Friday, November 30, 2007

Faux Pas

I would like to think that I've been doing fairly well in my fight against procrastination. But then I'd be lying, which we can all agree accomplishes very little.


So let's say that I've been doing alright, losing a battle here and there, claiming a victory here and there; just a general gentle rocking back and forth between failing and doing marvelously.

In all honesty, I can understand how ridiculous my position looks: I'm slacking off a bit too much in class, I'm not really as involved in extra-curricular activities as I ought to be, and I've been rather lacking when it comes to certain responsibilities.

But Elaine and I were talking and I realized that I've given myself a few good kicks in the pants, but it's not enough. Making goals is nice, it makes me sound lofty and diligent, and it's very easily done. But making goals is too abstract and too far removed for me to take myself seriously. And phonetically speaking, I'm leaving -een for -enty, quite the linguistic betrayal to suffix that has served me so well.

So here it is:
  • Catch up on all my reading
  • Make study guides for all my tests
  • Write my Shakespeare paper
  • Begin finding freelance writing/designing jobs to build a portfolio and assemble clips
  • Look for internships with a fashion related firm in the city (Angela has suggested Ford SF)
  • Rewrite my resumé
And here comes the dizzying feeling of impossibility and the fear of rejection. But I think I've decided that I'm kind of fed up with my fair of failure. If I fail, I fail.

Ugh. Now to say it with a little more feeling.

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Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Mother Nature's Sun

From the front, the Logan from Noon Solar looks like a pretty standard messenger bag: 3 interior zipped pockets, leather zipper pulls, Bavarian vegetable tanned and dyed leather. And at $412 it's a pricey, but not necessarily putting it into the stratosphere in terms of price point. But when you turn it around:

A weather-proofed solar cell connected to a lithium-ion battery allows for iPod and cell phone charging on the go. And it works even if it's turned towards you. I'm rarely on board with a lot of the modern fusions of fashion and technology (Zegna comes close to earning my approval, but some of the looks are still a bit too spaced out), but this seems like just such a smart idea. 

According to the makers, a 6 to 8 hour sit in the sun will provide a full battery to juice up your music or your calls. So whether you're actually out in the sun or just propping it next to a window, you'll always have a little extra battery for your electronics on hand.

And I have been on the lookout for a new bag...

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I Got Greed For...

YMC Belt Boot ($392, Oak)

I have been craving these bad boys for FOREVER. Well, any belted/strapped/kick-ass boot, really. Chris over at Suptertalk has a pair that he constantly wears and everytime he shows them off, this deep pain rings in my heart. If anyone knows a pair that are reasonably priced (so that I might lay claim to it for my Christmas present from the parental units), please drop me a line!

Truly, I've become obsessed with finding a good pair of boots. Not just boots you slip on just to trudge through the day. I want something that I can stomp in and make that bridge between Moffitt and the Chancellor's House shake. And when my new iPod comes and I upload my CSS/Beyonce/Blur/Waitresses mix on it, that's exactly what I'll be doing.

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Superawesome

Army of Mushrooms

I had totally forgotten to post about the "©Murakami" exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Angela and I went over Thanksgiving break, which was a lovely break for me from Die Familie.

Paul Schimmel did a fantastic job with the exhibit's set-up. Upon first entering the museum, one is greeted by a buxom transforming woman soaring overhead, a towering monolith of lustrous metal, two hyper-realistic figures in sexually explicit poses completely devoid of sensuality, and mushrooms of every shape and size. Although Angela and I wound up going through the exhibit backwards, it was still extremely fun to wander backwards through his art, almost like some trip through pop art history.

A few of the smaller rooms were plastered from floor to ceiling (well, to the top of the wall, seeing as there is not real ceiling) in brightly colored patterns, compartmentalizing the various motifs that recur throughout Murakami's works and literally forcing us to immerse ourselves in the colors and shapes of his universe.

Murakami's dizzying cast of figures, from the enormous Gero-Tan to the hilariously juxtaposed Kaikai and Kiki to the ever metamorphosing DOB bring a sense of surreal narrative to the world. All of his work is an excellent study in contrast. His paintings featured highly detailed and calculated cartoon art rendered with painstaking precision, but placed upon flat colored surfaces, deliberately obliterating the carefully crafted dimension of the foreground subjects.

His sculptures were equally impressive, showcasing a mind working in full three dimensions while still considering the demand for visually direct and metaphorically flat art in such a commercialized society. While the Inochi statues showcased a morbid obsession with the grotesque and awkward side of human nature, Hiropon (which I had gotten a chance to see earlier when it visited the SFMOMA for its "Pop Art" Exhibit) and My Lonesome Cowboy were evoked laughter for their absurdity and solemnity for their pointed critique of modern culture.

Angela and I debated what souvenirs to take home (the Kaikaikiki Co.-printed shirts were $69!), but the fully-operational Louis Vuitton boutique proved to be a much greater attraction for the more financially-stable museum patrons; there were tons of people purchasing the ridiculously interesting LVxMurakami bags. Say what you will about them, but they are pretty damned interesting and you can't call them a boring bag.

In the end, we wound up leaving with the same mug, a nice modestly small mug with two flowers printed on opposite sides. Considering that all it cost me was $5 for admission, gas money, and having to fight with the weather as to whether or not it would be necessary to wear my coat, it was pretty damned fun.

Now I've got my sights set on "Stylized Sculpture" at the Asian Art Museum.

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Saturday, November 24, 2007

A list of delayed reactions:

  • It is painful to sit in a car with a long-term couple for a cross-state drive.
  • Feeling good is little more than a matter of making sure you take a shower whenever you feel gross.
  • A book tends to make more sense when you aren't somewhere on Pluto.
  • I like essay writing under tense circumstances.
  • I need more practice at a lot of things.

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A Great Converging

So yeah, I guess I would say that the major discovery of the week has been my sheer indolence. I mean, I used to be way more critical of people who spent all their time loafing around, but I'm not much better.

And I would say that you're to blame, and you know what you are and what you do and why we have to speak on terms like this. But I'm not angry, because it is a mutual sort of thing, and it's natural that two separate, discrete forces in the universe must lend just as much as it borrows. Then what is the nature of this relationship? Why do I eat fire and why does it eat me and why are neither of us particularly concerned with the inherent danger of such an arrangement?

But the problem is that it wasn't very much arranged. To say that I arranged these circumstances—put my bed here, put my chair there, read this book then, drank this soda yesterday—would be correct. But to say that the everyday flow of fate is predetermined by my very actions, that, indeed, the next steps I take are connected to the last ones I took seems to be simplistic point of view. It's much more accurate to say that the natural happenings of life arrange themselves. Take the sand in an hourglass. As they fall, they don't say, "There. I shall occupy that place and name it and take it and make it mine forever." Instead, they close their eyes (or would close them, had they any) and fall. The fall itself is the blessed thing, the natural warping of a soul's fatespun thread as it is woven through time. Felix culpa! Beautifully, the grains fall one after another, arranging themselves not through some patterned, rigid order from above, but by the natural, simplicity of falling.

To intellectualize it further does nothing to enhance our appreciate of the fall. As writers, we cannot be satisfied with how sharply we have honed our mind's knife. We must reassemble that which we have so precisely taken apart, transforming it, transmuting it from what it was into what it could be. Possibility, the imaginative faculty of which we alone bear witness, must be our creed. Once we embrace this realization, the future becomes a hazed cloud of odds, a crapshoot of whether or not to be. But this, too, is beautiful. Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

Soon we will see the infinite expansion of the canvas, the never-ending poem, the song written for sixty horns, the meandering of the stroke upon the subject. And I look forward to this, because this is how I feel more comfortable embracing the world. Before, they called it detail, called it division. But this division is inflation, is duplication of the very natural and extrapolating the "perhaps" to its further limit. I don't think there is a nobler pursuit for the artist than this.

I feel this way because of the world around me. It, too, has not decided upon its own path. It has merely tumbled through countless possibilities to arrive exactly where it is.

And I don't want to link this to the now, because as far as I'm concerned, this should have always been the goal; it just hasn't become explicitly possible until now. So I think I'm going to seize this chance and hope that I make it out alive.

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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Thanksgiving

The holidays imply booze. They don't require it; there are plenty of teetotalers who enjoy celebrating with their families.


But wine is just too perfect a match, too compelling an element to be excluded. Cheery red cheeks from wood fires and wine. The wood fire has since been modernized, logs replaced with scorch-free imitation. The hiss, so indicative of the gaseous release, precedes the hesitant scratching of a match head.

It's finally become an exercise of how early we can open the bottle without feeling tacky.

Extended ninety degrees from the afternoon, we begin.

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Sunday, November 04, 2007

For You

Ryan reminded me—inadvertently, I'm sure—of how frustrated I am with this whole deal. And I don't think I made it clear to him exactly how this works. Although I'm not quite sure either. The only thing that's real right now are the few strands of hair long enough to enter my peripheral vision. It's in front of my face. And I really can't extend my consciousness much further than that. I've attached myself to anything and everything, hoping that it might travel away and take away a bit of my tiredness, my disappointment, my unrequited self. And I stuck myself to a million things with a billion strings drawn straight from the substance of my heart to something trivial and unnecessary (if you look at the grand scheme of things).

There are things that I really haven't asked myself very seriously. Actually, I have asked myself these things, I just haven't answered myself very seriously. I've avoided it. I've skirted it. I've traced the perimeter of the questioning with my finger and I've found my way around it, through the least existentially honest means possible. If you despise me for this, then I agree. This is not appropriate, nor well-mannered, behavior.

And for that I really ought to apologize.

But I can't. Because deep down, I really feel like you ought to apologize. Not you, but you. Because I tried really hard. I tried harder than I've ever tried in my life. There were times where I thought I should have given up, but then something inside me refused. Something inside me told me that this was worth it, that all my effort was going towards something meaningful. Something with substance. And the fact that I'm not saying these things, using the past tense, and making some conscious choice about temporality...well, it obviously means that you didn't think the same way I did about this.

I really tried. I gave so much of myself in the name of trying. And maybe that's why I feel like this. Maybe I've already given too much of myself. Maybe I'm less than what I was before all this happened. It certainly feels that way sometimes. Does that mean I can blame you? No. I don't think I can blame you. Because that would be creating some system of value for a sentience that really transcends it. My spectrum would be a false measurement of an immeasurable quality. Or quantity.

So now I feel bad. Now I feel like I'm putting things where they don't belong. Now I feel like whenever I open my mouth I might break something. And now I'm afraid of breaking everything. I'm afraid of upsetting some great cosmic balance that I can't sense with any of my ten senses. I round up for the sake of trying. I round up for the sake that things cannot be left at odds. Not here. Not with you.

Yet they are not even. But certainly they cannot be odd. So I would wonder about whether or not this really made any difference. Whether or not there was a Spain or whether or not this throb was true or whether or not you should make this true and not say such things to me. For these are breaking me, these things you say.

A "maybe" is just as bad as a great fang sinking into my shoulder and rendering this hand unable to write. But yet I write for that very fang, which has so deeply lodged itself into me that it is the only thing I have left to write about. I wish that these scales were turned, for I want to know what you think about what I think.

So this is still for you, but for me. For me to know whether or not I am anything anymore anyhow. For me to fill in the vague outline of a figure left by a terrible upheaval.

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Subtle

In recent years, I've been doing more supposing than guessing.


I hope that isn't just a thing that happens as you get older. I'd hate to start reckoning.

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