blogs, no subtle manner

Particular words stay in your mind. Particular people use their particular words and some of these influence us and become part of who we are. There are people who overuse words, who incorrectly use words or who use words too loudly – there are word-droppers just as there are name-droppers and when words are dropped they sit rather heavily. Still, there are certain people that have perfected the art of subtly sliding their little piece of poetry into the conversation (or onto the page). They might not even be noticed (unless you’re concentrating) and somehow add to the overall feel of whatever it is being said.

parallel universai?

"I may not know much about Jean-Paul Sartre, but I've got a handicap of four."
--History Boys

"You hear two auto mechanics and you have no idea what they are talking about, " [Peter Schjedlahl, chief art critic for the New Yorker] explained, "There is a kind of poetry in their impenetrable phrases. Why wouldn't art criticism have that?"
--Seven Days in the Art World

edible narcissism: things i've eaten

metawatching

In our post-1950s, inseparable-from-TV association pool, brand loyalty really is synechdochic of character; this is simply a fact.

-DFWallace in E Unibus Pluram Television and U.S. Fiction

What about post-early 1990s inseparable-from-Internet association pool?
Blog loyalty is synechdochic of character?

projects

"Like a nun withdrawing"

The End of Solitude.

"Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to on another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths and of the value of keeping them hidden."




Found via Facebook.
Consequently decided to post on both Twitter and this blog.

Husbands

“It’s a terribly sad thing,” blurts John Cassavetes, drunkenly slumped over on the subway early in the morning, lighting his umpteenth cigarette after another sleepless night, “when a man realizes that he’s never going to be a professional athlete.”


Candida Höfer's Libraries

suck it up

BioDome

"I first came out here in the early '70s, lured by the hippie eco techno worldview embodied by the Whole Earth Catalog. I joined a friend in an attempt to build a dome in a field up in Napa County. I eventually lost focus on the dome project and ended up busking with another friend on the streets of Berkeley -- he played accordiaon, I played violin and ukulele and struck ironic poses. It was successful. I realized at that time I was more interested in irony than utopia."
--David Byrne
Bicycle Diaries
page 221

Director's Note

If I were to simply state the role of the director, it is to relentlessly ask the actor, "What are you doing?" Not "what are you feeling," or "what are you thinking," but "what are you doing?" As a director, I am first interested in action. We watch plays to see people in action doing heroic things in impossible situations, and succeeding or failing. We learn from their mistakes, and are inspired by their victories. We marvel at the conflict they overcome, and we laugh at the absurdities of their struggles. Everything dramatic is full of action. To get at the action is to get a the heart of the play.

Directing Beckett is unique in this perspective, because most of the action is internal. The characters are rarely wrestling with each other, but instead are wrestling with themselves, struggling not with the pain they inflict on each other, but with the pain that comes with existing: struggling to find meaning, facing death, being aloe. When I ask an actor in a Beckett play, "what are you doing?," the answer we come to eventually is usually a variation on "creating meaning." It is an internal thing, but full of action

Our heroine Winnie, is having a rough time, as you will soon see. She is immobile, with a barely present husband, and no toher company beside the occasional ant. She is subject to seemingly arbitrary rules. She is struggling to make meaning in it all. Not just to survive, but to be Happy. Winnie is both a hero and a clown. Her attempt to create meaning where there is none - to find purpose and happiness in a hopeless situation - is noble and absurd and utterly human. The creation of meaning is in the action.

--David O'Connor
Director's Note to Happy Days by Samuel Beckett
Lantern Theater October 2009

David Lynch on Eraserhead. "It all sprung from Philadelphia"

"Henry in Eraserhead is a person who is living under the influence of those things that existed for me in Philadelphia....

There was a sense of dread pretty much everywhere I went. I didn't live in any good parts of Philadelphia, and so dread was my general feeling. I hated it. And, also, I loved it."

read me:
A Fish in the Percolator

Diagnosis.

Nostalgia is a mental disease.

Krapp's Last Tape

Just saw Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" at the Lantern Theatre. Curious, whether in 80 years a blog like this will give me the same remorse / disease of nostalgia / pang of regret / heightened awareness of youth / heightened naivete of youth / heightened jeolousy of youth the tape sixty-five year old Krapp listens to does.

Also, Krapp ? Crap?

Krapp///Crap.

sharpie me in

Not mine. This designer from a TED video who liked to go on sabatical.
But still, the ultimate!
Attempt to break conditioned patterns and the spell of forgetfulness.

Don't Quote Me On It (Dot Com)

"A good man is like a good bass line: hard, steady, and provides for smooth transitions."

Hurrah for a justification of my David Lynch phase !

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect.
Also re-reading David Foster Wallace's "David Lynch Keeps His Head" from A Supposedly Funny Thing I'll Never Do Again, which is a whole lot freggin' better when you've actually seen the movies he's talking about.

bewy beawtiful

Enough said.
Vanessa Traina in Givenchy.
Courtesy of Jak and Jil.

Alexithymia

Beating the Penguin from Batman Returns, by far.

Robert Blake in Lost Highway.
Most terrifying Character I can remember ever having coming across.
Well done, David Lynch.

don't watch these enough.

Yo La tengo - A Take Away Show - Part 1 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Used to post often, then stopped. I wonder why.

pains of being pure at heart.

Willz sent me this a while ago. I don't look at it enough.
This notion of "Love" becomes much more curious as time passes.

Back is for Emergencies.

Faster than Twitter.

After my run this morning, which usually clears my heads of pain, suffering, disappointment, the only thing I wanted to do was rush home to think/ponder Google Wave a bit more. The biting question being: will this catch on?

All my techno-savvy friends keep twittering they want to be invited to it, as was the case with Google Voice, which I've heard of nothing since. Google is also trying to establish a social networking site in conjunction with Google Wave, however once Twitter has come along, can there even be another Facebook social networking site to replace/rejuvinate. Are people over Facebook yet?

Are these instances that Google is over-doing it? Would you get Google Wave? Replacing the "shosh is typing..." comes the actual words you are typing. AND then on TOP OF THAT you get the option to show what you are typing or not. Do you vomit out thoughts? Do you want to remain the impression of elegant verse? Or have you tranformed into the present day internet lingo-verse of having all thoughts revealed, documented, as soon as they are present in your head and are transmitted to your hands typing them?

Google are you the future or are you past your prime?

Technology never stops, but when does as a little self-awareness to saying STOP to the technology and listening to your own archival senses (aka scrapbooking) awaken something deeper than technology?

Once again, a constant motto, in the words of Robert Heinlein:
"Back is for emergencies."
Right?

birthday wishes

Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies.

A Primer on Oblique Strategizing.