soulmate

i know they're out there.

SUMMER'SKOOL

it's starting to feel like summer. finally.

midder-day beers, longer bike rides, sweatier hangovers.

i'm ready for it.


being out of school is starting to feel less oppressive. you know, like the thing i actually want and have been wanting for the two miserable (mostly) years spent at uchicago.

back to the base

i was feeling pretty rough this morning. when i woke up, the weird metal valve in my bathroom was flooding everywhere. my half-packed boxes of books were in mortal danger. the water was hot and murky, which was even grosser than it needed to be. then i had to make all hundred calls to the landlord, super, the landlord's son, etc. i got the leak under control myself. it was just messy and obviously clogged. it wasn't as refreshing as the leisurely morning i had planned for myself of searching the nyfa website and drinking coffee.

i was feeling all restless and angsty when i realized something. oh, wait, things are still pretty cool. the world is still filled with pretty great things.

it was the discovery of a real live unicorn that really did it for me.

yes, i did just write "a real live unicorn."



not a joke. a shy italian unicorn no less.

it got me back to the whole point of this thing, the blog i mean. the idea was i would keep a record of the tiny, stupid things that make me feel so emphatic about the world being great. the world is this big thing. it's a big thing made of a lot of little things and sometimes you get to brush up against some really cool things.

like this lady


i normally get really annoyed by street musicians. but this lady! holy shit. i have never encountered such a silent subway audience. she was playing three instruments at once and also using her shoes to tap dance a rhythm. and she was stoked with this lady gave her a lunchable. she is a one-man-band and humble to boot.

i also started a new mixtape which is the first bummer summer mix i have tried to make. it is a delicate balance between summer jams and heartbreakers. i am driving myself back to bloomington this weekend and will need jams. i have never driven that long before. i have a tape player and a sunroof and i am pumped.

i am ordering my favie jams, listening to the wipers amid a bunch of boxes and drinking beer before noon.



addendum: what the fuck is going on with the figure behind the dogs? what the fuck is this picture?

no wait fuck this more

so, i am scouring the craiglists for most major american cities for jobs, apartments, non-underwear related opportunities and by far san francisco has the most annoying roommate posts i have ever seen. they may be just the most annoying thing i have ever seen under any circumstances. i'm not not a free spirit, right? i don't like to think i am a hater or anything, but sometime the faux quirkiness is just a little too much. it's like they ate some adderall after watching eternal sunshine of a spotless mind and were inspired to write the most quirky craigslist roommate ads. when it really comes out is the people who bother to write these questionnaires for the potential roommate.

this is a selection from the worst offender to date:

1. What in particular specifically drew you to respond to this posting?
1a. Who are you in 9 words or less, or a haiku:
2. In life, what do you do?
3. Why would you be a good fit here with us?
4. What are your top 3 favorite recordings that you’d take with you if you were to have to evacuate the planet to go to mars and could only take three 8 tracks, cds, records, or tapes with you?
5. Do u like madlibs? Finish the following sentence: George W Bush has a wife named Laura who can really put the__________ back in your ______!
6. MTV sucks. Please elaborate in 1 sentence.
7. You are against violence and you are a vegan who occasionally eats insects. You see a small sick little girl being bitten by an infected mosquito. What do you do; kill it? Ask it to leave? Call a long dramatic house meeting and act as a team to eradicate the flying fuck.
8. You have been asked to join the Bach street boy’s backup band for their tour of AfghanistanGetz.
What instrument will you play? Sorry, you may not sing or dance.
9. Which fake band name is cooler: Cuddlefish, the i can'ts, KasioKrist, press play, Kilt them all, or the Masters of Bating?
10. What would you rather do: Clean toilets and bathrooms, clean the food infucted kitchen, or pick up after others and vacuum the house?
11. You MUST vote for the next president so who will it be: the old Pope, Joseph (father of Jesus), that guy from “nightcourt”, Miss Nancy from romper room, John stamos. You must pick one of these people.
12. At Halloween you like to be: scary, stupid, original, drunk, any combo of the above.
13. In concise detail (1 sentence) what are any of the following things? A low frequency oscillator, a reducing compound, the word for “waste” in Japanese, a falsetto, the anal stage?
14. You are at a party, someone hands you a tray on which is a doob, a white line, a needle, a parcel of fresh air, a glass of scotch and a little tiny piece of square paper. You must ingest 1 of these. Which one and why (the tray doesn't count)?
15. Which column are you in? Column A: "I h8 fags and all sorts of other types of people". Column B" I like anyone except those in column A", or Column C "please leave me alone everyone as no one is cool".
16. Without looking it up!! How do you spell that word that rhymes with "with him" and describes a repetitious pattern? ei "That drummer has a great sense of _____. Spell that word.

i h8 quirky 30-something that still think h8ing mtv is relevant. "do u like madlibs?" you want to me describe myself in haiku and give you definitions for basic psychoanalytic concepts? am i applying to live at a satelite burning man convention?

it's times like this that make me wonder if the bay is the right place at all.

oh fuck you

i really don't need existential questions posed at me from a mid-sized suv vanity plate right now, thank you very much.

arrow of time

i just finished college.

the world seems like it just got way way bigger. and i gotta keep movin.

my fancy, top-tier education has taught me that the universe actually has and is still and will never stop expanding. nothing like the theoretical dismantling of stasis to getcha movin. thanks second law of thermodynamics!

Elm Street

i think i am generally pretty posi, love life, affirm my interest in a state of being perpetually stoked. but, lately, the idea of time has started to really weigh on me. i am probably going to be alive for a while and that means making choices about how to fill my time -and there is alot of it to fill. ordinarily, that is something i do without thinking. i keep busy and rarely feel bored. if nothing else, i am pretty satisfied with my internal dialogue and personal jokes to feel okay about doing things i don't even really like that much because i always like making fun of things more than i dislike whatever i am forced to make fun of. but, my eternal flame of a pma is straining right now. i am just sort of at a loss with what to do. it's funny because it's a general fact. the thing is i have no idea what i will be doing at all after the next three weeks. i could literally fill my time with anything. i have zero plans and unlimited choices, which in a certain way makes making any decision harder. strangely, my new indecisiveness is also manifesting in my inability to do small things like decide what to eat, to read anything for more than a few pages at a time, or do anything besides lay in bed. this uneasiness is a normal part of any major transition i guess. but, it is sort of disappointing to be going through such a cliche crisis as i am about to graduate.

is it really so scary to be in the world?


i guess i have a pretty long lineage of people trying to turn dreams into reality.

this is what

friendship looks like when it is sleepy and drowning in plush patterns.






photo by liza rose

wishlist item #1

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290233754861
oh, what's that? just a townes van zandt fan club shirt.



are you kidding me?!? how could it be any better?
and designed by "rusty chest"?

graduation gift, hint hint

lonely hearts flub

me and hannah went to see the new harmony korine movie mister lonely last night. as i expected, it is so so so good. strangely, there is a central plot which is a sort of love story of a michael jackson impersonator and a marilyn monroe impersonator. it's not that i didn't like the narrative parts. but, to be honest, they aren't what made my jaw drop in the theatre. it was the smaller, unconnected parts that made we go wild. the there are these incredible scenes where nuns in the bluest blue robes are skydiving in panama against the bluest blue sky without parachutes from a plane flown by a priest played by werner herzog. it is the perfect meeting -not really a balance- a shifting meeting of these two poles of unrationalized beauty, like actually sublime, and then this bizarre surreal joke. an example: in one of the scenes the nuns are riding bmx bikes as they fly through the air, flipping, turning, grinning (talk about catching some air!). the speed of their fall and the blending colors as they are spinning makes this pinwheel image that i couldn't get over. also, the abe lincoln impersonator might be hannah's favorite character in a movie ever which is really saying something.

i think what i love best about the things korine makes, his books, movies, even the name poems he and mark gonzalez make, is that what comes out is just what he wants to see. it is sheer fantasy. it is completely generated for his own enjoyment. the fantasy itself feels so personal. there is never a moment where the film tries to justify its contents. there is just a castle filled with impersonators in the highlands. the how's and why's are not important. they can't be the exact things that i am dreaming up when i fixate, eyes-closed, on an image. but, there is something great about watching someone else's fantasies materialize before your eyes. it reminds you that there are ways of making the things you want to see in the world.

the day before i went to the art institute to go to mario ybarra jr's opening "no man is an island." blake had made a replica of wrigley field for him. the whole installation was centered around the baseball and the chicano power movement in the early 70's. the song "no man is an island" was playing the whole time. fuck, that is a good song. the gallery it is in is the last room of the contemporary wing. i was wandering around and stumbled into this



holy shit! david wojnarowicz!



bizarrely, there was just this room of david wojnarowicz and keith harring. i am not sure that i love the choice to put the two of them together, or at least the pieces that were actually put together. plus, i think it would've been really great to put these late wojnarowicz works into conversation with the felix gonzalez torres pieces in another part of the very small contemporary wing... but, still! i finally got to see that print! really, it's wojnarowicz's writing that i love most. that said, some of the photographs are simply incredible; like in the aperture that he did, or, rather, was done about him. but, some of the paintings are sometimes a little simple or even cheesy.
this is is on the cover of close to the knives and i think it is still absolutely mesmerizing.





this one is an earlier work that is part of a fairly large series where he took photographs of himself with a mask of rimbaud on.



in terms of the idea, isn't that really charming and sweet? but, the photographs are so much more complex than that.

rimbaud seems to be one of those figures that people really try to embody. in the chris kraus book i love dick, she talks about david rattray moving to paris and going to the bibliotech nationale to look up every book rimbaud checked out. then he actually read them. all of them. the idea was that if he filled himself with the things rimbaud was filled with that he could be that much closer to understanding him. i love the romanticism of that, in a way. but it also grosses me out a little. do you have to become someone else to love them? i mean any other person -whether a writer or a lover. i don't think so. isn't the really gratifying part learning about the other person and yourself, the distance, the contrast, the bridging?
in some ways, it seems like the desire to be rimbaud through reading is no less bizarre and self-effacing that the impersonators in mister lonely. where do we start to think that we can be other people? not aspire to have other traits, to fix ourselves, but really be someone else?

take some time, drink some beers and get to the bottom of this: