Come Downstairs Now

new blog!

2008-10-11T12:21:00.001-05:00

go here?
http://tobogganeer.wordpress.com/

2008-10-01T01:05:00.003-05:00

lately i've been obsessing over mutilating myself.
and my top two ways are:

AIRPORT CODE TATTOO
(phil's idea which i didn't like at first but surprisingly warmed up to. it will be of the places where i've [substantially] lived and will be expanded as i continue to move). it will look something like:

ACC / TRD / SFO / HKG / JFK

not taking into account places i moved back to. and not taking into account the fact that i've grown tired of my past tattoo ideas. we'll see.

TRAGUS (EAR) PIERCING
(am mere dollars away from doing this...with a barbell!)

small change

2008-09-29T15:12:00.001-05:00

i am filled with sunny nostalgia
because i just saw a professor's son
settling down into his haphazard
office with afterschool anecdotes.

memories.

crossed-out

2008-09-29T00:35:00.004-05:00

i am sitting here and glowing because i've finished the carmex ad and i have a new idea for a short movie that involves:
- a mother trying to buy a dildo on ebay
- a father that is an ex porn star
- and a son that is parading as a 70-year-old woman

isn't it romantic?

and one day i will reclaim the ability to write creatively and write well. but for now i am just getting rid of the things that press against my chest.

also, when i watch a cinematic glorification of the everyday, am i simply being defamiliarized? or am i pining for a suddenly unattainable everyday? self-perpetuating alienation or something to do with negative feedback and defamiliarizing & because it is film you are not inputting your own version of the ideal but pining for that very specific boy in the very specific white t-shirt in the very specific beard, and wasn't that staged? and how can anyone live up to it? and have we broken the filmspace and what does that mean for our reality and our everyday AND I NEED TO WRITE A PAPER OR I'LL DIE (i am trying to resist the academic in me)

ma'am

2008-09-27T13:22:00.002-05:00

almost done!

finely

2008-09-04T03:26:00.003-05:00

- major debates in the study of africa
- intermediate fiction workshop
- film theory I
- ~~shakespeare & the 18th century~~
- intro to linguistics
- silent cinema

new digs

2008-08-22T01:45:00.001-05:00

my headaches are returning just in time for school
& i will burn more calories on the walk home.

long things

2008-08-17T18:28:00.002-05:00

after just watching the edukators, and after reading what seems like 50,000 articles on why the "hipster" is the end of both culture and counterculture, i am annoyed when i hear the now-hackneyed phrases: THERE ARE NO YOUTH MOVEMENTS! THERE IS NO COUNTERCULTURE!

i mean, i feel it too, but i am annoyed when i hear this. and i am annoyed because they simply stop at the statement. it's not a radical statement. and it alone is not going to shock anyone into creating a movement. but being me, it's been bugging me. we are not the lost generation of apathetics. hemingway's generation claimed that title in the 1920s and the beatniks and hippies and punks and riot grrls to follow were able to live anti the establishment. and the thing that bothers me about the claim is this:

DEFINING A MOVEMENT IN THE SUPERFICIAL
when people look around and state their claim, they are looking for the fashion movement. they are looking for a movement in the cigarettes smoked and the beers drunk and the shoes bought and the clothes worn and the cars driven and the haircuts and the accessories. to look at hipsters and see in them the end of action, is to look for action in the fashion. we don't look to the prom queens and football players for action. this is because we assume you have to earn the right to wear a studded jacket or a keffiyeh. maybe in a certain code of ethics you do, but hipsters have proven to us that you really don't. and that to look for social change in a v-neck or a mohawk is fundamentally futile. and moreover, many people that i would call hipsters are the ones searching for that spirit of the counterculture and social change. they put on the spandex and the converse as if to raise the spirits of times long gone. and it takes only the thread to tell us that fashion does not = movement. in your search for the counterculture, do not look to hipsters! they dress differently does not mean they think differently! the punks hated the hippies for being apathetic and the new wavers were tired of the punks and the riot grrls hated the patriarchy-microcosm in punk ... and we look at these movements and what do we see but fashion and a few catchphrases? when long hair became the mohawk, love+peace in turn became anarchy, but do hippies and punks want fundamentally different things? NO! and when we look for the movements in fashion, it makes it that much easier to commodify our beliefs as proven, once again, by hipsters.

THE PEOPLE
this one is a lot more complicated. to have a movement, you need the people. hopefully a majority to change the status quo, but if not, then it becomes a counterculture to make visible the views of the other side. but to sit in a room and try to organize anything political, you find that activists have a twisted sense of the people. 1) how can you appeal to the people when you see them as lower than you, as idiots? there is so much segregationist thinking in making the other view the "absolute Other" so that disagreement = apathy, a lack of compassion, greediness. oh what labelling! and if it doesn't create enemies, it patronizingly creates allies: oh those poor people being kicked out of houses and how we must protect them and we create quintessential profiles for them so that they are either black, or spanish-speaking, or old, or in need of healthcare, or innocent. guilt is so powerful. we simplify to create enemies and patronize to create allies, which in turn means that the only activists (read: passionate, caring, active, selfeless, informed...) are the ones in the room - and not to digress, but even in the room we find the ISO fighting with the democrats and SDS with the ISO when they are all attempting to oppose a war - and a few select friends. because this is the way we like it! to be fighting the good fight and still be original! and this is how we fight with ourselves, we want to change things, we want social justice, but we do not want to be like everyone else. and we don't search for originality in doing original things, but in creating enemies in people all too similar to us. does it not seem ironic (and here we go with this term) to look for a people's movement by segregating? and it's hard, i know, because often, the more people involved, the more simplified the ideas have to be (marx in the communist manifesto vs. on the jewish question), and the easier they are going to be to commodify. but there is no social change without impetus in society. no social justice without the hand of the people. and we cannot go calling for people to unite! if we are going to be hostile in holding on to our originality (esp. when that originality is manifested in wearing black vs. rethinking how we can reform healthcare). it just puzzles me how we are on the brink of an environmental revolution and the "activists" i know approach it with sarcasm, saying that "recycling is primarily western" forgetting that recycling and reusing are integral parts of human history and WASTING is what is primarily western! antipathy can be equally as bad as apathy.

DEFINING A MOVEMENT IN MOVEMENT
this is a smaller issue, but i hate it most when activists want to abandon education and awareness in order to take on radical actions. radical actions would be great if they created radical change. but so much time is spent in being secretive and self-involved and righteous only to have the columbia administration ignore you. and people want radical actions so that they can feel radical. people want the adrenaline, the fire in their bones, the rip & the rush regardless. you see here that i am more critical of activists than i am of hipsters. hipsters are mere vestiges of a time when fashion was a gauge of a movement. if they achieve anything, it will be the instant knowledge in people that the person decked out in leather is not a biker with biker's beliefs. the person with a bandana and long hair is not a free-loving hippie. i can live in that world and live in it happily (and i've scanned over the damage being done by hipsters re: diminishing affordable anything). but i will not live in a world where even action does not denote movement. it's easy to look at history and see the revolution in a single action.

in 1917, a tsar was overthrown and it changed russia forever. let us overthrow george w. bush then, and the system will stay the same. i'm reading the grapes of wrath right now and this issue is brought up in the inability to go and shoot "the man" that is driving people off their farms because "the man" is greater than men, greater than a physical bank, greater than headquarters. no, the thing controlling it is not physical and cannot be fought with the physical. if they have taken it and made it theoretical and systematical and intellectual and virtual, then we must fight like with like and - sorry for this really anti-climactic conclusion, but - we must EDUCATE (and i mean educate, not raise awareness. education creates a person equipped with the mental tools to critically analyze and know what "the man" knows. raising awareness by spouting facts and statistics and horror stories is easily met with boarded-up ears).

and yes, the quiet slowness of education, the uniformity of education, the toiling confusion of education makes us feel that we are not doing anything, makes us feel like we are slaving for nothing. but without an educated people, activists are nothing but bar-stool intellectuals hierarchy-creating leaders (and solidarity with the uneducated or the poor does not remove this system!).

i end by saying, yes, let us protest, yes let us wear skinny jeans, but do not let this be the symbol of our activism. let the symbol of our activism be our activism. in other words, REMOVE THE SYMBOL! especially when symbols rely on the beholder anyway.

i think this feeling of being the lost generation, the heavy generation, the apathetic generation is all born in nostalgia for a time and a moment we cannot even understand. sold to us in books and newsreels and songs and photographs we only see the high-points concentrated. and here we are at a time when the technology before us could easily democratize and revolutionize the way we are and who calls the shots. but as we log online to download bob dylan and the clash songs, the blackberry and the iphone continue to oligopolize (word?) the internet. a shameless plug of one of my causes.

we feel lost, we feel apathetic. but let us not self-indulge ourselves. let us go out and do something and be hit in the face and not complain, but go out and do something again differently. i am not against a sense of hopelessness. i'd rather be honest and agree it exists. but i am against people pinning it with the label of THIS IS OUR GENERATION

yes.

2008-08-16T17:43:00.002-05:00

if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. for man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
- william blake

social anxiety

2008-08-16T00:38:00.004-05:00

i can't sleep and i am remembering the time
i was revising for my GCSE "IT" (computer science)
exam and i was revising with guys in my year
and we were talking and joking and suddenly
my heart started to clench and i had to get away
and i went and sat on the toilet until it was
time to take the exam.

this is who i am.

advanced screenwriting

2008-08-15T20:41:00.004-05:00

ESI
a character that has been boiling inside me for years now. she wasn't always called esi. she was called noah. she was called ellen. she was called hayden. and she is the tobogganeer. she is the one that has risen to fulfilled dreams only to have them burst with disappointment. she is the one who knows hope is futile but dreams the dream in the seconds before the crash. and in her most recent incarnation, she arrives in new york city to chase something that is not here. I JUST CAN'T WRITE HER THE WAY I SEE HER. possibly it's because she was too close to me last semester. and i see now what the immigrant burst-bubble is, this search for freedom that can only manifest itself in the superficial and cosmetic, leaving extra space for the emptiness. and i see now what i say repeatedly, that america cannot give me anything that is unique to this country. and it can, i see, but those things are only felt in the desire to pierce & tattoo myself, the whimsical whim to buzz off most of my hair, purchasing make up for black people (BLACK PEOPLE!), shopping at thrift & vintage shops, very physical! very cosmetic! and they make you feel like you have a hand in this world, every mutilated ear and inked inch of skin, but soon soon you feel that you are still standing still. you feel that you brought all your neuroses with you to these shores. and on these shores you don't have your family and friends and home and backbone. but you can't go home anymore. you are stuck.

and the movie projected before you is basically what you do with that.

i think i see it now.

something.

2008-08-15T14:40:00.004-05:00

i came of age post- everything and childhood often feels like hibernation, looking up to bigger heads resting on longer legs with bigger breasts and bigger words and one day you will be and become. and one day you will not look at the world from this windowpane and see tim-tam the bully punch holes into the little children and go to help but instead smack your head on the glass. one day you will walk out the front door like mama does every morning and you will go to Work. one day you will wear oven mitts like baba and cook porridge in the morning before driving the children you will birth to school. and at school the children will sit. they will nap. they will learn and look and wait. and one day they will be.

be. be. be. be. beep. beep. beep.

when you take the MTR in hong kong and when you are crossing across stations and being carried escalator-wise to the next level and the next level and resting your stiff hand on the sidebar you hear a beep. beep. beep. and it takes away all other noise and it slows down all other time and there is only one battle in sight and it is with your eyelids and they want to go down. there is only one battle and it is with your eyelids.

the eyelids got the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

what did you do today at work? oh, i can't even remember, and where is my bed? where is my bed? and why don't you let me rest my eyes before i talk to you? i say. and the only things that worked today were my eyeballs and eyelids and i think i have arthritis in my fingers. i think i have a rheumatism. you do? i think i do, mummy, i think i do! and mummy ran to her computer desk and logged online and ran back and stood in the doorjamb and said. i think you do! and cancer too!

and she turned off my lights for fear of radiation and ran far away to her bedroom and i lay there in the night without my covers tucked under me and without my nursery rhymes read to me and i thought and i said,

"i came of age post- everything."

and it felt like the slow din dark smog on schoolday mornings and our bus driver squinting slowly up the hill, and it felt like my head was turning to metal, hanging heavily over my neck, and it felt like being permeated, it felt like being overcome, by liquid like some funny osmosis to leave me darker and heavier and slower and quieter and

in the morning i sit. and in the day i learn and at night i eat. and all the time i look. and let me tell you my skills, well i am good on the intake. do you know that some like it hot was rated the #1 comedy of all time by the american film institute? and do you know that the yardbirds gave us more rock n roll legends than any other band? and do you know that everything you feel is birthed in the secretion of hormones?

but my parents are not impressed.

baba says: pop culture consumer and never creator
and mama says: don't obsess over their success! they're already successful! look at yourself.

and true. in steinbeck and hardy and shakespeare and twain i read behind my windowpane of runners-away and cultivators and fighters and murderers and their books are a gerund-overload and their books are a rhythmic overload and is and am and are and -ing and go and live and hurt and sweat. but i don't think i can care to care about the thought i was beginning to express.

and i all i could feel was, one day one day i will be.

just think

2008-08-15T00:28:00.003-05:00

we are young
heartache to heartache
we stand
no promises
no demands
[life] is a battlefield
we are strong
no one can tell us were wrong
searching our hearts for so long
[all] of us knowing...

i am in that kind of mood when this (esp. its alterations) doesn't sound as contrived as it should. the smell of fantastik permeates everything and i can sleep but i don't feel like it, i want to be entertained & i am finding this entertainment in old 80s music videos on youtube. HOT CHILD IN THE CITY! RUNNING WILD AND LOOKING PRETTY! and i want to watch a good movie, read a good book and feel good no matter how fleeting the feeling is. everything is fleeting. even election year and al gore documentaries. everything. what a relief! ....right?

hot child in the city

2008-08-14T18:50:00.003-05:00

when she goes downtown, she walks
like she just don't care, yeah.

this has been the easiest move-out process ever. partly thanks to wide-eyed insomniac delirium, partly thanks to the fact that i don't like this place. goodbye hewitt. goodbye harsh sunrays at 8am, goodbye construction workers' whistles, goodbye linoleum, goodbye filthy communal bathroom, goodbye dysfunctional kitchen, goodbye nights when i thought i would actually die from all the heat and air con less ness, goodbye archaic sign-in policies, goodbye patronizing res life workers....

and hello homelessness.

7 days to claremont.

with the smiths right now i am doing that thing when i loop back in the cycle to buried past loves and oh my i've been listening to everything! and all i can keep singing are songs about keats and yeats and tutus and why not to get married and ambiguously described gay love and feelings of nothingness and yes, i try to resist it because i hate its namesake but THE QUEEN IS DEAD is really the best smiths album. it is! i actually like more songs on strangeways.... but liking one song on TQID can often be likened to two songs on strangeways ... so there?

i want to catch something that i might be ashamed of...

also ...

"oh, you don't understand! i'm a man!"
"well. nobody's perfect!"

I LOVE BILLY WILDER

and scene:

go-go-go-glasses

2008-08-13T23:32:00.003-05:00

finished dubliners.

of all my summer reads, it felt dearest to my heart. but i still continue to struggle with this columbia-bred mechanical approach to reading: this rushing, this soaking this digest later, to distilling, this analyzing extra-textually. grrr! especially with james joyce! who attempts to draw his reader into the moment by focusing on the most intimate, the most inconsiquential, and by being so playful with his language/sound (though not as much in dubliners). i was hoping that a summer of leisurely reading would erase my reading-routine, but alas!

and i move on: the grapes of wrath (oh how i love thee, steinbeck).

keats and yeats are on YOUR side

2008-08-13T16:53:00.002-05:00

i look like this now.

things of summer

2008-08-12T07:02:00.008-05:00

i think it's funny that, when you spend all our time playing the foreigner who doesn't understand a certain term or idiom, and when you do this to humour people's egos and when you do this to allow people to feel superior and smart ... the result is not simply their boosted egos, but also the view of you as stupid & naive & earnest & unwitty.

ha!

please.

and one day i will write a film article for spec and it will be about how, in the absence of reading, film is sadly being created as the new book and it will begin: anyone who has ever taken any two-bit film class has heard the phrase, "film is a visual medium."

also, when you live inside your head too much, you exit with a speech impediment.

can you tell i'm changing?

THE INFORMATION AGE
when in _____, _____ said _____, a thousand viewers across america would see their_____ and feel the same annoyance.
and my new thesis idea to tie into defamiliarization and the pre- post- and previous apocalypse(s) of the 20th century (up until now) has to do with apathy, desensitization, incessant repetition (on a linguistic and visual level) & and how increasingly real images of everyday life terrorize our ability to live our everyday lives. the new paralysis/full empty nothingness/politically what we call apathy. we do many small things but are reluctant to do one big thing and see it through to the end. it makes sense in my head. i will basically start with, as always, what comes naturally, the myths, the rhymes, the collective consciousness, the repetition in language, the codes of continuity in film, any representation of normality that we've internalized ... its effect on our reality (because these are representations!) and then the effect of bathos, defamiliarization, and anything to come and terrorize the pattern without making us dismiss it like abstract art or revolutionaries painting slogans on our walls.

i like to think i'm changing.
-
send me the pillow
and how could they call morrissey wrist-slitting emo music when in almost nowhere else will you find a spirit so adamant in his pursuit of happiness (however it is perceived, happiness like the others have)? and in the face of perpetual sadness a person who will continuously run into the wall of reality in a vain attempt to answer hope's call? no, nowhere else but in these lyrics will you find someone to try so hard and to want to much despite constant loss and constant emptiness and apathy and heaviness and hurt.

i've said i would run outside and slap the tar
but i haven't done it half as much

co-consumerism

2008-08-11T17:58:00.003-05:00

lookee what i got in the mail today:

and i am waiting for
-killer of sheep box set
-mystery train
-dooney & bourke evening bag

does the fact that i got all of it secondhand on ebay make this less atrocious?

okay.

J'AI ENVIE DE VIVRE AVEC TOI!

morning! morning!

2008-08-10T02:47:00.005-05:00

and if it takes forever
then i'll wait forever
- stephanie zinone, grease 2

SCRIPT: REFORMATTED
I know it's stupid, but I can't shake the sense that statues move. It's childish, I know. I'm crazy, I know.

I want to do it but I can't do it! I can't do it! Its hands, its thighs. Its muscles. Look at its knuckles and its toes. Fingers for movement. Lips for movement. Muscles for movement. And yet as still as stone. How could they know that when those fingers froze, they would become nothing but frozen fingers?

I know it wants to move. A smile frozen on its face yet frustrated by the cars zipping by and the dogs barking and all the runners. They're jealous. Watching a world going by with stone-cold eyes. They scare me, these statues.

I see them ambling slowly towards my bedroom window, stomping home. Digging their hands into the brick and climbing and in my dreams they come in tens

Oh I see you.

With eyes and lips and bones and knuckles, frozen, stuck and they just didn't know and I always say tomorrow. But one day I will die and this will be all I had.
-
Eternity is my comfort zone! When I can't sleep I imagine myself naked and doing the breaststroke up and out of the city, swimming softly into a black and starless sky. And the city becomes the stars. A star. No star. And nothing. In one of my dreams a whale comes crashing into my window. I hate immense things.

But it doesn't see us, it just does not. Look at it! It's just amazing! And they never knew that one day their teeth wouldn't move in their jaws and their eyes wouldn't blink in their eye sockets. They thought they were going somewhere, but only this.

When my grandmother died, my mother cried, saying, "why do we stock up our pots and pans waiting to put them in a better house with better curtains?" And then to have only this. She said, "no one knows why we freeze our days with hope and blind our eyes with if only." Birth and death. Nothing before and nothing after. And, waiting for absolutely nothing, life can feel like a lot of sitting and staring.
-
i think people that post pictures of the things they want to buy on their blogs are indicative of a materialistic and consumerist culture (originial thought there) but let me wear that hat and wear it proud for the next few seconds:

the panasonic AG-HVX200. waouw!

quartered

2008-08-09T10:13:00.003-05:00

here's something i've been thinking about, i.e. my newest nationality crisis.

my new philosophy is to ignore all the negative energy of what people call reality re: student loans and the thousand-year debt i'm accruing. because it is only by focusing on what i want to become that i can push forward and make something of myself, which will come with money to pay off said debt. i am ready to pick myself up and make something of myself. to work hard, to grovel, to move myself upwards. the reputed american life story.

i've been looking for film funding. and, of course, i look to the various governments that could in one way or another support me (because that is how independent film has more or less worked historically). the BBC has a wonderful section called the Writer's Room that takes UNSOLICITED screenplays and stories from UK residents. so my first instinct is to find its american equivalent: PBS. of course, though, like everything else in this godforsaken country, living here and dealing with its many pitfalls while not benefiting from any of its so-called "opportunities" or "freedoms" is not enough to partake in anything. they slap the words back at you: CITIZEN. not resident. but CITIZEN. it's like they won't even allow you to grovel. wow, america. america!

i go next to the countries that will, in terms of citizenship, take me as i am and here is where my frustration begins: i am living in america. my stories are inherently bred from everyday experience, an american everyday experience. living in america has removed me from hong kong and from ghana so that my stories are not "ghanaian", they do not appeal to a ghanaian audience and to go in and write ghanaian stories - experiencing the culture through my rose-tinted nostalgia - won't be much better than all those westerners that that go in and bring out misrepresenting tales of barbarism and poverty. but my positive point of view is equally as patronizing. again: my stories are inherently from a western perspective because i am living in america. but america won't have me. ghana will, but i am not living there and everything i write about it will come from a skewed nostalgic perspective. hong kong will, but only if i am writing a story about hong kong ... and oh that skewed perspective...

there is no place where i can exist as a whole. i have often longed for that kind of unity, that kind of conviction in place. and i hate hate hate third culture kids whining about not having a home and sitting around, i hate that with a passion. that is not my point here. my question is how to push ahead? how to solve, how to live, how to be, because i really want to. it's just really hard to not have a foundation or corner stone because this world comes with its earthquakes. i have existed mostly in an international sphere - artistically, this manifests itself as stories ABOUT my nostalgic memories, my rose-tinted perspective. this manifests itself as tales removed from "reality", tales which focus on psychology and perspective. and my only cornerstone and backbone has been my family. my family thrust 12,000 kilometres eastward. or westward. it's so far you can't know.

and this is not just a girl whining about not being able to fund a film. this is #7,545,466 in a long list of why america needs to get over herself as a superpower as the richest country in the world as the land to take everyone's weary and hungry. that is what i'm whining about. economists spout the highest GDP as if that is a gauge of general quality of life. and it's just so frustrating to be treated like this on a daily basis, to be told that you are not one of us despite the fact you are experiencing all this with us. you are not one of us, we will help our own, pick them up from the bowels we push them into. and we will push you into those bowels and leave you there to fester and spit and wonder why you came here in the first place. i hate america. you see? i have no allegiance to this country. i do not NEED to experience all this bullshit because at the end of the day i can just leave it. if it was a welcoming country i would quickly grow this allegiance. but as it stands, i very confidently say that this country can give me nothing (i am paying fully for my education, and to jump start my career so it is not giving me these things). and i will give it nothing.

and i've been trying to figure out why i am still here. everything i like about this place is not unique to this place. except for columbia: you know, i love columbia and the academic experience it's giving me cannot be questioned. but even this is marred by its price tag. and it is marred by the fact that, going to college involves more than taking classes. it involves being in new york city and trying to meet people and trying to change things and trying to realize my dreams and why does this government have to make it so that i have to put all that at a stand-still? i can't work off-campus, i can't even stay in this city i may come to call home after 4 years, i can't apply for scholarships, and i can't fund a film, i can't enter a majority of your competitions. what are your citizens doing that i am not?

and america thus breeds this "us" vs. "them" mentality. i have never been nationalistic or even seen nationality as something at my core. but coming to america, all i can think is: well, i am definitely NOT american. but living in america and thinking to the places i am concretely from breeds none other than a rose-tinted view of the places that will have me. i will proudly say i am from ghana, i am from hong kong, as if these places have no pitfalls. but i have never been made to feel this way in any other country. just so unwanted.

i am just split, straddling, across nations. and parts of me are allowed and parts of me are not. and it is funny and frustrating to so manifestly, so physically feel the division of blood and soul and mind and body.

as long as they gaze a

2008-08-08T20:19:00.002-05:00

friday night spending
time perfecting my smiths
collection on itunes while
listening to waterloo sunset
on repeat & i am so easily
pleased.

i am in paradise.

it takes guts to be gentle and kind

2008-08-05T19:56:00.006-05:00

i don't know what i've been thinking these days, but i've been really thinking. and somehow the pieces of my life have been falling in place to include all the gaping uncertainties. i said include and not embrace. i don't know if this is active positivity or simple indifference. there is a small difference when happiness and contentment consist of just not caring & right now i am closer to number two. but it feels more like the touch of a knife that i can feel and not sense. or like the moments in life when i get lazy and slip into cynicism and realism, which devolve into self-pity and inching closer to the edge.

but no dreams about people stealing my doorknob for a very long time now.

and all i can see sloshing in my head is: healthcare. education. save to buy professional-ish camera. work. slave. read. write. carmex, carmex. plan, plan. hurt, hurt. maybe the UN (but not really), maybe france (but not for long), somehow i feel like i'll be staying put.

and i have tendonitis in my right foot.

take the bus with me?
-
as far as i could transcribe it, when godard is good:

j'ai envie de vivre avec toi
tu ne viendra pas au rendez-vous
ce soir
les étoiles filent
madeleine!
mais voici à la ville
madeleine!
imagine que c'est écrit comme "ASTOR LA
CIGARETTE DE L'HOMME MODERNE!"
souviens-toi!
tu sortis de la piscine,
le même disque tournait.
souviens-toi! souviens-toi!
cinq décembre dix-neuf cent soixante-cinq.
les étoiles.
j'ai envie de vivre avec toi,
oui!
brune en bikini
où jouer à un baby foot (?)
ah oui!
regardes:
ici, aviation.
tu mets du rouge à lèvres
sers-toi contre moi
nous avons décollé.
"hallo! ici la tour de contrôle
boeing sept-cent trente-sept appelle caravelle."
PAUL APPELLE MADELEINE!

- jean-pierre léaud, masculin féminin

thank god

2008-08-03T21:01:00.002-05:00

being international means never having to look at the state of affairs in america and say, "this is my world."

in search of a midnight kiss

2008-07-29T21:55:00.002-05:00

i love cinema.

high times

2008-07-26T20:26:00.001-05:00

prince on the dancefloor
that's all i ask for

best!

2008-07-23T21:49:00.003-05:00

remembering driving around the bay area with my daddy that summer and this is what it sounded like when he talked to me and told about his senegal days and ghana in the 70s:

1. Positive Vibration
(when i was in senegal, this was the song!)
2. Roots, Rock, Reggae
3. Johnny Was
(hmmm, as for you children. you don't know how we fought for you)
4. Cry To Me
5. Want More
6. Crazy Baldhead
(ah, as for you bob marley, if you had lived longer you would've gone bald just like the rest of us)
7. Who The Cap Fit
(oh nuo, this song papaaa! you don't know. when i was applying for tenure and ***** was doing those things to me ... "who the cap fit, let them wear it!")
8. Night Shift
9. War
(he enunciates every word in this song like it hits him right there)
10. Rat Race
-
and i have decided that next summer i am going to paris for a six-week film program run by the NYFA. and i am also going to ghana in august to film a film that is festering within me to come out

need to sleep

2008-07-21T23:33:00.004-05:00

coins i need to have all 50 state quarters:

ohio
pennsylvania
~~north carolina~~
alaska (not issued yet)
hawaii (not issued yet)

won't you help a brother out?

antoine doinel

2008-07-21T01:02:00.003-05:00

it is hard to keep yourself steady in the face of the deluge
and they can wear their realist-branded cynicism like hard hats
but that is not and has never been me, and that cold view of
the world only comes to me in empty self-pity so i will keep
on trekking despite the fact that my town has been doused
and glossed over by hungry licking water-waves.

but it still surprises me how defeated the ones who want to
change things are: "and in the ear of every anarchist who sleeps
but doesn't dream, we must sing we must sing we must sing..."

it's a nice way to die she's so easy on the eye

2008-07-18T14:42:00.004-05:00

i think i have found a way to be happy and
i want to tell my mother but i don't
want her to think i'm sad
-
but pickle jars are just pickle jars
and pickles are just pickles
ingredients : water, salt, cucumber, garlic and
pickling spices
-regina spektor
-
so instead of THE BLUEST EYE i re-started THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS and i'm in love. and i am listening to regina's songs and also strangeways, here we come (the most underrated smiths album!)

in soviet russia...

2008-07-18T03:52:00.004-05:00

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA: quick thoughts

finally finished the master and margarita and feel quite smacked in the face by it all. i keep commenting on the weakness of the translation only to find out it's pevear & volokhonsky. the best, right? though i am not one to hold close to the quite arbitrary process of translation.

representation of women: i was very disappointed by the fact that women were depicted as either screaming with fear, greedy, adulterous, or naked. they were mostly maids and wives and mistresses. i did not like how he fell into gender cliches. but MARGARITA is a wonderful character despite love being all she works for.

i must say i really enjoyed the PONTIUS PILATE chapters and how wonderfully he weaved that into THE MASTER's process of writing.

and the narrator was excellent, switching from omnisicent to conveniently mortal and within the story, from the subjective to objective views on the scene, crossing across time a lot to draw parallels and pull strings, emphasizing the smash of windows and the blazing of buildings. this is what i enjoyed the most, his fascination with the heaving spectacles that terrorize moscow & his satire: especially when it comes to depicting atheists confronting the absurd events. love it. imagery above all was this novel's saving grace.

though i must say i tired of it towards the end.

on to the bluest eye (yeah yeah toni!)

right on

2008-07-13T01:08:00.005-05:00

i love re-reading this:

if juno was 10 times shorter and 100 times more honest (from cracked.com) -

ELLEN pisses on a pregnancy test and it tells her that she's PREGNANT as well as PRECOCIOUS.

teehee.
-
ps.
naana says she doesn't
do that anymore
-
UNPUBLISHED FALL 07:

Akron/Family
Love Is Simple

Buried in the adrenaline-charged drumbeats of Akron/Family’s previous offer, Meek Warrior, was an ingenious track that featured repeated chants of “Love and Space” under fragile gospel vocal. In their latest album, Love Is Simple, the experimental folk group heralded as part of the New Weird America movement, has charged further off the beaten path and into the world of communication beyond words that they aim for.

Yes, there are significant lyrics on this album, asking us to accept love (most prominently in “Don’t Be Afraid, You’re Already Dead”) and bask in the glow of happiness, sunrise, “Phenomena”, “Crickets”, and all things naturally beautiful. However, these sweet melodious statements don’t replace Akron/Family’s trademark tribal, spontaneous, percussion-charged sound, which is seamlessly interspersed between the prophetic songs. In songs like, “Lake Song/New Ceremonial Music For Moms”, they re-awaken epic improvised songs rife with energy, chanting, harmonies, and enough downbeats and uncontrolled revelry to suggest being catapulted into another plane (fitting, given their obsession with portals). In this album, that plane is one of happiness and love too pure to be told, so Akron/Family take on the challenge of showing. At times you’ll think of John Lennon circa when he was singing “Va Guru De Va Om” but it’s mostly folk rock at it’s best: spur of the moment, experimental, inclusive (check out the chanters in “Ed Is A Portal”), and fun, ultimately showcasing raw talent.

The end result is mantra without mere ritual: Akron/Family doesn’t stop at preaching the hippie-hackneyed notion of love, but takes to the street with their crowd of happy singers, singing and chanting blissfully to evoke it. Akron/Family rush into our anatomically-correct hearts by keeping up the soul-moving, mood-lifting, lethargy-shaking feeling people go to church (or the Sunday morning drum-circle) for. Without the getting-up-early-on-a-Sunday-morning-with-a-hangover part.

how to

2008-07-09T01:32:00.005-05:00

spring break 08.

i am for some reason remembering
that my sister, Naana, has her breakfast
every morning at 10 on the dot.

on the dot.

a tray with a sandwich and choco-milk.

and she has everything in her bag you'll ever need
including a PK wrapper from ghana in 2005.
it's orange.

strangeways...

2008-07-08T13:29:00.003-05:00

they said :

there's too much caffeine
in your bloodstream
and a lack of real spice
in your life...

and people who are weaker than you and i
they take what they want from life

seasons don't fear the reaper

2008-07-07T13:09:00.005-05:00

i am currently reading the master and margarita in which every fantasmogorical event features the screams of women & usmagazine.com has a photo gallery dedicated to hollywood's "scream queens"...

which makes me realize that i don't know what a man sounds like when the life is scared out of him.

wanting to be haunted

2008-07-06T12:11:00.003-05:00

i witnessed my paranoia/anxiety reach new levels yesterday when, half-asleep, i heard a lady blowing up my air mattress and attempting to steal my laptop, i remembered my father when i was very young saying, "nuo, if you ever wake up in the middle of the night and hear a thief, just pretend to be asleep." so i played asleep for a while until she started to leave, then i wanted to confront her and get my laptop back. but when i tried to raise my head it stubbornly held still like stone, and like a comatose patient i attempted to prove i was alive with movement - but to no avail. and after a steep struggle, i twisted my head towards the door. and only stillness.

only stillness and my messy room.

it happened again when, half-asleep, i was bothered by the crescendoing sound of a concert going on in the quad. some annoying rock star playing some song that began with a c, and i thought to myself, "those idiotic pcp kids!" and i opened my eyes, but they sunk heavily back down and my ears continued to be terrorized with vibrations rising high into my cranium. and i attempted to lift my head to the window to see, but once again, heavy-stone head. and the band seemed to be rising up to my seventh floor window and when i finally raised my head and opened my eyes wide, i found my fan in my eardrum. and its humdrum whirring sounded like the blunt sound of a cheering crowd.

and this is me not on drugs.
-
when i write my theses:

ENGLISH
i am really interested in wolfgang iser's the act of reading, i want to study reception/reader studies (whatever it's called). i'm interested in how language becomes habitual & how small changes can be shocking. so starting from some type of collective consciousness (pop songs, mythologiy, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, monomyths...), i want to explore how writers have questioned the limits of literature to really change perception. i think all my authors will be modernists - from woolf to stein. but i am also interested in the impetus for modernism around the world: what wars, what genocides threw reason down from its throne. what quiet apocalypses and screaming dangers caused writers to overthrow & question one of the most innate aspects of life: language.

FILM
i am really interested in film's creation of reality. and how it uses this to control the world's perception of reality. especially in an "information" age when a majority of our information comes from video, when no one will read a long blog post, but will amble happily through photo blogs. yadda yadda. representation & reality.

skylark. nightingale.

2008-07-06T00:48:00.004-05:00

i started reading c.s. lewis's studies in words (but took a hiatus from it because his purpose, to explore how to read old texts, is so different from mine). but in it, he briefly describes the moralization of words / how they come to inherently contain the designation "good" or "bad" (basically an ultra-linguistic continuation of what nietzsche writes in the genealogy of morals). anyway, i was thinking a lot about the words "idealist" and "realist" and how i believe that they wrongly carry that value judgement.

today, if you say the word romanticism, you garner immediate eye rolls and sarcastic comments. because the word dreamer is associated with naivety, with stupidity, with a disconnect from reality. no, everybody wants to be a realist (forgetting that cynicism is careful and easy) because a realist is grounded and connected to the truth.

but for me (and i don't necessarily want to politicize the terms), a realist is person not unlike a conservative: someone who does not want to change the status quo. because i have seen realists settle far too often at, "but that's the way it is in the real world." that's the way it is. laziness. unwillingness. the desire to take the "smart" route without questioning anything, without looking around to see that their destitute "objective truth" is almost entirely perceived. because switch to a different decade, a different country, a different skin colour, a different gender, a different social class, educational background, childhood, even birthdate ... and your truth will switch accordingly. no, their truth is the perception of truth that has been fed to them - the kind that the media has very easily commodified so that avril lavigne was once real because she scowled, so that the sex pistols were real because of the way they dressed. film for example, has created a codified system which we see as fantasy. it then negates this system to feed us "reality". completely constructed. and not to linger on the media, but to read a newspaper and watch the news is to get a hyper-realized sense of an impending apocalypse so that, the minute you lift your head from behind the paper, the world seems all-too still, all-too serene.

i still struggle to understand why grit is inherently real, when especially here at columbia, we live in green grass. i mean, i understand where this comes from, i understand the upper-middle class guilt which operates to make us believe that our privileged lives are not reality. and the funny thing is, that in ghana, people generally believe that their destitute lives are not reality.

but i am moving further and further from my point. i've mentioned why i think the term realist connotes over-glorified complacency. i also, think that the terms "idealist" & "romanticism" are highly misunderstood. and though i am not necessarily talking about the artistic movement, it hurts me to see poets like keats, coleridge, and shelley thrown aside because people generally misunderstand the term "Romanticism" and don't see it as the continued, relentless questioning of the world's great paradoxes & acknowledgment of its great wonders.

i won't launch into conspiracy theories, but it seems to me that, because idealism and romanticism are always portrayed to us in the "dreamer" archetype of hollywood films, always shown to us as men so disconnected from the physical laws of reality, forever in their own minds, we learn to dislike them, to quickly dissociate ourselves from them. but i have seen idealism and it is what has changed the world. to look at the gritty world and imagine a better one, to know that there is still so much wonder in this world, to want to change anything, to go exploring and questioning this world ... this is inherently romanticism & idealism. to look at the world around you and see the good and the bad, to acknowledge the good and believe in it so much that you want to save it by attacking the bad ... this is idealism, this is romanticism. and they run on the hackneyed concept of hope (now copyrighted by barack obama, oh lol).

you can't say you want to change the world and call yourself a realist. because, realist, how dare you think that your puny insignificant life will be the one to change a system that has been in place for centuries before you were born?

that's the mindframe, no?

also, to be an idealist, you need to focus your attention so much on the good, to constantly remind yourself that it is there. we live in a world that will focus on the bad. i can vaguely see how this all started, but we have forgotten to acknowledge what we are fighting to save. this fight to focus on the good in a world forever throwing bad your way is what has been picked up as a disconnect from reality, i think. but a realist is a person that focuses on the bad in a world constantly throwing good his or her way. it is an equally disconnected world view. the difference being that, as a realist, you have no chance of falling.

on a final note, because i have lost my train of thought & i'm tired, i find it really funny, really hilarious here at columbia when the left-wing student activists pretend to be realists. i love to see them separate themselves from the artists, the theorists, the scholars ... i love to hear them spout words like "fact" & "concrete", and especially, "reality". and i am not trying to separate myself from these people, but i find it very hard to take part in activism at columbia for many reasons, and the complacency that comes with defining yourself as a "realist" is one of them.

i wish we wouldn't let the common perception, the moralized connotation, of these words affect who we are so much. and you may ask what changing the connotation of the word will do (because, despite my philology i am aware that a word is a word and cannot entirely define a person - especially thanks to a process c.s. lewis details in the book)? well, my ideal would be a person willing to dream but also willing to physically fight for their dreamworld. when we call ourselves "realists" based on the common perception, we inherently accept the status quo. a realist should be someone who is willing to realistically reach for a better world. but realists often snowball into cynicism, pessimism, and complacency. no, in the moralizations of the word, i would rather be an idealist, an optimist, a romantic. because i would rather acknowledge the wonders around me. this is what spurs me to want change. and in a world where my feeble attempts are often curbed quickly, it is idealism that keeps me going, keeps me taking the punches.

oh yes, oh definitely, i will be an idealist.

kids.

2008-07-05T13:03:00.004-05:00

23.09.08
new kings album soon!
and can i just say that we need more hair
more church-music-southern-rock-n-roll
and less tight-jeaned-clean-shavenness?
-
a family of trees wanting to be haunted
i really like the way this is sung.

a lot.

one of the things that make me believe in this decade of shells & kernels.
the 20s were on fire, the 60s were on fire, and these 00s have us haunted
by a too-long history and a too-intangible apocalypse.

hokay

2008-07-04T10:09:00.003-05:00

my winnipeg was great. and it made me realize
that i am trying to do a very similar thing with
this film that i want to make in ghana. and even
though i am coming from a very different place
(physically & situationally), here is the jolt to say,
wake up and think.
-

despite hating this song in so many ways,
i love the music video (if his jump means
suicide and not some weak reading of the
end of the relationship).

i drink only that which makes me thirsty

2008-07-03T19:39:00.003-05:00

i just watched
sex, lies, and videotape
(note: the oxford comma)
and it has restored in me the
desire to make films after a
dark din of i will never ... ever ...

so quietly perfect.
-
and in other news, i LOVE
we brave bee stings and all
the lyrics to bag of hammers
and thao's voice (her voice)!

bubble

2008-07-03T09:45:00.003-05:00

I like to read this to remind myself:

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I were dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness' sake! what the dickens! but me no buts - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

(The Story of English)

<3 ewan

2008-07-02T00:52:00.002-05:00

"are you gonna kill me?"
"yeah."
*sobs*
"well then i don't see why i should dig!"

david, or: death comes with her dagger hands

2008-06-30T18:27:00.009-05:00

very recently i've been struggling with an inability to contain my nostalgia. by that i mean that i cannot make myself conform to the truth of my nostalgia and i rush - perform mental arbitrage - to the future. and by that i mean that, when i look at a picture like this one:

it is a picture of my father and i, taken when i was four years old and we were in kogri, ghana for the summer holidays.

i looked at this photo and my stomach sank to a depth beyond my ankles because the thought that shot through my head was not, i miss my dad, but: one day, my dad will die and i will look at this photo and really miss my father.

it's a quiet fear i've been living with since the almost successive deaths of my father's father and my mother's mother (the only people i have known to die). grandparents are often like buffers, and their presence ensures you that your parents are young. but in their 70s they quietly passed away to leave my parents as the next generation to go & the thought drives me crazy and i've tried to express it to no avail. i keep looking at my parents as they speak and i keep thinking that one day their eyes won't blink and their teeth won't move in their jaws like that. my mother's lips won't purse when she's angry, and my father's eyes won't come alive with annoyance, and they have left me so much to love them for and i cannot bear the thought of the inevitable happening...

and this paranoia has been fed and exacerbated by the fact that i am on the other side of this fucking globe now. my mother once called me with a cold that made her voice hoarse and i was sure she was about to tell me my father had died in a plane crash. a few weeks ago, my mum and little sister left for china late at night and we couldn't reach them by phone. i was certain that they'd been murdered on the train ride there and i began to prepare myself for a life as naana's sole big sister and surrogate mother ...

this really does sound crazy and i can admit that it is, but it does not minimize the way in which these thoughts terrorize my existence. seeing that photo caused the most recent resurfacing of the idea and it's haunting me to an extent i almost don't want to admit to.

and this comes at a time when i am quietly lamenting the wonder years of life at home with my backbone, a way in which i will never get to live again. and they say that this is why we get married and have children and create second families but nothing can compare to my sisters and parents. nothing. and nothing can ever compare in the same way. i am beyond protective of my sisters. when they started taking the bus by themselves i would sit at home and worry until they came back safely.

and yes, this is the one reason why i try not to think of anything beyond this life, but i still pray. it is pascal's wager on a micro-scale. i care not about heaven or hell or religion or god as painted by bibles and torahs and korans, or my own salvation. but if there is something out there that is keeping my family safe, i want it to keep doing that.

i continue to acknowledge how crazy this whole system is, but my life is dominated by these thoughts right now and i can't take it. i can't deal with my burgeoning social anxiety, my intermittent inability to function, my dirty dance that is a constant attempt not to fall back into a pit ... i can't do all that and entertain these thoughts.

and the answer is obviously not: to simply acknowledge how ridiculous this is (i already have), and the answer is not to just be rational and know that the chances are low (i know that) ... but 0.01% is still a chance that terrorizes my insides.

death lingers over my parents as they are now the oldest generation. and my parents are quite young and very vital. they are running marathons and doing their PhDs and being academics and raising children and at present they are rationally only halfway through their lives ... but all i can then think is that accidents happen and everyday my parents & sisters are on buses and in buildings and crossing streets, and you know how absent-minded naana can be, how temperamental and impulsive vilaa can be, and daddy refuses to stop running when his heart beats too fast, and mummy is always on those weird diets ...

and i've been thinking that all i have to do right now is move back to hong kong when i'm done with school so i can be with them all the time as if my presence is a protective force ... but it's not even that. it's two things: 1) that i want to see every moment of their waking lives while they are still alive and 2) that i want to know them as they are and not remember them as they were as if they are already dead and i have to preserve a memory built on interspersed moments, dotted across my lifespan.

you can't think like that.

but i do.
-

my mother still tries to do this.

and i know this nostalgia will only last for a little while and i will be okay again. but i also know that all i am doing is burying daggers and they always resurface with sharper blades.

and i am trying to tell myself that these photos are not a substitute for my memories because of course each photo is drenched in my mother's tendency to orchestrate for the camera

THE DOORMAN (2008)

2008-06-30T10:25:00.001-05:00

http://thedoormanmovie.com/

omg tray your so cuniving

2008-06-28T11:59:00.004-05:00

surprising to me that the new face of fan fiction is youtube videos consisting of pictures of the high school musical cast with captioning. interesting to see film made without resources, but disconcerting to see the complete lack of literacy in all tomorrow's grown ups...

this is some fan fiction i wrote when i was 14. for the band busted no less, but we can get over that ...

Fiona gazed around the packed auditorium for any sign of live talent. As she forced herself through a moshpit of screaming teenagers she wondered how long it had been since she was one of them. She was so tired. The sweat and stagnant air was killing her.
The things you’ll do for a promotion, she thought to herself.
The flyer had said ‘The Biggest Talent Competition of the Year’. She’d witnessed the worst. These days, any teenage boy could pick up a guitar, write a song about girls, girls, girls and get signed. Music was dying.
With the last vestiges of her hope still present she gave one more band a chance.

Four boys stepped onto the stage.
“One, two, one two three,” a rickety clash of drums and guitar filled the room, “I wanna get with you! Me and my mates do! The things I’ll do to you! You, you, you!”
Fiona started heading for the backdoor as the song closed with the worst drum solo not to go down in history. Piece of Heaven they called themselves? Try Piece of Shit!

zee zed

2008-06-27T12:06:00.003-05:00

BODY POLITIC
if my heartbeat is the marching drum, and my
clenched fist is my agency, and my two feet are my
parts to play, then what of my eyesight and ear-
hearing? and if my mohawk is testament, my skinhead
is testament, my afro, my jesus-hair, my bowlcut are
testament, and my tattoo is testament, my tee-shirt,
knickerbocker, pinstripe are testament, then
what of my liver and bile? and what of
my superimposed networks of synapse and artery and
relay neurons and musculature and bones? they grit with
rust and knock-knock with non-use.
-

European Pressphoto Agency via NYTimes.com

disgusting.

ghana 2005

2008-06-22T13:48:00.004-05:00

calabashes in kogri (pito?)

mosque in the north

tar streets and mud huts

the gated community of trasaco valley

korle bu, accra (where i was born)

elmina castle

town of elmina

akon's "locked up" was playing

madonna and child

post-drunk in the morning

2008-06-21T09:34:00.001-05:00

i need a new blog but i told myself i wouldn't unless i had something meaningful to write or take pictures of or film and the only words running through my head right now are those cheesy sappy ones that came from mr. gyllenhaal's lips:

I WISH I KNEW HOW TO QUIT YOU.

blergh.

stomachache day

2008-06-19T19:43:00.003-05:00

this week i've been listening
to tenderness, and deceptacon
and if you want to sing out, sing out
on endless repeat and
i've been really really happy.

and today i added the boy least
likely to's cover of faith and thao's
album with the get down, stay down.

rooibos

2008-06-15T23:13:00.003-05:00

concrete cuddle from the
red, red slip down red,
red oesophagus.

a ceremony
for the ones we've loved in our
noontime dreamtime funtime
sleep, still, our lives mirrored
in silhouette or cinema, or when-
ever we are the things we do and
the things we do are us more
than noontime dreamtime
funtime glazed eyes

looking looking
into the "when i grow up": i want to
be be, sitting sitting into every sinking
sun and rising
afterlife.

paul & romero

2008-06-10T20:59:00.004-05:00

"ha?"
"ha."

have you ever been to the playground on sakura hill? There is a big turtle statue there that spits out water on hot days and the kids wear their bathing suits and try to catch the water with sandcastle buckets and spades shaped like a banana.

and romero loved paul.

underneath the covers

2008-06-08T03:45:00.005-05:00

i very recently discovered that my life before college was a constant festerous burning underneath my ribcage and it was okay

because i told myself when i go to college i can turn this late hibernating to becoming and finally being. but

coming here presented two obstacles: a) to be and become fucking what?!

but the more recent revelation is b) i can't have what i wanted and i can't have what i had.

in my failed race to outside-living i have forgotten to do the things that kept me sane. i am not outgoing and unabashed (still shy and socially awkward to the point of anxiety!) but i've also lost my sense of wonder, the only thing to keep me sane.

and this feels nothing like the anxious wishing-waiting, that feeling of being alive, no this feels more like a complicated and damp heaviness that manifests itself in tears before sleep and forgotten resolutions to fix myself

and now that it's summer and i'm reading and drinking tea and listening to entire albums and sleeping in and seeing the waterfronts and skyscapes and i feel so great and maybe i can maybe start to think the way i used to about the little things

that and i need to get over the academic notion that every opinion you have needs to be backed by something someone said before you.

returning

2008-06-07T18:49:00.004-05:00

psst!

i have a new radio show for the summer!

it's called three children on a road in iceland (after the first image from sans soleil) and it's on air every monday at 10pm new york time. 10am for all y'all in hong kong! and okay, while i won't forgive you for not staying up into the depths of after-midnight just to hear my show, i can understand not being up by 10am on a summer day. therefore, the show archived for y'all. dani, you are in england though, and 3am is primetime for radio listening!

notice the y'all. this morning i gave campus tour to prospective athletes and a mother from somewhere like texas wouldn't stop going on about how women like to talk and, therefore, saying "y'all" saves time because it saves a word, it saves a word! not you all, not you guys, but y'all, y'all!

p.s.
something
filled up
my heart
with nothing

a sudden desire to go "home"

2008-06-06T20:28:00.005-05:00

is it devilish to admit to the glee that rises within me when i see this on the hong kong observatory's website? also, if i was in hong kong i could film the opening scene to HARBOUR despite what people thought. rain machine?! we're in hong kong!

i miss the booming nights and deadstill mornings, shivering at the bus stop trying to keep our novels and spectacles out of the rain, dreaming i could walk on this water and such. new york rain does not, and cannot, compare to the booming ominous fast-moving clouds that dart across the sky and suddenly-

and this picture is my hong kong:

29.04.06

Love of two is one
Here but now they're gone
Came the last night of sadness
And it was clear she couldn't go on
Then the door was open and the wind appeared
The candles blew then disappeared
The curtains flew then he appeared, saying don't be afraid
Come on baby, and she had no fear
And she ran to him, then they started to fly
They looked backward and said goodbye, she had become like they are
She had taken his hand, she had become like they are
Come on baby, don't fear the reaper

teehee!

2008-06-05T19:52:00.004-05:00

RULES:
1. Put Your iTunes on Shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
d2 boyfriend [live] - the moldy peaches

red light room

2008-06-05T01:28:00.002-05:00

the asch recordings and thrifting through the
discarded magazines and sunglasses of a
put-together girl quite unlike me and
i will wear her rosy dress with trainers
and i will eat cereal in her porcelain bowl and
will agree that it was sad when that great ship went
down and hum with my fan to this lovely silence
on the early morning before the first day of work

<3 guerrilla girls

2008-06-02T05:35:00.002-05:00

spot on.

2008-05-31T12:54:00.001-05:00

WHY I WRITE

George Orwell

(taken from: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw)

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious — i.e. seriously intended — writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ — a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's ‘Tiger, Tiger’. At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed — at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week — and helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost —

So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.

which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature — taking your ‘nature’ to be the state you have attained when you are first adult — I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma:

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. ‘Why did you put in all that stuff?’ he said. ‘You've turned what might have been a good book into journalism.’ What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

1946

THE END

memory bus route

2008-05-27T01:40:00.003-05:00

6 songs i listened to on repeat while sharing earphones on the bus to school when i was 15

1.
ashanti feat. ja rule
always on time

2.
fat joe feat ashanti
what's love

3.
smilez & southstar
tell me

4.
mya
free

5. frankee
fuck you right back

6.
cam'ron
hey ma

i wonder if they sort of fucked me up?

e.

2008-05-26T02:41:00.002-05:00

HEWITT
tea top windowsill
faerie light oval
clear plastic bag tangerines
tablet-pill symphony
the ghost of an hsbc gold
battery-run fan
the sun almost rising

head hung happy
on a monday morning
far into springtime

time is all around

2008-05-25T05:56:00.002-05:00

my fortune cookie tells me i am
"transforming [myself] into someone who is certain to succeed"
but do transitions feel like heavy hung deadness
and stillborn babies?

my summer

2008-05-24T12:49:00.000-05:00

Dani
1:48 PM
so whatsupdude? how're you spending your summer and endless uni-free days?

Fran
1:49 PM
walking, eating out, moving rooms, having friends over, reading hemingway, trying to write

click click click comic

2008-05-22T09:33:00.000-05:00

the end of it all

2008-05-14T04:22:00.003-05:00

the cars zooming by in the rain puddles
makes it feel like we're by the sea

today we're younger than we're ever gonna be

2008-05-06T23:35:00.002-05:00

Writer's Block Phase 3 is the worst and the best: yes, I am excited to almost be there. But I am still only on the verge.

Like the moment when I was leaving Hong Kong
Like final's week.

shock, shock me

2008-05-06T02:52:00.004-05:00

something about mika's love today is so conducive to studying.
no. i have not joined the revolution.

also, the first part and not the rest of this film is sort of amazing (and available online in its entirety):
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/main.htm

yeah. i hate this limbo of am i seeing what i think i'm seeing or seeing what i want to be seeing and somehow i want to be a schoolgirl again and never wash my shoulder.

also, happy birthday to my dad.

2008-05-05T19:34:00.001-05:00

REGISTRATION

2008-05-03T19:16:00.002-05:00

CORE:
- judo
- major debates in the study of africa

ENGLISH
- shakespeare & the 18th century
- literary criticism & theory
- intermediate fiction workshop

FILM
- film theory
- senior seminar in filmmaking (maybe)

this is the 1st semester ever that i will be taking more major classes than core classes. booyakasha!

teenage head

2008-05-03T18:14:00.002-05:00

11.
Westlife - Westlife (also, S CLUB 7)

The epitome of the Smash Hits years! I remember taking my dad to HMV and asking him if I could spend my first allowance on the S Club 7 CD. He said sure. I also made a Westlife scrapbook and Vilaa copied me. I like Bryan, Vilaa pretended to like Shane, Naana pretended to like Mark. We jumped and screamed when this video came on screen. I was going to go to Ireland after high school and never go to college. It made my father very angry.

12.
Jonathan Larson - RENT

I was going to write a musical named "c/o Life". It took place in a Post Office and centred around a girl that had AIDS (her solo song was, As.I.Die.Slowly). There was a couple in it (Stacey and Roger) and a girl named Candy who wanted to chase her dream of being a hairdresser. It was about communication and how these post office workers deal with so much communication and yet can't communicate. It was never completed. (PS. I really hated the Rent movie)

13.
*NSYNC - No Strings Attached & O-Town - O-Town

I wrote a lot (A LOT) of boyband fan fiction.

14.
P!nk - M!ssundaztood

Pink - Don'T Let Me Get Me
Uploaded by hakim93200

I fancied myself quite real. This is still a great album! (milder version of my impedning Kimya/Moldy Peaches love)

15.
Crass ... lots of it.

My friends thought I was rather punk with my DIY attitude and care no-nonsense/feminist outlook on life (let me tell you, I was none of these things, just a girl with deep thoughts and feelings). so they told me to listen to Linkin Park. And Metallica. I had a crush on a metal head so I did listen to a lot of bullshit. But ONE band really epitomizes what I loved: CRASS, fucking CRASS! I also heard my first Moldy Peaches song (I Forgot) and my sisters and I didn't know what to make of it ... at all.

16.
Regina Spektor - Soviet Kitsch

An awakening, my god! All those nights spent with Regina. I really experimented with my writing style and began to write a lot of forceful quirky prose-poetry that nobody got.

17.
Indie

I fancied myself somewhat of a music connoisseur but of course this meant the demise of actual music listening. The time in my life when I played the role: name-dropping, listening to know and not to listen, rushing through bands just to know them. Yeah. I even read NME. Some great stuff there, but I don't remember it fondly for the simple reason that I was posing. Still, some real good and true listening occured with: The Smiths, Pixies, Joy Division, etc.

18.
Kooks - Inside In/Inside Out

People love to hate the Kooks, but this was the soundtrack to my leaving Hong Kong and it really was a great album!

19.
Anthology of American Folk Music

Finally, NEW YORK! It meant I could immerse myself in the "scene". That never happened (thank god). Instead I listened to fewer bands more deeply and music vanished from my life.

20.
everything is about FILM now (and lots of twee!)

MY YOUTH!

2008-05-01T20:51:00.002-05:00

BEST SITE EVER:

http://www.coloring.com/

jajambo!

2008-04-30T04:51:00.000-05:00

allow me to be happy for this one moment, please.

[wo]menstruation

2008-04-27T23:36:00.007-05:00

maybe my whole life has been the tooting of this horn:
man cannot deny facts; but he establishes their truth by the way in which he deals with them...
-simone de beauvoir

yes yes oh yay!

-
I'm a O95-C17-E31-A69-N84 Big Five!!
I'm 43% freak!!
My Music Personality
Check out my blirtatiousness!
Check out my Morality! 79% liberal, 21% conservative
-

on that note, WBAR-BQ was this friday and it was awesome shows and afterparty.
good times ... yay

and this means that there have been two photos of me on my own website in two consecutive posts, which never happens. and will probably never happen again. you can relax

maybe we will win the war

2008-04-27T22:07:00.006-05:00

i hate to be the person to quote my writing professor like a therapist but:

when it comes to writing, if you can do something else, then do it.

writing is a horrible process, it really is. it will forever make you feel inadequate and deadened and damp because the fire pew-pew of your mind is never ever going to materialize . writing, in its essence, is simply a record of something far greater, far transcendent etc etc. yeah. my brain isn't prepared to spout out intellectualized dictum etc etc. but yeah, all i wanna do is (bang bang bang bang) tell everyone that yesterday i free-wrote esi and alex and norman and xin into real people with wants and needs and conflicts & despite my telenovela-esque plot i am happy happy happy.

also, simone de beauvoir makes me really happy.

and in my proto-slumbering (geez) state i scribbled in this system it is not laws that make (men) right, (man) himself is right. to change things, you cannot change laws, you need to change (man). and was thinking of woolf & de beauvoir & i meant it as a way to justify literature and art (film) against the deluge of (oh-look-at-you-pretentious) criticisms.

statue

2008-04-27T02:19:00.004-05:00

there is something very wrong about statues and, in all my life i have not been able to explain the spine-tingling eye-shaking feeling i get when i see those frozen giants. i cannot explain it. but here is an intellectualized explanation because it fits my purpose today:

statues are sentiment encased.

that much is obvious. statues are time capsules: erected at a time when they mean so much that their very beings breathe the breath of the time. they are embodiments of a sentiment, a new world order. but once you encase a sentiment in bronze you freezeframe it and it stays stuck as the times pass so that your life-breathing monument dies, but dies alive so that statues (disregarding their gigantic size) are dead-yet-alive replicas of life but still as still as rigor mortis. it's like catching the clock at 11:11 or true deja-vu, that feeling when your brain perceives perfect symmetry, event perfectly placed on event. here: life is placed on death and they co-exist to make me my mind whirr.

and i hate it.

didn't freud say that seeing old rome superimposed but co-existing with new rome should cause elation? i don't think the mind likes to see itself in the world.

i haven't even started with my hypocrisy rant, re:
...A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore...

did you know that emma lazarus actually wrote this poem for the colossus of rhodes and not for lady liberty? the colossus of rhodes was a world wonder that toppled over in an earthquake.

ozymandias anyone?

...whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things....

exactly my point.

but my very favourite statue belongs to ms. barrett-browning:
...Deep-hearted man, express Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death-- Most like a monumental statue set In everlasting watch and moveless woe Till itself crumble to the dust beneath. Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: If it could weep, it could arise and go.

and this is exactly where my statue theorizing begins to mock my very existence.

out of my brain on a train

2008-04-26T14:02:00.004-05:00

i hate columbia.

i hate it as an institution, as cold heartless concrete. as nothing but mouths pressed open with greed & lies. i hate that it won't give me money regardless of my flailing financial situation, that it is willing to give up on me and cast me to the dogs even though i've spent two years here engaging with academics and community, two years here exploring its resources like it fucking said in its fucking admissions brochure. i hate that, despite all the time i have spent in america, i am not american and therefore i am not eligible to be helped. that bullshit they engrave onto that bullshit statue about tired, poor and weary foreigners, about melting pots, about diversity & about globalization. THEY SIMPLY EXPLOIT US TO MAKE THEIR CITIZENS MORE COMFORTABLE. that is what america stands for in every single microcosm on its soil. and this is what i mean about loving new york city but not america, about loving columbia but not columbia inc. i feel so cheated and exploited and meaningless and unworthy and inadequate. i feel so unwanted by this fucking school. columbia does not have the right to mourn minghui yu, or commemorate 1968, or go on and on about its large international student population. what do you fucking do in the face of something like this? how can you punch the bully back when curling up and taking blows has gone too far? how can you go far beyond festering in frustration and throwing away a future your parents have fought for just to be sucked back into the system in order to pay back student loans. HOW THE FUCK CAN AN EDUCATION BE THIS EXPENSIVE? can you call it an education? and isn't it so fucking ironic that we who are actually paying for this education can't get jobs & need to place $500 deposits on each amenity we want in this fucking country.

I WANT TO GO HOME!
but to where?

wonderlust [sic]

2008-04-23T01:37:00.004-05:00

my mother made me smile today amid gusts of snot-faced crying when she finally broke through her packaged and prepared advice to tell me something true, she said: she said, after i told her to stop telling me to take everyday as it comes because i have never lived like that & where did it get me she asked, and i said columbia and she said, "you worried about positive things."

"you worried about positive things."

because here i am going crazy over what will i do with my life and how will i pay back my projected $120,000 debt when the only loan available to me has folded and I don't want to live in a box or have to sell myself to the system because i wasn't born with money shooting from my ears. and my problems are so tiny compared to the rest of the world's but when i push them aside to be socially conscious i create a cavity and she said, "you worried about positive things"
-
Esi yawns. She looks out at the beginnings of a Saturday night: hookers, suits, bar-hoppers, future fighters, future lovers, the night is awakening work-tired people.

next semester o_0

2008-04-19T23:10:00.001-05:00

cutting you

2008-04-17T00:52:00.001-05:00

just not good enough:
When Freud speaks of religion, he mentions: “the whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality … it is painful to think that the majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life” (22). It would seem that Freud endorses reality, that he endorses the death of the original, infantile (native) state.

one of these things

2008-04-13T13:48:00.003-05:00

-How old will you be in 11 months? 21 (finally!)
-Do you think you'll be married by then? um, no?
-Was yesterday better than today? not at all
-What does your last text message say? "For Sure"
-What month is your birthday in? February
-When was the last time you saw your dad? january 18th :(
-How many pets do you have? none
-How many houses have you lived in? do i have to count?
-How many cities have you lived in? over a year in each = 5
-Do you prefer socks, shoes, or bare feet? bare feet
-Relationship status? dinner for one
-What is your favorite color? green (preferably the lime variety)
-What are you doing for your next birthday? hopefully i will be in paris ... gettin' crank!
-Do you like coffee? NO!
-Do you like iced tea? yes.
-What are you listening to? talulah gosh!
-Do you sleep on a certain side of the bed? my bed so tiny
-Do you know how to play poker? nope
-What were you doing at 12 last night? sleeping (only to wake up an hour later, do laundry, cook, and clean)
-Do you smile a lot? i guess
-What was the last time you cried and why? very recently & i don't really know why
-Have you ever had a life-threatening injury? not really.
-What do you want to be when you grow up? writer! filmmaker! cardboard box tenant!
-Do you like flying or driving? walking / subway
-Do you know how to drive a stick shift? don't drive
-What is your favorite thing to spend money on? useless ebay purchases
-Do you wear any jewelry? necklace. sometimes.
-who did you get the jewelry from that you are wearing now? wearing none.
-How often do you remember your dreams? very often!
-What is your ringtone? ringtone 11
-Do you wish someone was with you right now? depends on who. i generally like being alone.
-Are you mad about anything? a lot of small things. the impossibility of getting the smell of smoke out of my room!
-What time did you go to sleep last night? 5:16am. after watching "law of desire" (which i really didn't like!)
-Where did you last sleep besides your own bed? the floor.

erase the colours

2008-04-09T00:12:00.002-05:00

(found on the hype machine <3)

i can't think
but i can't sleep.

send me the pillow

2008-04-07T03:04:00.002-05:00

take me anywhere i don't care, i don't care, i don't care

on being ill

2008-04-06T02:14:00.003-05:00

under confusion of depth and negativity
do people only want happy friends or friends to make them happy like surrogate mothers in a world where we've been timely ripp'd and transported to the city with its burning sulphuric lights lingering. but time is a construct. and when we are all crying in the [p]aternity ward and not reaching over to the next cot to give boo-boo kisses ... does this make me wrong or make me mentally sick. i hate question marks shaped like carving sickles to disembowel and disturb turbulance. and from my far away anthropological perspective i've seen negativity for negativity's sake because reality is the opposite of nice and good and accept happiness. avril lavigne's scowl is real & henry rollins' crossed arms are real. depressed artists are real. acknowledging the absurdity of life is real. acknowledge & appreciate: why do we see them as ends?

偏頭痛

2008-04-01T22:11:00.000-05:00

dysthymic
migraineur

this is what i want

2008-03-31T10:59:00.003-05:00

REJECTION LETTERS
burn holes through
galvanized paper-skin
rush quickly for the gut,
push forward to the phantom
limb with feather-quill in
hand and say,
tickle-tickle.

tickle-tickle-tickle.

unscratchable itch painfully
forgotten only to be
reawoken by bloodless
sorries.

rhythm ick

2008-03-30T12:58:00.003-05:00

i let him get to me but he don't let me get to him
david breaks the palindrome
stressed desserts to stressed deserts!

i don't want anything i wanted
and i can't have anything i had.

life.

£(!^%^)$)(!YT&I(£))**&&^!

2008-03-22T14:26:00.002-05:00

2008-03-21T19:06:00.003-05:00

you do not post when you have a life and my life has, for once, been mobile. on wednesday Jenny and I walked to an african restaurant in harlem where we ate fufu with palmoil-okro soup (glee!). then we walked down fifth avenue to the guggenheim (the cao guo-qiang exhibit is in its own league of excellent), the goethe institut, and the whitney. fun times. i discovered after a year and a half that broadway and amsterdam switch at lincoln center?! i also ate at red bamboo that night: vegan tandoori chicken to die for! yesterday, i went back to west 4th to a thai restaurant across from red bamboo named galanga and had red curry with vegetarian duck so scarily like meat that i couldn't eat it. i also experienced rice to riches for the first time my god i am going back. that's been my two days: walking and eating. forever. amen.

back to work.

ohcalypso

2008-03-17T00:21:00.005-05:00

我蹦蹦跳跳愛 Calypso
Oh Calypso Oh Calypso
你不要說我太辛苦
扭呀扭呀扭呀扭呀跳Calypso

I am determined to not see my room today.
-
okay. i walked out at 1pm to get my phone fixed. i made it almost 10 blocks. phone problems, need to wait to get a new one. but still 8 blocks - w00t! i lead the saddest life. i cooked curry and watched "the river" (most harrowing and yet the sweetest), when i am done with tsai ming-liang, i think i'll move on to chantal akerman:

needed break

2008-03-16T19:55:00.005-05:00

one day i will finish this movie. also, when people heard of leslie cheung's death, did they think it was an april fool's day prank?

daniel cowman

2008-03-13T23:22:00.003-05:00

i came to new york to "do" and "be", but to do and be fucking WHAT? tomorrow i will push my hands into the air and scratch the tarred concrete, though it is already tomorrow and i don't know how. my receiving generation and me. stuck behind observation windows looking in: my leg-step is anthropology, my lip-move is sociology. and every eyeblink, every penholding wrist flick is to create and push me into a world in which i do not exist anymore though i nonexist exist right now.

the royal see

2008-03-11T17:54:00.003-05:00

GR-AV-IT-WHY
sometimes you've got to admit
that you are just keeping your (a)head
above ground.
-
in a past life, this was me:

a very merry unbirthday to you...

2008-03-09T16:21:00.002-05:00

20 and 1 month. what what?
reading schopenhauer makes me very aware of
the fact that my life will amount to nothing.

all i wanted to do was

2008-03-08T20:54:00.005-05:00

post this awesome little photo of mr. bowie.
<3
but because it's also women's day, i'm posting this video of jeanne moreau who ran faster than the boys (and is still going):

studying for the cc midterm

2008-03-05T00:31:00.003-05:00

"a revolution may bring about the end of a personal despotism or of avaricious and tyrannical oppressions, but never a true reform of modes of thought" - kant, what is enlightenment?

"with regard to illnesses, I will not repeat the vain and false pronouncements made against medicine by the majority of people in good health" - rousseau, discourse on the origin of inequality

"the human race would long ago have ceased to exist, if its preservation had depended solely on the reasonings of its members" - rousseau, discourse on the origin of inequality

"pure sincerity in friendship can be no less required even if up to now there may never have been a sincere friend" - kant, groundwork on the metaphysics of morals

"[passions] get their power from the fact that they observe none of the limits which the law and morality would seek to impose on them-and from the fact that these forces of nature are closer and more immediate to human beings than the artificial and tedious discipline toward order and moderation, toward law and morality" - hegel, introduction to the philosophy of history

and that is all the corelove you'll get out of me tonight.

honey nut cheerios & basiers volés

2008-03-01T18:01:00.002-05:00

with soymilk

bucket season

2008-02-29T00:46:00.002-05:00

that time of year again
and good is a rush and
bad is a crush and
i hate being a thistle blowing
hither and tither as if i am no-
thing but the way the
world treats me.

je mesure un metre 69

2008-02-27T22:54:00.005-05:00

maybe writing it organically, feeling
the pen scratch paper, electrons flow from my
right brain, hand strain, twirl down and down,
throw me round and round:
now smack.

heavy eye strain, sleepful

2008-02-27T01:11:00.004-05:00

i don't know if i am allowed to call this writer's block anymore, it is writer's self-awareness, the result of living in a post-postmodern world. i am too conscious of structure, of the act of writing, that i always write about writers. and, these writers are always myself packaged with another face and another backstory. it's too hard to write about yourself and not know more about your own character than she does. but i need to write this, i need to write homes!ck. maybe i'm being over-ambitious and i'm writing for film what should be a novel: overusing voiceover and showing moments of nothingness during which virginia would've presented kilometre-long thoughts spanning mere seconds. but film is show, show, show. and i know what i want to show, but i do not know how to show it. and i need to stop over-thinking it but i also need to stop under-thinking it.

i hate myself when i write.

my mood fluctuates from day to day and i am at that point again when i am like an almost-full bucket and any small kick sends water flying over the edge.

et voilà mon histoire est terminé

2008-02-26T00:55:00.006-05:00

i am happy to have found the one something to make me feel like i don't have to go searching for the rest of my life amen. and it makes me not want to be in school and it urges me to do and do. even filmwriting forces the present tense, active and reflexive verbs, the here the now, the everything. and i like that.

but i still need my mellow meadow.

P.S.: =)

2008-02-25T09:56:00.005-05:00

CANSEE
i can see cansee, i can:
and she is the long & lost gaze,
eyelid-batter,
coy-smile, invisible wink-wink
with me not inbetween,
never inbetween though once again
i am signalling to antennae. but: she
is the skinnier, longer-haired,
shinier, smilier, happier
would-be me if i was born
with another face in another
race projected over tv screens
in every living room across AMERICA!
but the problem is only this moment, this
electricity once again not running across
my personal powerlines, never across
my powerlines, i can see cansee &
once again i want to wish and hope and
improve but right now i know to
just wallow.
-

sitting in frontiers lecture for the
first time, i declared majors:
english & film finally finalized.
and if i
break this
little paragrpah
in the proper places it would be
a poem.

marilyn knew

2008-02-22T00:31:00.001-05:00

the worst thing in life is the time to think.
the worst thing in life is time.