looking into sloth adoption

Meet the sloths from Amphibian Avenger on Vimeo.

In religious terms, the human narrative — birth, life, death and rebirth — has for millennia been relatively straightforward in the West. You were born. You lived. You died. After a judgment you went to heaven (or hell) forever and ever. Eternity was the end: no appeals allowed.

But nearly a billion Hindus and a half-billion Buddhists — not to mention the ancient Greeks, certain Jews and a few Christians — have for thousands of years believed something entirely different. Theirs is, as the theologians say, a cyclical view. You are born. You live. You die. And because nobody’s perfect, your soul is born again — not in another location or sphere, and not in any metaphorical sense, but right here on earth.

I liked Buddy Cianci's brand of entertainment better...

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

Amazing

Help my friend Jo edit her documentary on asexuality!

Kanye West's tweets are egocentric, whiny, and use a lot of exclamation points. They also make great captions for New Yorker cartoons.

Let’s say you see a kitten. Fine, make it two kittens. Let’s say you see two kittens. One’s nimble and fast and cute. The other one is dead. My experience is that people—and by people I mean children—by nature go for the live kitten. They see strength in the live kitten. Also, who wants a dead kitten?

To say that I haven't been writing wouldn't be the truth, because I have been. Just not blogging.

The truth is, I have been in a metaphorical cave, investigating the dark, and silence. This is initially not a pleasant place to be, when you first get here; but after some time the dark isn't so bad anymore.

Words can be a terrible compulsion to live with; the worst kind of addiction. In caves, you don't have to narrativize anything, particularly your own experiences. You don't have to investigate various characters and their motivations. You don't feel compelled to draw out the map of your life, and everyone elses, in order to construct a whole. You can nap in caves, become a part of some sort of organic whole. In the English Patient, Katharine Clifton died in a cave. And if you haven't read that book, you really should because it's far better than the movie. I think about Katharine Clifton a lot. Also about death. Sometimes when I am in my cave, I fear that I will die there, that I will be engulfed in silence. But after a while, even this isn't so bad, the idea of being forgotten in a cave. Even hyper-awareness of your own mortality can become exhausting.

I grew up reading an absurd amount of new age-y self-help books. I did this as a child, which I now understand was somewhat precocious, but not necessarily in a good way. I was interested in dreams and analyzing them, in Buddhism, in mediation, in the middle way, in cause and effect, in excavating layer after layer to find some sort of truth. These ideologies still frame my way of thinking, of narrativizing. But sometimes I wish I was free of even all of this, unfettered, unimprinted, unmarked.

This alchemy of personality with environment - I understand that there is something perfect and whole about it. It is a process that unfolds and continues, ad infinitum. So I don't have anything new to say. I am still (unfortunately) the same person I always was. Maybe this isn't so bad. And ultimately, it doesn't really matter.

oh Radiolab, I can't get enough of your cheesy promo videos

‎Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

-Hippocrates

The girls of my generation were raised to be perfect. Our high-achieving baby-boomer mothers had labored mightily to raise us in a world where our potential would be unfettered. We were supposed to grow up to be physicists and judges and CEOs. Failing grades, ill-advised sexual encounters, or as, I did, running penniless to Europe for two years to get away from an expectation of success no less restrictive than one of Betty Draper’s iron girdles (not to mention falling into a painful and destructive relationship with a man who already had a girlfriend): these were more than simply personal failings. These were an affront to the sisterhood, all the battles that had been waged a generation ago in our name. If we screwed up, we were letting the team down.

Of course people still have hangovers and affairs, but what dominates the wholesome vista is a sense that everything we do should be productive, should be moving toward a sane and balanced end. The idea that you would do something just for the momentary blissful escape of it, for intensity, for strong feeling, is out of fashion.

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.


-Frank O'Hara

Tips for Starting an Illustrious Career as a Songwriter!
(or, how I got enough material lodged in my brain to torture me til the end of my days)

Go temporarily insane.
Make a tearful confession to a priest.
Get thrown out of your parents’ house.
Go broke.
Apply for several credit cards using different names; have them all cancelled and each of your fake identities reported to a collection agency.
Sleep 10 hours in one week.
Sleep 24 hours in one day.
Drink lots of whiskey (non-alcoholic for those under 21).
Fall in love with somebody completely wrong for you.
Have your heart broken. Have your heart broken again. And again.
Watch your friends change into people you don’t recognize, either because of some fundamental change in their personality, or plastic surgery, or both.
Give away all your possessions.
Return to the thrift store later and try to get your possessions.
Shave your head and move to Alaska.
Endure the questioning disdain of your friends, family, and mentors.
Worry about things that don’t matter.
Forget to worry about things that do matter.
Sleep through college and wake up with a diploma.
Wonder how that vomit got on your shoes.
Work for somebody who literally blows a whistle to keep the pizzas delivered on time.
Deliver a pizza to Michael Bolton.
Get fired for setting the xerox machine on fire.
Move someplace far away from anybody you know, grow very lonely,
and give your television a nickname.
Experience glorious success in front of thousands of people, let it go to
your head, and experience a rapid change of fortune.
Get booed off a stage.
Get in a fistfight in the alley outside Emo’s.

I can't believe how sad this made me.

A little saccharine, particularly the cliched music. But still kind of cool. Watch it while listening to something else.

I've always liked movies about imagined realities, particularly collectively imagined. You know, in the vein of Matrix or Thirteenth Floor or Dark City. Between the Inception viewing, the Radiolab episode about perceptions of time and various weird events that that keep occurring the past few weeks, I feel like I'm on the brink of formulating some sort of idea about something. But I'm not there yet. It is a consolation that it took Christopher Nolan nearly ten years to work out the screenplay for Inception. I am envious of those people who have razor-sharp reasoning or analytical abilities. It is highly inconvenient having a mind that sometimes feels like mush.

post-inception question

why does the dark metropolis exist as an iconographic landscape of everyone's (sometimes) dream-subconscious?

Is this a collective memory of an unnameable past?

What is the crumbling urban landscape an archetype for?

Does it represent the limits of our perceived notions of time and space? The end of the x and y axis of our collective mind?

Is our greatest fear a landscape (both geographic and psychic) that is wholly created and destroyed by man? Therefore, I suppose, by ourselves?

Why is it so sinister?

Scale of the Universe

Color Hue IQ Test. This is fun!

-Via R

Best Headline Ever...

Recent sighting: Zack de la Rocha, riding his bike through Highland Park.

It is a Proust-Madeleine moment. With Zack de la Rocha serving as the madeleine.

A glimpse of the younger me.

A door opening into lost time.

thinking of upcoming trips...

-via M
"Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference."

-Steve Jobs

it was kind of like this

slow. or slower than i am used to.

and stuck in time.

or stuck in several times. collective and personal.

heavy with dry heat and landscapes.

flies at a diner. staying up late and talking.

tacos and date cake.

all in all, perfect.

away

for a few days.

now back.

and dreaming still

of blue skies and mountains.

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

-W.S. Merwin

What happens when you realize that all your subconscious notions of relationships and love through most of your twenties were predicated on a misread of approximately 200 viewings of this movie when you were five?

I'm not talking about myself. Just other people I know.

Also, these subtitles are somewhat problematic. My favorite one is "With your vision, this is the complaint. Even flowers create a distance!"

What does that mean? It's like in code or something.

No wonder I misunderstood this movie.

Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth." Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path." For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923

songs I've had stuck in my head all day part II

songs I've had stuck in my head all day part I

Lost Half

On Echo Park Boulevard, outside an art gallery, I lost an earring. This was years ago, and that's the thing about jewelry; sometimes it just disappears. There's something about earrings though, or an earring. A mitten, a sock. Losing one half of a pair feels like the worst thing. And even now, years later, when I walk by that gallery, I still look for the glint of my lost earring, in the cracks of the sidewalk around the shrubs, by the doorway, in the planters; this restless hope that all lost things can somehow, at some point, be re-found, reunited, complete.

Hammamet, Tunisia

Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia

Pervy Optmetrist

My optometrist's name is Ira. He dresses like he works at Sterling Cooper. He's 70. He doesn't understand why anyone actually pays to eat lunch out when you can just bring a sandwich from home.

The first time I went to see him, while checking my eyes, he informed me that his 98-year old father has the same eyeglass prescription as me.

"But it took him a long time to get up there," he said, as though I had just won the blindness Olympics. Then he made me read another chart.

"No, sorry, your eyesight is actually worse than his," he nodded.

"In my day, a girl with eyesight like that - blind as a bat, you'd have trouble finding someone to marry you. But times have changed. We now value girls based on their intelligence. And we have contact lenses. But, pretty girl like you, I think you'll find someone to marry you." He looked skeptical for a minute. We both looked at each other in silence. I think he was waiting to see if I would react in some way. I think I was waiting to see if I would react in some way. Then I started laughing, kind of more in shock than anything. And then he started laughing too, except I think he was laughing out of discomfort because he didn't get what was funny.

"I'll have to special order your contacts," he informed me. "We don't usually keep prescriptions that high in the store," he shrugged.

Outside on the sidewalk, I stopped to think about that exchange. My optometrist called me blind as a bat! Amongst other things.