the brief wondrous life of oscar wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is such a sick book. i have rarely loved prose so much — he writes how i want to write, so bursting with the SPOKEN WORD.

and the history he talks about! i would love to read a junot diaz history book. that might've really been the highlight for me, learning about trujillo and porfirio rubirosa popped with life.

it's kind of nuts how passionately manly dominican men apparently are, and the odd union of FLESH and SEX with super traditional, oppressive values about women.

it's a really fabulous book and there are many things in it but my father is watching the news too loudly for me to think straight.  

yo what the fuck is with the swooning muzak musicians in the boxes at the oscar theater? this is embarrassingly entertaining altogether. i gotta go to bed soon. my tooth hurts. the red carpet slow motion panning over actresses's dresses is some preposterously bad cultural studies shit. does anyone know a quote (probably from some mafia movie) about how no one leaves the family? how you're dead if you leave the family, or something? they definitely say something like that.

The Driver

Ryan O'Neil is extremely handsome and this movie is handsomely spare. What's more interesting though is the lengths to which America goes to convince itself that cars are a badass thing. Rather than sitting on one's fat ass in traffic, The Driver is all about The Mythical Highway of Freedom.

We need more movies about train robberies -- The Driver is actually brilliantly snide about public transit and getting bothered. What sedentary shit. It's actually horrifying knowing how seductive cars are though. Sinister ideas about freedom and independence start to well up in people as soon as they get behind the wheel; it's like it ages you, turns you into a Republican.

eeeeeeeesh

i'm a vegetarian and an intern at BOMB magazine and my girlfriend's name is kira, she lives in stockholm and i live in new york with my parents and the distance between new york and stockholm is a very prominent and unhappy fact in my life. i'm working on an article for BOMB about an obscure, difficult polish filmmaker named andrzej zulawski. i also teach a kind of after school pre school thing and tutor now and then and that takes up most of my time. i think i want to be a journalist when i grow up. i carry a purple notebook with me everywhere i go because i read somewhere that being or not being able to write down a thought in the moment is the difference between being or not being able to write. that's hard to say in my case but it gives me a sense of purpose. i have extremely few friends in new york city and am doing my best to romanticize my solitude. i have a pair of gold sneakers and a pair of red leather shoes and they make my feet too warm and they're embarrassingly splashy; i wish i had a pair of converse. there are documents that recently arrived in Dallas, Texas petitioning some US government agency to let kira come to the United States on an alien fiancee visa so that we can be together and also married. i'm not reading anything very interesting right now. my father gave me my first driving lesson in new york earlier today on my family's black, standard shift 2008 subaru outback. we live in Greenwich Village in a very big house. i have moderately radical leftist ideas about capitalism.

this is probably the most frank, factual thing i've ever written on here about my material life.

yo i think it'd be interesting to do a study on people's perceptions of when things happen as it relates to news. like asking people when exactly qaddafi was deposed or those terrorists took all those hostages in mumbai or when lehman brothers collapsed or any number of other news stories. i just thought of this because i was just trying to remember when qaddafi was deposed and i really have no idea whether it was in december or maybe late october. which is really an enormous spread. and i think itd go a long way to illuminating a lot of the theorizing about how NON STOP NEWS affects our sense of disaster, of eventfulness, especially if it was contrasted with other kinds of memory (if there is a contrast...) like when this or that marriage, family event etc happened. COOL STUFF

yo, are gay people disproportionately kinky because they've been so oppressed? this is kind of obvious i guess. but it would also be depressing if that was really at the root of kink. I don't want to think that all the wonderfully weird shit that turns people on has its roots in evil. is every rape fantasy, diaper fetish, nipple clamp, feeder fetish, overwhelming desire to have sex with a dragon borne of a societal, parental, ancestral depravity? that way of thinking would, at any rate, explain my utterly banal sexual tastes.

i can't be bothered to cook in my parents' house. it's so boring, so obvious, been done to many times by my mom -- that'd be a sad reason for my not wanting to, to take up that mantle, but i think it is. 

i'm working on this piece for bomb about zulawski and i think i've been wrestling with the lack of an idea. the most horrendous writing wrangles are all because of trying to build something out of nothing. i'm good with words but they're awfully flimsy on their own.