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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.

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.

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 = 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

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

The Please Catalogue, December 2006

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.”

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)

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...

'Cause today's my 22nd birthday.


BICHEZ.

"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

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

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

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

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