Barack Obama Looking at Awesome Things

When soldiers part ways at wars’ end, the breakup of a platoon triggers the same emotion as the death of a person; the final bloodless death of the war. The same mood haunts actors on the drop of the final curtain after months of working together, something greater than themselves has just died. After a store closes its door on its final evening or Congress wraps its final session, the participants amble away, feeling that they were just part of something larger than themselves, something they intuit had a life, even though they can’t quite put a finger on it.

In this way, death is not only for just humans but for anything that existed. And it turns out that anything that enjoys a life has an afterlife: platoons and plays and stores and congresses, they don’t end. They just move on to a different dimension.

Although it is difficult for us to imagine how these beings interact, they enjoy a delicious afterlife together, exchanging stories of their adventures. They laugh about good times and often, just like humans, lament the brevity of life. It may seem mysterious to you that these organizations can live on without the people who composed them but the underlying principle is simple: the afterlife is made of spirits. After all, you don’t bring your kidney or liver or your heart into the afterlife with you; instead you gain independence from the pieces that make you up.

A consequence of this cosmic scheme is going to surprise you: when you die you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. I mean, they hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen but with your death, they don’t die, instead they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, actually haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.

-David Eagleman, Ineffable, from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

sto·chas·tic
   
–adjective

Statistics.

of or pertaining to a process involving a randomly determined sequence of observations each of which is considered as a sample of one element from a probability distribution.


Origin:
1655–65; < Gk stochastikós, equiv. to stochas- (var. s. of stocházesthai to aim at) + -tikos -tic

—Related forms
sto·chas·ti·cal·ly, adverb

Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo, Pierrot le Feu, Jean-Luc Godard,1965

Trinidad, Cuba

Trinidad, Cuba

Sometimes what you need is right at your fingertips...

S mentioned that my dad looks like Salman Rushdie. I said, "No, I've always thought Homi Bhaba looks like Salman Rushdie." S wanted to see a side-by side. So I googled Homi Bhaba and saw that he already knows Salman Rushdie and that they even hang out and have pictures taken together in which they stand side-by-side and can easily be mistaken for one another. Seriously, can you even like, tell them apart in this photo? Actually, looking at this photo, I think my dad looks more like Homi Bhaba than Salman Rushdie.

God, the interwebs never ceases to amaze me. If the internet was a person, it would be your most thoughtful/enabling friend. The one who encourages all of your stalking tendencies and even does some of your recon for you. And brings you cupcakes when you're sad. Then you realize that the interwebs is everyone's friend like that and it makes you feel cheap and sad.

Doesn't this word sound positively dirty?

Valgus

/ˈvælgəs/ Show Spelled [val-guhs] noun, plural-gus·es.
Pathology

–noun

1.

an abnormally turned position of a part of the bone structure of a human being, esp. of the leg.

–adjective

2.

of or in such a position; bowlegged, knock-kneed, or the like.

---

Origin:
1790–1800; <>

Countdown for the Best Party Ever has begun...

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

It was a textbook dialogue that hooked Batuman, one between “Vera,” a physics graduate student, and “Ivan,” Vera’s physicist boyfriend, who with no explanation moves to Siberia and eventually marries someone else, by which time “Vera didn’t care anymore.” Adding this star-crossed pair to the cast of Slavic malcontents she’d previously come across — including Anna Karenina at her grandmother’s apartment in Ankara, and Maxim, her brooding violin teacher in Manhattan — Batuman concluded that “at every step, the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love appeared bound up with Russian.”

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The Drs. Iyengar met by chance, at a bus stop in San Francisco when they were graduate students at Stanford. She found him morose and geeky; he thought she was confident, bright and funny. Predictably, they fell in love, and married a few years later, horrifying their families — he is Hindu, she was raised a Sikh — whose respective cultures view arranged marriages as sacrosanct. (Panicked, his mother visited the family astrologer who told her not to fret; the couple had been married in seven past lives and would be married in seven future ones as well.)

It was an involved process, Dr. Garud Iyengar told this reporter later via e-mail, to choose someone outside his caste and his religion. In the end, his marriage calculus was solved by the tricky factor of love. “Over time,” he said, “she became someone I could not live without.”

Explaining romantic attraction, Dr. Sheena Iyengar writes, is nearly impossible. In her book, she relates the experience of one of her graduate students who traveled to India with a woman in whom he had a romantic interest. He knew of the “love on a suspension bridge” study, which showed, through an elaborate ruse, that participants were more likely to develop an attraction for someone they encountered in a dangerous setting, like a spindly bridge swaying above the rapids, than in a more staid environment. The student thought to recreate the study with the object of his affection, on a thrill ride on a rickshaw through Delhi. But it backfired: the woman fell for the rickshaw driver.

Dream

I am shooting a biopic about Katharine Hepburn. The real actress, Katharine Hepburn emerges from the dead in order to play herself. We also hire my friend Amy, who looks a little like Katharine Hepburn, to play a younger version of her. We shoot everything on Micheltorena Street, and at the car wash on Sunset in Echo Park. The gaffer steals a keychain from the car wash boutique store that sells air fresheners and dusty packs of M'nMs. As a result, we have to shut down production. Katharine Hepburn is sad about this. "Now I have to return to the underworld," she tells me, irritated that I brought her back for naught.

"Are you going to Hades?" I ask her, completely perplexed.

"No, just the cemetery in Glendale," she says.

I wake up, get some water. Then return to sleep. This time, I dream that it is years later, and I am writing a book about the making of the Katharine Hepburn biopic. I've locked myself indoors and the world outside is a terrifying place. There is a serial killer on the loose. Then there is a knock at the door. It is James Franco.

"I hear you make biopics with people starring themselves," he says, "I want you to make a movie about me and James Dean and me playing James Dean."

"I can't do that," I tell him.

"Why not?" he asks.

"Because that's not a movie. That's reality," I tell him, "Come up with a better idea and I'll consider it."

James Franco slumps on my couch and contemplates movie ideas while I water my plants.


Themes to consider:

crime
death
celebrity
making art
I've lived in LA too long

“THERE’S A THING about being capable of a great moment,” Simon told me on a break from shooting. “This city is capable of moments unlike any moments you’ll ever experience in life. To see an Indian come down the street in full regalia on St. Joseph’s Night on an unlit street of messed-up shotgun houses and one burned-out car, and he’s the most beautiful thing on the planet, and everything around him is falling down. It’s a glorious instant of human endeavor. It’s duende from the Spanish, chills on the back of your neck, and then the next minute it’s gone. Lots of American places used to make things. Detroit used to make cars. Baltimore used to make steel and ships. New Orleans still makes something. It makes moments. I don’t mean that to sound flippant, and I don’t mean it to sound more or less than what it is, but they’re artists with a moment, they can take a moment and make it into something so transcendent that you’re not quite sure that it happened or that you were a part of it.”

Hurtie

The world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who can look at images of destruction, however large or small and find aforementioned destruction stimulating or satisfying in some way (people who like those completely retarded action blockbusters) and those of us who can't as much as watch a Mr. Clean commercial in which a child knocks a plate of pasta sauce onto a white carpet. I don't know whether it's my tendency to anthropomorphize objects or the fact that my mind completes the cycle of destruction through a visual narrative of an arduous/irritating cleanup/rebuilding of some sort that makes me so cringey about broken things. Explosion scenes in movies exhaust me. I want to take a nap afterwards. I had to quit my job at CNN after the Shock and Awe campaign. On the rare occasion that I get yelled at, like for reals, I get nosebleeds. I'm not saying this to impress upon you the fact that I am an oversensitive soul, but as a meek insistence that we keep destruction on this planet to a minimum so that those of us who can't handle it can somehow keep it together without having a nervous meltdown.

Unfortunately the forces of nature sometimes have a mind of their own. There were storms in Greenwich over the weekend. My parents told me about the maple in the front yard falling over and landing on the car. I could somehow visualize this, but the pictures completely freaked me out to a point where I just want to curl up and sleep away these images for an hour or two.

Nerding Out

Nerdly book swap happening at the SL Library on Thursday. I've also been invited to an event at some bar in Hollywood, but a book swap sounds like so much more fun and also, I don't know what to do with the three copies of Madamme Bovary and four copies of Ibsen I've collected over the years. I'm running out of bookshelf space and yet, I can't bring myself to part with any of my books. I know I will inevitably come home with a dozen more. And yet this seems like an ideal way to spend a Thursday evening if you must leave your house; which I prefer not to do most Thursday evenings. My requirement for Thursday evenings is that they 1) must not involve venturing more than a mile from my house or 2) Must be spent doing some sort of productive activity that makes me feel virtuous or gives the impression of expanding my mind. Most Thursdays, I cook a semi-elaborate meal, or watch Tivoed NOVA or curl up in my reading chair and read. Or do dishes or pay bills. Two Thursdays ago, R and I cooked a stew at her house and then, tipsy on two glasses of wine each, found ourselves doing extensive internet research on Saipan. The book swap fulfills all of my Thursday evening requirements. Also, there is a hot dog truck with veggie dogs parked outside the library on Thursdays. Also the tastings at SL wine next door. Whoever thought of building a library next to a wine store is brilliant. Books, wine, veggie dogs, hanging at the library a mile from my house? What could be better?

“Greenberg” is the first of Mr. Baumbach’s films to be set in Los Angeles. Both he and Mr. Stiller are native New Yorkers who have grown to love or at least appreciate Los Angeles. “If you don’t embrace what’s there, it’s very hard to fight against it,” said Mr. Stiller, who has lived in Los Angeles for nearly 20 years, in violation of what he called “a family tradition.” He added, “I know that I’m not going to live there forever.” (He and his wife, the actress Christine Taylor, have two children, and he said he wants his kids to “have a New York experience growing up.”)

Mr. Baumbach credits Ms. Leigh, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, with helping him see the city in a more expansive light. (The couple divide their time between New York and Los Angeles.) The world of “Greenberg” owes as much to the lived-in, off-Hollywood Los Angeles depicted in the ’70s films of John Cassavetes and Hal Ashby as it does to the queasy languor of Joan Didion's California.

Roger is a native Angeleno, but the city makes him feel even more alienated. A dip in a swimming pool turns into a panicked dog paddle. He no longer drives, and his lack of mobility leaves him either a sore-thumb pedestrian or a needy passenger. Mr. Baumbach recalled discussing these aspects of the character in an early conversation with Mr. Stiller: “Ben said to me, ‘You know, the fact that he doesn’t drive or swim seems to me beyond pathetic, beyond what we can expect even in this character.’ To which I replied, ‘I don’t drive and I don’t really swim.’ ” (Mr. Baumbach got his driver’s license last month.)

For Mr. Stiller “Greenberg” captures a central fact of Los Angeles life. “There’s an emptiness out there that can be healthy and also very tough,” he said. “It forces you to look at yourself — you don’t have the distractions of the city to go out and pick up on everyone else’s energy. In a good way that can feed you. But to wake up in the morning and have this quiet and emptiness, you have to deal with where you’re at. That’s the Greenberg effect and that can be a little scary.”

Keyboard Dyslexia

I went to type the word "female" and when I saw it on the screen, I had typed "feelame." I laughed because my dyslexic fingers are intuitive. This is actually an accurate description of how it feels to be female some days.

Highlights of this Weekend

M orders in French at Taix/the waiter brings us dessert on the house/Peach Tart/Mousse au chocolat/creme brulee/our appetizers take an hour and a half to arrive but all is good because we are laughing too hard/I run into my friend Q from Atlanta at a coffee shop in Silverlake/This is the coffee shop I generally avoid because I run into everyone here/And sometimes it just induces feelings I don't want to deal with/But I like Q, and we haven't caught up in forever/So I consider giving this sickeningly hip coffee shop (that serves $8 hot chocolate) another chance/Also, they have this passionfruit-shiso-basil seed-coconut milk-gelee thing that makes me want to cry it is so good/Mark Everett and appealingly nerdy girlfriend sit beside us at MC/I try and listen in on their conversation/They are talking about a show they went to/I admit to mild obsession with Mark Everett/When I can't sleep, I get up and google his new book, which I consider ordering on Amazon/Then decide that no decisions should be made at 4:00 AM/I take on hermetic tendencies/curl up in bed/I make a breakfast of fruit, cut up with precision and love/and creme fraiche because I don't care to ever find out my cholesterol levels/Read a book on North Korea by Barbara Demick/R and I outline, outline, outline/The 40-foot tall maple in my parents' yard falls in the storm/It crushes the SUV/They have no power/I imagine the tree on its side blocking the driveway/And Mishan staring at it with that look of incredulity he sometimes gets/I change into a black dress and wear my Egyptian scarf boots and my vintage Mexican necklace/I cry in I's office/I ignore a series of texts/I bemoan the invention of texting/someone send me a fucking letter to show you care already/Jo sends good letters/As do my parents, who send care packages/As does my middle school best-friend Mary Wall, who would write me letters over the summers while I was in India/I cry in my car after hearing a particularly moving NPR story/I finish an essay/I hike up to the top of the Franklin Hills/To watch the Sunset/I miss things/And people/Particularly people/So much that I don't even care to detail it/It is what it is/I suppose is all you can say/Or all that people do say/Whatever that means

Saudade

Supposedly, my ancestors lived in/around the city of Mohenjo-daro, in the heart of the Indus Valley. I wonder if the sense of nostalgia I feel when I look at pictures of the now-skeletal remains of this city are carefully cultivated as a result of people telling me that this place is significant in terms of my family lineage.

But I'd like to think that this feeling isn't learned, that it comes from something other than a kind of indoctrinated clansmanship. I'd like to think that recognition, that particular sense of familiarity we sometimes experience, with a person or a place, that moment of saudade, comes from something deeper, more primal, a kind of psycho-geographical recognition of something not in relation to your cultivated/learned identity, but something else altogether.

Circus Animal cookies!

I just discovered these a couple of weeks ago (Thanks, C) - I'm an immigrant; I missed out on a lot of things that you probably took for granted in your youth. Also, I try to avoid processed foods. But these are so good and so gross and they have sprinkles and they come in my favorite combination of pink and white Easter colors. They taste like my sixth birthday. Which was at a McDonald's so clearly I caught up on some aspects of American culture quick.

American Airlines stewardesses, mid-1970s from 'Airline: Identity, Design And Culture' by Keith Lovegrove.

Pravda La Suivireuse cover by Guy Peellaert

Jean Shrimpton in Manhattan, David Bailey, 1962

Jean Shrimpton in Manhattan, David Bailey, 1962

Confession

I was reminded of this on Friday when Alessandro and I, seated across from each other at the Hungry Cat were sipping our kumquat martinis ("This tastes like OJ, and it's girly," says Alessandro) and confiding in one another on minor life infractions: sophomore year in college, Alessandro and I invented a fictional boyfriend for me in order to capture the attention of my sophomore-year crush, a known home-wrecker - a man who was only interested in women who were seriously involved. I was single and deeply enamored, willing to do anything. I am a good storyteller (I'd like to think. Well, convincing, at least). You know how it is.

This feels terrible to confide, but I must do it. It is important, once in a while, to take ownership for the kind of loathsome person you're capable of being. And it was ten years ago. A disclaimer: yes, of course I'm ashamed. Telling this story upsets me greatly.

But I must: we invented a soccer-player boyfriend. He went to Stanford on athletic scholarship and was an orphan because he had lost both his parents in that Bay-area earthquake. And he wasn't about to come visit Providence because he was taking a year off, traveling through the Middle East, attempting to find inner peace. Because the Palestinian territories are where people go in search of "inner peace." Such is life. Despite the distance, we were bonded in a cosmic way. At night, we would have parallel dreams - like two parts of a story. It was intense. I remember he was also a musician of some sort and a community organizer, I think? And he was documenting his life experiences for an upcoming book, to be published by Knopf. Either way, he was a pretty intimidating fictional boyfriend.

In the end, my fictional boyfriend became more compelling and larger than life than the love-interest. He was the kind of guy you wanted to hang out with and be friends with, and he said and did these really interesting things. That I invented. I had to abandon the project. It got complicated, maybe a little out of hand; I lose interest in projects quickly. This is another loathsome quality I have that makes me a loathsome person. But there was also this - the part worth considering seriously: do you ever engage in a project, simply for your own entertainment and the entertainment of your friends, because you don't actually think anything is going to come of it, and then the fictional world leaks into the real world, creating consequence, and then you're up shit creak with a mess on your hands? This project would fall into that category.

I'd like to think I've redeemed myself. Alessandro definitely has; after dumping a man on his driveway the morning after (also, I think he was crying and begging Alessandro to reconsider) he felt bad. Years later, after a karmic incident that made him reflect on the driveway situation, he donated to Haiti in the name of the poor driveway-reject (who, in Alessandro's defense was a known drama queen clearly taking advantage of Alessandro's patience (I have your back, Alessandro)). My karma came back to haunt me too, in odd ways. There's no getting away with anything in this world. We are capable of terrible (and only mildly funny) things. That redouble into other dimensions and chase us through life in wholly Other, but still perceptibly recognizable incarnations. Oddly, it takes a kind of emotional criminality to realize just how much life has up its sleeve. And this is a particularly unique aspect of the psychic/consequential world. The truly kind never really experience karma through this distinctly absurd lens. And what do you do when the door swings the other way? Laugh, I suppose, even if life isn't a particularly laughable enterprise.

The world is full of sad people. Sometimes, we are them.

That's it.

I'm going to spend the rest of the evening thinking about this article

Furthermore, chaos reigned near the boundary. Two points might start very close together, bouncing side by side for a while, and then veer off to different roots. The winning root was as unpredictable as a game of roulette. Little things — tiny, imperceptible changes in the initial conditions — could make all the difference.

Hubbard’s work was an early foray into what’s now called “complex dynamics,” a vibrant blend of chaos theory, complex analysis and fractal geometry. In a way it brought geometry back to its roots. In 600 B.C. a manual written in Sanskrit for temple builders in India gave detailed geometric instructions for computing square roots, needed in the design of ritual altars. More than 2,500 years later, mathematicians were still searching for roots, but now the instructions were written in binary code.

Three Random Realizations

1. Glass bangles are the best; they break, rip your flesh open, you bleed. And yet there's something oddly satisfying about this. I can't quite articulate it.

2. Gavin Newsom and Joanna Newsom are cousins? Really? How did I miss this?

3. I know I'm going to get shot for saying this, but I don't get the Sam Worthington thing. Really, I feel such flat emotions for him. He's too clean, too militaristic-looking, there's something annoying about the way he talks, the glasses seemed like a poser-ish attempt to look smart/sensitive/interesting. God, he bores me. He reminds me of a particular type of vanilla lacrosse player I went to high school with. I have similar feelings for Ryan Reynolds. I don't get it. Serious yawn-fest.

The Uncanny Valley

I’ve noticed that some younger writers are really being brave, trying out new things, and I think they may sense that a lot of big publishing is shitting the bed anyway, that getting out of the mindset that there is a nice living to made writing serious fiction is the important first step. Then you are free. I think the internet has been great for new fiction. That’s been the big change. People are still writing stories and novels and a few are great and some are good and most aren’t very good at all. I guess what’s different is that you could go through your awkward stage in private. Back when I was figuring out how to write the internet existed but not like today. We’d have the same conversations that people have online now, rants about the more established writers we revered and hated, and we made a lot of stupid pronouncements about the state of literature and how it’s all shit except for so-and-so and what’s-her-name and, of course, us, but the only witnesses were a few people and a sofa and some beer cans. Or you might show somebody a story you wrote, but there was no posting it on a blog. So there was no real record of when you were a dumb, scared, angry baby who didn’t know how to write yet.

Manifest Destiny

A pile of post-its. Sickly yellow, bruised purple, swampy blue-brown.

Ideas, thoughts, musings. I am always so impressed by people who do things like climb Kilimanjaro or study for MCATS. "Good for you, you good citizen, you, you do-er!" I think. All I do is think, write things on post-its, in notebooks, on scraps of paper that constitute my life. I think about the rhythms of time and how our minds process them, the sound of heartbeats, the space between echoes, between people, physical and psychic, the space between ourselves and the things we want.

This is a luxury. I think about colors - the color of poverty, or the color of sorrow, the color of regret.

I don't think sorrow is consistent throughout the ages, throughout time. Urban sorrow has a color of its own, a particular timbre, a particular light. It is dirtied-bright colors. Filthy magenta, putrid turquoise, dusty orange. Think of fabric on an urban third-world clothesline. Maybe this is the color of poverty, of dearth, a separation between what is and what could be.

Time, the expanse of it. Is time for you like the hallways of an old Victorian house in Angeleno heights? For me, time is about planes reflecting light, hard angles, surprising turns. The stretching creak of sounds both mechanical and organic. The struggle of these two entities, separately and in relation to one another. I grew an inch this past year and I thought about the stretch of my bones, the joke my body is still playing on me, "30 and still growing!" it winks.

Growing, itself, sometimes feels like a joke, in those moments where everything seems futile anyway, and one has to question the wisdom of sprouts, shoots, leaves, bone, thought, the Universe, expanding. For what? Something that we don't even understand. And through such austerity! And with such audacity! Like this: in Havana a tree growing out of a five story building, through concrete and pavement, towards some sort of light. What choice do we have, once we're thrown here into this thing and forced to grapple with one another?

Everything crystallizes in airports, don't you think? The echo of the PA, the sound of movement, feet, planes, golf carts. Crystallization in transit, we are bugs trapped in amber. For a moment. There are moments of clarity in airports, or if you are seeking a cliff's notes version of this, slightly lesser clarity, go to a train station. I recommend Union Station. But I warn you, it might make you think of Jack Nicholson, or 20s Hollywood glamour, or mission architecture, or whatever associations your neural pathways are prone to. And then the clarity won't come. Airports and train stations are about unfamiliar spaces, and familiarity is everywhere, like a niggling relative who keeps calling you and inviting you to picnics you don't want to go to.

Do you meet people in airports? I meet people everywhere. Airports, coffee shops, on the street. A psychic once told me that my life was about serendipitous meetings. "Isn't that what everyone's life is about?" I asked skeptically, "Isn't that what this planet and consciousness is about?" There are moments where this feels highly unfortunate. There are times where I would rather not have it. There are moments where I would rather saw these unwieldy limbs off. Like the audacity of that tree! What was it thinking, even, growing out of a fifth story apartment?

But if I were an island, I would reflect on my misfortune. I would be lonely, I suppose. I would ponder the futility of a world with no connections.

I think about those movies where people get amnesia, the "Where am I? Who am I?" question of a groggy recovery. What is time to a person who has lost all memory of it? Arrive at an airport and its not even like they lost your luggage, but that your luggage arrived empty. "What happened?" you ask yourself.

And what sort of interpretation of time is this? Not an old Victorian house, its ornamented comforts, its chandeliers and bay windows aflood with light, but flat planes, smooth surfaces, time reinvented.

Motifs. People used to experience amnesia in movies. Or die of heartbreak. Now aliens attack the Earth and they are assholes. But so are we. If not aliens, then vampires. Freemasons. Werewolves. Dead people. Zombies. The enemies distinctly not within. Hollywood, I am so positively bored with you, and on the eve of Oscar night too! Oh yes, I loved that Hurt Locker and that Up in the Air. Regardless...

How do you contextualize a singular incident into the larger story of your life? Or is it even worthwhile to consciously do this, if your unconscious is doing its own work doubletime? I rely on my unconscious to tell me everything and I suppose this is why I'm still alive. I can only speak for myself, not you, of course. Perhaps my intuition is a placebo that I take religiously every day, every morning when I get up, like some useless vitamin. Like the Kool-Aid! not just Kool-Aid but the Kool-Aid. What Kool-Aid are you drinking today? I am drinking the one I drink most days. The I'm ok, you're ok Kool-Aid. I have drunk it for years. When you are not ok, I just avoid you and go hang out with people who are ok in order to feel ok myself. Or spend time with myself which is when I feel most ok. In my head. Positively entertained, and alive in a world of my own creation. I am not in denial. I am not a denial-ist! I just like my Kool-Aided equilibrium. The gentle rhythms of my independent existence.

One of the hardest things to accept when you like being by yourself is the Venn diagram nature of the world, of relationships. But it's like this, the circles are all different colors and sometimes they puncture and there is a spillover of color, emotion, consequence! Best to stay in your own perimeter, no?

The above is how my parents talk, asking no? at the end of a sentence. This is how immigrants talk. I like it, and so occasionally I do it. With a kind of authority. It punctuates an idea without room for ambivalence. You might as well say, "Best to stay in your own perimeter. No."

So how to negotiate? Spillovers and Kool-Aid, the need to draw circles around yourself, the need to sometimes be in airports, running into people in airports. Last week, a B-list celebrity at the Albertson's buying toilet paper. I felt bad for him. It's not like I make direct eye contact with people in the checkout line when I am buying sanitary napkins or toilet paper either but it made me think of spillover, of public domain. You are always in this realm of public domain! We are all public domain, our actions, our behavior. Somewhere, someone else maybe knows. I thought about this when I saw We Live In Public as well. But I didn't like that Ondi lady. Later Jo told me that she was a shady documentarian and so I revove this into my already cynical story of her. Woven stories are like a shared blanket that we all sleep under at night. I don't know how I feel about sharing my blanket with someone, much less so many someones. But at moments, it is comforting, I must concede, to be a part of something.

A Pound of Blood

The Red Cross apparently has weight requirements now and I don't meet them by like twelve pounds. I hope they don't actually make me step on a scale and then turn me away because that would be awkward and embarrassing for everyone involved.

Photography Now

Reporting in the Journal of Psychological Science, James E. Cutting of Cornell University and his colleagues described their discovery that Hollywood filmmakers, whether they know it or not, have become steadily more adroit at shaping basic movie structure to match the pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us. This mounting synchrony between movie pace and the bouncing ball of the mind’s inner eye may help explain why today’s films manage to seize and shackle audience attention so ruthlessly and can seem more lifelike and immediate than films of the past, even when the scripts are lousier and you feel cheap and used afterward, not to mention vaguely sick from the three-quart tub of popcorn and pack of Twizzlers you ate without realizing it.

What then? Shall we sit idly down and say

The night hath come; it is no longer day?

The night hath not yet come; we are not quite

Cut off from labor by the failing light;

Something remains for us to do or dare;

Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear;

Not Oedipus Coloneus, or Greek Ode,

Or tales of pilgrims that one morning rode

Out of the gateway of the Tabard Inn,

But other something, would we but begin;

For age is opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress,

And as the evening twilight fades away

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College

1st Street, Los Angeles, 1953

Hill Street at 4th, Los Angeles, 1928

Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, 1952

Revelations

We had the address for the mole place in East LA, but the storefront was an income tax office. So we walked to the back and ended up in some guy's backyard. There was a party going on. And a woman walking around with a pan of mole in her hand. Children playing, men sitting around on lawn chairs. I could see women in the kitchen next to the lawn because the door was open and people were walking in and out, older women hovering over a vat of some sort of stew, laughing, tasting, teasing one another. The kitchen had pastel blue walls and fluorescent lighting. They spoke in Spanish, joked with us that we could leave the wine behind. It must happen all the time, people stumbling into this house instead of the mole place at dinner time.

There was something about this particular home though, through a gate, tucked away behind an alley, an extended family getting together on a Sunday night and sharing a meal, the ease of it, the way they laughed when we walked in, like it was something that had been choreographed lifetimes ago and practiced so many times that it had become an easy ritual. It reminded me of India, and I felt such a pang for a sense of home that is different than the home my parents have in Connecticut. It was the feeling of the home I maybe could have grown up in, did grow up in when I was very little. And I missed my grandparents, and our gated verandah with the guava tree and the smells of dinner being prepared in the late afternoon. It wasn't one of those quiet disclosures of time, a slow realization of something missed, it was more like a punch in the gut, the recognition of a broken trajectory, and for a moment, I felt like I couldn't breathe.

Brain Insult

A medical term for a stroke, traumatic brain injury, and central nervous system infections.