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.