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[10 Sep 2002|03:09pm] |
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mood |
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actually, I'm hungry |
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music |
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Who else? The Pretty Things |
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Last night I was feeling, couped, hadn't been out for a while so ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kore suggested going to Spaceland which was free...so we saw the Moving Units, and I was impressed...it's not often you get S. Albini guitars crossed with Modest Mouse lurch beats, Iggy type vocals, and a methed up drummer. A fine night of Jumprock...I think I will go back and see them again next monday...ran into opensieve as well...but he didn't stay long...
now I'm at school awaiting thesis seminar and teachers practicum. I hope I get the drama students because they like to chatter and then I won't need to "lecture" as much. I'll probably get the art kids who style themselves uninterested...
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[07 Sep 2002|02:56pm] |
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so I registered:
popular criticism
thesis seminar
artist book seminar
music as language with Subotnik!
independent study and blah some teaching stuff
I think opensieve gave good advice to take classes, get something out of my money instead of taking a minimal load so that I would just work on my thesis...anyway, I'll still have time to do that...it's not like when you finish they sweep you off to a publishing house...it's kind of depressing: 130 grads from Calart's since the writing program started and only one novel published by a student. I guess students just do other things...maybe scribble or sieve will be next...
bee reading old Critical Inquiry journals (taken from Calarts), Boundary 2, social text...and all my thoughts seem to have been pertinent in 1980-85, but now - in this shinny millenium -- they're just mangy cats good only for alleys full of broken beer bottles...oh well, so I'm dated. are the 80s retro yet? can't theory-folk be cool by rehashing/covering old riffs like the "new" bands that rape the Stooges and the Sonics and the Chocolate Watch Band? retro-thoughts dressed up in hip duds...
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[03 Sep 2002|12:38pm] |
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mood |
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gingerbeer |
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music |
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The Raincoats -- Odyshape |
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I finally got a raincoats album, been wanting one ever since Babaluma played them for me...string instruments in rock bands are a nice addition, my favorite such addition has to be on the Dambuilders album, the one with "Shrine" on it.
Anyway, up at Calarts, tomorrow we have the little meet-everyone-in-the-program get together, so I thought I would come up today, flee the heat and spend one last day (alone) fucking around on the computer, listening to albums, ordering books, and maybe even recording some music. Friday I register for classes, and I can't decide if I should fuck my thesis and take a slew of classes (since I will abjure from calarts in december) or if I should take a light-load and focus on getting my shit done? Which seems impossible these days...I just sit at the computer and cut-paste all sorts of fragments together, trying to see if any interesting combinations appear. I gave up on the "unified work" thing...a structured form would have contradicted the meaning of "boundary" that I am trying to work out...
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[29 Aug 2002|01:32pm] |
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mood |
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shifted |
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music |
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hollywood autos |
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E.M. Cioran--
At the age when, for lack of experience, one takes to philosophy, I determined to write a thesis like everyone else. What subject to choose? I wanted one that would be both familiar and unwonted. The moment I imagined I had found it, I hastened to announce my discovery to my professor.
"What would you think of 'A General Theory of Tears?' I feel ready to strt work on that."
"Possibly," he said, "but you'll have your work cut out, finding a bibliography."
"That doesn't matter so much. All History will afford me its authority," I replied in a tone of triumphant impertinence.
But when, in his impatience, he shot me a glance of disdain, I resolved then and there to murder the disciple in myself.
A wonderful little aphorism I think...as the introducation drew to my attention, an aphorism has the word horizon embedded in it...a limited thought, a limited space of expression, perception.
Anyway, I like that, "At the age when, for lack of experience, one takes to philosophy..." which is certainly how it goes for me, turning to some pre-constructed knowledge for lack of the empircal kind. I also enjoy the image of slaying the disciple within oneself...a formidable task I think considering all the ideological crap that twists around us in the agony which is America. But I do think it's possible to break away from the control fostered by certain disciplines...hopefully...
for example, like french deconstruction which has been occupying -- military sense included -- my mind and writing. Recently I have been moved to just interrupt the passage i'm in, mid-sentence and type "this is fucking ridiculous" or "this language is pathological" or "what the hell am I doing" -- little performative phrases to express my distaste for the constraints of writing jargonfull-shit like this....if that is breaking against some form of disciple within me (however pitiful) than ok, but I'm afraid its just moving from one discipline (formal academic) to another (some sort of outdated modern revolt)...
"Toward a vegetal wisdom: I would abjure all my terrors for the smile of a tree..." -- EMC
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| Been a while |
[13 Aug 2002|01:47pm] |
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mood |
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LA 1969 |
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music |
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The Seeds -- Falling off the edge of my mind |
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so I picked up an amazing album, The Plastic People, a psyche/garage group from Prague in the late 60s and 70s...formed a month after the soviet invasion of zee Czech republic in '68...hassled by the police, instruments confiscated, spent time in jail...twitching horns and blurt noises (a la Beefheart style)...chanting guitars...that kind of shit.
finally made some headway in my thesis...I give credit to "The Last Unicorn" lent to me by r. (ro. not ru.)...yes cheesy at parts but the unicorns returned to the world and made my thesis all verdant and springy fresh, or at least my mind...
I'm quoting an entire song by Nick Drake in my thesis, "Time of no Reply," because that's just the goddamn theoretical age we're in. keep asking and asking and no one has a splendid word to say. I'm using it to refer to "philosophy" cuz I keep asking of it to help me out and it's not doing shit for me...
Time of No Reply
thanks vignoche for the new beachin' user pic!
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[25 Apr 2002|07:12pm] |
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mood |
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suturated |
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music |
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Diablo II sounds from, ha ha, scribble's computer |
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hmmm...i'm engaged in this "I'm ripping out your mind as I suck all your goddamn time" project where I'm writing a theoretical text/narrative(ha ha, yes a story...I rarely do that...) stiched into a pair of coats...with zippers and pockets with locks on them and keys and maybe scrolls and Ashbury quotes and...I've never had to care about the "look" of the text, and now I'm dealing with design issues...which is killing me. How should the text look on a jacket, on a sleeve of a coat? certainly not Times New Roman....anybody with good handwriting inside 50 miles of LA want to come and do some fancy writing on fabric? I'll buy you a cappucino or a manhattan at bigfoot lodge or a sex toy, your choice...
oh well, in a week the coats will be showed...pretty or disgusing...and then they'll end up in a closet until well, the moths have had their way with them.
um, for some reason I want to type: Gaston Bachelard is my hero.
No need to have a reason for that...
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[24 Apr 2002|09:38pm] |
why didn't you ask a question?
". . . we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in a hollow among the sand hills (sheltering ourselves from the high, cool wind) and smoked a cigar. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated;" but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists -- and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before -- in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us."
-- Hawthorne
I believe I heard a story once, which I often tell, though perhaps now I know why I heard it...
After writing one of his novels, Melville went for a walk with Hawthorne, on which few words were passed...at the end of the walk Hawthorne said to Melville, "I read your book. It's good." And that was that...the book was Moby Dick, which was dedicated to Hawthorne...
I remember hearing that story from Stanely Cavell at a dinner at Vassar...though for the longest time I thought it was Thoreau, not Hawthorne...but oh well...it makes more sense that it was Hawthorne...and perhaps, we will never truly know, his name could now be Erickson...but history hasn't a fucking friend.
why didn't you ask a question?
Nothing to ask. It's good.
It is strange how he persists -- and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before -- in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid we were sitting.
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| oh no! |
[17 Apr 2002|03:56pm] |
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mood |
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i will eat you |
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music |
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chicks on speed- gimme back my journal |
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scribble has conquered this livejournal. it will now be used as a holding pen for my animals children. i will change the name of the kingdom to no mend! cuz healing? replacing one wound with another is all we know of that (some people call that 'dating')- oh i am so clever! i must go fuck myself now.
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| academic publishing is frostbitten hype |
[05 Apr 2002|05:02pm] |
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mood |
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kinged |
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music |
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Madonna "Fever" -- and scribs, I'm not a gaybot. |
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The art openings were quite the event last night. broken art carts and vodka with coke, internet recognition and clocking smokes (R. Young) from gothic-waitresses, mending hearts and slo-gin with green-shasta...
tonight is the trail of the dead. which I thought we left last night, but apparently they're catching up to us. "Guaranteed not to Suck," I'm told...I'm sure it will be quite the show(ing), that is, on stage and not backstage.
R. made me cheesy blintzes and eggs this morning...it was charming...Miette only scratched me once...I think he's beginning to enjoy my company. or perhaps my blood is naught to his liking these days. outside the aliens were directing traffic.
drove up to school w/scribble where we just attended a useless lecture on publishing....the hand-out warned: "Don't say you write like Stephen King -- Only Stephen King writes like Stephen King." Yes, only Stephen King writes like Stephen King. Thank god.
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| Interview with a... |
[03 Apr 2002|03:49pm] |
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mood |
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performing telos |
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music |
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sounds of blood pressure -- a la A. Choate |
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ant. see, the ants outweigh us in body mass, it's about time to ask them what they think about the current situation in the Middle east, before they throw their weight around. I guess there's a movie about ants becoming ultra-intelligent and turning humans into specialized breeders, called Phase IV....someday I want to be a human ant breeder.
LA feels like a colony sometimes. Once I made a call from the payphone outside my apartment, and in mid dial I looked around and I was surrounded by a swarm of giant cockroaches. OK, maybe not a swarm but definitely over fifty.
This is what sucks, at least for me:
trying to think about the world when everything I seem to come across remarks that it is already dead, death of the author, death of man, the ends of history, the ends of performance, the death of rationality, irony, god, metaphysics, idealism, actuality...etc. etc. so here I come after this critical/theoretical onslaught of decay and finality, pinching myself to remind me that I'm still alive, and looking for some where to go with my thoughts, looking for some hope that points toward a thinking that can be genuine, dissident, productive...but all I come across is the impossible, the aporia, the sublime, the enigma or secret, the construction of silence. And all our databases seem just the ediface of amnesia...
ho hum. but not all things sadden me...sugar cubes, postcards with curled toes...hmmmm.
it's a strange thing to mourn some loss of what I know not...and pleasantly smile when my thoughts go elsewhere...
didn't pizzacato five have a song called "happy/sad"...
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| because the oscars are sinews |
[27 Mar 2002|12:02pm] |
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music |
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some lovely bluegrass on the internet radio |
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last night I watched Hedwig...and something about the angry inch...with kore...and miette...who likes to bite my toes and drop from the ceiling onto my face. Hedwig was fun, but I didn't like the fact that she relinquished the "she-ness" at the end in order to become successful (or, coincidentally, at the same moment she became successful). There were many gender cop-outs in the film, though still some important suggestions. The gummybear sequence made up for everything.
Vignoche made popcorn and a tangy gimlet...and we even had a glass of Chianti...
Yesterday I read an amazing book called Heidegger and "the jews" by Lyotard...I kind of have to read up on the Heidegger Affair since I'm writing about him...constantly trying to decide if his thinking contains fascist residues, and if so, what reprimands need I state and what can I write without worry of re-inscribing the "fascinating," the thought that leads to extermination. The book kind of kicked my ass...which is good: it was a catalyst for my own political thoughts, something that is a necessary requirement for any "emacipatory" thinking today, especially in America where just the other day I heard on the radio a quote from Ashcroft, talking about how the US is the only superpower and its our job to police the world (I don't remember the exact words), "Its frightening when you realize that the only people that matter are us." Now, by the "us" he meant the U(nited)S(tates), but the ring of that particular sentence vibrates much deeper...the "us" of the Americans...the only people that matter. Of course he meant we, for the time being, seem to hold the most power in the world, but beneath is the sceptre of national pride, a dangerous hubris that can lead to the suggestion that we are better than the rest of the world, that "we are the only people that matter." And that is a scary scary thought. I only hope that our leaders don't really beleive such ridiculous notions. Though, current actions are certainly yelling and screaming as loud as the words.
ok, went off for a second there. anyway the book is wonderful for anyone interested in a discussion of art and politics and the sublime after the death camps. it's not a joyful read....but important...
oh well, I'm in the middle of springbreak, trying to do work and get ready for the hellish month that will soon follow. but my mind is constantly fading to other quiet and happy things-- alphabets losing letters and dollar dresses and bumblebees...and...and...and...
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[13 Mar 2002|11:46am] |
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mood |
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ciphered |
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music |
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silence in the writing lab |
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Often I would stand before Lake Anka, watching the Autumn waves softly clad the shore in a white fluff of foam. I remember, years ago, my sisters and cousins and I delicately scooping a tiny cloud of froth in our cupped hands. Sometimes we would try to throw it upon each other, watching, disappointed, as the wind caught hold of its lightness and dispersed it across the brittle sky. Other times, and when our parents weren’t looking, we would spread it across our faces like we had grown the ivory beards of wise and ancient men. This lakeshore foam, like the milkweed seeds and fuzzy caterpillar, like the bulrush whip and purple head of knapweed, was such a thing that the eyes forget to see, a spume bobbling somewhere between the water and the air, part substance and part spirit warbling on the boundary of lake and land. And standing on the shore of this humble lake, its swirling pattern staring upon me, I think of Melville and the ocean and a passage I read not long ago:
…lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
In my absent-mindedness, dollops of foam upon my sorels and jeans, I envision this quiet lake a space enough for my thoughts, a tear dropped from the bottomless eyes of the sea, a silent lee, far from the caterwaul of the American city, ample enough Nature for questioning “every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes” me. On this shore, this boundary too, is the diaphanous film of life, the airy foam of spirit deposited and twitching in the Minnesota wind, and though this lake is not home to porpoise and whales its shallow belly contains plenty enough to chase and plenty enough to catch in the nets of thought.
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| psycheshit aufklarung |
[07 Mar 2002|11:06am] |
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mood |
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60s |
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music |
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A cover of "I had too much to dream last night" |
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drove past Ameoba last night...dropped 40 dollars, and they didn't even have a headphone mono-converter...bastards...but they did have some funky 60s garage comps, a Sun City Girls w/Ruins soundtrack, and the Tall Dwarves "Hello Cruel World," finally!
Got my 8-track from Maryam...now I can start playing tunes and recording again....gives me something to do when my head isn't jimmy-rigged to some goddamn book. Anyway, had to define some medical terms for class...this is one of them:
Terminal
The term, terminus, the line, the limit, the boundary at the end of what can be thought. Once sickness or disease has been named "terminal" life becomes a pointing finger, gesturing and indicating beyond itself, pointing out and toward what we know not, what is unnamable, what turns away and hides when life begins to look. The terminal indicates the moment when we cease to speak because - in the eyes of the patient and in the faltering breath before us - we see and hear what is beyond the seeable and sayable. We might call this "death," for death always visits cloaked within a sign: a coughing of blood, eyes glazed with morphine, skin marked with the legions of the unfamiliar. Yet, we should not strive to "see" what cannot be seen, the un-signed, or rather, the sign that erases all others. Instead we should see what we do see in those signs of illness: that is, the murmurs of the living.
When the doctors or the experts determine an illness "terminal" they mark the living with the sign of the boundary or the edge or the limit. It would be imprecise to say that the official declaration of "terminal" really marks the living as dead, but it draws a line through the Being of the patient, forming the place where the body and the soul linger together before the effacement of the living sign. The space of the "terminal" is where we say our good-byes, where the "signs of life" depart and arrive in the body of our memory. Yet, it is important to note that the "terminal" exists only in life, even if it shows itself on the periphery or within the margins of the healthy. In this way sickness, illness, and symptoms are "signs of life," and if we think about it, the silent or gasping moments of terminal sickness mark the most powerful signs of life, the signs that shatter and erupt and flare within our minds and hearts. These "terminal" signs are the most powerful, not only because they point toward the unknown of "death," the absence of life, but because they give us completely over to our lives, lives shed of all but the struggles of living. Within the boundary ? within the utterance of the "terminal" ? life speaks words that do not say but touch; it is here that language nurses us, laying a wet cloth upon our fever and listening to the coming of its own silence.
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| dejection |
[27 Feb 2002|01:06pm] |
after a sad series of events, in which I actually paid attention to my taxes, I discovered I now owe 142 dollars to the government thanks to Calarts takin' nothing out of my checks...so now the question stands: what should the government do with my money? But I guess the answers that people gave are the same anyway...
hmmm,
I think I'll convert the 142 dollars to 671,135 Afghani, send it all FedEx. I mean, save the Fat Cats some trouble...
http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic
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[24 Feb 2002|03:30pm] |
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april 15th is already over for me. slowmend is happy that he accomplished something early for the first time in his life...what to do with my refund check i wonder...
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[21 Feb 2002|03:32pm] |
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music |
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some fucking concerto or another |
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So I've quite over extended myself on projects...I haven't been doing work for a week, and I feel like I don't want to do any for ten more. I'm thinking of flying away, maybe end up at my family's cabin again, just let myself read and think...
Been checking out writings by Charles Ives and Dewey and James, some Edgar Allen P. because I read this book Water and Memory by Bachelard, a psychobible for the analytics of opaque waters, you know sludge and slurry and stagnant blood...none of this tricking crick bullshit. I miss minnesota and its lakes...the place of the shore, like an eyelid. Bachelard writes about the melancholy depth of the lake, the fact that we walk up upon it and realize that the representational creations of humans have always already been completed in the lazy gaze of the reflective waters; the lake was the first artist and the last; we are just narcissistic wanderers in a nature that has already been spledidly reproduced...for Bachelard the lakes are the eyes of nature, nature looking out upon its own reflection. To see our own reflection is to seep into the melanic depth of its iris...
I guess I've entered a kind of conceptual malaise: and it's so pathetic that I'm privileged enough to feel something so goddamn decadent. Sometimes this graduate school thing sucks, too much time to feel. I get depressed when I begin to realize that the old materialism/idealism distinction in philosophy is passing, an idea we told ourselves to have an idea to tell, and with its passing passes the metaphysical and the meta itself, everything flattened ... And all I want to write about is american trascendentalism and german idealism, solipsistic fool dangling his feet in a lake that dried up years ago. And it depresses me. Silly huh? Fucking ridiculous in fact. If metaphysics has receded and philosophy no longer searches for absolutes, for conditions of Truth, principles that formulate thought, then it is just a questioning, and a repetition of questioning as each generation questions its own times, discovers ideas so that it has them to tell...but at some inevitablejuncture we'll also question the point of questioning. scribble's back in CA, must go smoke.
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[28 Jan 2002|08:41pm] |
so I found a fucking amazing Kant essay which grounds the last two years of my thinking. It's too bad that there's probably three people in the world that would give a shit. I need to find myself a more sociable hobby...
anyone want to take swing lessons?
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[24 Jan 2002|03:34pm] |
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music |
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Strokes w/scribble |
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ok I'm a butterfly today...I got my evaluations back today from my students last semester...and they thought I was tasty and lovely and the best part of class... so shit I'm gloating but at least something in this world's making me feel good...or at least...a little bit appreciated.
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[17 Jan 2002|08:01pm] |
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mood |
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supposed |
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music |
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random radio |
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I think I have like three projects for my integrated media shit. one project that sounds fun: working with a clothes designer to produce two or three constumes with multiple pockets, velcro attachements, various flaps and straps...then I'm going to write snipets of text, maybe some lists, some notes, some other things, maybe have a walkman with some sounds, etc etc. A narrative to wear I suupose. I think it'll be shown in may...we're going to have a dressing room where people can dress up in the clothes and then interact with others, slowly learning the story as they explore the "dressings." Let's see...I'm doing a video project with Karolina, writing a two minute text piece that decays into incoherent splatters and then re-assembles itself. She's from that place we call europe so I think it's a piece about non-native speaking...and finally I kinda agreed to do some hypertext/director files for a sound/video piece, text to add to sonics to add to pictograms. But I'm unsure if I really want to do much for the last one...
I think I realized that I'm at a fucking art school so I should at least try to collaborate and get a sense of "doing" work with artists/others before I leave this place and end up stewing in my own solipsistic mess for the rest of my life. And that's another thing...I'm beginning to think that this "writing" thing is too goddamn lonely. I mean, christ, if the words talked back. but they don't and I end up rusting at my desk, listening to an Armenian opera singer somewhere on the street below, wondering what the fuck anybody cares about the theoretical bullshit I spin in my slurred little room and in my little head, glancing at my red phone with a dilapitated strawberry-shortcake sticker...
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