I have this thing for Peter Sellers.

I mean who, with any taste at all, does not share this thing?

Sellers was the king of self-erasure.  He would become entirely who he was directed to be for his audience.  When the audience was not sufficiently large enough–say, family, women, his children, friends–he would feel he was no one, nothing, someone with out self.  But that was what he wished was true, what he wanted to be true.  He wanted to be tragic, misunderstood, hollow so when you tried to aim your finger at the monster, there was nothing.  Just shadow.

He hated himself.  So he inhabited others. 

He said, “Me?  There is no me.”  Here, you can see him confess this himself.  To Kermit the Frog.  In a Viking’s helmet.  It’s the truest thing he’s ever imagined so he tells it to a puppet.  Even the puppet wants to change the subject.

Follow that public confession with Richard the III’s soliloquy accompanied by musically tuned chickens, however, and top it off with “Shave and a Haircut”? Well that is just genius.  The liminal gray space between comedy and tragedy, the truest of the true. So there’s a conflict of interest here, isn’t there? “It’s all part of life’s rich pageantry,” isn’t it?

I wonder how much of it is, about the self.  When he was swaying between lucid and senile moments just before his death, he often would confuse himself with Chase.  He fought to make that film, he loved it fiercely, it was like his epitaph.  One whose name was writ in water, yet again.

A bunch of people have asked me lately how my handwriting is so miniature and uncharacteristically precise.  This is because I write on Doane Paper.  Exclusively, if I can help it.

Recall Lolita; ol’ Humbert Hum spends his afternoons milking the venom from his fangs in a fey little leather bound diary.  He assumes the Big Dove too witless to make any attempt at deciphering these ruinous revelations, the stuff which fills the exhausted silence she neurotically mistakes for love.  And yet, Lo!  The Fat Haze has it in her.  A Bad Accident soon follows.  Hum, feckless greedy tick that he is, was not writing on Doane Paper.

“College ruled” paper should be left for the animals.  Wild minds need structure or else they’re all over the page.  Must each letter be a mile high, visible to every wandering eye vying for a peek at your engine?  That’s always infuriated me.  My mother prefers gridded paper, but because I am a dumbell, my eyes cannot stay on a linear path.  Chad Doane has brilliantly solved this.  Every three horizontal lines on the grid are a slightly bolder blue.  It’s a beautiful thing.

No one’s throwing themselves in front of a speeding car for me, my friends.  They can’t read a goddamn thing I write.

It’s also great for drawing and mapping out plans to better your future which you will never execute, but will frequently pause amongst the ruins to admire the order and ease they had so elegantly promised on paper.

(I’m only allowed Nabokov in small doses.)

I want you to see something.

My mother found this on her window shield a few years ago randomly.  I have kept it for years.  At first I was astonished by how many of those needs seemed superfluous, even luxurious.  Don’t allow yourself to live without, in both what you demand for yourself and what you give to others.  With each day that’s passed since first holding this in my hands, I have understood better in small, nearly imperceptible ways how deeply impoverished we so often allow ourselves to become.

This is the only time I will ever use this concept in the affirmative, because it could be the only instance in which it applies: you deserve every single one of these.  You do.  Perhaps rationally you might agree; now the trick is to massage it so deeply into your psyche that you do not just agree, but believe.

The only way to answer this is by saying to the universe, “I’m right on top of that, Rose.”

(click to enlarge)

Having a very nice stereo has got me losing my goddamn mind over three records: Foley Room (Amon Tobin), Uneasy Flowers (Autistic Daughters), Standing On a Hummingbird (Mark Templeton).  Whatever, it’s cool to be 3 years late to every party.  Here, have all three. I’m trying to attract the Eff See See’s attn so like twenty universes implode because I’m a brat who believes in sharing art so they destroy our server and sue each of us for a zillion dollars and our futures wither into internet obliv. (Hi Nick!! “Getting angry, baby?”)

I’ve really only been interested in exploring/cooling out to electronic music in the last year. That is while I’m at home, because it’s sort of weird to drive around in your car with your ipod sourcing some really sick glitchy-comatose soundscape jams. That’s when you work it out with a little Dead Milkmen so your friends are all singing along like everyone’s 14 again instead of stewing in alienated silence over in the passenger seat. Anyway, my point is that my preference still leans towards mechanized music that lays its primary samples down with organic stuff you can feel with your body, all the visceral sounds stolen away from the real world.

A personal aside: Paul, do you know that the very first exchanges Ian and I were in Ms. Keisler’s art class where he was just some older little filthy punk who talked like Tim Armstrong and gave me hella shit for my “nintendo music” cuz I was sulking under headphones to this Swedish outfit Baxter, whom I still maintain put out like one of the best albums of all time? (Same lady who fronted Salt, who are also basically perfect.)

I know this is an impossible wish, but my big fantasy is that one day when I call Ian up to wish him a happy 97th birthday, he will tell me he’s finally grown out of punk rock like the rest of us did with the onset of pubic hair and he’ll talk all gravelly at me into the phone and say,

“Lah-Lah, Lah-Lah.  Listen to me, Snizz. Snizz, you were right. You’ve always had better tazzzzte. I’m zo zorry the only record we ever allowed you to play was Reagan Youthssssssssss or that you evuh had to stand in the back of the Continental with our jackets and the L.E.S. Stitches. Hey, remember thah guy Mick though, how he uzzah serve us with no ID?  Thah wuz pretty good.”  (I sure do, Future Imaginary Ian.)

And while I’m at it, Paul, I wouldn’t mind a collective apology for all the chair matches and Rick Flair-isms I suffered through while you guys were smashing baking sheets into each other’s faces.

Jesus Christ, life.

Tonight when I arrived home from the Cape, my new (to me) Tivoli radio had arrived. My model one has finally rattled it’s last breath; it will now be played in the kitchen so the warbling treble does not drive me up a wall in the privacy of my own music time. I even have this time another speaker and a subwoofer, which as the daughter of an audiophile, is simply velvet.

I’ll be eating only lentils for the next four weeks for various reasons.

The first record I played on it when I set it up was from the Benitez-Valencia Trio. It is pure pleasure and sweet heartache. It makes my toes curl. You can download it here. There is an especially lovely song “Si Tu Me Olvidas,” and it reminded me of a Neruda poem. Some friends and I were talking earlier in the afternoon about all the joyful nuance and shimmer that will slip away in translation. Luckily, music suffers less than language with this.

Here, listen as you read. Tell me what you think is lost.

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An Iranian woman in support of Mousavi (more here). It reminds me of the painting which has become stock imagery in my brain when facing struggle. Also, it’s on the cover of a Melvin’s record.

This is an ode to my lunch date and study buddy.  You’re not the only one around here cooling out on a bev, sister.

The thing about Keats was his death wish.  It’s complicated.

The poet was different from everyone else.  He had a gift.  His purpose, compulsion even, was to embody this gift.  He could see in ways that others could not, and then take the blind by their hands and lead them nearer to knowing the sublime.  The sublime of course would be a poet’s natural habitat, but an isolated one.  There was no one who might sense the world in the way they would.  If love was experiencing beauty in sync with another, when you’re born a poet, it’s understood to be something you’ll never know.  You will always be the scribe or the witness or the translator.

At least, this is how the Romantics thought of it.

But the curse of being human is need, right?  Some people are at peace with what they must take, but others aren’t.  Keats was not.  This makes sense when you think about the poet as a medium, something divine.  Divinity exists above the frankness of biology.  Was ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ Fanny Brawn or was she the burden of language?

I don’t know, but who does.

The point is, negative capability is something to be willfully not understood.  Does everybody have thoughts that form first in language?  Just some of us?  If a poet’s purpose is to articulate mimesis through lyric, does he exist when he’s got nothing to say?

But for now, check out everyone’s favorite ladykiller in the NY Times. Double trouble: there’s a killer lady getting quoted elsewhere in the Times, talking about how the worst thing in the world is decidedly not a fat ass.

See? My friends are up to rad shit. Just imagine all the hijinx that’ll never make it to the leisure section.

From over the last few days, a few passages to make us think:

But I think we also can consider alternative paradigms of activism that are not based on self-interest. Myself, I realise, am involved in social activism not primarily because I’m fighting for my rights and I want this and I want that, but because I feel an obligation to my ancestors and my descendants. And that’s, I think, a profoundly non-Western approach. It’s not because I want something for me or I think that everybody should have this or that but because I feel that I owe it to my great grandchildren and I owe it to my great grandparents that I fight for social justice, that I fight for gender justice and I fight against heterosexism and the destruction of the environment. And I don’t know if that’s a common sort of motivation for white people. I get the impression from my context that it isn’t. That it’s motivated more by self-interests and I think that was a problem in the white feminist movement, you know, white middle-class women wanting better pay, better working conditions, better health care access etc, rather than seeing their fate in common with working-class women, women of colour and non-heterosexual women.
- Victor Lewis

From an old interview with Zizek,

BS: You describe the internal structure of anarchist groups as being authoritarian. Yet, the model popular with younger activists today is explicitly anti-hierarchical and consensus-oriented. Do you think there’s something furtively authoritarian about such apparently freewheeling structures?

Zizek: Absolutely. And I’m not bluffing here; I’m talking from personal experience. Maybe my experience is too narrow, but it’s not limited to some mysterious Balkan region. I have contacts in England, France, Germany, and more — and all the time, beneath the mask of this consensus, there was one person accepted by some unwritten rules as the secret master. The totalitarianism was absolute in the sense that people pretended that they were equal, but they all obeyed him. The catch was that it was prohibited to state clearly that he was the boss. You had to fake some kind of equality. The real state of affairs couldn’t be articulated. Which is why I’m deeply distrustful of this “let’s just coordinate this in an egalitarian fashion.” I’m more of a pessimist. In order to safeguard this equality, you have a more sinister figure of the master, who puts pressure on the others to safeguard the purity of the non-hierarchic principle. This is not just theory. I would be happy to hear of groups that are not caught in this strange dialectic.

From our favorite, I Cite,

Interpassivity [is] the way that an object does something for us, enabling us to remain passive…For the past several months, 24/7 news media has repeated that the American people are outraged (imagine typical Jon Stewart mash up of relevant samples).

My hypothesis: blame Glen Beck and Keith Oberman. Blame Counterpunch and whatever right wing net-based publication you want. These folks are outraged for us. They are outraged in our stead, enabling us to retain our general passivity. Extreme media, in other words, doesn’t stir us up: it stirs for us.

Of course, I posted this way back in September, but isn’t it funny/heartbreaking to watch it all over again?  Like wine, the romanticism of cinema becomes so much more pungent given just a little age.

Barbie just got Ken’s name tattooed on her ass.

What’s amazing is that Barbie has been cultivated as a “woman” who is so fucking fabulous, with a CV so epic it might rival the bible in length, that her joi de vivre was never understood to be that tagalong eunuch she had on the side.  Ken was a perk (without much to perk), but never the point–yet when she gets tattooed, she volunteers to mark her body not with something awesome that means something/nothing to her, but a cattle brand.

I liked Barbies as a kid.  She had dignity.  And lots and lots of sex, because kids are perverts.  I still doubt this will be the cause of so much psychological ruin among little girls, but as women, it’s uncomfortable to know that in some panicked corporate office somewhere, yet one more band of Men’s Warehouse motherfuckers sat around and decided the only way to imagine “sexy” is by signaling “submission.”  Not just when those plastic pelvises are banging up against one another, but all the time, in whatever she does, under whatever tiny clothing she’s been snapped into.

Sounds like one boring bitch, if you ask me.

There are a few upsides to depression. For example, should you read embarrassing trend pieces with headlines like, “Why Single Women Need To Shut Up,” you are awash in a tidal of gratitude. No need to read it all the way through like myself and the ladies at Shakesville did, it can easily be reduced to single sentences like, “I’m so afraid of the ocean of lack inside of me that I can’t stand to be by myself,” or “Because I hate myself and other women, I’m 99% sure everyone else does too.”

At least I am not that. That is what I am thinking. “Love is the ultimate narcissism,” eh? At least it is when you love like that.

If your happiness is hinged on another person, you will always be disappointed. If your solitude is consumed by longing for another, just a body, just anybody, you can’t face yourself. If you refuse the possibility that someone may exist or be whole without somebody else to hold their hand, you need to take a vacation. To the ends of the earth.

All by your self.

A fucking Billy Collins poem has more intellectual complexity than these people.

by Rilke

I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every hour holy.
I am too small in the world, and yet not tiny enough
just to stand before you like a thing,
dark and shrewd.
I want my will, and I want to be with my will
as it moves towards deed;
and in those quiet, somehow hesitating times,
when something is approaching,
I want to be with those who are wise
or else alone.
I want always to be a mirror that reflects your whole being,
and never to be too blind or too old
to hold your heavy, swaying image.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere do I want to remain folded,
because where I am bent and folded, there I am lie.
And I want my meaning
true for you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I studied
closely for a long, long time,
like a word I finally understood,
like the pitcher of water I use every day ,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the deadliest storm of all.

Addiction to perfection, as Marian Woodman reminds us, amounts to having no garden. The anxiety to be perfect withers the vegetation. Shame keeps us from cultivating a garden. Men and women deeply caught in shame will, when they tend their garden, pull out both weeds and flowers because so many of their own feelings seem defective or soiled.

What do we love so much that we want to protect it from strangers? That is a good question for garden makers.

No matter how deeply I go down into myself
my God is dark, and like a webbing made
of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.
           -Rilke

(from Iron John, by Robert Bly)

I really miss the thrill of discovery, and get very little pleasure out of finding new music now that the internet has happened. In my younger years, this was basically my life’s mission. Now I am one of those people who reads nonfiction and listens to either talk radio or the same Elvis Costello record 4,000 times in a row. That’s not really true at all, but I feel like it is.

Anyway, here’s a mix of tracks I’ve been listening to. 8tracks is rad.

(via siik, who has a track on this mix)