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

"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

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

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

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

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

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…

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

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.”

----

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....

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

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

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.