Category: Thoughts

OK, really. No more posts about the gay marriage debate and how it’s just like the legalization of divorce, or birth control, or what have you. Let’s talk about, oh, movies. Apparently, some musicians are consorting with and doing business with adult film stars. There’s a surprise. No, really, a real topic. Something serious, not the usual crap banter.

I saw Lost in Translation, finally, and I realized two things: one, Bill Murray really deserved that Oscar. Sean Penn can play a hardass eight days a week without breaking a sweat– that’s just him being himself. Remember when he would beat up journalists for fun? Mystic River was a great movie, and he did a great job in it, but Bill Murray’s role was deeper, and required greater range and expression, was more of a reach, and I think he got shafted when the more popular picture won.

Two, I now understand my reluctance to see the movie, and to see a lot of other serious movies recently. The anomie expressed in the movie is my entire day-to-day life. There are brief instants when I glimpse life through my own eyes but for the most part I spend my days behind a shield of ironic detachment, foreign to actual living. Yes, this is overblown, but I do feel insulated from reality to a disturbing degree. I didn’t want to see that movie because it would remind me that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. I’m all too familiar with the feeling of being surrounded by signs and voices whose meaning I can only guess at: watching the expats in restaurants, streets, subways. The worst was the sex: the strip club, where he’s watching these women contort themselves; the unexpected arrival of a call-girl he can’t understand; even the pointless sex with the expat lounge singer, all represent sex at its least intimate, least arousing, least satisfying extent. Yeah, there’s a redeeming connection and a kiss at the end, but they just serve to highlight how miserable the rest of existence really is.

Since I saw the movie I’ve felt completely hollowed out inside.

I was once told that Drinking diet Coke will not make you gay, but it sure as hell will make you look gay. Whatever. Diet soda doesn’t give me the sugar-sleepiness that sugar-soda does. Hence the Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke cans piling up on my desk.

Put on headphones, ready for next frenzy of text generation.

One two three four my baby don’t mess around….

I’m on the way back from LWE on the Limoliner luxury executive bus, listening to the people behind me talk about nearest-neighbor compression algorithms and realtime processing in embedded devices. I think they were at the show too. The bus is fabulous: clean, spacious, comfortable, and of course it has net access. Highly recommended: NYC to Boston for less than the train and in roughly equivalent style, although not quite as fast. And of course, network.

In a few weeks I’ll be going to Vegas and I’m thinking about the last time I was there, at another conference, in November 2000. I was so lonely and for such good reasons: I kept burning my bridges. I guess I still burn them, or at least let them burn and watch them fall. Nonetheless, I’m quite attached to those ashes and charred embers of my past.

For example, I used to keep a set of Wired Magazine issues from 1999 to 2001. They got fatter and fatter, then they shrank abruptly with the crash. I eventually tossed them– what was I doing with back issues of a magazine I don’t even read? I still have a Kozmo.com receipt and an Eazel t-shirt. I have fewer physical mementoes of people from my past, but I think of them more often, turning moments over and over in my mind. And there’s music and weather and places and tones of light that remind me of people and times. I used to be more susceptible to this sort of thing, really. Now I sort of slip into a reverie, but I used to feel gutwrenching nostalgia or pain or anxiety seeing a picture of an ex or driving past the house of a friend I’d lost.

They say nostalgia is corrosive; I think it may have been Sartre who talked of it as politically dangerous. I certainly agree that it’s as destructive as unspoken resentment.

Nonetheless, I’m listening to Tom Wait songs: “Picture in a Frame” which is about promises and the pain of fulfilling them, and “Black Market Baby,” which is about temptation, and the pain of giving in to it despite knowing it’s the worst possible choice:

Liars say their prayers to her
and sailors ring her bell
the way a moth mistakes a lightbulb
for the moon and goes to hell
There’s no prayer like desire,
there’s amnesia in her kiss,
she’s a swan and a pistol
and she will follow you like this…

I joked awhile ago that, on the one hand, I really hate the idea of moving again, but on the other hand, my girllfriend doesn’t like eggplant, and that may be a real showstopper there. Some of my readers may have taken this as sincere advice. Neither vegetable preference nor the inconvenience of moving is a good indicator of relationship quality. I regret any confusion my previous statement may have called.

In addition, it has been brought to my attention that no-limit poker is probably not an adequate metaphor for a relationship. Love is not about losing or winning, and barely about chance at all. Nor does someone else having “a better hand” ever really come into it. It’s right, I am told, when you know that you prefer your partner to any other, no matter what, when if you could see or know all the options, you’d stick with yours anyway. There is no definitive best, after all, and you’re not going to lay down your cards and lose– you just walk on hand in hand. And if someone has a better relationship, it’s not really a reflection on you. There are no prizes outside of the satisfaction of the relationship itself. It’s not a fucking contest, Aaron.

Will I be pretty, will I be rich? Que será será….

I try to keep money and emotions apart. If I’m playing cards, I try to avoid thinking “I’ve got five bucks in, so I should keep betting” — after all, if you have a bad hand, you’re throwing good money after bad. But forming a household is the ultimate combination of everything you have and feel and know. It’s betting with everything you have, with incomplete information, depending on luck and gut feelings and emotional strength.

Early on in a relationship, in the back of your mind there’s the little voice saying hey, no problem, if the going gets tough I can bail without too much penalty. But at some point you realize you are very much invested in the whole relationship: emotions, obviously, but also time and money and everything material. And what ties your physical and financial ship to the other person is this completely intangible web of trust and respect and love.

At that point, you really have too much in the pot to just fold. This is the territory that so many men try so hard and so irrationally to avoid, it’s the reason they inexplicably stop returning calls. The little voice in your head starts worrying: if you break up, who gets the vacuum and the pets and the plants, who gets the friends? We’re both on the lease, what if I’m stuck paying two rents? We bought a bed together, and what will I sleep on? And if you start thinking about buying a car or a house together, and you sign on a debt together, then you have to know This is Permanent. This is a No Matter What kind of situation. This is why they say better or worse, this is why breaking up is just harder and harder, and you really have combined your entire spiritual, emotional, financial, material life with that of another person.

At this point, you better look at your cards and be able to say honestly, this this is the best hand I’ve ever seen, this is the best hand I can imagine. I will play this hand to the bitter end and I will bet everything and I will win big. That’s a scary moment when you’re playing poker with friends and there’s ten bucks in the pot, and when you’re playing for everything in a game you don’t really understand, it keeps you up at night.

I don’t know when it stops, but I guess at some point the decision is made, and it feels right, and things work out, and then you can sleep at night and know you’ve won, and instead of playing poker you can play hearts, or maybe Scrabble, which isn’t so nerve-wracking, and allows you to sit around the couch with your family and friends and forget to keep score.

One of the more intense images at SF MoMA was a photograph of sugar and blood by Shimon Attie, from a series called “White Nights, Sugar Dreams.” Although not all his art deals with the subject, this image was a way for the artist to address and interpret his diabetes.

For viewers, the images not only offer a way to understand diabetes, but position diabetes as a metaphor for general illness, forbidden desire, and for discontent. Sort of like diabetes cookbooks.

Other articles delve further into Attie and his contemporaries, but the real impact for me was the way that his art acts as a bridge between his disease and the outside world. How does my art (not as good as Attie’s, but I long ago discarded the fear of mediocrity: there’s no wheat without chaff, and if my art is crap, at least I enjoy making it) work with respect to my particular ailments? (Yeah, sure, art can reflect health and joy and success too, but let’s be honest: the cool stuff is the conflict, the death, the things that disturb, sicken, fascinate, and madden.)

Anyway, I want to start creating more, not just in a blogging way– making prints or shirts, writing, going back to that Rojas translation. I’ll be posting, I hope, pieces of the Rojas translation, possibly in a new category, shortly.

The Minor Fall, The Major Lift is great, and it points me to two funny little bits:
Parody Porn Titles for 2003 (not real, sadly)
The Modern Drunk’s Guide to Dating (for women dating men, but generally good advice. As The Minor Fall points out, it’s telling that most of the rules begin with “Never…”

“‘What we heard today‘” about over-the-counter emergency contraception “‘was frequently about individuals who did not want to take responsibility for their actions and wanted a medication to relieve those consequences,’ Dr. Hager said. He said he was worried in particular that it would encourage sexual activity among adolescents, who could just buy the drug on their own.”

So, in other words, Doctor Hager, you’re worried your daughter is a slut, and that eventually she’ll end up being arrested for encouraging masturbation.

This miserable failure of a president is just unelectable.

Kiss my shiny metal ass, shitbird. I’m off to the Bazaar Bizarre, a.k.a. Punk-Rock Flea Market. Rock on.

I must confess that I am addicted to laughing at the troubles of others. I make fun of other people’s religions and want to debunk their political views. It can get very petty– to the point of just writing snarky reviews so I can be judgemental of everything. Maybe I need a propagandist to spread my message, or maybe I just need to shut up.