so watching the black power mixtape, and angela davis in particular, convinces me that one shouldn't necessary call a group that advocates violence violent, but rather call it self defense. this'd be giving those groups the respect they deserve, constituted as they are, or have been, by people who suffer a lot of violence from the police.

but this still doesn't clarify for me whether self defense, or however you market it, is actually useful to a cause. it seems too easy to villify and make monstrous anybody who fights against the police; we live in a civilized country where law enforcement has a monopoly on violence, and there are probably some good reasons for that. it's just real fucking scary to me and most people that i know. i am a privileged white kid and i've never been a victim of police violence so perhaps i'm not the one to say. but i am the one to say in the sense that i'm a citizen and i choose whether or not to associate myself with political movements and if one is getting violent that gets me down and makes me want to stay away. and it'd suck to lose a super sympathetic guy like me. am i wrong though? i mean, i've always thought that violence was just fundamentally a deal breaker, that as soon as it came out that the protesters were not avowedly peaceful, were in fact avowedly packing, did in fact KILL SOMEBODY, made people bleed, the whole population that'd never been exposed to police violence would abandon that movement.

is that a socialized thing? could that be changed? is the blood of a police officer this magical substance i've felt it is? i mean, it is pretty important in that that signifies revolution and not reform. (does it? i guess not if you understand it as self defense) perhaps if there was more publicity of police brutality protester violence could be more sympathetic, nothing's set in stone. one'd just have to contextualize it better. reinforce, time and time again, that they were attacked. this would still preclude protesters readying themselves to fight, that'd undermine the whole peaceful thing. if people show up with weapons, even if they insist so sweetly that they're only in case the police turn out to be brutes, that pretty severely undermines that argument. so violence but only if they hadn't started protesting with visible weapons in any way? hidden weapons? no. so just ad hoc weapons, which is to say they'd have no chance, which is to say one shouldn't try to protest violently, to fight back. i'd love to be told i'm wrong, or at least i'd be curious to hear that. maybe k would tell me differently. ha! what a funny thing that is to say at the end of this, by appending her to this i implicate her as its inverse; a glimmer of a mention paints her as definitively as could be. one who might disagree

this really funny thing happens every morning. recently, because i've started to fear having a little belly, because i don't want to be a little panting shrew for the rest of my life, i've started doing some really meager exercise every morning. it's meager but it's enough to make a shrew pant and that's the idea, right? it's baby steps, but not in the true sense of progress and moving forward, only that baby steps are about all the effort i care to invest in this.

i hold off on eating to do this little exercise because it's pretty incredible the noises one's stomach will make if there's stuff in it, like i'm pregnant or something, like my cereal has a right to be at peace before it dies its fiery death in that acid of mine. so i hold off on eating before i exercise. but i also hold off on exercise because i don't want to do it. so what happens is i'm generally driven to exercise by hunger. i'll even prepare the food in advance as a way to try to convince myself to do this utterly shitty thing, all the worse because it isn't gallant and attractive and 80s leggings when i do it, it's just solitary shrew panting on the rug. and it's such a stubbornly filthy rug, all the sins of humanity are embedded in its fibers, and when i stand up off of that thing i've got them on my back. just to give you an idea of the moral atlas i am.

so when i finally finish these exercises i'm raving with hunger and also panting, my arms collapse to my sides like i'm a desultory monkey. and i fall on the food. i can never restrain myself. and so this horrible scene happens every morning, when the desperate intake of both air and peanutbutter happens, and my mouth is a ragged maelstrom, spitting and swallowing.

frank is MOVED

http://www.nplusonemag.com/OCCUPY_OWSgazette.pdf


this is so fucking great! what a substantial, soberly felt movement! there's an awful lot to understand about what's wrong with the world, and the little i know has only ever convinced me that i can never know and therefore can't go about trying to change something i don't understand into something i've never really tried imagining. but they're there! a malaise is actionable and they're actioning it! and they aren't corny!

FRANK IS TROUBLED

i have rarely felt more rotten than i do now, because i fear i've been rejected by something i loathe. i need to get the job at hollister though. my innards are going in all different directions but crawling there. crawling in despair of not getting to stay here, crawling because i was stupid enough to not dupe the manager, some bug eyed girl from dallas texas who, smiling so fucking blankly, chides the laziness of swedes with their socialism and their silver platters. what a little idiot. but i need that job!

aaaaaahhhhhhhgggggg

i should've realized when she was telling me about her time in turkey where she got to see the places in the bible. but, when asked what things i was proudest of, i scrambled and just started speaking -- it's amazing how one can just speak when necessary, the spoken bullshitting is more strikingly bullshit, smellier and more vacuous, because it's scary how quickly and fast it comes. i've got a raging river of empty nonsense dammed up in my mind and i don't like seeing it. anyway, i mentioned the article they printed in the local newspaper about homosexuals and romcoms and whatever, but i felt the mood cooled significantly because, well, it was about HOMOS! how could i have been so STUPID! and now i'm anxious! i'm reduced to thinking ill of myself and my leadership abilities because of being so unprepared for that goddamn interview! how did i not think up some goddamn camp counselor anecdotes; camper with dead parent, rescued canoe, lost puppy, whatever the fuck. and now what the fuck am i gonna do.




also, i want to write like pauline kael. there's some awkward ambition, it's even worse to have written it down. now everything i type seems to steam with pretense, with trying.

shortcuts

anybody ever seen robert altman's shortcuts? that movie is a fucking DOWNER. i mean, well done, that is GREAT, that is as big as this world, it's like a billion times better than this movie i saw recently, magnolia, which now that i think about it is pretty much a remake. what a shitty imitation. anyway, yeah. it's ENORMOUS, there are tons of marvelous little bits, relationships i actually believed in, a real relief from wuthering heights where heathcliff is ever sending his soul to hell and back for catherine because he's an ALIEN and NOT REAL, but these were some fucking actual relationships, ones full of contingency, that's the fucking word, relationships contingent on this big and very affecting world we live in.

shortcuts is a terrific name for this movie; that is one wry, sly title

kira says i'm like a baby when i speak swedish, such is the miraculousness, the surprise, the newness. i have mixed feelings on this.

windows! the portals!

i mean, really, the thing i should write about, if i am to write about things that i actually think about, not tepid little thoughts that i stretch into weak, tedious paragraphs by way of writing, that fundamentally long winded thing, is windows in stockholm. because they, along with puts, are that defining thing that make this city so special and beautiful. they are what make this city open, what lights this city. its such an obvious but novel thing that people's private spaces light the street, that stockholm scarcely needs streetlights because of the glow cast by every home. and i know, yes, it's a beautiful thing borne of the wretchedness of a land plunged in darkness, but it opens this city up, it makes its structures transparent. i'd love to talk to an architect about how the emphasis on windows effects how they design. this city glows by the light of its people.

there're these shipping containers being used as offices across the street from kira's apartment and they've installed windows in them. i mean, it's fucking obvious, i'd rather die than be stuck in a shipping container without one, but still. there's a fucking beautiful thing here.

so i may be working at hollister within a few weeks. it'll be good for me, in the trenches with a company i deplore aesthetically and philosophically. i don't even like the smell, it evokes people who fantasize about grinding, it evokes me at my most sarcastic, sexually frustrated and pimpled. it's very dark in there, you can't see very well except for what they're selling, which is pretty brilliant. it's the kind of lighting that gives a pimpled boy hope that his fantasies will come true.

i went to an information session today. the company is proud that hollister, together with abercrombie and fitch, gilly hicks and some other kids store are entirely interchangeable. if you've worked at one you can work at any of them. globally. i mean, this is particularly egregious and funny in sweden because they can import the america they're selling blaringly unaltered.

hilly is a pretty weak word

you get to feel like a pilgrim getting around in stockholm; the slopes are biblically steep, redemptively steep, and you cannot avoid them. "hey darling would you be a savior and go grab some milk from the store?"

well, either that or a sociable mountain goat. maps of stockholm should be topographical; it often simply isn't true to say that ulf lives this 4 blocks this way and 7 that way when it is also a vertical distance of 300 meters. this city is not navigated as the goddamn crow flies -- side note, crows are as common as pigeons here, super weird -- it'd be like measuring someone's hike up a mountain by measuring the distance from the mountain's base to where the summit maps onto the ground deep within the mountain.

man, stockholm is great

you don't get lost in stockholm or overwhelmed by it the way you do other cities. part of why new york is so dazzling and vertiginous is because you can't get any perspective on it. when you look at a painting in a museum you step back in order to get a sense of it. in cities, the buildings are like paintings, except that you can't back up because there's another equally large painting right behind you. it's because of this that the most recognizable pictures of new york are of its skyline, taken from new jersey or something, someplace where new york has finally ceased looming over the photographer, where the gigantic fact of new york is comprehensible. because stockholm's a bunch of little islands, you regularly get that vista, that room to breathe. though it is a pretty weeny, homey place; when i first came here over the summer i felt i could count the windows in this city if i wanted to. 

seeing water all the time is a psychic boon. water's dynamism is a relief from the unchanging, dirty and boring things that people build. it moves! it changes color! it's a richer sky. it also enriches the sky; this summer stockholm attracted herds of clouds that feasted on the city's water, building their cumulous castles and swallowing all the sun, as fat and luminous as happy cows. 

stockholm is fucking natural, man

i needed kira to open the door for me recently so i threw pebbles at her window. i threw pebbles that i found on the street at kira's window. stockholm is like that. it's mutable and alive, its ground is more than hard cement; you can get a handful of it. think, for example, of the mania to get a seat whenever a stadium closes, of the romance of an uprooted paving stone in paris, of how irresistible it is -- though maybe this is only true of drunk college kids -- to steal construction signs off the street. most cities are great, hard wholes because they'd just be dry bones if they weren't, like the rubbed away patches of ancient things that you're allowed to pet in museums. 

the streets are littered with snails when it rains; the dogs are off leash; you can just drop your apple on the ground because the ground, the living ground, will deal with your apple for you. kira went out in the rain one night and came back with a handful of dirt and rocks with which to replant a plant. her hands were dirty in a way that wasn't gross. it wasn't city dirt, which clings and sweats and stains. it was the dry, the cleansing kind. 

stockholm is natural, man. it's not a city in the typical earth suppressing sense, you get the feeling that you're on the tip of the iceberg of naturalness. its parks are not dandified "poets’ walks" with imported boulders, they're actual forests. there are stairways careening up rocky cliffs. its buildings aren't taller or shorter because the developer was more or less of an asshole, they were just built on higher or lower ground.

the buildings and stuff

and then there's puts! it translates as plaster but it's so much more than that. it twinkles in the sun and it's velvet in the shade. puts facades are either blank and flat and a bit fuzzy, or great warty things, seas of a billion pustules. they're beautiful. puts facades look like they're at the critical stage when something simple and elegant is about to be prettified, made symbolic, made to signify a certain, heavy quantity of money.

puts is colorful too, but in shades that don't insist on a certain mood, a certain weather. it has the understatement of a white canvas, of a thing built to receive and not project. it looks a lot like florida stucco except that it doesn't look like a wet cat when it rains. it's all things to all skies.

but not everything is puts. there is a lot of objectively ugly architecture in stockholm, stuff with aluminum siding, with drab geometry, with the clunkiest of balconies. but they aren't because of the windows. it's like everyone living in stockholm is out to convince you that everyday is christmas morning here. no one has not spent eight years finding that shade of orange that just glows in the morning light. everyone has these large, ridiculously well polished windows and absolutely no one is using their curtains. they're like hearths, like lanterns of domesticity; they bespeak rocking chairs and eating a little too much. they make big ugly structures into something lived in and respected and handsome. (recently though, it was explained to me that people have a special relationship to their windows because of the darkness and depression of the winters here. but this is about more than light, it's about warmth and home.)


realizing that ugly buildings aren't ugly because they're endowed with the pride of their occupants made me wonder about the occupants themselves. swedes are famously attractive people, but perhaps they're just flush with their citizenry in a relatively just country. "maybe she's born with it, maybe it's social democracy."  

you can actually see the social democracy in stockholm, like in how the streetlights hang from metal cables bolted to neighboring buildings. maybe you've got to be an american to imagine someone complaining that that cable is on my property, but i can. the massive infrastructure to keep the lights on is lashed to every private building, and maybe you've got to be an american to see a symbol of collectivity in that, too. the cables also look terrific, as nimble and sharp as a bird through air. they're an invitation to tarzan swinging or spiderman swooping.

and the scaffoldings here are the sturdiest things i have ever seen. there's probably a direct correlation between how much a country cares about its working class and how rickety its construction sites are, like a literalized social safety net.

pedestrian

stockholm is like an infuriatingly benevolent parent. i like to think of myself as a notorious jaywalker, but here, i can't cross streets in all my rebellious glory because the cars always yield. in new york, darting across the street is a riotous thrill because i know half the cars accelerate when they see me; i'm not an inconvenience, i'm in a war! but here, a car will come to a complete stop for you, and the driver will shake their head at your saucy behavior, and it really gets me down. nothing neuters like other people's civility. 

and there are some people who get angry. kira, a dedicated feminist, is wont to yell jävla fitta -- fucking cunt -- at cars that fail to yield. i saw a postman on a scooter stop for a little old man shuffling across the street against the light. the postman beeped lengthily, disbelievingly. the old man continued down the street and the postman turned off in the same direction, slowed down to beep at him some more, and unfolded his middle finger before finally speeding off. these people may be finicky nitpicking sticklers, but they are in the right. 

madame bovary

i really don't know what to think of this book. i'm pretty overwhelmed by it and i'm dazzled by all the stuff that people -- having read it a dozen times and translated it -- have to say about it. it's a super disappointing thing to read the book's introduction still so pleasantly bewildered, to know that every single one of one's uncertainties and hunches and feelings have already been distilled into workman like little essays on "neighbors" or "marriage" or "childhood" in the novel. they don't leave much room to waffle and dream, they don't much allow for the infinite oddities of a book that is, ultimately, about a faraway country 150 years ago.

one thing that i sheepishly think about madame bovary is that this is, in a sneaky way, a salute to the plodding charles bovary. he sires the title, he brackets the story. in a preface michele something or other writes that this was flaubert's subversive node to the male dominated world in which women lived (for the real story, of course, is emma's). but something the book made me think of is what constitutes drama, a tale worth telling. you get swept up reading the book by the fear, always fulfilled, that this will fade, that feelings strenuously felt will eventually exhaust themselves and that emma's performative emotions will be revealed for what they are. her paramours are no more particular than the velvet of her dresses, they only exist insofar as they provoke feeling in her. it doesn't seem to me that emma ever acknowledges that they (or anyone else she interacts with in the book, for that matter) have interior selves.

anyway, emma's got the story. the intro talks about how we start off with this charbovari guy and it's throwing us for a loop; we doubt if this young man who grows like an oak will hold our attention. he isn't given the chance, but he definitely wouldn't. but what's interesting in this is how this intensely boring man contains love in the most pure, passionate form imaginable. or maybe not, maybe it's contentment -- he is described as pretty passively enjoying her company and not trying to ravish her every other minute, but that's its own proof; emma was a spectacularly shitty spouse, i'm pretty sure charles is banned from her room, her floor of the house for a good 75% of the book and he's regularly described restraining himself for fear of disturbing the one he so pathetically loves. and the ending is its own proof; this man dies without her.  if he'd been simply content, the falsification of that domestic happiness with the discovery of her infidelity wouldn't be so devastating, charles doesn't have a lot of pride to lay him low. what he did have was love.

this is a pretty funny thing to bring up. there's a book in the 19th century, a big, interesting book that's all about a woman and the things she feels! it condescends to her, yes, and pretty forcefully identifies her as a woman, but it's still about her. and then i try and put emphasis back on this stodgy little bourgeois man. but still, it's in that ruddy simpleton that there is love, the real and not performative love, the love as intense and drunk and eternal as any oriental farce.

also, the intro to the book makes elaborate arguments about flaubert being subversive and taking down the bourgeoisie. it argues he was depressing them from the inside, rotting out the conventional people with his relentlessly cynical novels. and that they are, but that is pretty weak. and in a novel so epically flowery, so "supremely beautiful," i think it's a mistake to say that something that might conceptually nibble at the edifice of bourgeois life actually does anything at all to it. if anything, it reinforces it because people are underratedly blockheaded in taking what they will from culture, in cherry picking. and in madame bovary there is a smorgasborg of contented-ass  landscape painting and towering love affairs and everything passionate and beautiful that one might ask of life. and for many readers, perhaps nearly all, that is all they will take from it.

this bullshit about punishing job creators that republicans keep hawking, claiming that raising taxes on people who have an enormous amount of money means that there won't be any jobs, is the most lying nonsense. the reason there are jobs -- and this is part of the whole structure of capitalism -- is because there are people who have money to spend. and since the government won't raise revenues people have to be laid off which means that people don't have money to spend which means that things won't get bought and more people will fall into poverty.

ending unemployment benefits or laying off teachers or whatever means that those people collecting unemployment or who were teaching may well plunge headlong into not having money to spend on things. and i suppose what these scoundrel republicans are arguing for is that these public sector beneficiaries will be hired by private business, and that they'd be more likely to do this if there were no taxes on them, but there's enough evidence out there saying that that isn't true to make one yank out one's hair in a single handful.

the guy living two floors above kira

The winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for literature is eighty years old. A reporter said he had been coming to his building for the past three years on this day, and that it had rained all three days. A neighbor said they had been waiting on this for fifteen years. The winner, the poet Tomas Tranströmer, hasn't really spoken since he had a stroke about twenty years ago.

The subjects of news are sometimes preposterously fragile things, and they make you realize how much energy and eventfulness and tension news brings to bear. It's an unreasonably bright light, and when news shines it on something like Tranströmer it can't but rebound upon the news itself. News is a very incestuous thing; the photographers photograph other photographers photographing, and a writer thinks that this a dynamic worth chronicling. There's a hierarchy of litheness: a lumbering camerawoman was filming the nameplate on the door while two photographers, like agile little scavengers, leapt and pranced on the stairs behind her, using her light on the door and her body for their meta coverage.

For most people who are not megalomaniacs, being news must be fantastically unpleasant. Lights were blinking red and there was an extremely loud, erratic beeping that sounded like a robot parakeet. The staircase was unnavigable and camera flashes were extra bright and frequent because these pictures go in the paper -- to get seen one has to get blinded. There were young, irreverent people who were there because the equipment is heavy and because the point is to get there, panting, and to scoop, break and get the story. And so there was also a young man who took off his shirt in the hallway, who wore boxer briefs with a purple geometric pattern and Michael Jordan sneakers. There were dozens of these people.

There were strangers who hadn't read his poetry but who needed a piece of him, to claim to have known him in some small way. When you're news you are scrutinized by professional curiosity, by an industry that crowns interviewers by how good they are at making people cry (see Piers Morgan). When you're news you need a security guard.

Someone told me that Tranströmer plays the piano with his left hand, that he had in fact just been playing while we were out in the hall. They were surprised I hadn't heard.

It's super weird, hilarious, wonderful to think that this guy heard the same horrible renovations that I heard in this apartment, I love the idea of my silly little life with it's sensory perceptions being sensed by someone who senses so exquisitely. It's like a challenge to me to try to hear the finer monstrosity of the drilling that starts at 7:30 AM. 

Rebel Without a Cause

I knew James Dean was young and extremely good looking and that he died on a motorcycle, and I knew that Rebel Without a Cause has the word rebel in it, and so this paean to patriarchy really caught me off guard. The movie is about how America need more dads, and manlier dads at that. It's about how all too often dads fail to assert themselves by abusing their wives and children, how sometimes they even end up in the kitchen.

America's sons are shooting puppies, its daughters are incestuous sluts, its daddies are donning floral aprons. But Jim Stark (James Dean), soldier of patriarchy, is here to save the day. He will not abide being called chicken, he'll offer you his coat at the drop of a hat, "he doesn't say much but when he does you know he's sincere."Jim is the star of a movie in which the acme of honor is going to the police station to hash things out with the local authority figures. We've come a long way to get to La Haine. Jim is here now, and Jim will be your dad. That is, if you aren't a sniveling, faggot, momma's boy deviant, in which case it's probably for the best that you're dead -- you can shore up Jim's sweetheart bona fides as he cries over your body without having to confront the bigotry that made you a murderous outcast.

I loved the super sneaky ending with the guy walking up the stairs to work, that was some SLY conformity there.

I sincerely appreciated james dean's daringly unfinished sentences, the guy is a terrific actor. He really got the laconic, manly, ''sincere'' thing down pat. Also, this movie is super beautiful. The colors are great, I really want that red jacket and some levis now. I have often claimed to have invented the white t shirt, but that is pretty clearly untrue.

the glow

isn't it nuts how one never, ever gets tired when looking at a computer screen? it's the evil, foundational fact of the thing, of how it suckers you into staring at useless stuff far past your bedtime. That LCD glow puts you into a state of immovable stupefaction. For something to not make you tired is somehow proof that it is a bad, bad thing. Anything worthwhile has to eventually make you want run away. This has its end in rivulets of drool. It's immortality in the worst way.