resolve to stop attending Sunday mass, tell her priest that: “Destiny is a starvation for coincidence.” She is probably right. No one is ever where they should be. Everything is just barely being held together.

Do these stories seal a space between you and the anonymous world? Do they recover a link to the unexceptional? Do they unbolt the corkscrewed lampoons crammed into each shrill, narcoleptic corner of this city? Do they confirm all those feverishly real, giddily debilitating blue strokes of recognition you experience upon meeting a face (or even the suggestion of a face) with a sort of inexplicable familiarity about it? The sort with an unrequited history that you’re incapable of tracing back, but are almost certain – no – unquestionably certain exists?

Or is really much simpler than all of that?

Because it’s like this: it is 1983 and you are thirty-three years old. You’ve shaved your head into a Mohawk like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. You are thirty-three years old, terrified you may never really finish “coming of age.” Thirty three years old, and standing before a crosswalk, waiting for someone to take your hand. Thirty three years old, and still no closer to knowing anything at all.

*

No, you’re not supposed to believe it could happen like this.

The nostalgic chime from an ice cream van is drawing upon you. Sounds of Latin children follow them as they breaking hands with their mothers, running out into the street like jackals. You’ve heard this melody before, though you can’t seem to locate when and where. Someone is singing along now. A hostage voice. A child’s voice. Near, then from faraway. Soft and sweet and sinister.

Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son, John,
Went to bed,
With his trousers on,
One shoe off,
And one shoe on!
Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son, John.

The crowds irrigate. The voice crescendoes. The streetlights strobe. The billboards go blank. You look around you to see if you’re alone. You are not. There is a girl, a girl of seventeen in her underwear, standing just a kitty-corner away. Her back is turned away from you. Her arms are clasped upon her shoulders. Her arms are crossed upon her chest. Her gallant red hair is floating up like a cobweb. She is turning around now with her head down at the gutter. You can’t make her out in these shaking lights. She looks up at you, slow and afraid. The light above her thunders out and freezes there in a cryogenic blue. Her arms slide away from her bare breasts like an emaciated Venus. It’s her, you’re thinking. Your schoolboy infatuation. Your beacon saint of past, present and future. A girl whom you left by the riverbank sixteen years ago.

Yes, it’s her. It’s B.

She points out at the remaining four corners. It’s them, you say aloud. The boys in flapping collars. The boys in turquoise ties. The boys of Belvedere Academy. The boys whom shared that same beach, years ago, swapping your dreams with their arms cast up. Edward. Geoffery. Ralph. The Doom Troopers. The only faces you will ever know.

Yes, it’s them. And they want you back.

They leave their corners to congregate at the one left empty. B is standing there watching you, seeing the future in a way that the four of you can’t. Four, you think. The number of wings beneath a tabletop of chair. Four. The number of wings on a dragonfly. Four. The number of strings on a viola. Four. The number of seconds it will take to run across this junction to meet them in embrace, then start your entire life over again.

You dip one foot into the asphalt. The song recapitulates:

Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son, John,
Went to bed
With his trousers on,
One shoe off,
And one shoe on!
Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son—

BOOM! The traffic whineys to a halt. The force comes crashing into your side like the foot of a giant. The impact bolts you into the air, turning you upside-down into a curling flail of limbs. The man in the ice cream truck springs out as you collapse onto his windshield. The van whittles back-and-forth before falling to its side. Your bones smash onto the asphalt then out it comes, a spattering rainbow of ice cream bars shooting from the rear-view window, landing around you in a lathering, sticky carnage. Your spine is ticking. Your canines quake. And the children have broken hands with their mothers, running out into the street like jackals. They’re seizing up the carnage by the fistful, cramming their mouths with your evidence. They’re biting at the cops who have stocked up at the curb to pull them back to the sidewalk. He’s still alive, says one cop to the other. They can hear them coming from more than five blocks away. One ambulance, then another.

The song is playing still.

Bloody Motherfucking Asshole

2006-07-16T02:21:00.000-07:00

Poetry is no place for a heart that's a whore

And I'm young & I'm strong

But I feel old & tired

Overfired

And I've been poked & stoked

It's all smoke, there's no more fire

Only desire

For you, whoever you are

For you, whoever you are

You say my time here has been some sort of joke

That I've been messing around

Some sort of incubating period

For when I really come around

I'm cracking up

And you have no idea

No idea how it feels to be on your own

In your own home

with the fucking phone

And the mother of gloom

In your bedroom

Standing over your head

With her hand in your head

With her hand in your head

I will not pretend

I will not put on a smile

I will not say I'm all right for you

When all I wanted was to be good

To do everything in truth

To do everything in truth

Oh I wish I wish I wish I was born a man

So I could learn how to stand up for myself

Like those guys with guitars

I've been watching in bars

Who've been stamping their feet to a different beat

To a different beat

To a different beat

I will not pretend

I will not put on a smile

I will not say I'm all right for you

When all I wanted was to be good

To do everything in truth

To do everything in truth

You bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody...

I will not pretend

I will not put on a smile

I will not say I'm all right for you

For you, whoever you are

For you, whoever you are

For you, whoever you are

Reverse Chronologies

2006-07-12T14:46:00.000-07:00

Backs to the Future
Source: University of California, San Diego
http://www.physorg.com/news69338070.html

Tell an old Aymara speaker to "face the past!" and you just might get a blank stare in return because he or she already does.

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.

Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies' orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.

Appearing in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science, the study is coauthored, with Berkeley linguistics professor Eve Sweetser, by Rafael Nunez, associate professor of cognitive science and director of the Embodied Cognition Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego.

"Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world from European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on have not only characterized time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front of ego and the past in back. The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model," said Nunez.

The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile, has been noticed by Westerners since the earliest days of the Spanish conquest. A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara was particularly useful for abstract ideas, and in the 19th century it was dubbed the "language of Adam." More recently, Umberto Eco has praised its capacity for neologisms, and there have even been contemporary attempts to harness the so-called "Andean logic" which adds a third option to the usual binary system of true/false or yes/no to computer applications.

Yet, Nunez said, no one had previously detailed the Aymara's "radically different metaphoric mapping of time" a super-fundamental concept, which, unlike the idea of "democracy," say, does not rely on formal schooling and isn't an obvious product of culture.

Nunez had his first inkling of differences between "thinking in" Aymara and Spanish, when he went hitchhiking in the Andes as undergraduate in the early 1980s. More than a decade later, he returned to gather data.

For the study, Nunez collected about 20 hours of conversations with 30 ethnic Aymara adults from Northern Chile. The volunteer subjects ranged from a monolingual speaker of Aymara to monolingual speakers of Spanish, with a majority (like the population at large) being bilinguals whose skills covered a range of proficiencies and included the Spanish/Aymara creole called Castellano Andino.

The videotaped interviews were designed to include natural discussions of past and future events. These discussions, it was hoped, would elicit both the linguistic expressions for "past" and "future" and the subconscious gesturing that accompanies much of human speech and often acts out the metaphors being used.

The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits "nayra," the basic word for "eye," "front" or "sight," to mean "past" and recruits "qhipa," the basic word for "back" or "behind," to mean "future." So, for example, the expression "nayra mara" which translates in meaning to "last year" can be literally glossed as "front year."

But, according to the researchers, linguistic analysis cannot reliably tell the whole story.

Take an "exotic" language like English: You can use the word "ahead" to signify an earlier point in time, saying "We are at 20 minutes ahead of 1 p.m." to mean "It's now 12:40 p.m." Based on this evidence alone, a Martian linguist could then justifiably decide that English speakers, much like the Aymara, put the past in front.

There are also in English ambiguous expressions like "Wednesday's meeting was moved forward two days." Does that mean the new meeting time falls on Friday or Monday? Roughly half of polled English speakers will pick the former and the other half the latter. And that depends, it turns out, on whether they're picturing themselves as being in motion relative to time or time itself as moving. Both of these ideas are perfectly acceptable in English and grammatical too, as illustrated by "We're coming to the end of the year" vs. "The end of the year is approaching."

Analysis of the gestural data proved telling: The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn't command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future by thumbing or waving over their shoulders and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones only exactly in reverse.

"These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon," Nunez said. "That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn't have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.

"But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all here we have a basic concept that is utterly different," he said.

Why, however, is not entirely certain. One possibility, Nunez and Sweetser argue, is that the Aymara place a great deal of significance on whether an event or action has been seen or not seen by the speaker.

A "simple" unqualified statement like "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" is not possible in Aymara the sentence would necessarily also have to specify whether the speaker had personally witnessed this or was reporting hearsay.

In a culture that privileges a distinction between seen/unseen and known/unknown to such an extent as to weave "evidential" requirements inextricably into its language, it makes sense to metaphorically place the known past in front of you, in your field of view, and the unknown and unknowable future behind your back.

Though that may be an initial explanation and in line with the observation, the researchers write, that "often elderly Aymara speakers simply refused to talk about the future on the grounds that little or nothing sensible could be said about it" it is not sufficient, because other cultures also make use of similar evidential systems and yet still have a future ahead.

The consequences, on the other hand, may have been profound. This cultural, cognitive-linguistic difference could have contributed, Nunez said, to the conquistadors' disdain of the Aymara as shiftless uninterested in progress or going "forward."

Now, while the future of the Aymara language itself is not in jeopardy it numbers some two to three million contemporary speakers its particular way of thinking about time seems, at least in Northern Chile, to be on the way out.

The study's younger subjects, Aymara fluent in Spanish, tended to gesture in the common fashion. It appears they have reoriented their thinking. Now along with the rest of the globe, their backs are to the past, and they are facing the future.

The Please Catalogue, July 2006

2006-07-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

BOOKS The Waves by Virginia Woolf / The Diviners by Rick Moody / Gaudi: The Man and His Work by Joan Bergós and Marc Llimargas

MUSIC Gabriel Yared - Self-Titled / Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope / Various Artists - The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered

ENTERTAINMENT Cache / Dave Chapelle's Block Party / Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List

Color & Light

2006-07-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

BOYS by Rick Moody

2006-07-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

BOYS ENTER THE HOUSE, boys enter the house. Boys, and with them the ideas of boys (ideas leaden, reductive, inflexible), enter the house. Boys, two of them, wound into hospital packaging, boys with infant-pattern baldness, slung in the arms of parents, boys dreaming of breasts, enter the house. Twin boys, kettles on the boil, boys in hideous vinyl knapsacks that young couples from Edison, NJ., wear on their shirt fronts, knapsacks coated with baby saliva and staphylococcus and milk vomit, enter the house. Two boys, one striking the other with a rubberized hot dog, enter the house. Two boys, one of them striking the other with a willow switch about the head and shoulders, the other crying, enter the house. Boys enter the house speaking nonsense. Boys enter the house calling for mother. On a Sunday, in May, a day one might nearly describe as perfect, an ice cream truck comes slowly down the lane, chimes inducing salivation, and children run after it, not long after which boys dig a hole in the back yard and bury their younger sister’s dolls two feet down, so that she will never find these dolls and these dolls will rot in hell, after which boys enter the house. Boys, trailing after their father like he is the Second Goddamned Coming of Christ Goddamned Almighty, enter the house, repair to the basement to watch baseball. Boys enter the house, site of devastation, and repair immediately to the kitchen, where they mix lighter fluid, vanilla pudding, drainopening lye, balsamic vinegar, blue food coloring, calamine lotion, cottage cheese, ants, a plastic lizard one of them received in his Christmas stocking, tacks, leftover mashed potatoes, Spam, frozen lima beans, and chocolate syrup in a medium-sized saucepan and heat over a low flame until thick, afterward transferring the contents of this saucepan into a Pyrex lasagna dish, baking the Pyrex lasagna dish in the oven for nineteen minutes before attempting to persuade their sister that she should eat the mixture; later they smash three family heirlooms (the last, a glass egg, intentionally) in a two-and-a-half-hour stretch, whereupon they are sent to their bedroom until freed, in each case thirteen minutes after. Boys enter the house, starchy in pressed shirts and flannel pants that itch so bad, fresh from Sunday school instruction, blond and brown locks (respectively) plastered down but even so with a number of cowlicks protruding at odd angles, disconsolate and humbled, uncertain if boyish things — such as shooting at the neighbor’s dog with a pump-action BB gun and gagging the fat boy up the street with a bandanna and showing their shriveled boy-penises to their younger sister — are exempted from the commandment to Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself. Boys enter the house in baseball gear (only one of the boys can hit): in their spikes, in mismatched tube socks that smell like Stilton cheese. Boys enter the house in soccer gear. Boys enter the house carrying skates. Boys enter the house with lacrosse sticks, and soon after, tossing a lacrosse ball lightly in the living room, they destroy a lamp. One boy enters the house sporting basketball clothes, the other wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. One boy enters the house bleeding profusely and is taken out to get stitches, the other watches. Boys enter the house at the end of term carrying report cards, sneak around the house like spies of foreign nationality, looking for a place to hide the report cards for the time being (under a toaster? in a medicine cabinet?). One boy with a black eye enters the house, one boy without. Boys with acne enter the house and squeeze and prod large skin blemishes in front of their sister. Boys with acne-treatment products hidden about their persons enter the house. Boys, standing just up the street, sneak cigarettes behind a willow in the Elys’ yard, wave smoke away from their natural fibers, hack terribly, experience nausea, then enter the house. Boys call each other Retard, Homo, Geek, and, later, Neckless Thug, Theater Fag, and enter the house exchanging further epithets. Boys enter house with nose-hair clippers, chase sister around house threatening to depilate her eyebrows. She cries. Boys attempt to induce girls to whom they would not have spoken only six or eight months prior to enter the house with them. Boys enter the house with girls efflorescent and homely and attempt to induce girls to sneak into their bedroom, as they still share a single bedroom; girls refuse. Boys enter the house, go to separate bedrooms. Boys, with their father (an arm around each of them), enter the house, but of the monologue preceding and succeeding this entrance, not a syllable is preserved. Boys enter the house having masturbated in a variety of locales. Boys enter the house having masturbated in trainstation bathrooms, in forests, in beach houses, in football bleachers at night under the stars, in cars (under a blanket), in the shower, backstage, on a plane, the boys masturbate constantly, identically, three times a day in some cases, desire like a madness upon them, at the mere sound of certain words, words that sound like other words, interrogative reminding them of intercourse, beast reminding them of breast, sects reminding them of sex, and so forth, the boys are not very smart yet, and as they enter the house they feel, as always, immense shame at the scale of this self-abusive cogitation, seeing a classmate, seeing a billboard, seeing a fire hydrant, seeing things that should not induce thoughts of masturbation (their sister, e.g.) and then thinking of masturbation anyway. Boys enter the house, go to their rooms, remove sexually explicit magazines from hidden stashes, put on loud music, feel despair. Boys enter the house worried; they argue. The boys are ugly, they are failures, they will never be loved, they enter the house. Boys enter the house and kiss their mother, who feels differently now they have outgrown her. Boys enter the house, kiss their mother, she explains the seriousness of their sister’s difficulty, her diagnosis. Boys enter the house, having attempted to locate the spot in their yard where the dolls were buried, eight or nine years prior, without success; they go to their sister’s room, sit by her bed. Boys enter the house and tell their completely bald sister jokes about baldness. Boys hold either hand of their sister, laying aside differences, having trudged grimly into the house. Boys skip school, enter house, hold vigil. Boys enter the house after their parents have both gone off to work, sit with their sister and with their sister’s nurse. Boys enter the house carrying cases of beer. Boys enter the house, very worried now, didn’t know more worry was possible. Boys enter the house carrying controlled substances, neither having told the other that he is carrying a controlled substance, though an intoxicated posture seems appropriate under the circumstances. Boys enter the house weeping and hear weeping around them. Boys enter the house embarrassed, silent, anguished, keening, afflicted, angry, woeful, grief-stricken. Boys enter the house on vacation, each clasps the hand of the other with genuine warmth, the one wearing dark colors and having shaved a portion of his head, the other having grown his hair out longish and wearing, uncharacteristically, a de-dyed shirt. Boys enter the house on vacation and argue bitterly about politics (other subjects are no longer discussed), one boy supporting the Maoist insurgency in a certain Southeast Asian country, one believing that to change the system you need to work inside it; one boy threatens to beat the living shit out of the other, refuses creme brulee, though it is created by his mother in order to keep the peace. One boy writes home and thereby enters the house only through a mail slot: he argues that the other boy is cryptofascist, believing that the market can seek its own level on questions of ethics and morals; boys enter the house on vacation and announce future professions; boys enter the house on vacation and change their minds about professions; boys enter the house on vacation, and one boy brings home a sweetheart but throws a tantrum when it is suggested that the sweetheart will have to retire on the folding bed in the basement; the other boy, having no sweetheart, is distant and withdrawn, preferring to talk late into the night about family members gone from this world. Boys enter the house several weeks apart. Boys enter the house on days of heavy rain. Boys enter the house, in different calendar years, and upon entering, the boys seem to do nothing but compose manifestos, for the benefit of parents; they follow their mother around the place, having fashioned these manifestos in celebration of brand-new independence: Mom, I like to lie in bed late into the morning watching game shows, or, I’m never going to date anyone but artists from now on, mad girls, dreamers, practicers of black magic, or, A man should eat bologna, sliced meats are important, or, An American should bowl at least once a year, but these manifestos apply only for brief spells, after which they are reversed or discarded. Boys don’t enter the house at all, except as ghostly afterimages of younger selves, fleeting images of sneakers dashing up a staircase; soggy towels on the floor of the bathroom; blue jeans coiled like asps in the basin of the washing machine; boys as an absence of boys; blissful at first, you put a thing down on a spot, put this book down, come back later, it’s still there; you buy a box of cookies, eat three, later three are missing. Nevertheless, when boys next enter the house, which they ultimately must do, it’s a relief, even if it’s only in preparation for weddings of acquaintances from boyhood, one boy has a beard, neatly trimmed, the other has rakish sideburns, one boy wears a hat, the other boy thinks hats are ridiculous, one boy wears khakis pleated at the waist, the other wears denim, but each changes into his suit (one suit fits well, one is a little tight), as though suits are the liminary marker of adulthood. Boys enter the house after the wedding and they are slapping each other on the back and yelling at anyone who will listen. It’s a party! One boy enters the house, carried by friends, having been arrested (after the wedding) for driving while intoxicated, complexion ashen; the other boy tries to keep his mouth shut: the car is on its side in a ditch, the car has the top half of a tree broken over its bonnet, the car has struck another car, which has in turn struck a third, Everyone will have seen. One boy misses his brother horribly, misses the past, misses a time worth being nostalgic over, a time that never existed, back when they set their sister’s playhouse on fire; the other boy avoids all mention of that time; each of them is once the boy who enters the house alone, missing the other, each is devoted and each callous, and each plays his part on the telephone, over the course of months. Boys enter the house with fishing gear, according to prearranged date and time, arguing about whether to use lures or live bait, in order to meet their father for the fishing adventure, after which boys enter the house again, almost immediately, with live bait, having settled the question; boys boast of having caught fish in the past, though no fish has ever been caught: Remember when the blues were biting? Boys enter the house carrying their father, slumped. Happens so fast. Boys rush into the house leading EMTs to the couch in the living room where the body lies, boys enter the house, boys enter the house, boys enter the house. Boys hold open the threshold, awesome threshold that has welcomed them when they haven’t even been able to welcome themselves, that threshold which welcomed them when they had to be taken in, here is its tarnished knocker, here is its euphonious bell, here’s where die boys had to sand die door down because it never would hang right in the frame, here are the scuff marks from when boys were on the wrong side of the door demanding, here’s where there were once milk bottles for the milkman, here’s where the newspaper always landed, here’s the mail slot, here’s the light on the front step, illuminated, here’s where the boys are standing, as that beloved man is carried out. Boys, no longer boys, exit.

Verse 21:11 from the Gospel of St. Trystan

2006-07-04T08:27:00.001-07:00

INSTRUCTIONS FOR WRITING SONGS THAT SAVE THE WORLD
Sit up from your bed each morning and press your left palm firmly to your ribcage. Count back from your lucky number and rise out from your spine as it grows into a fist. Take a walk around the same block twice and say "Good morning" to your neighbors. (Even if you send them turning on their sprinklers and sprinting inside terrified.) Return to your kitchen table and replace yesterday’s carnations with souvenir straws from places you've never been. Take another bite from your apple as you recite the obituaries in the paper to your goldfish. Write down five things you did yesterday that you’ll never do again. Tap your foot against the floor as if it’s the world’s one and only rhythm. Send off your memory to somewhere tropical and dust off your 400 watt crystal ball. Read the opening to Mrs. Dalloway in your spinning chair till gravity breeds a giant in you. Stand at your window to imagine the sounds of trains and hunger and disappearing oceans. Whistle "Amazing Grace" in a paraplegic’s praise of undiscovered planets. Switch to the classical FM station and summon up landscapes from the dead. Dance improbably to Mahler’s 5th and stop to watch the ceiling swell. Say: "This life is just a replay of all the things you forgot the first time." Then make a song that defies continents; that drives dormant souls out of silence; that redeems love to the disappointed; that swings open every front door to a prehistoric chorus measured by panasonic waves of souls unanimous. And when you play it for your mother over the phone, don't poison it telling her it’s "all in progress." Color over the words that crave flesh and history--and never deem the lesson done.

The Ann Coulter Obsession Continues....

2006-06-26T02:59:00.000-07:00

One day I will write about my obsession with Ann Coulter. But not today. Today, I'm merely coming out of the closet with a bad political cartoon.

HILARITY

Study: Earth (likely) hottest in 2000 years

2006-06-23T02:04:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It has been 2,000 years and possibly much longer since Earth has run such a fever.

The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the "recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia."
A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that Earth is heating up and that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.
This is shown in boreholes, retreating glaciers and other evidence found in nature, said Gerald North, a geosciences professor at Texas A&M University who chaired the academy's panel.
The report was requested in November by the chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-New York, to address naysayers who question whether global warming is a major threat.
Last year, when the House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, launched an investigation of three climate scientists, Boehlert said Barton should try to learn from scientists, not intimidate them.
Boehlert said Thursday the report shows the value of having scientists advise Congress.
"There is nothing in this report that should raise any doubts about the broad scientific consensus on global climate change," he said.

Other new research Thursday showed that global warming produced about half of the extra hurricane-fueled warmth in the North Atlantic in 2005, and natural cycles were a minor factor, according to Kevin Trenberth and Dennis Shea of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a research lab sponsored by the National Science Foundation and universities. Their study is being published by the American Geophysical Union.

The Bush administration has maintained that the threat is not severe enough to warrant new pollution controls that the White House says would have cost 5 million Americans their jobs.

(Watch as lawmakers argue saving the planet could ruin our economy-- 2:24)

Climate scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes had concluded the Northern Hemisphere was the warmest it has been in 2,000 years. Their research was known as the "hockey-stick" graphic because it compared the sharp curve of the hockey blade to the recent uptick in temperatures and the stick's long shaft to centuries of previous climate stability.
The National Academy scientists concluded that the Mann-Bradley-Hughes research from the late 1990s was "likely" to be true, said John "Mike" Wallace, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington and a panel member. The conclusions from the '90s research "are very close to being right" and are supported by even more recent data, Wallace said.
The panel looked at how other scientists reconstructed Earth's temperatures going back thousands of years, before there was data from modern scientific instruments.

For all but the most recent 150 years, the academy scientists relied on "proxy" evidence from tree rings, corals, glaciers and ice cores, cave deposits, ocean and lake sediments, boreholes and other sources. They also examined indirect records such as paintings of glaciers in the Alps.
Combining that information gave the panel "a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years," the academy said.

Overall, the panel agreed that the warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years, though relatively warm conditions persisted around the year 1000, followed by a "Little Ice Age" from about 1500 to 1850.

The scientists said they had less confidence in the evidence of temperatures before 1600. But they considered it reliable enough to conclude there were sharp spikes in carbon dioxide and methane, the two major "greenhouse" gases blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere, beginning in the 20th century, after remaining fairly level for 12,000 years.

Between 1 A.D. and 1850, volcanic eruptions and solar fluctuations were the main causes of changes in greenhouse gas levels. But those temperature changes "were much less pronounced than the warming due to greenhouse gas" levels by pollution since the mid-19th century, it said.
The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization chartered by Congress to advise the government of scientific matters.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Nowhere Man

2006-06-23T01:56:00.000-07:00

To read the First Act treatment for MIRACULOUS LIVES - The Berserker (which has been described as by my friend as a "sociopathic Angels in America"), click on the graphic below:

2006-06-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

I'm going to make an effort to blog more frequently after suspicions that I've been killed in a limo accident. But as for now, I'm bereft of things to say, so I'm going to post a few selections from the website that consumes most of my time spent at the computer these days...

Ann Coulter Pie Throwing Incident

Parody of Britney Spears CRACKING. Oh wait, this is legitimate.

Bette Davis at 400 years old on the Johnny Carson Show.

"Sugar Baby Love" - AIDS Campaign

Is Wayne Brady going to have to CHOKE A BITCH?

100 Things (Well, actually 50... which I guess makes this Part 1 of 2)

2006-05-04T17:06:00.000-07:00

1) I actually liked the movie Titanic.
2) I own over 200 rolls of scotch tape.
3) If you wake me up in the middle of the night, there’s an 8/10 chance that I’ll never get back to sleep.
4) I am obsessed with the atlas of my spine.
5) I thought I was beyond guilty pleasure until Jason got me into The Real Housewives of Orange County.
6) Back in grammar school, I only listened to classical music and 50s Motown.
7) I also used to spend hours trying to memorize the World Book encyclopedia, but in the end, gave up and drew mustaches on Todor Zhivkov and all the other communist dictators.
8) I believe tetris is probably a metaphor for everything else in life.
9) It can take me up to two hours to completely unpack
10) If I go more than three days without a salad, I take it out on the world.
11) I am automatically drawn to people whose names are toward the beginning and end of the alphabet.
12) “Tortoise” is my new favorite world.
13) I also like the words “pneumatic” and “rhododendron”.
14) I’ve been ending most of my sentences lately with “man” or “dude” due to feelings of homosexual inadequacy.
15) It’s nearly impossible for me to leave home without spending money.
16) I’ve been smoking Marlboro Lights since I was 16.
17) I’ve been trying to quit smoking since I was 18.
18) My ideal meal would start off with a spinach salad with pears, pine nuts, strawberries, kiwi and raspberry/poppy seed dressing.
19) The main course would be grilled unagi over basmati rice, garlic shrimp skewers and baba ghanoush.
20) And for desert, lemon gelato over a cranberry walnut tart.
21) This is possibly the gayest meal ever.
22) My cat of thirteen years died last week.
23) I own the new Lindsay Lohan album.
24) I used to be so ashamed of my Filpino heritage that I actually tried to pass myself off as Navajo Indian until I met someone in 5th grade who was doing the opposite.
25) When I was four, my parents would take me to Kareoke bars where I’d perform renditions of Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton tunes in a brown apron and cowboy hat.
26) The last movie I saw was Hard Candy last Friday, which I would probably rate a B or B+.
27) I prefer straight porn.
28) I dyed my hair black last night after nine months of red.
29) I am currently trying to get over my vocal crack after years and years of not performing.
30) No matter what I start, in the very beginning I’m plagued with reservations about it, or at least my ability to do it well.
31) I have written 5 full length plays. ( Subterraneously Here, Aquaculture, Hands On Her Spine, The Animal Cracker Box, Here Come the Alligators)
32) I am embarrassed about the fact that over half of those titles have references to animals in them.
33) I was mugged last March on Lakeshore Drive.
34) I’ve easily seen the movie Beetlejuice over 100 times.
35) I am afraid of gay bars.
36) I’m almost positive I have hyperhidrosis.
37) I have frequent cravings for Haagen Daaz pistachio ice cream.
38) I overuse commas and parentheses.
39) I’ve been “blocked” for over a year, which is to say that I have too many ideas and not enough focus.
40) I have no idea where I want to live anymore.
41) In spite of everything, I’m fairly sure that some form of God exists.
42) I’m just not so sure where I stand with Him, Her, It... whatever...
43) I start kickboxing classes next Tuesday.
44) I have horrible posture at the computer.
45) Spring is my favorite season, probably because it’s the shortest.
46) My current dream is to have enough money to buy organic.
47) I spent all of last April ignoring politics, which I am only partially ashamed of.
48) I still haven’t received my tax returns.
49) I have no idea what the next few months will bring.
50) My parents had originally planned on naming me Henry.

2006-04-14T13:08:00.000-07:00

The previous two weeks have been something kind of miraculous. Aside from all the things going on that need my attention, I've been procrastinating hardcore. Here's a list of a few I've seen in the last couple of weeks that I might given mini-reviews of later, but for now you're just going to have to deal with the letter grades.

The Devil & Daniel Johnston A
Thank You For Smoking B+
Inside Man C+
King Kong B
Videodrome D+
A History of Violence C
Tsosti A-
V for Vendetta B+
Wild at Heart D

2006-04-10T00:11:00.000-07:00

So yesterday, I got a job playing at Howl at the Moon in Pioneer Square for "The World's Greatest Dueling Piano Show." The gig is three nights a week and $100 a night plus tips. The basic job description calls for playing spontaneous renditions of songs being requested by drunk people. And if you know me well enough, this is something I've been doing my ENTIRE LIFE.

The show I went to Saturday night after the Mariners game was packed elbow to elbow and people were tipping insanely well, as in like, I couldn't fucking keep count. I auditioned playing some faux-Joplin, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" and "Damn It Feels Good To Be a Gangsta" and was hired immediately based on that alone. I start on Wednesday. I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes. But even if I was born for this job, I'm still a pile of nerves. Especially since I applied as a server/host and somehow, thanks to my very long, very overdone resume, ended up auditioning to become the centerpiece for the show itself.

The universe is weird. ("Kiss me while we're out of focus.")

The next few days, I'll have to practice like crazy and up my game. (I'm a little less limber since I stopped being a music major.) Ontop of that, there are play rehearsals, car payments, passports and a hundred other things to think about.

Here's to making lists in my sleep...

But tonight I think I'd rather just go dancing.

2006-04-06T23:47:00.000-07:00

Zen

There's so much going on in my world right now that I have trouble sitting down and deciding where to begin. I'm mounting a production of Here Come the Alligators slated for the weekends of June 9-11 and 16-18. Auditions are taking place this weekend at the University Heights Community Center. A table reading will take place the next Sunday and the week after that, we begin rehearsals. How did this all happen so quickly? Wasn't it just last Friday that was lugging my suitcases into the foyer, wondering what the hell I was going to do with myself?

What it ultimately comes down to is channeling my obsessive tendencies in some self-validating way, knowing that if I don't start doing something now, I'm just going to keep sitting around and keep making excuses for why my life is not working. (BOR-ING) Even if I do harbor crippling insecurities about my ability as a writer, director, composer, self-motivator, whatever, I can't deny that these things, above all, seem to give me a much larger sense of identity and contribution than anything else. And so regardless of whether or not I trust myself to put this all together with virtually no one else's support, this is something that I am doing. Period.

Aside from all of that, I've been booking interviews for part-time positions as a barista/server not only to accomodate this project (which is coming straight out of my own savings), but to keep myself at financial equilibrium for when I go overseas this summer. This means, Xiaochang, that the month of June is out for me. In the next few months, I'll be as busy as I've ever been. But the plan after all of it through is to move on, maybe even move up.

*sigh* I don't want to address my reservations about all of this happening at the speed it is happening and yet I feel as if I must. Because while I'm quite proud of Here Come the Alligators, a part of me feels very, very exhausted of it. After all, it was supposed to have been a side project. Am I bereft of ideas, or is this just a "happy accident"? I certainly don't feel as if it adequately represents my capabilities as a playwright. And I'd like to think that while I'm rehearsing for this show, it'll give me further motivation to continue other projects and avoid writing anything similar.

We'll see. There's a lot to think about. But for now I just want to go to bed.

2006-04-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

"Gnarls Barkley makes UK pop chart history..."

I think I'm in love. Here's a link to The First Great Song of 2006.

2006-04-02T01:12:00.000-08:00

So tonight I went to ACT production of this play. A quarter of the audience walked out during intermission. I thought it was one of the most macabre, visceral, hysterical pieces of theatre I've ever seen. It was... well, how I describe it? Think Cronenberg meets Kafka meets Maurice Sendak if they were interpreting Cain and Abel set in a totalitarian prison. Throw in some car battery torture, implied dismemberment and a glowing green girl (no, I'm not joking) and you get appoximately a tenth of what this play is supposed to be. In other words, it reminded me of why I try writing theatre in the first place. Anyway, I don't think I can write anymore about it without absent-mindedly giving certain things away. Sati found it claustrophobic and mentally distressing to which I replied, "Well, yeah. But what about the GLOWING GREEN GIRL?" I've determined to drag someone else to see it with me again before its April 16th closing. The big question is, who will be my next victim? Come on, you know you want to.

2006-03-31T08:18:00.000-08:00

Bottle up your springtime.

Yesterday may have just been one of the finest days I've ever spent. All my friendships here have officially made their full circle. Six surprising expedites to various haunts around town. The revisiting of old faces, deeply-etched memories and the absence of overwrought resentments. Apologies were finally exchanged accompanied by much needed liquid courage to leave everything behind for the best. Leaving Chicago at four in the afternoon. My life has been packed away in a series of six overstuffed boxes. I've decided that George Carlin was right all along. Maybe all home really is just a place for your stuff. Spending the morning watching the Fassbinder trilogy synched up to Nina Simone and Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasilieras. ("Let's switch reels at the end of the song. Bury old motifs and hold tight to this new rhythm. Shall we? We shall. Let's go.") If I were any happier, I'd turn to gas. If the sky were any more blue, we'd be deep in the ocean. Everyone is out today. And no one is a stranger. I'm full of love and beauty and sense of glorious renewal. I can only hope it sustains itself a little while longer.

Or forever. Yes. Forever would be nice too.

---The Deleted Commentary - Hair-twirling, caution stickers, etc.---

There's an underexplored natural phenomenon that occurs within any switchover period of a person's experience. Like that feeling you get at the end of summer break before going back to the job you really, really hate. Or the final week of that job you really, really hate when you get drunk with your employers and decide maybe they weren't so bad after all. Or... okay, I don't feel much like coming up with another example. But you know what I mean, right? It's the same phenomenon as danger itself. Standing on the heels of one experience before coming into another. Which sounds simple enough, but I feel ridiculous for even trying to describe how complicated it really is. For one, it's not a place where you can live, and after awhile (if you do it enough) you can tired of all the bridge-burning, all the arbitrary swerving and hair pulling and hysterical phone calls to Mom and Dad. Today, I feel an incredible of release from all this. But why can't I give this a sense of constancy? What's the hell is that going to take? I guess it's the next thing worth finding out.

Big Wheel Keeps on Turning

2006-03-24T15:57:00.000-08:00

"I’m living in a static fury, an unraveling laugh track, the land of the dead. And now, my heart is telling me to get back."
MIRACULOUS LIVES, Part I – The Berserker

I seem to be experiencing most of this month in the third person. The seasons are changing, but manic as ever, with clear and crispy afternoons followed by ill-omened sessions of snowfall. I hobbled down Rush Street last Wednesday to hand in my week’s notice to Urban Outfitters. When my lease is up in March, I’ll be returning to Seattle for a few months for some final medical treatments and recuperation before planning my next move. Although there has been discussion about relocating to New York, San Francisco, or even Berlin, what I mean when I say move is, in fact, somewhat open to interpretation. Living in Chicago and working in retail has proved to be manageable, but not nearly enough to establish a foothold here in the weeks, months or years ahead. Since having dropped out of school last October, I’ve surrendered this incendiary determination to generate something that is all my own in this city and instead, become one of those pneumatic bodies filling up the street who live from one paycheck to the next, hardback to paperback, prescription to subscription. It’s dishonest and unproductive.

I blame no one. Not Chicago, not two-and-a-half years of school, not even some idiot mugging crew on Lakeshore Drive. I will come back, if necessary, with the ammunition of logic and experience, with the muscular creases common in the faces of most survivors, with a navigational design undeviating from desire and principle. But first, I’ve got to get all those things back. The words and music and intensity and conviction. Without any of these things I’m simply another one of the hungry. The walking roundabout. The men in black mouthing at their reflection in the train, recoiling into their coat-collars, resting in defeat. Forever anonymous. Innocent and guilty and unknown to themselves.

(All these triple-ands, this colorless rumination and talk of blue devils and whatnot…quite the birthday party, isn’t it? Actually, it’s got nothing to do with being miserable, this is just my way of getting sentimental.)

I spent my first day out of crutches walking around the city listening to a free audiocast of Michael Cunningham reading from The Hours. I finished Specimen Days last summer and found it to be a revelation. I’ve since decided that I’d like to take some sort of stab at writing a novel. Maybe when I’m thirty, maybe tomorrow. I’ve written several different openings, a few of which have the potential for expansion if I could just permit myself to commit to an idea. I’m reluctant only because I don’t want to encourage the perverse meditation than goes into prose writing, the patience of laboring on spherical descriptions and defying dramatic impulsions. To be honest, my problem is that I want to do it all. In fact, it’s this same recklessness that all too often gives to inertia and lack of sleep. The key to these next few months will be redistributing these energies into a specific domain. Maybe it’ll be a project, perhaps something far less selfish, I don’t know. But these unremitting patterns of flippancy and indecision have become rather boring, silly and conventional.

It’s time to grow up. Yes. This time, without settling for less than enough.

- TO BE CONTINUED, Part II – From the Hancock Observatory -

Recent Purchases That Make Me Happy

2006-03-02T13:12:00.000-08:00

Check out the teaser for my friend James's upcoming short film Future.

Excerpts from A TANTRUM OF CLOWNS and UPSIDE DOWN MOON or BALI SHAG NIGHT

2006-03-01T00:43:00.000-08:00

In addition to working full-time without sleep, I'm currently at work on two projects: a prequel to Here Come the Alligators entitled A Tantrum of Clowns and Upside Down Moon or Bali Shag Night, a one act full length that takes place during the sexual revolution.

A TANTRUM OF CLOWNS

Moments after shooting his son in the foyer with a pistol.

QUINN I’m sorry, Benjamin, I thought you were your Mother.

--

MORGAN I hope you don’t mind, Pabbo, but I discussed it with Janet’s father, the symphony conductor. He wants to adapt your castration tale into a Three-Act-Opera with singing genitals that die at the guillotine.

QUINN Hey kids...

MORGAN “The grisliest finale since Don Giovanni!” is what he said.

QUINN All right! We're done talking about Daddy’s penis!

--

DOROTHY When I look at your father, all I see are the things I haven’t done, all the things too late to do. And when he looks at me, I search into his eyes and see an iceberg, shifting out, sinking down... and my fault that he’s sinking. All my fault.

--

MORGAN Do you know how hard it is for me to stand here and say something like “alcoholism is a legitimate biological condition”? All I can think of are those memories of Mammo staggering through my room past midnight, gnawing up her skirt, limbs pounding to Joe Cocker, knocking me out of my crib...

BEN She knocked you out of your crib because you were four years old. It was time to get out of the crib.

MORGAN Up yours.

BEN And back again.

--

BEN I’m only twenty-three. I still haven’t, I don’t know... climbed Everest.

QUINN You want to be one of those people that climbed Everest so they could brag about the time that they climbed Everest?

BEN I’ve never been arrested for streaking.

QUINN Better not to call attention to what God didn’t give you.

BEN Or listened to Pink Floyd synchronized to The Wizard of Oz.

QUINN We’ll do that when we get home.

--

QUINN I'd let Bill Clinton fuck me.

DOROTHY Pass the crepes.

QUINN Bill, but not Hilary. Am I the only one? Let's have a show of hands. No one? Great. So then what does that make me?

MORGAN Uncharitable. Poor, poor Hilary. Look at the woman face. She’s more frigid than Aunt Magda.

--

DOROTHY Well after all, a woman doesn’t always marry into what she likes.

QUINN That’s right kids. Take note of this: the sex only improves with someone you’re driven to kill. Listen for us around, oh, a quarter till midnight? That’s me molesting your mother in her sleep.

DOROTHY With your girth, honey, I’m likely to sleep all the way through it.

--

DOROTHY Your problem, Quinn, is that you’re unwilling to submit to change. These are the facts: your children have left. I’ve had a post-menopausal breakdown and do not know who I am anymore. Our canary is died last week. Our croquet mallets have been stolen and every day, a two-year old boy with downs syndrome sneaks through our backyard and lights things on fire. The way I see it, you and that pyromaniac kid have a lot in common, Quinn. Everyone except for you seems to be in the process of... I can't think of any way other way of putting it... of finding themselves... and you’re set on punishing us for it! Well, I think that’s silly and I’m not going to let you do that. You want to shoot me, fine. But as long as I’m alive, I will do what I want. Because if I’m to survive this marriage it's imperative that I learn how to keep you from crushing my soul.

QUINN You haven’t got a soul. No, I take that back. You did and you aborted it. Don’t you see, there’s no use trying to find yourself anymore, Dorothy?! You’re too old for that! We’re both too old for that. Now is the time for us to rest, to watch things grow...

DOROTHY I disagree.

QUINN Well then Cheers! To our children! Finding themselves. They’re in for a lot of pain.

UPSIDE-DOWN MOON or BALI SHAG NIGHT

ABE How do you take a slogan like “Make Love, Not War” and apply it to trying to change the most violent civilization to come out of human history? Any asshole can say they’re fed up with coercion and control nowadays, that they want to change the entire nature of the institution. But look around, baby: It’s 1973. The war isn’t over. What does that mean? What do all these fat baldies mean when they call us a bunch of “horned-up, cakewalking vigilantes”? Have they got a point? Are we just reinforcing the stupidity and motivational bankruptcy of every youth-upheaval that’s taken place in this country in the last five, six years? Or are we standing for something real, something true? Something more specific than a mass-movement, something more practical than the sharing, shifting and reshaping of an entire establishment...

--

RALPH Are you a real woman?

MIKAELA (Hooking the heel of her stiletto to her shoulder strap.)
Peel me away and see for yourself.

--

CYBELE Descartes had a name for this. “Le Petit Mort”, he called it. “A Little Death”. Maybe I’m confusing my cross-references again. I can't remember, was he a mathematician? Doesn’t matter. “Le Petit Mort”. The part after the lovemaking where two souls part ways and hold each other through the afterlife. They lie together, naked, in opulent anguish... sharing secrets, anticipations, uncertainties... what are you uncertain about, Abe?

--

MIKAELA It’s a shame how mortified we are of our own bodies. We’re instructed to loathe them, desert them and only give in until they’re on the brink of emergency… to use our skin as an asylum for our secrets, nightmares, our dangerous recollections… there’s nothing at stake tonight, no reason to be nervous, you see. I can tell you’re a sensitive person. You should never be ashamed of that.

--

CYBELE How would it make you feel? Someone else. Touching me.

ABE What do you want me to say?

CYBELE I want you to say that you’ll fight to keep me, Abe...

ABE You’re better off putting all these thoughts in a journal.

CYBELE … that the thought of me with someone else would make you homicidal! I am tired of playing Tinkerbell to a bunch of half-baked revolutionaries! Tired of this goddamn children’s crusade! Tired of all of it, Abe! When we met, all this banging around wooden spoons, Bonnie and Clyde stuff sort of made me hot. But look at us, just look at us now! What are we still doing in the middle of it? I don’t think any of us ever expected we’d be at this for another hundred years, ending up in jail and ruining our lives! And what I'd like to know, what I'd really like to know, Abe, is why the man I’m having a child with is off fucking strangers on rooftops instead of me? Tell me what establishment is being tested here?
(Pause. This is difficult.)
Or am I the establishment. Are you testing me.

ABE I’m going home.

CYBELE You’re a bastard! You walk away from me and I’ll wring your neck right now, I will! TELL ME WHAT I’VE DONE NOW! TELL ME!

ABE You’ve made growing up look like something I never want to do.

--

ABE So back to this question of changing the nature of institution, what that means or rather, can we do it? Or will we be chasing one gun-and-butter war after another, because we let it happen. Will our children and their children will live indoctrinated by the powers that be because we let it happen. Or will life in this country will be unlivable, because we let it happen. Our time is now, Bali Shags. No more upheavals. Personal freedom is our permanent revolution. Armor away...

The Big Sleep

2006-02-22T09:56:00.000-08:00

There's too much that I want to do, but not enough worth devoting full attention to achieving. In the end, when I curse myself for not being as far along as I ought to be, I resolve to shape down my focus but just end up getting bored. Classic ADHD, you're saying of course; no use in denying it. But it's not as if these things are impossible, just poorly orchestrated. This year, all I want is to keep working, maybe start performing live again, finish this play I'm writing... and maybe it comes down to getting life as a process rather than an ascension or declension that is bound to leave you behind. Ugh. How morbid. How morbid and completely boring.

Up until now, the weather in Chicago has been intolerable. Subzero temperatures, wind and snow scraping at the skin shards of glass, the streets empty and post-apocalyptic... Jolly Jack has never been so dead on. [ http://www.thepostshow.com/2006/01/26 ] I've been watching the Olympics on and off with Nick and Alice, nostalgic for the days where I'd put Chopin waltzes in the record player and skate across the kitchen floor in my socks and long underwear. What gets me the most are the contestants who finally get there and can't perform because of some drunken ankle sprain or some petty feud between team members. I mean, you spend years training for a few brief seconds of potential glory and it suddenly, all potential is devoured whole and you're back to zero. And you can either wait another four years or decide to hang up your suit to dry, but either way, you've lost a lot of time trying to get to a boat which sails you by before your very eyes. I can't imagine that anything hurts worse than that. But it's what I love about the Olympic; that sense of finality, the "epic upsets, victories and everything in between" as NPR described it.

I wrote the opening to a screenplay yesterday that might have potential. [ http://community.livejournal.com/theboysupstairs/2290.html ] The half-baked premise involves a man who has spent the past three decades in a celluloid coma after being sentenced to life-in-prison at age twenty-five. He sells a successful screenplay and uses his films as a means to live, breathe and interact with the world as he might have known it. A studio decides to commission him a two-picture a year deal and hire a lawyer to reevaluate his case and possibly bring about his release. He is subsequently forced to deal with messiness of the life as he left it behind and to disengage from the cinematic illusions he has dedicated himself to for the last thirty years. I like the idea of expanding our scope to include behind-the-scenes action footage as a framing device. It's a stylistic conceit, but it's there to never let you forget that it's a film; I think it would support the story and I don't know if I've ever seen that done before. Maybe in Dogville, which was fucking garbage. Anyway, I think I started it because I wanted to write something that dealt with our modern-day fixation on voyuerism, entertainment and the self-absorbing (though necessarily self-fulfilling) root of it all. Ha! I'm much too tired to take any of this seriously. You can probably tell.

I don't know where to end. So I guess I'll end with a vague quote from my (written) journal. Take from it what you will:

"Ask him why he underlines his books, if he lives in your neighborhood, then ask him if he'd like to have dinner. You'd have done it already if you weren't so afraid that he might find out that you're wearing his name on your boxer briefs."

Oscar Projections & Insipid Commentary, Part I

2006-02-14T23:07:00.000-08:00

BEST MOTION PICUTRE OF THE YEAR

Brokeback Mountain

Hideously overrated, but will probably WILL WIN just to reinforce that the gays own Hollywood. Which we do, by the way. *sugarsnap* George Cukor is probably pissing himself in his grave.

Capote

Okay, let’s face it: this was fucking excellent. Probably the first film I’ve scene to depict writers as the scared, soul-sapping monsters they can be. Given the oblique subject matter, I find overwhelming positive response to be sort of a surprise.

Crash

If you don’t count Magnolia, consider Crash “Short Cuts: The Sequel”. But this time we get a whole lotta’ ham-fisted, one-note insights on race. A lot of people were affected by it, I just fell asleep in my corn nuts.

Good Night and Good Luck

Skipped it.

Munich

For my money, this is the film that SHOULD WIN, if only for the fact that it merits its own controversy and makes all other historical fiction look irrelevant. The screenplay is a debacle and it isn’t a better film than “Schindler’s List” or even “Capote” for that matter, but Good God, it’s certainly more brave.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A LEAD ROLE

Phillip Seymour Hoffman for Capote

Someone call the doctor, we've got a rare SHOULD WIN/WILL WIN situation. A performance that shows anyone who thought they could act that they were, in fact, very, VERY wrong.

Terrence Howard for Hustle and Flow

Skipped it.

Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain

Best Underplayed Performance? Maybe.

Joaquin Phoenix for Walk the Line

Stellar in the music sequences. Was he acting too? Funny, I can't remember.

David Strathairn for Good Night, and Good Luck Skipped it.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEAD ROLE

Judi Dench for Mrs. Henderson Presents

Skipped it.

Felicity Huffman for Transamerica

Gender confusion is so passe. I wasn't particularly convinced that was transgender, either. Obviously I've seen too many episodes of Desperate Housewives. But still, this was an achievement. Definitely a SHOULD WIN.

Keira Knightley for Pride and Prejudice

Skipped it. (Yawn)

Charlize Theron for North Country

Skipped it.

Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line

Reese's cups sure does one mean rendition of "Wildwood Flower", but please spare us the vintage dresses. WILL WIN.

- MORE CULTURE VULTURE SNARK SOON TO COME -

The Game of Give and Take

2006-02-13T19:01:00.000-08:00

So I have this unusually clairvoyant connection with the shuffle option on my I-Pod. A friend of mine maintains that this is no accident, but a part of some inauspicious marketing strategy by the Apple Corporation. Yes, apparently this strategy, my friend says, involves certain processing devices that are implemented so that we'll bond with the product through mechanical puppy love. (To reiterate, it’s his conspiracy theory. Not mine.) All I know is that from the moment I leave my door to hit the street, I can usually count on my “mechanical lovepet” to churn out the perfect playlist matching every change in the weather, location, disposition, etc. It usually succeeds at this with an almost eerie cinematic efficiency. This week is no exception. Which means the fact that “Can’t Hurry Love” by The Supremes starts to play every time I’ve seen an ambulance or run into an ex-lover is a little more than Tarantino-irony, baby. No, that’s just not good.

How many heartaches must I stand?/Before I find the love to let me live again?/Right now the only thing that keeps me hanging on/When I feel my strength, it's almost gone…/I remember mama said…

How did this song, probably somewhere in the Top 5 most recognized in the American pop-music catalogue, turn so suddenly into this colossally cruel, omnipresent warning of life spinning so terribly out of control? (For the record, it hasn't yet. At least I don’t think it has.) As an agnostic with no coherent sense of the rowdy spiritual forces that may (or may not) surround him, I tend more to lean towards recognition of the coincidental, the paradoxical, but mostly, if I’m being honest, the completely nonsensical. So when I hear the words “You can’t hurry love”, they forge themselves into an encrypted anagram which say: “Expect less, breathe more” or “Slow down, sugar… your youth ain’t up for bargain just yet.” A therapist might call this projecting. A prison guard or grocery clerk might call it keeping everything in check. I prefer to think of it more like a quick glimpse or two in the rear view mirror… looking back in a series of paranoiac spasms and pushing forward into a greater sense of becoming.

When I left home at seventeen, the objectives were simpler then. It was about going to school and meeting him, who would give me an internship here, where I’d secure a position, drop out of school and move there, which would supply me with enough opportunities and surrogate family to officially call that place home. It was about living in a constant state of arrival, which seemed at the time to be the only real way to find success in the world. A guy I dated briefly in college was similarly driven, hence Act III of our relationship ending in bloodfeast and fiasco. But it wasn’t until I laughed in his face when I heard him say: “Failure was not an option” that I understood the extent to which I’d been jinxed, tested, even scammed by these earlier ambitions. I had always known to some extent that talent and drive were, in themselves, insufficient. I had always known that the “getting there” would be a process, one which would inevitably consist of a lot of excruciating waiting. What didn’t occur to me is that this process would take its toll on one’s own survival to point where things like talent and ambition would be rendered irrelevant; you might even forget that these things existed in the first place.

The term “coming-of-age” is interesting to me. Some would say it signifies that defining part of a person’s life when all routes seem open, but no direction seems accessible. I would add that it’s also when a person reconciles him/herself to what the world is and is not, and their capacity to deal with those immensities and disappointments. But this Twilight Adolescence that everyone talks about in their early-twenties seems less innocent than the days when we were skipping gym and picking at our pimples. There’s more at stake when you fail, and as one of my character’s say “less room for you and your dream to walk the same street.” So maybe when Diana Ross and The Supremes were singing about “love” being “a-game-of-give-and-take”, what they were describing was the fight for self-affirmation, the fight for what our hearts deserve…

2006-01-30T18:19:00.000-08:00

Hi. My name is Trystan. I live in Wicker Park, or as I like to call it The Triple-O District. (Overstimulated. Overglorified. Overgentrified.) Everyone's a poseur.

I love it...
I hate it...

And then I love it all over again.

---

This is where I work. (Actually I work at the one on State Street, but I couldn't find it on the Google image search. I'm getting transferred to this branch at the end of Febuary. Except, like, you know. The one that's open. )

I know this doesn't look like an Area 8 building, but I swear to God that's exactly what it is. This place is the major source of the Great Chicago Bedbug Epidemic. It's also where I live... maybe. (Stalker.)

And look, I'm so not taking pictures of my apartment. But here is me in my apartment. As you can tell, I broke the lampshade. Hence the solemn face.

I also have ghosts.

---

So OK, it's over. That was anti-climactic.

Well, it took me long enough to start using this thing. My New Years Resolution is to take more pictures of Me and The Power Entourage on wild hog chases, piefights on the Red Line, stroller thievery and other pointless acts of depravity. Until then, this journal will mostly consist of rantings on pop-culture and politics, the occassional weekend rehash, a bit of long-winded overpontificating... (okay, let's be honest... a lot of it.) I might even discuss about my ongoing projects. The point is that I'm not taking this thing too seriously. I'm working 64 hour weeks. I'll do whatever I want. And if it succeeds in being entertaining, we'll call it a brilliant mistake.

I'm going to watch The Wedding Crashers with Brandon now.

KAPUT Enterprises/Mission Statement and Proposition

2006-01-30T17:15:00.000-08:00

KAPUT! [URGENT. UNCOMPROMISING. UP INTO THE BEAT.] is a Chicago-based production company dedicated to the industrial accommodation and collaboration of working artists. Through conglomerating the work of passionate creative professionals with competent management and public relations resources, KAPUT! thrusts original work out of the fringes and into the urban consciousness without censorship or compromise of vision.

Our belief is that the role of art is not sensationalize or dissimulate, but empower the role of both artist and spectator as free and active citizens. As it becomes increasingly popular for art to be synonymous with leisure, we reject the idea of it as an elitist diversion. We believe it should instead be presented in a venue with open invitation where people arrive (or at the very least, depart) perceptually engaged with the world they live in.

In its inceptive stages, KAPUT! will be sponsor theme-oriented events open to every medium. (I.E., live bands may share their billing with short films, fashion shows set to amateur disc jockey competitions, a 24-hour festival of three six-minute plays, etc.) The purpose of such events are to:

A) Launch KAPUT! as an organization with an active community presence.
B) Create a dynamic social climate for people and different artistic mediums to share the same space.
C) Help to establish a multi-disciplinary arts facility with administrative offices, a recording studio, two multipurpose exhibition halls and a regularly operating bar/café. (Developed after CONSOLIDATED WORKS of Seattle.)

If successful, KAPUT! will reinforce the indivisibility of art from our contemporary lives. It will also, once and for all, help dispel the so-called advantages of being a “working artist in solitude.”

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THE SUITS

Adam Kavanaugh - (773) 294-3023 - akavanaugh@comcast.com

Isabel Pagonis - (314) 813-2909 - Isabelpagonis@artic.edu

Trystan Phillip Toole - (773) 726-3003 - trystantoole@yahoo.com

Hold Onto the Wheel....

2006-01-30T15:34:00.000-08:00

Hegel’s dialectic theory defines skepticism as a sort of paralysis where people give themselves to their deepest despair. It’s sometimes described as an abyss in which all certainty is swallowed whole, leading to a feeling of decay about the world due to an inability to affirm any positive value. This seems like a fairly cerebral explanation for why most of us, through internal or external conditions, probably experience bouts of crippling deficiency. It’s as if the universe demands it of us to fasten our grasp on what's real. And as I review the events (or lack thereof) of 2005, I begin to understand just how much of it can be attributed to the laws of ontological principle rather than some long prison sentence for yelling blasphemies at homeless men singing Christmas carols. (I know. I’m appalling.) At any rate, we can jerk off all we like and gloat lofty theories that tell us how the world works. But ultimately that doesn't separate us from the world. For every big/little catastrophe I experienced last year and will keep experiencing in my paltry, saltspeck of a life, I will continue to ask myself: “Why is this happening to me? What have I done to justify this?” And most of the time, it isn't my place to know.

The reason I pontificate like this is because for a long time, I have felt very far-flung from the present, as if the world outside is coming to me from a tapedeck and I’m unable to find the appropriate moment to interject. I even catch myself occasionally pre-scripting job interviews, fake anecdotes, conversations with friends and family over the telephone, just to restore a sense of self-discipline to a mind which more often than not resembles an overactive, reeking glob of mayonnaise. It’s really no wonder that my sense of humor has dulled considerably, since where else does laughter begin but in a spontaneous heart?

It’s no secret to most of the people who know me that I live daily in a state of critical dread. It has nothing to do with being a quacking lunatic. (That's not to say I don't have my moments of hysteria, but I try to pass them off as being endearing.) In fact, aside from loathing all the Tom Cruises and imitation-June Cleavers of this world, I actually find myself feeling pity for them. Okay, that’s a lie. But I do wonder how it people can evaluate the state of the planet in which they live and manage to resist the urge to stick their head in the oven call it a day. The environment turning against us; it’s possible that within only a couple hundred years the world’s water level will have risen to the point that most of human life will be destroyed. We’re living in a nation of marginalized people run by a neo-fascist Rodeo which appeals strictly to fundamentalist urges, arousing enough international fear and resentment to where the U.S. isn’t going to have to worry about history, because simply isn’t going to be any history to worry about. And so, for the time being, we engorge ourselves with dissimulation, driving our attention spans into quicksand, roaming the city alone and afraid, sparing our compassion to safe, limited circles as we coerce ourselves further into isolation. Nobody knows on another anymore. And I doubt we’ll see an improvement. Why doesn’t this drive anyone else crazy?

My most recent project, UPSIDE DOWN MOON or BALI SHAG NIGHT takes place in the summer of 1973 in Boston. The son of a Libyan ambassador jumps of the rooftop of the St. Excelsia Hotel after having been disowned my his family for spending his first night out of boarding school with a transsexual prostitute. A week later, The Bali Shags, a radical faction of former members of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) gather on the same rooftop to stage a public orgy both in his memory and the up-and-coming spirit of the sexual revolution. Their inevitable arrest inspires numerous copycat events from youth all across the city, but their intent seems thwarted after the prostitute comes to them having experienced an incident of anonymous public molestation in the alley of a Chinese restaurant. In spite of everything, it is a comedy with a lot of racy humor to counterbalance its ultimately heartbreaking themes of youth-based revolutionary disillusionment and the struggle for faith beyond younger, larger-than-life principles without succumbing to the world’s self-destructive logic.

Maybe this is what Kundera writes about when he refers to: “a suspended theme… the theme that thickens, maneuvering you through old age.” And then, the moment you forget that it’s even there, it let’s you go…

Top Ten/Twelve of 2005

2006-01-17T07:38:00.000-08:00

I'm sure a diehard culture vulture would explain to you why these selections make the best albums/films to come out of a monumentally shitty year. But in the spirit of bridges burning, I say, let's just torch the fucking thing down and just trust Uncle Trystan on his decisions.

If I had seen MATCH POINT last year, I probably would have given it a slot at number #3. It's just such a shame Jonathan Rhys Meyers can't act. I mean, the man is stunning looking. In a completely asexual, Oscar-Wilde-said: "God-send-me-an-angel" sort of way.

Anyway, I totally ate this shit up. I won't lie, I had my doubts. But take my word for it, it's worth getting over Scarlett Johansson's nasal drone and the unfortunate fact that the movie is a tennis reference. It's as taut and sublimely stylized as anything that ever came out of Hitchcock, surpringly well-focused, full of subversive humor and the kind of film that will probably have me coming back for more.

A Season Undone

2005-12-19T01:30:00.000-08:00

And so if we roll into a thick knot of black coats this winter
We'll converge into light, melt the ice from beneath us
and blind stars with the gold in our irises tonight.