"I heard we had an amazing year..." "Yes... doesn't tell what next spring will bring." "No... but you can only be glad for what happened now." "Cassandra... haven't seen her in a while." "How are you, though?" "Achy... Achy... but fine." "That's good..." "I'm a child now. Have to ask the boys to fix my knee..." "The boys?" "Really glad you called... I should let you go." "No need. Not that expensive." "Amanda interviewed for a new job. Don't know how it went." "Haven't talked to her in a while... She told me about that though. Don't know how it went either." "You mean you called me instead of her." "Yes." "Well I should let you go. Thanks for calling..." "How's your knee? What's wrong?" "You'll came back to see me?" "Yes. I'll be back." "I just need to get permission. I'm a child." "I'll put in a good word for you." "What?" "I'll put in a good word for you." "I'm like a child. Need to ask permission. Waiting till harvest is done." "I'm sure they'll..." "Thanks for calling. Don't want you to spend all your money on calling..." "Don't worry. It's not that expensive..." "Found any little English girls? You're going to bring a little English girl back." "I don't know." "Well you're looking hard." "I try." "You'll come back and see me?' "I'll come back and see you." "Don't spend all your money..." "I'm not... I'm having a good time..." "Well, I should let you go."
***
"Grandma, where's the ashtray?" "Somewhere by the bed..."
Fuck Lost Goddamn you Lost. They give us something resemvbling plot development-- ooh, the last surviving member of the Dharma Initiative-- and then, haha, nope, just another Other. We all must stop watching.
Battlestar Blues Baltar's Manifesto? Cheif goes Norma Rae? Helo goes "Diagnosis Murder"? What has happened to my BSG??? The past three episodes have been the WORST episodes since the tragic "Black Market," "Assasination," and "Scar" run of Season One. Child labor, union breaking, euthenasia, and Karl Marx. Christ, BSG has always had a sort of issue of the week appeal (reproductive rights, suicide bombings, et. al.) but it always pulled it off so handsomely. We're on the cusp of a war tribunal for frak sake, and you give us Cheif and Kelly diving through space because of a broken airlock? Shame on you.
Last Sunday's episode is supposed to be a return to form. It better be. My patience is wearing thin.
Insomnia Insomnia is the pennance for not creating when God herself has come down from the mountain, filled your brain with ideas, half-thoughts, and misremembered memories and forbidden you from relinquishing them to the corners of your dreams; you must empty yourself otherways, infinitely less fulfilling, infinitely less fleeting, but instead, you sit and scratch your back until your shoulder makes a popping sound. You roll over, and tumble out of bed. Then you go downstairs and you get a drink-- water? vodka? water? vodka. -- that doesn't help you sleep. You remember the day you should have had, and it becomes the day you had. The sheet slips below your feet and the blanket, slightly more rough, rubs against your skin. You reach down to the foot of the bed and readjust, pulling the cool sheet over you. 500 thread count. Who do you think you are? Now you've done it. That shit's far too philisophical for you to leave alone. "Who do I think I am?" the italics actually manifesting themselves somewhere in your brain as "CTRL-I." You don't read enough. Maybe you should read now. Proust? He couldn't fucking sleep either. Entertainment Weekly, from three weeks ago. You've read it four times. And now five. Your hand moves into your boxers, and you realize you might as well masturbate now and get it over with. Maybe you just can't sleep cause you haven't yet? You jiggle the loose folds of skin until they stiffen, more by stimulation than actual arrousal. Spit into your hand, and get it over with quickly, deciding somewhere in between your initial jerking and orgasm whether or not to watch yourself come. You sometimes get a kick out of that, but not a big one really. Shit, now you're all fucking sticky. Turn on the light, shield your eyes, walk down to the bathroom and wash up. Naked, semen-stained body, torso too curvy for your slender legs, chest too hairy for your boyish face. "Tomorrow, I'll start running." You lie. You ain't ugly enough yet, but you getting there. Cheeks fatter, tummy hanging a bit too far over your dick. How did an arrogant fuck like you end up with a fucked up body image? Shit, I want some peanut butter toast. Skippy with just a dab of honey like your mom made and her mom made before her direct from Good Housekeeping Healthy Snacks 1957 to your mouth. As American as peanut butter toast. Another drink... water this time. Walk up the stairs and sit down at the computer, constantly buzzing with information, but not buzzing very efficiently with it because it's so fucking old. And you download too much porn, or used too before it became such a piece of shit. New E-mails? Not at three in the fucking morning. Check your bank account. Check CNN.com. Check your e-mail. Still no new mail. Gay.com, pseudonymns, talking to strangers. talking dirty, trying to decide whether or not to go fuck them or if they should come fuck you. You just came, could you do it again? Probably. Judging from their picture how likely it is they have HIV. Torso shots have HIV. Men with facial hair have HIV. Men in pickup trucks, Men with "cock" or "suck" or "frat" in their name have HIV. Talk dirty quickly so you can jerk off again and get it done with and log off, you sad pathetic fuck. It's all a game of signfiers, and you're losing. "You gotta pic?" "Visibility is a trap," and so Foucault shuts down the conversation. Foucault is a cockblocker. Wouldn't he be proud? "I wish their were people to fuck so I wouldn't have to get on..." Lying to yourself again. You just like it easy... you never had to try, did you? You still ain't trying. If you were trying you would be good enough and better. Your goal isn't to be the best, it's to make everyone think you're the best. That's why you skim books and don't finish novels and read Entertainment Weekly instead of Proust. That's why you're such a goddamn good English major because you don't read because you deconstruct to the point where you don't have to read and they suck it up. GREs don't lie... "GREs are a judge of how well you took the class"... latching on to phrases dropped and forgotten by those few who remain, intact, your authority figures. It's all a game of signfiers... Closing the window, shutting off the monitor, getting back into bed, but no, images still mounting evolving, overflowing and so with one last attempt at pacifying that Great God on her fucking mountain, you go again to your computer and stare at that reprehensible cursor as it blinks in its elongated, ethereal "I." And then, after a moment of embittered reflection, you strike a key and then another and then another, a holy eucharist for your made up god: "Insomnia is the penance for not creating when God herself has come down from the mountain, filled your brain with ideas, half-thoughts, and misremembered memories and forbidden you from relinquishing them to the corners of your dreams..."
Penis Penis Butt Butt When I type in the letter "p" to my google search box, the first thing in the frequent/recent history box that appears is "penis penis butt butt."
"We live as we dream-- alone," Joseph Conrad writes in Heart of Darkness, and it would seem from his highly individualist and surrealistic oeuvre that David Lynch agrees with that Conradian notion. His films-- even his more realistic ones-- flow with the libidinal logic of the dreamtext, eternally hyperlinked and kinetic, down rabbit holes and blue boxes into red rooms and out Venetian blinds. We experience his dreams alone, yet together, the audience eternally linked to one man's unique vision of reality. Despite the stunning orginality and vision of his previous work, nothing that Lynch has done before-- no loglady, no ciphered dwarves withstanding-- could have prepared cinema for the stunning manifesto of a new age in the cinematic arts that is Lynch's Inland Empire. There are, in the history cinema, a priveledged few directors who have evolved their relationship with the medium to a point of total comprehension of the economic, social, political, and libidinal implications of the filmic experience. There names have become synonymous with their works; they are eternally interchangeable and ethereal, becoming studies more in signifiers rather than film form itself. Fellini 81/2, Godard Cotempt, Bergman Persona, Passolini Teorema. These few, these happy few, have bridged the gap between theory and the text and the text and theory. They are films that are simultaenously confesssional and enigmatic, both evocative and indecipherable. They are films, more often than not, about film, about us, about actors, about directors, about what we do and think and feel and see when the lights go down, all except one, that endless flickering phantasm of motion on a screen. They are films that interogate us, that look back towards us, the audience, ever-peering in the omnipresence of our voyeuristic fancy. With Inland Empire, David Lynch has ascended into this happy band of brothers, but what's more, in his mastery of his own medium he has ushered in undeniably and resolutely the dawn of new medium, a digital medium. More a translator than a pioneer, Lynch has taken digital video beyond that binary echo of ones and zeros, of pretense and portention, into the realm of cinema. In short, Inland Empire is the first masterpiece of the digital age. If we live as we dream, how, then, do we act? That is the question of Inland Empire. And the answer, for Lynch, is different from Conrad's. We do not act alone; we act for an audience. Performance demands a spectator, but more importantly for Lynch, a spectator demands performance. Lynch's performers have always performed to the dalliances of their voyeurs. Think of Isabella Rosellini's naked dance on the suburban lawns of Blue Velvet. Think of Naomi Watts's impassioned masturbation in Mullholland Drive. Think of young Laura Palmer's stripteast at One-Eyed Jack's. Lynch's women know how to perform for their spectators, but even more, they know how to perform for Lynch. Lynch is their audience par excellence, the everlasting monocular gaze, one with the camera, one with the voyeur. But with Inland Empire, he announces something that sets him apart from all the other male directors dictating masochism to their actresses. He says loudly and clearly, "I know what I have been doing." Mr. Lynch knows he has been putting, to take a turn from Inland's tagline, his women in trouble. He knows that he is complicit in their performances, in their masochism, and in Inland Empire he gives us once again a moschistic puppet in the form of Laura Dern. She is both Nikki Grace, the actress, and Susan Blue, the role. They are not separate characters but one who merges seamlessly with Laura Dern, the Actress, who, in turn, moves with imperceptible ease in and out and through each scene that exists autonomously yet homogenously, connected not by a narrative thread but by a thread a signifiers of a cinematic past, each echoing in the minds of the cinema-goer like Proust's tea-soaked madeleine. And yet, this is not a puzzle; we do not attempt to piece together a narrative from what we are given, but rather from what we know already as film goers. We know, for example, what it means for a woman to walk in an alley alone. We know what it means for a woman to cheat on her husband. We know those immutable signs of woman's failure, those foreboding appeals for pity toward the lowly feminine creature before her fall. The poverty, the drugs, the abuse. These are the signifiers of, in short, "a woman in trouble." They are as old and as unwavering as Hollywood itself, and from these bits and peices from that glistening history of movie misogyny, David Lynch constructs a narrative that is as cohesive in its incoherence as the most intricate novels of Joyce and Woolf. We know the story because we know the story. This is Lynch's confessional for himself and for cinema. He sees, accepts, and asks penance for the misogynist narratives of Hollywood's past, but he does not stop there. Extraordinarily, in the film's final hour, Father Lynch reaches out into the audience and demands our confession for our own complicity in this Hollywood mythos. There is a moment in the film where Niki Grace/Susan Blue/Laura Dern stands in a vacant movie palace and stares in horror, in sadness, in confusion at the image of herself on the screen. It is an image we, too, have seen before, an hour or so earlier, and now we watch it again with her in a deceptively simple shot/reverse shot pattern. We see her watching and then we watch with her in a point-of-view shot. We see watching and watch with her again. We see her watching... but then wait... what is she watching? Not the screen, not her image, not her performance, but rather us-- the audience-- staring on her. She has quite literally entered our space-- our hidden vantage point behind the closet doors. The fourth wall is not destroyed; it simply ceases to exist. She stands in the movie theatre and looks back on us as we have looked on her for the past three hours. We have aided in the construction of the narrative that has imprisoned her on that screen, that has mandated that she must die, that has necessitated her abuse-- but now is her chance to crossover. And it is in this moment that Lynch, himself, fulfills his promise that he is, indeed, an optimist for, as the heavy film cameras move back, as the director stands and praises his actress's performance, we are left then and there in the absence of film and in the all-encompassing freedom of the digital medium. Liberated from the economic restraints of film stock, we can finally move deeper into the theatre, and back and back again behind the screen, into the world that cinema has constructed, penetrating the walls that film has long barricaded. The digital age offers, for Lynch, a promise of liberation from the economic, social, and political constraints of the filmic medium. It offers, in short, the promise of connection-- of permeating the space between the spectator and performer by bringing the performer closer and by offering an intimacy that is simply impossible and potentially undesirable in film. I am, admittedly, skeptical that digital video can fullfil this promise, but Inland Empire is a film so daring and provocative in its audacious ambition to offer up this very possibility, that the reality of a cinematic intimacy as pure as Lynch suggests seems ever-closer.
I just finished up my final grad application... just a couple stamps and one transcript pick up away from being done with grad school shit forever? Let's hope.
Who knows... i might have to do this again next year.
"It's not my way to love you just when no one's looking... It's not my way to take your hand when I'm not sure... It's not my way to let you see what's going on inside of me. cause your love, it don't come easy, your not free..."
Sigh.
Current Mood: sad Current Music: Nashville Soundtrack
Brilliant, you steadfast Are-- Thought-provoking and Tough Lately, an hour a week hasn't been Enough to Satisfy my longing for Terrorism Allegory, questioning wrong and Right, Heroes and
Glory, National Identity, Abortions, often too, while never Losing storylines in favor of issues. A Challenging epic poem Told In Coup d'etats; A metaphysical metaphor that effortlessly awes.
I know that most people who read this are going to think that I am just reacting to my recent failure to get an endorsement from the University for my Rhodes application, but I really think that this is something more substantial than just that. Yes, I was annoyed and disappointed, and yes, it might have acted as a catalyst to some certain anxieties that I have had about the quickly approaching and nearly-ubiquitous fact of my future, but I think that perhaps if I am going to quell from this experience anything of worth, I should be honest about these feelings and the root anxieties and uncertainties that they might have brought bubbling to the surface.
First of all, grad school. Do I really want to go to grad school? Yes, I am interested in literature, but enough to be an English Literature Professor? I don't think so. I mean, honestly. I don't read. I read for class, and I read occasionally for pleasure, but even then, it is mostly Entertainment Weekly. I have started a great number of books that I have never finished. Many times they are books that I should , indeed, read, but I get into them and feel bored and not consistently entertained and I quickly put it down. Yes, Lily Bart is a tragic character, Ms. Wharton, but I don't really give a fuck. I have never read, for instance, the final section of To the Lighthouse, yet I wrote a paper on it that was "brilliant." "You should really expand this into a full-length article." Okay, in another year or two, when I've read the last 25 pages. I do a lot of skimming, too, and I am excellent at faking a "provocative" close-read, but I seldom, if ever, read closely. When I do, I'm pretty damn good at it, but why do it unless you have to? Frankly, I think I am too lazy and too good at bullshitting to succeed in grad school. Eventually, I'll have to come clean or I'll be found out,
I do so much bullshitting and get away with it all so well that it never really seemed worth it not to do it. This is the realization I came to about a year ago when I got through 255-- the hardest survey ever for so many nerdy young bookworms-- without reading anything really. I got an A+. Why try? And I'm not gloating-- I'm kind of ashamed of myself. I'm incredibly lazy academically because I can be. There had never been any insentive at all to be more than that. I get straight A's after all.
I try to challenge myself, but I'm always challenging myself with things I know I'll excell at. An Honors Thesis on porn. Wow. How provocative. Not really. Sometimes I wonder if I just study it to have something subtly erotic to talk to boys about-- to engage them in a conversation about sex in a roundabout way. To arouse them and entrap them. To at least get them to say something slightly dirty back to me. Maybe it is all salacious. Maybe it is all for my own sexual pleasure. Maybe the fears of that eighty-year0old man with a Nobel Prize shoved up his ass are 100% correct. Thomas Waugh, himself, when questioned on why he studied pornography said, "Because it turns me on." But at least he is honest about it.
So there it is. I, the lonely gay boy, with a propensity for pornography that is in reality a propensity for sexual attention-- the kind I could not get from the little boys at school who called me bad names. Yes, here I am, deceitful boy with a beerbelly that he could get rid of if he would, for one second, get off his ass and do something about it.
That boy, is me, I, the one who talks only in third person. It's easier that way. I can't sleep at night because I'm a liar. I can't sleep at night because I'm okay with it. I can't sleep at night because occasionally I want to pray. Pray! I kid you not. I wanted to Pray! I wanted a higher power to exist tonight, but instead I logged onto LiveJournal. When faced with the contemplation of the existence of God, I say, proudly, "To the Internet..."
Experience in On-Line Self-Publication.
I say all this because what happened today unveiled for me in some way the fallacy of the humanities that I always was painfully aware existed. Can I answer honestly why I believe the humanities are important? I believe they are important as a testament to human endeavor, to humanity's ability to create, and ultimately, they are aesthetic ideals of work. So, yes they should be studied...
but do i want to study them?
Not really. I don't see that as being something I could really love. Is it? I mean I was for a while incredibly excited about the prospect of a career in academia. I had profs I loved and I really cared about what I was doing, but this semester has been really dull. The idea of reading some of this boring and remedial shit just disgusts me. I don't know if I want to do it.
Then there are the alternative realities... realities I continually have to remind myself are not necessarilly impossible ones. The crazy ones. I want to make a documentary about carnies. Sine I was 17. 17! The idea of documentary film is so exciting to me. I'd love to work with it, And I want to go to Law School... I do. Since I was 17, 17!
I'm just at a point right now where i need to figure out what's going on. And I don't know at all.
Sounds are just the epic fury of a god whose wrath has yet to be felt by man, but I felt it in the rumble and tumble of passing storm clouds that came quite unexpectedly in the twilight bringing with them the silver-gray mist of morning dew drops. The blades of grass each beckon to me to reach out and touch them-- they are alive outside and I am dead inside with the steady drone of the air conditioning window unit bursting out repetitive puffs of aged air for me to breathe. So I sit on the slab of a patio, half caved in, searching the grass for living things, or memories, or a semblance of a life half-lived. But all I get are insects creeping and crawling a thousand steps a second. They fall. They die. There, on their backs, the final kicks of six barbed legs desperate to find their footing. I take the embers of a half-lit cigarette and move it-- sadist that I am-- closer and closer to the writhing rythmic motion. And then, it screams.
Not a chirp-- not the sound of a cricket on a summer evening-- no, a clear and distinct scream metamorphisized from the larvae and the egg and the chrysalis, deep within. A voice of one of hundreds of thousands of members of one of thirty million species. The definition of minute-- of unrepresentable-- it screamed at me. And I leaned my ear closer to hear what it had to say.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
randomanimosity's journal
sleepy
annoyed
exhilirated
sad
insomniatic?