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Movie Review!

Quantum of Solace is concerned with building character, the habits and legend of the Bond character, a psychological explanation as to his hero complex, always saving the girl/world. He turns back to save the girl as if he could save the life of Vespa, "the only woman he has ever loved."

"I sometimes feel that we are losing an intuitive sense of our own bodies," Mr. Ito lamented at one point during my visit. "Children don't run around outside as much as they did. They sit in front of computer games. Some architects have been trying to find a language of this new generation, with very minimalist spaces. I am looking for something more primitive, a kind of abstraction that still has a sense of the body."

__________________________________________Toyo Ito, NYTimes 7/12/09

"Allman says a girl recently asked him why he so many tattoos. She's just had her breasts enlarged. Allman pointed at her chest and said, "Tattoos do just the opposite of what those do. Instead of attract, they kind of..." Then he put up a hand, signaling, "Stop right there.""

_______________________Mark Binelli on Gregg Allman, Rolling Stone, 7/09

When I was out of college, living in Seattle, I still didn't really know or see myself doing, or being anything; living with Joel and Dave in the Northgate house. I had no plan, no idea and in some ways I'm still there, the same glass eye half full of desire as seen on TV a small blanket pulled up to my chin. No mountain in the way, but a gravity beyond comprehension I've wasted a lot of time trying to come to and probably never will, but this isn't the first time I've been beautiful.

"If group involvement or the ordering of choices changes the process of making a particular decision, and in turn the result -- whether because it tweaked our notions of risk or because it helped elevate social goals above individual goals and led to better choices for the global commons, -- that isn't necessarily a distortion of our true preference. We tend to always wonder, what's that person's true preference? What do they really want? I think that's the wrong question because we want it all. People have multiple goals."

___________________________- Jon Gertner, NYTimes Mag. 4/19/09

The more choices we make the more we become who we are. That if one is in a position where choices are being made for you (like a child or a cat) one's idea of self stalls. Like a conversation amongst three people, or planning a birthday party (that you later cancel), we must take possession of ourself before we can give it away.

This requires not just knowledge, but an ability and willingness to adhere to what one knows, right or wrong; to test every possible explanation and carry it though (to failure) until one reaches, as Wallace Stevens put it the palm at the end of the mind. You have to be a prince before the kingdom is yours to leave.

Writing will not get me or anybody else there, but the effort of concentration and the nudge of attention helps bring me to autonomy in that I cannot be sure of the choices I am making if I am not aware of the choices I make. Subject verb object and back again. Poetry is what one is willing to take credit for.

set out for work early ended up with a bagel ended up at the bank ended up sitting on a park bench reading a book checking my cellphone for the time and a man comes up to me selling a street sheet and he said sweetly excuse me and began to introduce himself when i interrupted and said i think we've met before you told me that i had nice hair which was true two weeks ago in front of the moma he began by saying i had nice hair maybe beautiful hair i don't remember exactly but it was strange because nobody has ever really commented on my hair not that there's anything wrong with it but it's not particularly remarkable a dark brown with a little wave a little thick and when it begins to grow it grows out not down resulting in a kind of afro that i've only let grow out once living in japan not knowing where to get a hair cut and afraid to ask i said we've met before and he asked if i wanted to buy a street sheet it's a new issue and i said you know i don't have a buck on me and he said well you look like a million bucks and i said thanks and he said have a great day and i said you too and went back to my book

Picked up my new bike from the shop up the street. Not exactly new, but my old bike after a serious tune-up including new handle bars, chain, back wheel, brakes, and wires. So it feels like new. Sorry about the "bait and switch" first sentence. Actually I'm not sorry. I just wanted to use that term: bait and switch. I tried to explain it to a student the other day, something like, offering something to get somebody's attention and when they try and take what you offer, you replace it with something else. Bait and switch. So it was a very exciting today riding around comfortably, running errands and went up to the Fillmore to see the movie "I Am Love" which is so good. It felt old fashioned in that it used symbolism and had "universal" themes. The end of the movie is amazing, a really strange and interesting mix of grief, John Adams, and love. I've never before been taken where that movie goes, at least not at the movies. In some ways it reminded me of "The New World" and "Paranoid Park" (two favorites) in a formal sense, using art school-ish camera work (at points) that did not feel intrusive or indulgent, and in fact advanced the story as much as any dialogue or plot point. There was barely any speaking for the last 45 minutes but you wouldn't know it because the images and editing do so much. That's a complicated way of saying it's beautiful, and I doubt it would be the same watching it on a small screen. Who knows. Maybe it would be just as much of an experience watching it at an airport terminal. Movies! I'm going to go take a shower and go to bed. Good night.

Today I was helping a student work through some ideas for an essay on Gianni Versace, helping her come up a with thesis from the three pages she brought in. I couldn't quite read her mind or her words well enough to understand the larger point driving her essay, and in fact, as is the case with a lot of reluctantly written first drafts, she didn't know her larger point either. This was a problem. One-on-one writing work can be tricky because it's tempting to do the work for the student, i.e. tell them what they should be writing about. It's easy and it's fast. Some students want you do to this, some do not. Personally, I don't want to write an essay about Gianni Versace so as, I have to find a way to help the student think through her own ideas.

What doesn't work is beginning with a big idea: the illusion that everybody knows what they're going to do before they do it. Ninety-five percent of everything that's appeared on this blog I didn't mean to write. I mean, sometimes I'll have a first sentence in mind, or an idea that I'm trying to get to, but usually once I get going I completely forget why I started and am just looking for a good place to stop. Then again (from a Liz Waldner poem,

I fell in love when she said,
"any insect creatures' babies make me disgusted."

For these people, they just open their mouths
and the world is there.

"Wants to Sit in the Big Chair. Does.") Sure there are some people who have big ideas on cue, but most of the students I work with don't. And even if they do, there's just as many problems supporting it, usually leading one to modify or abandon it and start back at the beginning anyway.

What seemed helpful was simple description of the image in front of us: what are these patterns called, how does the shape of the earrings relate to the shape of the dress, what associations come up when looking at this set of colors; simply, where does our attention go? What is there? What do we see? Starting at this point we were able to build an idea, rather than imposing one from the top down. Observing and then pooling all our observations until commonalities emerge. A kind of research. Here, in this moment, all these questions of what to talk about and how to write, disappear and we are working, finally.

on my way back from school a.k.a. work heading towards my bicycle which i lock around a large metal pole on the corner of howard and new montgomery with the black kryptonite cord that will sometimes receive the comment you know you should get a new bike lock because thieves can easily cut through that to which i reply i don't think anybody wants to steal my bike in a self-depreciating way to which they respond well you never know

on my way back from school a.k.a. work on my way to get on my bike and ride the not so far distance home from the academy's downtown location but far enough to warrant a bike ride and save a little money on the bart because i don't get paid until friday so as its been three weeks since i had any money coming in and a student today asked if i was a "biker" because i had forgotten to unroll my pant leg and i said i'm not a biker but ride a bike feeling like the terms was a little bit derogatory but isn't it always better to be specific than general and then we talked about skinny pants and how the crotches of my not as skinny pants have ripped from riding a bike

on my way back from school a.k.a. work before i got to my bike on the corner of howard and new montgomery there was some traffic lined up a car pulling into a parking place the car behind it honking the guys in the car getting out the guy honking leaning out the window telling them "that's not a parking spot" me standing there looking at the parking meter thinking that's a parking spot alright and then saying "that's a parking spot, look at the meter" and then looking up to see a meter maid stopped at the traffic light and i asked "is that a parking spot" and he said "not until seven" and the light turned white and i walked over to my bike and came home

Independence day in San Francisco and it's hot. Tyler doing? Woke up like its Monday meditated walked two corners away and got a paper, made breakfast and read. Laid on my bed and read. Got up and started writing (this). Feeling a little bit punky today, spoke with brother and sister who are in Mineral Point for the annual 4th of July race and parade, an event that my dad used to take us to as kids and in recent years my brother, who runs a lot, has been coming back to run the two mile version. Kind of like a ringer, but it doesn't exactly work out like that as he's taken second place to an 18 year old, maybe twenty now, for a number of years in a row.

It would be nice to be there though, instead of here, where my roots stretch no further than October of 2006. Recently a friend said to me: "There's no reason for you to be here [in San Fransico]." I agree. There is no reason for me to be here. Asides from work, teaching, I have no family here, not all that many friends, no car, no money, no in-roads into a particular community aside from where I teach, no connections, no etc. And not to be a boo bird, or a whiner, but when my colleagues skip town to shoot off illegal fireworks with their friends and families I get a little jealous and a little bummed out.

Then again maybe all this angst is actually a stack of student papers, and the thought of getting though them, so I can go watch the fireworks with a clear conscience. I could reframe the discussion of what my problem is, pretty radically, by getting on my bike and riding to the beach, like I did yesterday on my roommates borrowed bike (mine is in the shop), headphones and a sandwich (yesterday's big realization: if you get all the fixings on a sandwich it doesn't matter if you put meat on it). Lie out in the sun and doze, and read:

In almost any experience there's usually a little agony and usually a little pleasure, and the problem is happiness is something else...containing both pleasure and agony, a state that accepts and encompasses and transforms the whole range of experience, and when I called Jane the following afternoon, happiness was what I thought I wanted.

____________________________-John Haskell from "Out of My Skin"

Tuesday is a long day at school. I use a couple hours in the morning preparing for 202, teach 202, the usual rhetoric class, then head off to support 620, the graduate writing for broadcast taught by this man who knows a good deal about writing. It's interesting to listen to him lecture. The last two classes has been about the finer points of grammar, and common mistakes that journalists often make. "Writing for the ear." Much of the grammar stuffs can be found in The Elements of Style, which I've also been reading (again) in conjunction with this class and just because it's helpful to review, and kind of interesting. Ninety five percent of it I already pretty much know in the back on my head, sub-consciously and do, and my time in the writing lab with student writing and explaining why a sentence is written in a particular way and in class, after about four hours I begin to lose a particular sharpness, no longer able to focus on what's in front of me, and instead start to focus inwardly.

After nine hours of imagined and real explanation a kind of tiredness sets in and metastasizes into the thought that something bad has happened to me. When I come home I am much more likely to quickly consume two slices of cheap pizza than make my own dinner. Pizza tastes good! but, there is a kind of little failure I feel when I go this route. I'd like to think that the feeling isn't completely my fault, a lack of self control caused by the cruel world, but that seems to be the idea that gets the ball rolling in the first place. "I deserve it." When I'm tired and drained it seems more reasonable to address the feeling directly, i.e. take a nap. Lie down and not do anything, as opposed to staying awake via life support, plugging into a video game like the basketball one I've been playing.

Which is why I'm bringing all this up in the first place: in this game there is a 'my player' mode where you design a guy ("Bucky Kat") and play him in basketball games, and if you do well you are given points to improve the guy, his jump shot or whatever. It's kind of like a role playing game, where when you kill dragon you get the sword, and then you are ready to kill the super dragon. Or kind of like real life, where if you get a book published you can get a better teaching job, or if your girlfriend would just stop doing that one thing everything would be peace. Anyway, its addictive and totally escapist, and like spending a weekend smoking crack in a locked bathroom in a basement apartment or looking at pornography, it's an experience that doesn't translate well when somebody asks "What have you been up to?" I'm getting an eerie feeling that I've written all this before. Oh well. Maybe next time I'll write something new. In other news, Miley Cyrus is testing new identities which actually seems pretty normal.

Blogs are embarrassing! San Francisco was kind of kooky today, and generally all weekend because of the Pride festival, including the parade and Backstreet Boys concert. On my way home from purchasing a small brown bathmat I traversed ten thousand lesbians marching down the street late Saturday afternoon. Only in San Francisco? Maybe. But that was yesterday. Many a leather chaps have I seen today. Though I did not see the big parade this morning, I did witness a man wearing a speedo and cowboy boots, riding a ten speed down the middle of the street at eight in the morning, so feel like I didn't miss everything.

Later on, after some cleaning, I spent an inordinate amount of time with newspaper. It was pretty awesome, for example "I mean, the show is based on the premise that there's something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just a human being. It's not easy being a human being." says Laurie Anderson about the Oprah Winfrey Show. After doing some light school work, preparing for a study group and sending out a few emails I should of sent last week, I went for a really really slow walk with a plum. The plan was to walk really slowly up to Dolores park, find a bench, and eat the plum, thereby officially enjoying the sabbath. It didn't work out exactly like that, but I did manage to go slowly, catch a good amount of orangish sun and the dregs of Pride in form of strewn beer cans and ATM receipts blowing around. The plum got eaten mid-stride. Maybe the nicest days of the year thus far? Quite warm and perfectly breezy.

Oh, by the way, remember that last post about the readership flat lining for five days? Well, I figured out that when I changed the look of the blog it changed the html code of the blog, and in that code was the tracking code, so as, the reason it flat lined was because it lost the signal. So, yeah. Roommate Chris leaves for El Salvador on Wednesday and subletter Carrie comes for a month. The first week of school is over and I think it will be a good semester. My 202 class is small, ten people and I've decided to drop one of my support classes so as I can have time to do more writing, which I admittedly have put on the back burner the last couple semesters. In theory I teach so I have time to write but if I spend all my time teaching and don't write much I get grumpy. My cats don't seem to contain many bones when it gets hot, sprawled out and slow. Okay. Bedtime. Need to get up early. Goonight.

Usually it works like this: as soon as I say something definitive I turn and do the opposite. A week ago I wrote in the blog that I didn't feel like writing and I didn't, but since then have felt like writing and have. In the mean time pretty much everybody who reads the blog stopped reading. Google offers an analytical service where I can see many many statistics about who visits the blog (minus actual identity), for example I can see the number of visitors to the blog in a day. Then it takes that and puts it on a graph, so I can see the number of visitors who visited in a week/month/year etc. and it looks a little something like this:


However in the last five days it has done this:


Which is kind of exciting in a couple of ways. The first is a freeing way, that well, great, I've lost my entire readership. I can completely change direction/identity/purpose. No readers means no pressure. Second, it means that I no longer have to worry about posting to the blog. I can just totally let it rot, like a loaf of bread wrapped in a plastic bag tucked in a drawer in an unused kitchen in a locked apartment.

But, I can't help but notice that the drop off began right after the posting two postings ago the one written a couple of days after I got back from the meditation. That posting, after that posting the reader ship dropped off dramatically. Hm. Maybe I seem affected? Less so than the last time but the last time I was so paranoid about speaking about the experience because when somebody is under the spell of something it's easy to tell...unless you're under the same spell and then it seems normal. Like stress, or the World Cup. Or having two hands and ten fingers. My cats used to watch my hands by now they look at my face. I used to look at their eyes but now watch their ears. Most of my writing has come out of anxiety and misery, small islands of clarity in the midst of confused paranoia. I fell in love with English when I went to Japan. I fell in love with Japan when I came back home. Serve! I hope nobody reads this.

Aw heck. Who am I kidding. Of course I want your attention. I'm just sore after the first week of being back in school. Rather, during the first week of school. Breaks are lovely but the transitions are awkward: meeting a new class, or two, or three; settling into a semester, trying to solve problems that may or may not exist, snacking on anxiety cakes served by fellow teachers and students. Done for the day though. Laying on my bed with the cats. Jinx is making a heavy breathing noise and the brown one is dozing on my thigh. That's all for now. Nap time.

Today the summer semester started. I've decided to write in full sentences. This morning I supported a fiction writing class. There were three students in the class who may or may not need my support services. Tomorrow is the beginning of teaching teaching for the semester. Trying to avoid the pronoun 'I' by changing the order of the words in the sentence. It's different to begin a sentence with the object rather than the subject. Or a verb, which only works in speech and in novels. Why am I writing in the blog? There were some reasons. Okay. Got it. The other day in the mail Cole sent me his latest mix. It's pop-ier than his last couple of mostly ambient mixes. Here's the link.

Speaking of Cole, he and a couple others started an ambient music group blog that posts good stuff called Field Mic. There is a link to it on the right. Lately I've been listening to the new Crystal Castles album. Lots of great punky poppy techno, though there is this track as well. It's a little harsh at first but settles into something I like a lot. Speaking of things I like a lot, the other day a small press offered to publish a manuscript of mine but I turned them down. They offered a kind of 'raw deal.' I won't go into the details but it's a good sign that after four years of arranging poems maybe I've found a winning combination. Maybe the next deal won't be so raw.

The last week before school started was pretty great, relaxing. Good weather with plenty of time to get ready for the semester, organize, comb my hair, meet people, computer music projects, read and take naps. Continuing my hipster list of consumption, I quite enjoyed reading "Out of My Skin" by John Haskell if you're looking for a short beautifully written story about illusory identity, and the other day I saw the movie "Winter's Bone" which is a really engaging suspense movie about crystal meth in rural Missouri. Highly recommended if you have time to see movies. In addition, please note my new hit single "You should be ashamed of yourself." on the music blog for this week. Oh, and do you like the new colors of the blog? Blogger had new options so I tried them (after reading something somewhere about the difficulty that people have reading gray text on black) but now can't go back to the old template so that's that. Please:

On Sunday I got back from the 12 day meditation course and was feeling a particular kind of cleaned-out-high. Not a high as much as a somewhere-else-outside-of-old-habit mode of being that generally feels good, but not in a sensational way. The course was not as "life-changing" as the last one but this is good in the sense that it wasn't as dramatic coming back and making life style changes, such as morning meditation, shifting priorities from anxious busy work to whatever I feel like, and not eating not much for dinner, because I've already been doing all that.

One thing is for certain though, that after cleaning my system out (in a very particular way...for more details, attend a course) I don't feel much like writing or pursuing any kind of creative endeavor. I don't feel much like smoking, or watching movies, or basketball, or whatever else I do for fun. I don't feel much like teaching but then again, I don't feel much like not teaching. That is to say, it cleans out my anxieties and bile so well I'm really pretty content with whatever comes up: making dinner, sitting in a park, responding to emails, etc.. But not like a vegetable the opposite of a vegetable not clinging to a schedule. One the one hand this is kind of scary in the sense that well, if I'm not doing what I usually do, than I'm not a writer, or artist or whatever. What was the point of all the work I've put into writing over the last ten years if I don't keep it up? On the other hand I'm okay with that. It's a little scary.

Specifically about the course, we spent the first four days focusing our attention and lengthening our attention spans with a meditation called Anapana. We got up at four, worked on and off until nine, totaling ten to eleven hours of sitting a day. Then we switch over to Vipassina mediation for the next five days, that is, in general, a kind of body scanning, where a sitter (like me!) develops the ability to feel sensation on every little part of the body. Once this ability develops all over the body (and really, I didn't get this far until the second time I sat a course), and done *correctly* it opens the doors on cleaning out one's system (amongst other things) through observation in a very specific way that I could not possibly do justice to in an explanation on this blog. On the last day we do Metta meditation which is a kind of love generating meditation which may or may not work because I have the heart of baboon. The end. Back to the day. No picture today.

WELL, the news from San Francisco is that the semester ended a week ago. I finished my grading and got on with it to DC to see sister, brother-in-law and niece. It was lovely! Good weather, not too humid for DC and was relatively active with niece Beatrix; painting, swimming, playing, reading, talking about kitty kats (we bonded over this) and eating cake. Bonus material included walking the dogs in rock creek park, seeing roommate Chris and Sam who also happened to be in DC, visiting some memorials in the rain with them, seeing a different part of the city (Columbia Heights) where Sam's mom lives, going to the Sackler to see some old Buddhist art, watching parts of the Giro D'Italia, having lunch with my long lost cousin annnnnnd that's all I'm going to mention. Huh. Which I always thought should be spelled "Hunh."

Oh, and I finished LOST along with everybody else. Here is a good source of interpretations of the final episode and season. My favorites are towards the bottom, one by a person talking about past lives and realization, thereby avoiding limiting terms like "purgatory" and the Christian interpretations that follow from it (Dude, the Dharma project was the name of the scientific group on the island that dominated 4 of the 6 seasons). The other helpful interpretation was by a writer on the show, and she specifically references and explains some of the larger forces working on the island, such as Locke and the MiB's role throughout. Yes I totally escaped into this show, away from a particularly stressful semester. It happens. But wow, I feel lucky to have been able to watch the show as it developed. Watching it alone on DVD just would not be the same experience of letting it sit and reading about it along with everybody else.

Now I'm back here, doing a few odds and ends before I leave on Wednesday for another 10 day meditation course, which I have to admit I'm not looking forward to but after the first three days I'll settle into it. Many projects to get back into that got pushed out during the semester. My creative writing class was great this Spring but the other class, rhetoric and persuasion, was seriously one of the worst experiences I've had teaching. Nice students generally but just a really bad mix, mostly male and had a lot of too cool for school-ness happening. At the end of the day the quality of the work was good: we got where I wanted us to go but it wasn't easy. Anyway, teaching. The summer semester starts in the three weeks. Hope all is well. The music blog continues to be posted to so, there. I will write when I get back.

One more thing, neither here nor there, I think this is one of my favorite songs: "Daughter of a Child" from the album Mu-ziq vs. The Auteurs. It's kind of old (1994) and I don't know why I love it so, but well. The whole album it's pretty great.

Michael Clayton

What I love about this movie is not the heroic tale of truth winning out over the evil corporation, but the man named Michael Clayton and his job as the law firm's "fixer." What I relate to is the unseen nature of his work, on account of his "janitorial" status, cleaning up legal problems that more public and respectable lawyers avoid: running out at two in the morning to protect the interests of hit-and-run millionaires, or soothing the nerves of a jangled adulterer. Though he knows there is so much more to the-equation-of-what-gets-seen than the truth value of content, his job requires him to bite his lip and he's good at it.

But him, the man, responding to circumstance and the sometimes disappointing faith we put in one another, and the scene where he climbs the hill to look at the horses, to say hello and to escape himself and to cry; here we see the stakes and the weight of accepting one's position. He turns, not on his bosses or clients complaints, or on his friend's death, though these are the catalysts, but he turns on himself. Standing in the gray morning light, the three riderless horses watch as he slowly climbs the hill. The truth of himself and his sadness and his frustration and his person is what sets into motion the dismantling of these larger structures of corporation and law.

because he stopped
to look at the horses

to stop and look at the horses
to want to look at the horses

pure misery
is to be without

What I love about this movie is that it makes this connection so clear, the connection that what motivates us has nothing to do with morality, or systems, or circumstance; but where we are, dealing with the day. Creating something large and lasting that in retrospect could be called an ethic, but there is no good and no evil when we are working inside of ourselves. He says to his son, chewing on the disappointment of his brother and his failed business deal, he says to his son "you will not be one of those people who has shit falling out of the sky around them," All the time around them. That you won't give in to the hopelessness that surrounds us, distracts and confuses us, that muddies our ability to judge the truth of ourselves. Michael Clayton is a flawed man but it is because of these flaws and taking a single moment to feel them that allows him to see past them.

he gave the cab driver
fifty dollars “Fifty dollars

worth.” to drive him around
until the money runs out

to be rid of all this
the expression on his face

To your right is a link to a new blog that I am using to post music that I've been making with my computer, records, and recordings. It's been a very quiet six months here on this blog, not because I've dropped out of the world but because I've been spending my writing time on music and sound stuffs ("That's a nice hobby" said my mom). Every week for at least the first three months I'll post a piece and I think I have enough to go six months at that rate, but I'll only promise three months.

I will still be posting to this blog. That said, I feel like I owe the few faithful readers an explanation for my absence. "Don't ever explain yourself." Here is an article from last week's Sunday paper about the future/present of art. I found it helpful in the sense that it contextualizes collage and sampling, methods that come natural to how people make things (music, art, writing) these days. The fact that it's in the Times means that post-modernism is officially over. Here is a link to a very warm short review of Cole's Mix "Later" from earlier this year, and more importantly you can download the mix from that site. Okay. Alright. See you later. Enjoy the music. Happy spring.