| To my Media producing friends |
[14 May 2008|09:32am] |
Have y'all heard about the Orphan Works Act
Essentially it would do away with the automatic copyright that one has just by creating a work and would require the artist/creator to pay money to register all visual works with private companies.
There is a petition found on the above link.
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| So long and thanks for all the___ |
[12 Oct 2007|12:51am] |
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mood |
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 excited |
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So here's my attempt at settling the accounts...with no regard for time or space or memory.
Thank you desert. Thanks for growing up with me. Thanks for forgiving me when I forgot you can't take the stairs. Thanks for trying to teach me Qbasic in 7th grade. Thanks for letting me be in the band, and that band, and for countless jam sessions. Thank you for playing video games at my house for almost 48 hours straight. Thanks for thousands of chances to undue everything. Thanks for writing a zombie musical with me. Thanks for crawling into my bed with a smile/smirk/look of uncertainty. Thank you for talking about queerness, drunk on a porch. Thanks for having a long chat with me about Barthes over apple cider. Thanks for seeing countless movies with me. Thank you for forcing me to go to prom. Thanks for giving me the crocodile on your bass. Thank you for slapping me on the shoulder mid-laughter after telling me to shut up. Thanks for letting me serenade you for better or for worse. Thank you for letting me take over the classroom for 30-45 minutes at a time. Thanks for thinking everything I said was funny. Thank you for letting me 'teach' you about subjectivity when I was drunk as all hell while wearing a cowboy hat. Thank you for taking me to the Myriad. Thank you for discussing Foucault with me way too late at night. Thanks for putting a blanket on me while I was sleeping in the legos. Thanks for taking me to my first hardcore show. Thank you for wrinkling your nose at me again and again. Thanks for the permanent damage to my skin. Thanks for late night coffee in a borrowed car. Thank you for giving me more nicknames then I can remember. Thanks for making me drink water and eat food...sometimes I forget. Thanks for the burritos. Thank you for the photographic excursions in various urban settings. Thanks for cooking Thai food while I sat at the feet of an opera singer. Thank you for telling me I was the General Sherman of academia. Thanks for wave after wave of rain appreciation. Thank you for snickering every time I say Lacan. Thanks for endless penis rumors. Thank you monsoon. Thank you for trying to install a fashion sense in my head. Thank you for late night scrabble. Thanks for Milton conversations over coffee and cigarettes. Thank you for long set theoretical dirges. Thanks for giving me the chance to watch Fritz Lang films. Thanks for pretending to listen or maybe for actually listening. Thank you for drawing a line when it came to self deprecation. Thanks for writing a song about loneliness with me. Thanks for letting me trick you into a women's studies degree. Thank you for telling me about your astrological beliefs while we watched roller derby. Thanks for painting me in the nude. Thank you for 2 hour long midnight games of zombies. Thanks for countless rides! Thanks for 30 beer pictionary (read drunktionary). Thank you for trying to understand that I read too many books to be able to dance. Thanks for gender fucking. Thank you for laying on a Volvo hood next to as we talked about philosophy. Thanks for letting me tell the same stories over and over again. Thanks for a whole table top of miller high lives at the Grill. Thanks for cries of happiness at the sight of gifts. Thank you for losing all the staring contests. Thanks for directing probability to make all of this happen without it costing me much at all. Much appreciated.
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| Public Service Announcement |
[27 Sep 2007|08:09am] |
For my Tucson friends/associates/well wishers:
This is to let you know that I'm jetting on out of here on - that is two weeks from tomorrow. And this isn't a probably or most likely sort of thing - I've got the ticket kids, I'm gone!
So if you want to make fun of me, buy me a drink, start a fight etc. you've got 15 days!
(Tomorrow is my last day of work so I'll being pretty open for hanging after that)
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| asdfjhasdjdhgtryo;,gjd!!!!!! (but I'm okay now) |
[29 Jul 2007|05:04pm] |
So at 3:30 I get a phone call that due to weather in NYC my flight is canceled, oh, awesome, 8.5 hour warning.
So then I try to call them - the local number is busy for half an hour straight, then I call the 1800 number and they say that they're too busy and the robot hangs up on me....nice.
I finally get through on the local number and they tell me they can't get me out till midnight the next day (then I'd be fucked for my train not to mention other important things) and since they have no agreements with other airlines they can't help me get another flight, oh, okay, thanks assholes.
So I scramble, looking at flights, 600 dollars is the cheapest thing and that's to get me out the next day, damn it, damn it.
So I look at other red eyes, there's a delta one, after about an hour I get through to them and the lady is being a horrible ass, I can hardly understand her, she yells and doesn't understand why Jet blue's cancellation has screwed me and that it will be 900 dollars to get to nyc. Okay - I punch myself in the face.
So my dad has an idea - he has frequent flying miles, assloads of them, so he calls and they tell him they can get me out the next morning with a 100 fee (whatever at this point I don't care). But then they say 'oh but not a one way' so I have to call jet blue and say 'give me all my money back now suckas' they do. Pa calls AA they put me on the 6am fight and now I have to sit in Chicago for 3 hours and I get to JFK at 5:35pm. Also I just ate an amount of my dad's ff miles that I can't even afford. *HEAD DESK*
The money thing isn't really what pisses me off - I lost a whole morning and afternoon in NYC that I was really looking forward to but at least I can still make it to dinner.
I have learned why many folks I know are loyal to certain airlines though.
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| (re)making me angry (lol) |
[12 Jul 2007|05:00am] |
Clearly, I should have taken heed of the warning signs.
The leggings. At least I should have been worried about the leggings. I suppose the 80s have been 'coming back' for a while but lately it's just seemed like total colonialization.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Bois and Grrls, gentle ladies, ladymen, and so forth, it seems as if popular culture, as one massive lugubrious creation, is attempting to poison my entire childhood.
( Into the abyssCollapse )
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| Sleeplessness and hilarity |
[09 Jul 2007|01:38am] |
I should be in bed, but I can't sleep. Anyways, a perk of having a wordpress blog is that it informs you of the search terms that people used to find your site. Here's a list of some of the more disturbing/funny/interesting ones so far:
"I Am a Sex"
Pederasty
film sex 2007
black silhouette of woman
Larval and Magneto
einstein monroe
congealed void terror
artistic portrayals of addiction
jimi hendrix finger paint
hagmoss
evil teachers
irigaray jouissance sexuality queer
person being eaten by arachnid
silhouettes of women in heels
melancholy familiarity with death
punctuation face
sex enjoyment
demonic woman
facial twitches & trance
ORGASMING FACE
little hitler
nazi soldier art
dead female bodies
celebrity penis
how ıs woman emptıed
Apparently I write about horrible, horrible, things. Also, if anyone's interested, I recently did an entry on Hegel (I know you all secretly love him) and one on fathers before that.
Enjoy!
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| Help with the east coast |
[30 Jun 2007|10:27am] |
Okay folks, I could use, and would much appreciate, your help if your willing!
I'm traveling to NYC and Harrisburg, PA in either the last week of July or early August and was wondering if people had any info for me in regards to the following questions and/or suggestions of stuff to do in NYC (LB you know I'm pointing an accusatory finger at you mentally right now):
1 - How much does it matter what airport I'm flying into in NYC. What I've heard so far is that it's easier to get into the city (read Manhattan) from JFK but that it is a monster and impossible to navigate while LaGuardia is smaller but further away? Or does it really matter?
2 - Room/Board ideas? A couple of people have offered me floors to sleep on (and one guest room, woo?) but those offers were made other a month ago so I probably shouldn't rely on them too much.
Any other suggestions/warnings/threats would be appreciated as well, thank you!
Now I think I'm gong to go stick my head in the freezer because last night's over exposure to various substances/loud music is not gelling with this heat too well.
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| Gravity waiting |
[14 Jun 2007|11:54pm] |
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In regimented intervals, the landscape etched itself in the window glass. She sat in the train seat, sunk back in plush red. A spotty man, with the spectacles of an architect, wandered in awkward diagnosis of the train car. Sunlight lay mangled in her eyelashes. The train inched over a green caked ridge and the cars writhed like a headless snake. Think back to it – when she swirled like iron filings. The crowd held out elephant trunks of champagne. How they parted for her, how their feet made the circumference of a dais. The train starts to spiral up a mountain, the smoke plateaus near the peak. The lights had dimmed and scattered on neck jewelry and wrapped all the thin faces in glimmer. The shine off the chandelier bleeds into marionette strings above her. Posses lightness. Posses elation. The feather and the muscle, the body forgets its moorings where feet breach the tabernacle of the ground. The train clings desperately to the earth, a spider on a single string, the crumbled ridge tips like a butter knife. Her body moving, always new, always before itself, moving, ankles cradled in air. More than absence of weight, movement before thought, the way space opens up for all winged and lovely disaster. The dance that reinvents the skeleton, casts an emblem of soaring. Her body as diaphanous blade, her body as all aviation.
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| Hold the end that flocks against gravity |
[10 Jun 2007|09:59pm] |
She shuffled through the sand, head down, hair flip curled forward and bobbing just below her ear. Crescents of dust plumed up as her feet landed in rhythm with the twitching of her nose. The glossy, lunar lit water tipped up her chin with its brightness. She smiled, the star glean bent in parallax. She wandered all over, from Fairlyland, to June park, to Lotus. She thought of when he took slack time, reaching into the brambles to pull a string of Chinese lanterns. He tied it along the chopstick in her hair bun, back when it was long. She'd never remember where that had been along the Canaveral shore.
She stopped, pulled up her wrap skirt and plopped down. The sand ribboned out and nestled under the weight of the ocean. The earth rotted away beneath the eye. He had unceremoniously cradled her elbows in his palms and tilted his skull with clumsy grace into her temple. She laid down, remembering more. The shower walls, tiled orange, bled colored beams into the beads of sweat that glimmered like Venetian glass on their nestled bodies. She stretched out her toes in the sand, tried to flatten herself out, like a single celled organism, to slip under the lips of the ocean.
You can't cut iridescence, or coruscating memory, their frailty unfolds endlessly, the atoms mock the fatness of your touch. She picked herself up, sauntered towards the tide, kicked one photographic ball of foam. She made her way back and sat out on the porch of her slouching house. She craned her neck, eyed the gleam through the sloppy slots of the over hang. She followed the ladder of stars down to the fissured bicep on the horizon, smiled at the exploding candle light, quickly buried in bales of smoke. The rocket caterpillared, in hydrogen coughs, half spinning like an anorexic dreidel, towards the gossamer freckled blackness.
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| grimace or Mr Curtis hanging from the moon |
[09 Jun 2007|02:03am] |
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Swirls in the black, notches of moonlight in the tar pit - cast as the blinds go slack in the wind. Staring sleepless at the ceiling, praying for a rollover, the chin like the right peg of his clavicle. After the mark it would be nice if the razor slipped into the skin, behind the veil of blood, swallowed like a sideways apple core, stretching out the vein. Instead it stays, the mark, the remainder, the body indirectly weighing the sheet. In the dark, the way that sheet bends is the body, the echo of warmth that hangs about the bone. The first few tendrils, like poison, that shift the whole tone of the dim vat. Swirls of the black, the pruned hairs in the sink. Praying for the aphotic world, wanting all the lights to go dark, the tongue curls around a beautiful leaf of bulb glass. Beyond the desperate drowning, the closed-in gray, the pocketed horizon of a crepuscular cistern. Perhaps there is a better way to fail completely - to pick the most ambrosial barnacles at the roof of the rotten mouth, to drop the stopper chain. The dental Venetian white, stained to gray, chalky, lunar, the stones to pass somberly past - crystals to see the future dyed by soot. The boy, unable to sleep, tried to say 'I hope you come to the funeral' to the small of a back where the wrinkles in the undershirt piled up like a grimace. In the pause of expectation it is best to topple even the gift ribbon of hope.
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| trying poetry |
[05 Jun 2007|01:53am] |
Digging through my old text files I found a little nugget some folks here might appreciate. It's a poem I wrote a few years back that I often referred to jokingly as 'my big queer poem' though my fellow students simply dubbed it 'offensive.'
( It's called...Collapse )
Also, new entry over at Naught Thought. It's on fascism and Pan's Labyrinth.
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| Night at the one penny opera for my thoughts |
[02 Jun 2007|11:37pm] |
The burst strawberry, for a second, attempts to sadly reverse its fate in the imagination. The stain around the leafy stem appears to be a premonition of the fruit, trying like a flower, to bloom from the besmirched asphalt. Too quickly the mind wanders to bacterial subjection. There's no time to dwell.
The swap meet is not the usual anchored sort of people watching but the kind in the spirit of objectivity abandoning anthropologists. It's that kind of overly rational yet hysterical panic that anchors the head downwards in such a way that notices the strawberry in the first place. A fear of eye contact, or of looking too interested in the wares or...? Not that the ground itself is totally uninteresting - it shares that strange quality of grimy structural stability you catch at ballparks, fair grounds, drive in lots.
There's a conveyor belt abused suitcase filled to the brim with golf balls, lead tainted candy sweating in plastic, avalanche after avalanche of watermelons, golf carts dispensing beer and towing garbage, squadrons of razor scooters, and all Gwen Stefani all the time from the back of a biker's truck. The sun is down, the stars are down, the moon is late - some ladies pick up three tennis rackets - clearly they are responsible. An Asian man, with a perfectly aged face, sells petite girl heads, stuffed with symboled newspaper, and does it in Spanish. Strange chips, half oranges seasoned, sleek libraries of sunglasses, lifted plasma displaying computer constructed bears, shirts you could almost buy. Looks slide down you and me too slowly.
All the way down the lane you learn to spot the children with tantrum symptoms. Why is there more hand holding than high school? The dull thud of the patted pregnant belly, the wrist at the small of the back. The sunset is tumbling down the mountains, the chopper braves it like a hiccup. Why do I think a fight cannot not break out? Woman with a single tooth, the oldest man cuts a key as effortlessly as I put on watch. Someone is looking for a husband, the child almost wanders into the porn booth, maybe drawn by the warning strobe. The incense hut - the translady sounds like David Spade as Gap girl - so friendly and patient as we sample China rain, smudge my shirt with mint and almost drop cinnamon. I eye the black opium. I keep looking at the pink in her hair. The koi across from the carousel - maybe the last one, maybe the only bit of centrifugal childhood left, maybe the thing that notes the ever indistinct possibility that a sedimentation principle of class hangs shamefully in my head.
And there is the faint, jocoserious and strange excitement that the car is still there.
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| head explosion |
[31 May 2007|08:14pm] |
So I never really counted myself amongst those panic postmodern philosophers (Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Jean-François Lyotard etc) who paranoically fret over the loss of 'authentic experience,' who decried the contemporary disentegration of meaning.
But it's stories like this that make me reconsider: Coping with death on the web
While I can understand the appeal of some kind of online mourning when it's someone you only ever knew through the web, or someone you knew but can't physically get back to, the idea of making mourning effortless or more convenient is total and complete crap (this particular aspect is found more in the comments than in the story itself).
This kind of mourning is not interpersonal mourning or even public mourning, it's show mourning - in that we mourn or 'have our hearts' with someone, some group, just to 'feel' like we are participating in something without actually doing anything. It becomes maudlin masturbation. Case and point: at this years graduation the president of ASUA actually went as far as to point out how many U of A students formed a Facebook group 'supporting' Virginia Tech students. People cheered. For what?
Oh - good job kids, you pressed a button, awesome.
Maybe it's because American's have no tragedy proper, just the continual and collective falterings of our national idealism.
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| Dear Universe |
[22 May 2007|11:43am] |
Please explode me now.
Thank you.
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| Travel, work, grad school and so forth |
[19 May 2007|09:48pm] |
Seemingly, the supposed feeling of accomplishment which graduating college is supposed to court is late, overly so. I should probably work a little harder at squelching my optimism (that is my 'hidden' kernel of optimism which probably has something to do with death drive) but even, just now unwrapping the last piece of graduation cake (which took an army and a week to eat), something felt stupidly ceremonious...as if ah...now we have it. Frustration.
There is no good systematic way to look for graduate programs, unless you have money and people to do it for you it seems.
There's not enough American scholars in the group of thinkers I like who are interesting programs, so looking by faculty hasn't panned out at all.
Overseas seems too expensive and unrealistic, and I am not too excited about living in England since that's probably where I could get in and study continental theory.
Job application has not gone well, and even the posted jobs are not too promising.
So travel, yeah?
Germany, and in particular Bavaria. Every time I see pictures of Bavaria I think I'm going to go into a coma it's so pretty.
Oh and also this:
If you can tell the degree to which I am joking you get a cookie. But in all seriousness (that is if I am not already serious)
traveling seems like the lark. So Germany (Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart), side trip to Prague, Vienna maybe?
Anyone been to any of those places????
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| R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut |
[12 Apr 2007|12:24am] |
"I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke."
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." - Slaughterhouse-Five
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