fanny and alexander

ill learn swedish best from the mouths of the dying and lucid. they take their time, ready to freeze eternally on a syllable. though stroke victims aren't the best with their paralyzed muscles, one can't enunciate so well with a frozen cheek.

i'm disappointed to suspect that a big part of bergman's directing was telling actors to not blink and keep their damn eyes as open as they could because those eyes, god dammit, were why they got cast

i can't stop paying attention to the master-servant relationship, it's all i see in every shot, and how flammable everything is. i'm the dullard, the worried parent at christmas celebration because of the candles swaying in the tree.

and the religious step-parent is such a theme in horror movies, like robert mitchum in the night of the hunter. except whereas mitchum's an almost comically evil charlatan, who at least sings, this fucking bishop actually seems to believe. his bible is well thumbed, anyway. and his flute is as much a weapon as his carpet-beating thing. what a dense ball of evil


also, alexander has my haircut, modern stockholm boy haircut. nothing changes. ingenting

last night watching this movie was interrupted by my parents return from nova scotia. we were to discuss the future about how much money they'd give me to fly places and be happy but they'd been driving for a long time and they were cranky. fanny and alexander is such a little world, alexander's eyes contain so much depth and sensitivity that it was difficult to not feel myself a persecuted alexander when i was told that i had to do a few small things before they'd give me hundreds of dollars. when they said "it's because we love you" i heard the bishop explaning how his love is not "blind and sloppy but strong and harsh." there are lots of characters to identify with in that movie and i wonder if one day i will stop seeing myself in children. falling asleep, i realized that rather than alexander i could be carl, the wretched carl with the german wife who weeps so his face is like a fist because his mother won't give him any more money. i hope i grow up to be gustav adolf. to feel so gluttonously; his bib is spattered with emotion. he feels like a baby eats, and he does it wearing polka dot bow ties. i don't know what that speech about the "little world" was but i think bergman was getting old and happy.

pre-loved

things to do:
-destroy the word "used" and with it notions about scabies and funny smells and the ipod that fell off the truck (and destroy the facts from which those notions derive)
-make pre-loved more available. i have to look hard if i want to find a pre-loved something and that has to change
-get people's stuff out of their apartments so that there's more pre-loved stuff as an alternative to new stuff (also to free people of dust and clutter and all that evil)
-or else effectively get the stuff catalogued while it remains in their apartments
-defeat the cycle of buying new, unnecessary stuff all the time which is destroying the world and the people on it
-up with hand me downs (need a new name) (or maybe not, hand me down actually has a nice ring to it)
-up with the lasting, the durable, the supple leather of 10 year old boots
-and with it, up with retailers recycling back their old products. up with trade-ins (i think...)
-i went to east village shoe repair, which is the russian man in the whole in the wall on st. mark's place to the people that know it. the shop is a trash heap of shoes with which the russian man is intimately familiar, but which is a trash heap nonetheless. it struck me forcibly that there is a lot of work to do to change the face of that which has been owned already. one should not have to paw through such heaps to follow one's beliefs.
-i'm going to volunteer at housing works starting this saturday and i want to make sure i ask them lots of questions about how that business works. i am going to get knowledgeable, i've got enough blind excitement already -there should be return policies on pre-loved things. that everything is final sale at thrift stores instinctively makes one feel like a sucker, that they've finally pawned this thing off on someone and are glad to be rid of it. it means that they want it out of the store. this does not encourage people to shop at pre-loved stores.
 -i came across some cool hippy dippy sites today like freecycle.org on which you can tell the internet that you're dumping something on the street before you do. it is useful and good.
-fading! faded is the most elegant thing, the gradual replacement of the new with the sun and wind and touch.

the seventh seal

this movie's the bomb. i love the idea of the actor having visions rather than actually seeing all of these things, or at least that's what bibi andersson always says, because that lends the two stories, merging and diverging, an unreality to each other that i believe. the knight can only glimpse their heavenly world and they his from neighboring hilltops. also, the idea of death leading them in a dance to the "dark lands" is ineffably beautiful.

everything with jons (frederik egerman and vergerus sans facial hair! what a dour mouth that guy has, i never realized) is so funny and excellent and good. that's patter as sublime. you greasy cuckold. and the way he rolls his rs makes me lightheaded with desire.

and max von sydow with his face and his questions, playing chess as best he can. bergman likes the concept more than the actual game, i think. how dyou have the narrative force and central drama of the film turn on such nonsense as "i take your queen" and "i didn't see that coming" or whatever he says. that is pathetic, you've got to notice when someone can simply going to take your queen.

and the tree getting cut down by death, the stump with the squirrel.

on looting

has any world been readier for looting than ours? how tantalizing all the shop windows are. in a world where window shopping exists, there's only a thin line of etiquette separating us from the stuff retailers seductively dangle. what's a pane of glass? is it any wonder that someone would take something if a bit of that etiquette went away? it isn't even a change, just a simpler, less expensive shopping, it's a really good sale, paying the cost of the chaos and the unpleasantness of knowing what you're doing isn't strictly orthodox, and paying that alone for the object.

how ridiculous that anyone should expect anyone to behave otherwise when these objects have forced themselves into our mental pathways. s was telling me about an article he read justifying downloading music illegally, at least in the case of pop music, because the music, when blared in public places, has colonized, without permission, the pathways in our brains. to own the song, therefore, to have the right to listen to it whenever we want, is simply to own ourselves, to reclaim that which has already been forced on us. the shopping, the discounted shopping that is looting is the same thing. that we should be made to so constantly drool and not then act when the cost is affordably low is outrageous and unreasonable.

it would, of course, be something very different if shops weren't set up the way they are, if the windows were gray and the objects were squirreled away and dusty. i mean, if it took the tiniest bit of goddamn agency to WANT the things in the windows this would be a very different situation. looting in a state of chaos is really no state of exception at all, it isn't planning for a return to normalcy any more than it is to shop during a terrific sale.

s was arguing how looting is to plan for a return to normalcy, that looting is a kind of work where one recognizes that taking something has monetary value that will become actionable and profitable once things are back to normal. i think that's an aspect of this too that further helps to explain looting, to put a cherry on top for the particularly thoughtful looter really intent on justifying themselves, but really it's just shopping. how nice to have things.

p.s. s noted how stores had taken stuff out of their windows in anticipation of the hurricane. they're smart like the relentless flirt who's found themselves with a sexual assaulter. the retailers realize a line could easily be crossed where one could not resist.

hurricane irene

11:05, saturday. It's raining! if it rained like this for a month straight it would probably be a problem. this is a pretty respectable downpour, you can hear it like a clock ticking, the pelting progress of time. hearing rain for time is probably a truer measure of it in the same way that an impressionists chair is really the truer chair. how sad it would be if we felt time in the clipped interruptions of our human seconds; it'd be like seeing the world by the atom, with the cavernous spaces between nuclei and electrons. there's so much in between, so slippery, and there are a billion clocks. rain is a better clock. rain is time for the mind at large, for the unreduced mind. rain does justice to the great messy torrent which is the world moving, and not even straight, i guess snow would be the better analogy for the messiness of time, moving sideways and taking its time and then blindingly down all at once and then sometimes even moving backwards, back up again on the thermals of memory, except that snow doesn't make any noise -- but then again maybe that's appropriate. what, other than a fascist marching band, a soviet five year plan makes claims that time makes noise as it passes? time is silent. hey, it's snow, not time

also, 11:29, the rain has stopped. the sun is coming out again, the buildings have noticeably brightened.

12:32, back from shopping, that was hectic and funny. situations like this, situations where there's something universal to talk about you realize all the nonsense people have kicking around in their brains. people are harmless enough when they shop silently but it's an unhappy revelation to learn what they've been keeping cooped up in their skulls. one musclebound man with a sharp patch of hair on the top of his head was expounding on the toughness of koreans and their little delis. great. a universal happening like weather lets you see in everybody's head for once. when a dog barks after lightning strikes i know why he barks. the sad thing about that discovery and that opportunity is to find out nobody's thinking anything very interesting.

8:31, irene's moving at 16 mph. hilarious to think of it as a fat lady jogging. sixteen measly miles an hour! this is taking forever! i was expecting disaster tonight for god's sake, this could take all week! the people who have died are those having heart attacks from being so anxious about the terribleness of the storm. also, one guy fell off a ladder. this is shaping up to be pretty disappointing. my hope is to get some 80 mph winds so that i can pretend to be mary poppins on our stoop. that is my fondest wish. s and i made a delicious dinner and watched the life aquatic which i think is pretty second rate. there are some good bits. generally speaking, id like wes anderson to bric-a-brac my life. i think that's his greatest talent by far. s and i have pancake mix for tomorrow morning as well as ample supplies for pb and j into the foreseeable future. we are prepared and undaunted.

wind is a kind of magic too. it raises an army of trash, animating garbage bags into bag ladies, paper cups into skittering cats, caution tape into flailing arms. everywhere scraps hail you, alive only to be anxious. still, shadows must envy them.



10:08 Pickpocket by Robert Bresson is some preachy-ass scriptural shit with a plot and acting as ponderous as bible quotations. the gymnastics of their pickpocketing are truly marvelous but the weight of their emotions would make a messiah cringe. what's most terrible is the unflinching faith in the establishment, in the god-like wisdom of the police chief and everyone's bottomless kindness to the pickpocket-sinner. what a fucking farce. ponderous-ass farce.

10:30 or so s and i went for a walk down to hudson river park. it was misty with a 6th rate wind, it was a suggestion of weather, a spritzer. there were dog walkers and a bit of rowdy water, higher than usual, which looked today like a hungry animal too small to reach you. we're so unobservant that it's little wonder the sky is suddenly full of malice and strangeness or the sea frothing with metaphors when there's a big to do like there is right now. we should realize that sky and sea are pretty much ALWAYS full of goddamn malice and danger we just don't care to pay them any mind. all anyone needs to die a horrible, cruel death is to be left in a 10 foot sink filled 7 feet with water. water'd swallow you, sink you, grab you till you're dead. water's a 5th column; it's lain in wait for its master. for so long it lapped the shores, idly supping, and now it'll rise up and swallow us whole.

there WERE a couple of fallen trees in the park by bleecker street which was some consolation. i took a piece of brick as a souvenir. they had actually fallen over! it was terrific! though as s noted they'd doubtless been transplanted and were only supported by gravity rather than the typical tentacles of a tree that size. after all, in turning over they'd brought with them that dense square with which new trees get planted, like a a pastry for a Sauropod, but hardly any roots. s and i both slept with the window open and heard/felt nothing

11:47 also, the tragedies of hurricane irene continue to not have to do with wind or extraordinary amounts of rain -- houses burned down by candles, people falling off ladders preparing for 2nd rate tropical storm, heart attacks from anxiety at the fear people'd been made to feel. some idiot died hydroplaning, etc. better safe than sorry except for all the ordinary tragedies of safety, and of telling people to be a good deal more terrified than they need to be.

1:02 watching Solaris but am terribly tired, s is napping and i think ill have one too. this movie's weird. am watching commentaries to make sense of it. no one says much more than "tarkovsky didn't like space, science fiction, he liked the earth." great. also, this was all new stuff. id appreciate it more if i hadnt seen these ideas about memories and imaginations in blade runner already (though after, of course). and yeah the set is super dooper and there's a lot of stuff i flatly fail to understand. i just learned that apparently the rain, the highly isolated drizzles that happen now and then, are symbolic of the holy spirit. did not know that. been thinking since then about mutant memories back to haunt us. tarkovsky loves the earth and that's straightforward enough; what's interesting are these visions of the past gone rogue, without an anchor to reality (for our nostalgia would build people as good as faces we sketch as we sleep. i wouldn't want the nose i'd draught) would be monsters.

6:18, s went home, all is peaceful, trees get flustered now and then but i think they're hamming it up. trees are effectively sails after all, they couldn't be better designed to get terribly excited over little breezes. really, there could be nothing easier to topple than a tree in bloom, all set up to catch the wind but stuck to a trunk. on a windy day they're contradictions, a house divided.

i was also thinking earlier about how i was probably unreasonable about the wind, how i expected to be able to be anywhere and feel the brunt of it and how i got all in a huff when i went in front of my house and failed to fly away like mary poppins. but wind is a rather pathetic thing in a city, it can't blanket it like snow falling from the sky or make itself known like an earthquake beneath every foot, it has to navigate the streets like any pedestrian, finding street corners good for hailing cabs (those corners are always the windiest, especially 13th and 8th avenue) and avoiding blind alleys. it's little wonder if the wind got tired and lost on the doorsteps of my neighbors in greenwhich village and failed to get to me.

the magician, bergman

that was a weird movie. it was like smiles of a summer night for believing instead of love. in the end, the belief of a king is enough to change the whole genre of a movie. they are what we want? what tortured people, conforming to all the various expectations. and that crazy scene in the attic. i found that all really scattered, another one of those movies where i don't know what's what, where there doesn't seem to be anything with a foot fully in the "real world," anything on which i can rely and base the rest of my interpretation.

the characters not in the troupe are simple enough, and the characters that arent vogler and his wife are i guess the only ones for whom it all isnt clear.

do they not like him in the end because they don't understand him anymore? i guess we don't like him either, he's lost us the way he has them. he's come into a dream world, he's succeeded and so been damned permanently. still there are all these erratic sprinklings of magic throughout, the ordinary kinds. it's all however much you make of it, the police chief's wife telling the truths, etc. everyone wants so much to laugh, what a fucking relief to laugh and understand.

in a movie like that i suppose one expects the reprieve of learning whether or not vogler and co are at all magical, and they are for other people. other people can build their edifices of belief and imagination on them. the real magic, the creepy truths only emerge i guess after he takes off that face and frightens the wits out of us and the chief douche bag.

but there's all this secondary stuff i fail to understand, like the brandy ghost man. he i do not understand one bit except in and of himself, in the narrowest sense. and i also don't understand the witch. for why is that ending forced on her? why is she a fake, accumulating riksdollars? is it because she acted? it's all so hazy

things to remember

some things i want to remember:

from franny and zooey: do it for the fat lady. i'm not sure if the idea of doing ones best for the suffering ones out there holds water, but i like the idea at least in the context of not hating the audience that laughs at the bad jokes, that doesn't get it, that eats peanuts unselfconsciously. i also loved the idea of having sympathy for people because they probably ended up doing the wrong thing. the TV producer wouldve been a first rate carpenter, and yoga teacher wouldve been completely fulfilled as a mathematician, etc. it argues against the unbridled, unreasonable belief that there is self determination, and, even more truthfully and alarmingly, that the self determination there is doesn't necessarily lead us down the right path. there are blind alleys in which we spend whole blind lives. and when i started rereading it as soon as i finished zooey i saw lane with new eyes, better eyes, kinder eyes and that made me glad. i hope i can have that outside of the book.

and right now i'm reading the doors of perception which is full of truths a bit too fantastical for my daily life, but they make one think. i now sometimes think about my reduction valve, that thing through which my mind reduces the real, non-symbolic original universe, the wonderful originals, so that i might think and function and essentially survive as a material being. i understand and appreciate and know the world only about as far as is necessary to get my daily bread and not get run over by a truck. but there is the real out there, and if you take something like mescalin you are dazzlingly aware of it, aware of the folds in your linen pants, of how the portraits are so much paint, of the petty symbolism of our language and sight when our reduction valve is busy reducing. and there's this truly marvelous passage describing how in the tibetan book of the dead the souls without bodies burn and writhe and practically explode from their closeness to unmitigated reality in all its sensory overload (maybe kind of like dying if you see a greek god naked, now that i think about it). and in that state, they cry out and flee headlong into the next mortal body or into hell or into fucking anywhere other than the intolerable brightness of a mind-at-large. he also has interesting things to say about schizophrenia which i'm pretty skeptical of.

looooong walk.

earthquake!

There was an earthquake in New York today while I was at school. Things shook briefly, like the static of a telephone made physical or as if 8 seconds worth of gigantic trucks had driven by. I loved it. I wanted it to continue. I lost my shit with glee. It was fantastically exciting to not, for a few seconds, take the immense inertia of the floor and the building for granted. It's like remembering the gigantic bully that is bad architecture has a still larger person to answer to.

A girl in my class reprimanded me for my glee. In the most immediate sense she said I was being rude to the people in the room who were frightened, but also to those at the epicenter of the earthquake in Washington D.C. that might be in danger. More generally, my glee wasn't respectful to those who had suffered and died because of earthquakes. She had an interesting point. I was dancing at the fringes of what was a potentially homicidal happening. The tremors we felt were of one and the same source as those that might have done great harm. It was immoderate to love the twitching tail of a dragon.

The thing is that everything awesome that happens in nature is inextricable from violence. We have oil only because dinosaurs died; We have Hyacinths only because Hyacinthus died; We have life only because the sun is on fire. Saying we're made of stars is really saying we're made of the shrapnel of explosions of incomprehensibly destructive power. Life is the warmth of someone else's pyre. Beauty is having a seat at someone else's apocalypse. The universe is a violent stage; the idea is to be a spectator, not a player.

Distance is the important thing. Noting that the chain of push and pushed was started by and littered with occurrences with names like "the big bang" would be true but no less rude for it if your neighbor's house was hit by lightning. Charlie Chaplin said that "life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." Applied to the ongoing natural catastrophe that is the universe, it's polite to step backwards before we start chuckling at the wonder of the thing. Is New York far enough from D.C.? God, at any rate, must be enjoying the view.

several things

magical magical dogs. i met polly on my stoop with a woman with fifties hair, blonde and very sculpted, not hair as much as a frame. polly is this woman's angel, her shadow. polly also has "fly chasing disorder." she chases flies, or whatever else she's seeing -- and why limit it to flies? they could be dragons or tinkerbells or dog penises. she jumps after them and snaps at the air. dogs are really fucking magical. the world as it is is full of OUR dreams, our memories full of things that never were and shall never be. the air is thick with our imaginings, many of them quite literally guide our development and define the future, the world yet unseen. and dogs are doing that too with their maladjusted little heads. their piss probably reeks of neuroses, i bet other dogs can smell it. it is a rich and strange world when you know that even -- or especially -- the little brains of dogs aren't functioning quite right. it's like the toy room in bladerunner. what a lot of misbehavior there is to see behind.

http://www.petalia.com.au/Templates/StoryTemplate_Process.cfm?specie=Dogs&story_no=1530

technology ahead of its time is indistinguishable from magic, think dogs noses i guess. that'd be a depressing view, probably the truest one though. we'll excavate their minds, explain their oddities, demolish their mystery. we just need the equipment. and to hold our heads rather lower.

also, i hadn't heard of ernie kovacs before and that guy is fucking terrific. youtube him, dearest k!

love,
frank

hour of the wolf

ahhhh
hour of the wolf is like deconstructing harry for maniacs. i just don't know. i don't know what the deal is with that. it's about a maniac. horrible things exist in his mind. i don't know whether this can't be elaborated because it's the ineffable stuff of a mind or for aesthetic reasons, but they're crazy things, things that don't fit together very well but form an extremely troubled picture. there was one part at the beginning when it was sunny and there were apple blossoms. but then things changed rather fast. what a fucking serious movie. jesus christ. why is it that everything of any weight, anything that takes itself seriously is so unfriendly? it's really a take it or leave it kind of movie, very austere in its narration. i'm sure i can misinterpret it a thousand ways. papageno? i remember liking papageno. i don't envy the mind capable of making that thing.

there's an astounding amount of sexual tension to be had in the streets around my house. there is so much unflinching eye contact. i'd heard about gay people in some places having handkerchiefs and things to speak in code, but eye contact is really the best thing they've got to express their desires. for people that have been so oppressed and made to feel so ashamed, it's terrific that they, in this subtle, uncatchable way can cow anyone who isn't ready for their gaze. the air is thick with the laser sex eye beams. all the affirmation, the reminders i've ever needed that i can be and am a sexual being are for the taking in those stares.

not my breakup

i watched these two young gay guys break up across the street. the red t shirt was breaking up with the keffiyeh. the fight happened because they were at cubbyhole, the lesbian bar down my street, and red shirt was talking to a girl and keffiyeh came up and said "this is my boyfriend." this infuriated red shirt because apparently keffiyeh does stuff like that all the time. i didn't really understand what that stuff is. it was really ugly when red shirt was crying and yelling "don't touch me!" while keffiyeh was caressing his face and trying to kiss him. red shirt was angry and preachy and unequivocal and looked like he was having as good a time as one can have breaking up with someone. he lectured keffiyeh, saying "just because you say you love me, or whatever, doesn't mean it's okay" and made dark predictions about keffiyeh's life, telling him he needed "get his shit together," though he personally didn't care anymore and couldn't be responsible for him. he had put up with his shit for nine months. it was really theatrical, keffiyeh grabbing red's arm, the outdoor voices, the shrill, righteous, quavering and desperate outbursts. it happened between west 4th and greenwhich avenue along 12th street, ending in front of 239 west 12th under a scaffolding. i watched from my window, later grabbing cigarettes as an excuse to sit on my stoop to get a better view. they parted going in opposite directions, red shirt turning onto greenwich, but keffiyeh meaningfully turned and ran after him, flip flops slapping. it was hideous, i wonder if anything that loud inevitably creates such a gigantic gulf between the feelings of the actors and the audience; their voices projected too far from the depth of their emotions, echoing in the ears of people who will only remember them as red and keffiyeh. it was an authentically sad and violent moment and i was fascinated in the coldest way.

while i was riding my bike i tested whether my helmet was tight enough by shaking my head back and forth. this is pretty silly looking, but also really stupid while one is riding a bike. i immediately crashed into a construction barrier and half fell off my bike and people must have thought i was having a seizure, or certainly suffering from some involuntary spasm, because what kind of idiot would endanger himself so hilariously testing whether he was safe? i was operating an acetylene while reading the safety manual.

i want to write about life so i don't get bogged down with the little things. it's like thought is a river and i want it to run a course through new territory, to not get silted and turn in on itself as old rivers do. i want to be above the fray, the smallness, the petty components which really do make up life if you don't see beyond them. i don't want my life to be an uncut list of banal shit, without hierarchy, everything right alongside the bathroom visits.

while i was waiting for my chinese takeout i saw this woman eating frozen yogurt in TLC, The Lite Choice. She was sitting on a stool at the window and she was the saddest looking person i've ever seen. her face was very white and it looked like wax. her skin overran her brows like wax on a candlestick and her eyes were sunken and small and beady, pupil heavy. she ate the yogurt sticking the spoon a good way into her mouth, like some pokey medical instrument. she had the same, pretty pained expression throughout, but she did eat a lot of yogurt.

this chinese food is great.

their manners were great and impeccable in the way that puts you constantly in the wrong.

there is this green thing called mustard greens that looks like something that gets lost in a salad, but it actually tastes like mustard in the most intense way. it tastes like two fat fingers shoved up your nose. i keep eating it because i don't really believe that it can taste the way it does. i come from the heinz and hellman's school of thinking that says that taste is a monolith, a pure form that comes in a single color of a certain consistency. what a fucking vegetable.

more ESL

we have to ask questions to make sure students understand what we're teaching them. they're called concept check questions, or CCQs. we have to write down the answers to our own CCQs. the whole process is a lot like a lawyer preparing to question a wily and unpredictable witness. there has to be no question or answer you have not anticipated.

i had such a nice talk with s on the couch. kind of made me realize my high opinion of myself is a bulwark against self consciousness and any number of neuroses that afflict other people. i usually just think however i am is okay. i hope that doesn't mean that i'm constantly in a posture of foisting the not-okay-ness onto whomever i'm with, but i suppose that's a part of it. what a simple, happy guy i am.

the rolling hills in prospect park

last night i wanted to remember the rolling hills in prospect park. i played frisbee there with y and his cousin j, a guy who was not only boring but spoke in such a soft voice that i had to spend twice as long listening to him repeat himself out of politeness.

we ran around so much making our own action moments, we'd go long on every throw for our own benefit. i had that raw lung feeling i hadn't had in a long time, as if you breathe through a serrated tube. i "felt the burn," in a word. i was ragged and collapsable.

it was a super windy day and there were a lot of kites, including one we guessed to be a 1,000 feet high. there was a big bird that kept swooping around the park, perhaps a seagull but it looked even bigger than that, and it made flying look so fun. it was really riding the wind, doing nothing, but moving fast and abruptly on the swells. it looked like a better version of riding the waves, borne up by the water. the bird swooped around one of the kites quite a lot, an orange glittering thing shaped like an airplane, and it returned to it a few times. you know, it would be wonderful if we could digitally grid the world. we already literally grid the seas with fishing nets, we cast them down over hundreds of miles and what gets pulled up is a bedraggled tragedy of the seas, a map of that which swam in a particular swath of open water. i hope we never do to the sky what we've done with water, but it would be awesome watching a bird evade a swarm of kites and their strings, the sky twitching with vermicelli.

the hills were more like moguls than rolling hills, but it was picturesque. they made the little blanket encampment into isolated scenes, like so many stages and seating areas, like the cover of Nat King Cole's Crazy Lazy Hazy Days of Summer LP. the world's richer when it's lumpy, of course. there's more surface area, there's literally more of it. and i think you could glide a bike for longer over hilly ground, playing high off of low to coax a little more distance out of it. lumpen is bumpin'

ESL

teaching grammar is like applying a tourniquet. you must cut off the leakage and fix the broken thing to the bone. teaching grammar is generally a kind of triage. a learner's body of knowledge is broken everywhere so you just pick the most dire bits to work on and forget the extremities still flaming.

ziggy pissed wildly today

English as a Second Language

i have to teach again tomorrow and i am NERVOUS. below, complete with all the new code i've learned, is a vague outline

hello class. let's talk about some vocabulary you will need today. what is the opposite of private? (elicit, elicit, patience, patience) ICQs yes! louder! is my kitchen public? is central park public?
next, what do you say to someone who's old but acts young? hmm? someone who should be more serious? act - age? yes! repeat! write on board.

okay. here are some questions. discuss for 3 minutes. less TTT
okay. nang, what did you talk about?
and then point even, rather than speaking, at other students

next take out this [pointing] (page 62). you 3 pretend you are laura. how does she feel. you three jason, how... etc. take 5 minutes. ICQs? what do you talk about? how does barack obama feel? no, how does laura feel etc

okay. everybody stand up. if you are a "laura", find a "friend." in a pair and pretend you are laura and they are the friend. ICQ do you talk to your group? talk for 5 minutes

what was laura's problem? jason's? what are other problems people have? if blank, write on board "boss/mean" "dog/pee/floor" etc. with a partner, take 2 minutes and think of more problems people have.

after, show on OHP my letter, "write a letter about your problem. ask for advice" ICQ will you write a letter like mine? take 10 minutes

trade your paper with the person next to you and write some advice for them on their paper.

that's about it i think

this is the cause of my panic.

all the different paint colors are an abstracted form of the capitalist push to create new things for people to buy. "summer swam" and "tropical seaweed" are advents no different from the 7th edition of a math textbook that hasn't changed, or a camera with just slightly more megapixels. the push to personalize and find the perfect color for you is an insidious insinuation of palette envy and discontent. imagine a world with 20 colors.

the brute force of being talked at at CELTA is exhausting. at the end of the day i can hardly talk to people. this stuff is serious and dense, and the scrivener book is actually impressive. it makes me feel lousy for being a dabbler. you can teach for a lifetime, it is an art to trick people into learning, to hide the passive voice in fun. still, i wouldn't want to be an ESL teacher for a lifetime. it's like helping the deaf or the insane or disabled; they're the broken ones. a crazy person, i imagine, might attack and question common sense with lunatic abandon. they might make you wonder whether zuchinni can hear us. ESL students are kind of like that except within the petty confines of english grammar. they're fuzzy, imaginative and boundlessly wrong. the difference between rug and rouge can take half an hour, or leap and lip. they'll make you realize the insane variety of ways we use the word "by." but i don't want to live in these petty labyrinths, marching with them through the past perfect conintuous and never admitting the hedges are 2 feet tall (or is it "two feet high"? it's this kind of nonsense that teaching english blurs in you; "doctor, i'm losing touch with reality! i can't remember anymore whether [insert another fucking grammar conundrum here] anymore." everything starts to sound wrong in those rooms, we have to not think to be able to speak the unthinkable treacheries of our mother tongue, our heart tongue. this twisted, wickedly irregular language we speak must gnarl our insides.

WATA!

i got totally soaked on my bike coming back from celta! i biked through puddles, tires sputtering droplets. the way they shoot water up into the air would be beautiful to map if one drew the lines the droplets followed, i wonder how they'd compare to the axels or if it's got something to do with centrifugal force. at any rate, i'm sure i got soaked with exquisite, geometric precision.

it's funny how the water marks you and then disappears into you. it isn't like being on fire, screaming new colors, you just turn gray. water turns everything gray. by the west side highway a bus-turned-frothing-ship leveled a wave at me that i saw coming 30 feet away. it's really a fine thing to feel a wave on hard ground because you can better appreciate it. sloshing around in the muck of sand and retreating water is so destabilizing that you can't feel the beauty of the shape. but when you're on a bike, stable, you get not slop and whoosh but the visceral excellence of those japanese etchings.

goodnight!

tomorrow the english teaching course starts at 9 am. it's funny to write this down, just as it would be to write "i'm going to prague this fall to teach english" because i've said it so many times that it no longer has a place in my thoughts. "the eloquence of facts," in writing about my life, is one of polished tedium. i'll have to wake up at 7 30 and try to do something even more difficult than learn a language. i'll have to learn to diagnose all the diverse ways it can be difficult. i'll have to memorize all the inexplicable ditches and half finished bridges that my english mind has paved over and made implicit.

riding home like a demon to see kira was such a fucking joy. i have rarely felt so purposeful. watching the street numbers go down was cinematic, uni-directional, unwavering. it was so simple, i was the bluntest arrow. i had a single thought and left the rest to my legs and so acted purely, with my whole being. i mean, when do i ever get to reduce my purpose in life to "downtown"? it made me totally external, my mind didn't wander, i was exclusively reacting to the physical impediments to "downtown." that getting there was so physically exhausting was the happy reason why i couldnt think. i vividly remember playing piano recitals while thinking about basketball, as if my legs and butt and everything but my hands and arms had been left to their own devices and so encouraged the random thoughts. but on that bike ride, it was my whole physical self, and i guess my brain just fell in step with butt and toes and fingers alike, not getting to chat with any forgotten body part. well, this was overexcited and a bit much.

mh asked me if i'd ever done radio and said i should, would be good, which was flattering and funny.

several things

have been feeling a lot of things today. i asked s about the dia beacon and whether stuff in lived life reminds him of stuff in art, abstracted life he said no. maybe he didnt really say no, not perfectly no anyway, but i got the impression it didn't. that's comforting because it's an insecurity of mine that i fail to see the parallels to art in my life and so fail to suss out meaning, like a dreamer who hasn't gotten the memo about ravens and oncoming death. i live hoping and waiting to have all these movies and museums and books illuminate my stubbornly flat life. maybe s, other people don't either? but then why, why all this stuff, all these exquisite little emotions that then evaporate until some other thing i have sat down and gotten serious about stirs them up again, but only in relation to the other serious, sitting occasions? i don't ever CONSCIOUSLY think of paintings i have seen in museums, i do not do things that ever recall or evoke that francis bacon show i loved and FELT so well a couple years ago, or anything else. that sucks, because i like to imagine this stuff doesn't just evaporate to the artosphere where my actual life is not lived. then again, i'm sure it sneaks in unconsciously, and that's a hope.

i went to a mets game with steve and lisa and mitch which was super bizarre, because evidently people are still very serious about baseball. i think it's kind of like being inside the head of a little kid and so reliving my childhood. i know this head was once mine, but it isn't anymore and i'm amazed that it's a full fledged being in and of itself. the immersiveness of being in a ballpark, of being surrounded by all the insane ways in which people care is astounding. it feels like a religion that i no longer believe in but one whose rituals i can still watch with fascination. what SERIOUSNESS! and to know i once had it too! there were two fat white men behind us who really knew about baseball, who noted the stupidity of shifting the infielders right (i think it was right?) and pitching inside and who couldn't help, who LOVED to speak in announcer voices, insanely melodious, like something emerging from an cartoonishly twisted instrument. only people with as much time and as little to say as baseball announcers couldve invented such speech -- JuuuuuussSST a liiittle inside.

i was also struck by how sports mean winning and losing. when you don't care about either side, sports are constantly drowning you in pity for one person or another. any success means someone's failure, someone's average dropping or ERA going up, someone in danger of going to the minor leagues whose entire life is dedicated to baseball and succeeding at it. what a horrible thing to pit people against each other like that, of course they celebrate. what is sportsmanship with the barbarian fact that person's victory is another's defeat? and at least baseball is a team sport, so perhaps the intertwinedness of a whole team's destiny softens that absolute battle between a pitcher and hitter, but in any one on one sports, in tennis, for example, it's insane to expect sportsmanship, to expect people to not rave and murder and generally degenerate into children. if we ask them to care enough to do nothing in life but the sport they play, how can we expect them to treat it as if it were just a sport and not the single greatest arbiter of their worth as human beings? anyway, how can anyone get to that level without feeling that way, without investing themselves utterly? that would be as miraculous as sportsmanship itself. it's nice when it exists, think of the children, but it's totally unreasonable to expect. the repression sportsmanship requires is probably why they're all such basketcases with their streaks and neuroses and whatnot. sportsmanship ultimately requires you to have a sense of yourself outside of whatever you're doing, some reserve dignity that can sustain you in lieu of sports related dignity. this is usually possible because there is happily no competition in which we get defeated intellectually, romantically, physically etc. but when they're a professional athlete who can't even read for their dedication to expertly moving their body parts, what is that reserve?

k called me at the stadium and i was embarrassingly happy.

also, i watched closely watched trains again with s and didn't think much of it, a sort of lesser il posto. i think i loved it so much because i was horny and missed k.

need to change kitty litter

need to learn more about world

want to be complimented, coddled; want to prove self, be an adult -- adulthood is not having a backstop, the unqualified, bottomless support of something, someone (parents) else. adulthood is means having to fear being a totally SOLITARY wreck. adulthood means an end to the childhood that defies the laws of physics in that things will happen to you that you have not pushed, done to make happen, that nothing, NOTHING will happen to you if it is not you that does it.

closely watched trains

glorious music, do nothing schlubs. best ancestry ever

salutes the trains

closes eyes for his kiss

i realized about the jd salinger story last night, he shakes for the laughing man but nothing for mary hudson

afraid of horses, real man woman countess

screaming rabbits! kira kira kira my love

tactical withdrawals everywhere

car retreats backwards

so much evil swathed in childish incompetence

a religious harangue is a horny baby

tears the sofa, perfect little crotch

MY OFFICIAL AUSTRIAN SOFA!

love women, the nurses
no loyalty and no integrity makes everything apropriate for what they are. i want a cape like him
this movie is so sexy masa is so sexy lying in beds by dstroyed houses is a theme, laughing
trying to commit suicide? these are czechoslovakias saints -- the one hour hotel suicides. what a pose, getting carried out
how cynical, how rotten, and occasionally how very tragic this stuff is this train stamp scene is the kinkiest thing ive ever seen this is so fucking great premature ejaculation!!

what about your wife?
come to the vicarage, the church will solve everything! the unquestioned inanity, WHY blow up the train
the elegant brevity of conversations from the back of trains

stuffing the goose! This is too ridiculous


closely watched trains is the best shit ever. it is so funny, so sweet, so sexy. SO SEXY. and i don't even remember what happens! so much is unexplained on this first watch, where does this gun come from? who are these soldiers? the train station is an easy metaphor for life, for things passing through. OH MY GOD WHAT A GREAT MOVIE. what a phenomenally funny thing. and what odd, creatures czechs are, what cynics! what complete and total cynics! THIS MOVIE IS SO FUCKING GREAT!

today

i was having such a great day until i sat down at this table on the highline and started finding chocolate all over myself. i somehow failed to notice that this table was covered in melted milk chocolate. it stained the right part of my shirt you tuck in and the hem of the right leg of my shorts and got on the back of my red notebook and looked altogether so much industrially produced poop that i made a point of laughing heartily to try to feel less ashamed, thinking that people wouldn't think i had poop on myself if i looked so amused.

i really need to romanticize this lonely thing, something k once told me about. i need to invent dashing intent where there is only flailing loneliness. i also need very much to stop chatting with people on facebook because the lonely thing erupts out of me in unattractively unsolicited paragraphs of sociability. i really need to work on the codes of that kind of thing.

in other news, i watched 7 samurai and that was pretty much a day. there's a lot of terrific stuff in that movie, but i'm kind of skeptical of how we salute the epic for its size. it certainly was a big thing, but isn't it ultimately trite and silly to be mentioning that the movie's 3 hours long in criterion's synopsis of it? you can argue that you should tell people what they're getting into -- "an unforgettable ride" -- but i think it's evidence that we see that length as a big part of the achievement, which really makes us a lot of cows. it IS an unforgettable ride though and there is really great stuff in it, though it'd probably be better if it'd been split up into a million little pieces so we could appreciate the things that actually happen rather than how much happened. synthesizing such a majestic whole kind of ends up imitating life a bit too closely. but really though, it is a pretty fucking wonderful movie. and the ending is terrific, i was really worried that the battle was going to be won a bit too easily. it's a beautiful idea that fighting always means defeat.

another thing: these j.d. salinger stories are exhaustingly heavy on the dialogue, but i really love the initial opacity of people's ages. i think it's obvious salinger really loved kids, the greatest delight in these stories is matching up the banter retrospectively. you have to take the hint that ramona, of uncle wiggily in connecticut, is avidly picking her nose to realize that she is probably significantly younger than daffy eloise. but the words they speak speak to other hierarchies.

merlin the marvelous dog

I only know the Portland Maine reflected in the fur of a golden retriever. I have never taken a walk there not walking Merlin, a magical dog in that he has a yard in which he poops freely so that walking him is uninterruptedly unstooped. This dog, as far as I'm concerned, does not poop!

It's magical what a dog does to a place. As someone who walks staring distrustfully at the ground, walking Merlin means looking at the majestic mechanics of his swishing tail instead of cracked cement out to get me. I look at a literally golden thing. And people look at me attached to that thing, the leash like a painterly cue to lead their eyes. They're transformed by Merlin's presence: children writhe in their strollers, staring like pilgrims; adults wearing hangover sunglasses beam oddly. The air gets suddenly thick with words like "pumpkin" and "gorgeous." Merlin is kind of like beautiful weather concentrated in a dog: a dense package of universal happiness, water-cooler-happiness, as inarguably and as blandly good as the sun in the sky.

Walking Merlin also makes me aware of all the rabidly lonely dogs hidden behind windows, like having a radar for enraged spinsters.