excuse me, just organizing my thoughts

reading an essay by david graeber. what i think he is saying is:
when we make a social contract, we need to base it (or its enforcement) on something outside of the contract itself (ie the formation of a constitution cannot be done by constitutional means).
the more alien to us the mechanism we choose in order to do this, the more alien the social contract (alien? outside? different? abstract?). or vice versa - the more abstract the social construct, the more abstract its mechanism of enforcement.

Stop slamming the fucking door (an exercise in resisting closure)

Setting:

three walls of transparent plastic covering brown bag insulation striped with red wood

one wall of massive sliding windows, taped blue x's for safety

digression: "Safety does not come first. Goodness, truth, and beauty come first" - the prime of miss jean brodie (1969)

digression-digression: 1969 was the year after 1968 the year in which cosmogonic myths of social disturbance were born. burn her inside her vehicle and remember to support small business.

Tapestry plywood floor, massage table, two beds, two chairs, one white dresser covered in cellophane

plastic sheeting over electrical wiring on raked wood ceiling.

Well, Gloria, ahem, excuse my forwardness but as I recall blue duct tape was featured in VOGUE of Fall Two Thousand Eight.....

Motherfathersisterpullouthergutsslidethemuphisanusworkitspitsomelubemotherbecarefulofmynipplesyeahharderharder

confessyouturnedonthegasinthechamberthepoorcurlyheadedjewishboysfloggingthensuckingimnotwetyet

Face up in a skeleton of potential luxury. My house is beautiful, it is a skeleton framed by sunshine lavender and white roses. Four vegan restaurants on the same street, and in the middle flows a river of carrot beet apple puree, the new golden-skinned generation sucks it through biodegradable straws right off the sidewalk and we only vomit on sundays.

FAITH THROUGH ALLITERATION

(fortune, fairy-tales)

like a dream but verifiable by other articulate beings

I had a slice of enlightenment handed to me just a night ago, and it was delicious. just one of those timeless spaces you enter where every thought presents itself with the light of day, hits the tongue and ripples off.

all of it with such ease and meaning. you are connected to everything living and vibrating in this universe, and although you've always known it with your rational and systematizing mind, you now feel it coursing through every fiber of your being. open system.

like a container, your body opens and begins to let in -- drinking the world in through large licorice pupils. like the 80% water that you are, you begin to resonate with the exact frequency of everyone and everything that encompasses you.

breath is full&deep, rhythmic, sweeps those cobwebs out of your chest.

you're probably taking in a higher dose than you normally do of the dear ones in your presence and the particles they're shedding into their chemical aura. they're probably breathing with the same depth and tempo and taking in from you too.

did you know that the literal meaning of "inspiration" is to breathe in?

food for thought

communication is flawless -- what isn't accomplished through a simple shared glance is given through a gentle hand and few small words. (!!!)

if that doesn't sound like close to perfect information retrieval, i don't know what is!

you're reminded of love.

love for the people who are not physically present but who linger in your mind exactly because you've been waiting and looking for some external inspiration to finally tell them -- tell them how you feel.

love for yourself and all these lovely people who perhaps at other times in other places can be monsters but who in this moment and underneath it all are beautiful children who just want to be held and told that they are good and have big hearts and that everything's going to be alright.

--rant to be continued and related to scifi, fear, e=mc^2, feedback loops, information processing, dance, the physical manifestation of harmony (it's structure and anatomy)--

hark, it is the dawning of the

brrrrr i c symphonic collusions on all sides
reminds of a waterfall in a nether world
rush & shush & rush & shush
suddenly BLAM! KERPLAM! (just kidding).

at the dinner table i am an elitist
[and? so? i've traveled galaxies, fought wars, raised monuments - i've lived for so long my beginnings are lost to memory - i love myself and i love you - so yes, i am a lelitist]

at the gay club i am a spectacle
[and what about the 35 year old lumberjack wearing a thong and tight leather pants pulled down under the thong, grinding on a metal bar - why are all the middle-aged guys watching chris and i? why did we bother with 21+ night?]

at night, wrapped in sweaty limbs, believe it or not, i am a star -
[i didn't see it coming - they and they and they didn't see it coming - but in the end, everybody is coming]

but only in pittsburgh.

Fanfare for Ms. E. F. C

Meine Dame Und Herren und everything in-between or beyond that spectrum,

I give you Em Le Fay
Erstwhile Englishwoman in the County of Fyfe (after the Thane thereof)
Scholar and Soon-to-be Asset Manager
Cross-Atlantic Nomad
All-Around Encyclopedia of Minutiae
Former Co-President of the Dramatic Society
Receiver of a Glass of White Wine
and
my friend, Former Citizen of My Heart

Quoth the Economics Student, "It's not like I'm going to be happy anyway, so I might as well do a job that makes me a good deal of money. Then I can retire and do what I like." Quoth the Follower of Dr. Johnson and Adam Smith, "It's hard to do a thing you love, why ruin it? Get out, while you can." Quoth she, "No one around me has got their head screwed on right."

I give you Em Le Fay
Wearer of Sensible Winter Coats and Good Jeans
Attendant of Assessment Pools
(which I gather are rather like group auditions)
Applicant to the Financial Giant J.P. Morgan Stanley
Half of Matt and Emma
Recaller of the Tiny Details of the Political Machinations of the Alma Mater
(and Extensive Recounter thereof)
Drinker of Blue Drinks
Giver of Earfuls
Former Partner-In-Crime

I can't really remember half the people she mentions in conversation. My mind is going is my excuse. That time I puked so hard vessels burst in my eyes cleared away most of 2004-2005. Don't mind me, I'm listening.

She says, "You know, [insert favorite teacher here] once told me that she was worried about you. Sort of unsure of where you would end up. Of who you'd be." I open my mouth to speak as this is news to me, but these days it's hard to get a word in edgewise. The last time we saw each other, she was but two days out of the removal of her wisdom teeth and still talked my ear off for nigh on seven turnings of the hour. I think, "We're not all that different, you and me, scrabbling for happiness on this unhappy plain."

I think, "Remember the evening when we were at school late and no one was around and it was pouring (like it is tonight) and we ran out onto the field made of ASTROTURF and dumped cans of Coke onto their precious and expensive lacrosse/field hockey pitch in an act of nascent radical violence? Before we knew those words? And how we howled in the night and ran giggling back inside to the stares of our less-bedraggled classmates and winked at each other for the offense we had committed? Do you remember? Well, do you?"

Exit Em Le Fay
Helena to my Hermia
Shylock to my Bassanio
One Half of a Pair of Strange Little Girls
Citizen of My Heart

BAO!

nothing happens Here or There

back.

back to a bedroom with walls striped of posters, of song lyrics carved into doorframes, windows meant to be “picturesque”—catch a glimpse of a frozen retention pond, a plastic snowglobe deflating on someone’s lawn.  catch a glimpse of the neighbors who make people nervous because they Drink (the husband sits in his garage all night, calls out to me sometimes, used to be lewd until i cut my hair), the neighbors who make people nervous because the husband is Black and the wife is Puerto Rican but they are Very Successful Doctors so it must be some kind of mistake—they’re White like everyone else. 

back to drawers stocked with forgotten clothes, shelves stacked with books read before i really “got it”—before all of the genderfucking, the fucking, the privilege-examining, the late nights spent talking, talking, talking about what it all meant, before i positioned myself in a context where Before was something that Never Actually Happened.

 

back to where they first started staring, started asking that broken record of a question: are you a Boy or a Girl?

answer: Sometimes.

i am writing this blog in the closest thing to a Local Café.  i am writing this blog at Panera.

two soccer moms are loudly pondering which bathroom “It” will use when “It” looks as though It might be heading in that direction, towards the pair of gendered doors where It might reveal Itself.  Boy or Girl.  A or B.  (in high school I was notorious for overanalyzing multiple choice tests; talked my way into writing papers instead).  they are sorely disappointed.  “It” just wanted a glass of water.

back.

back to filling up days with documentaries, unnecessary tasks on To Do lists, five hundred pages into fiction.  escape escape escape.  wake up breathing hard because It was dreaming about fucking again but It couldn’t figure out how It was doing It.  body thrown into uncertainty worse than before because now It has two and It brought the Wrong one back Here, the Here where That Shit Is Fucked Up.  always.

Chicago in five days—back to too many phonecalls and connections.  organize, organize do the “good work” because someone has to, because It is selfish enough to want things for Itself that must be granted by Others.

escape escape escape bodies and politics in theory, in costumes, in play.  how?

i am stuck in places the way songs stick in my head.

to be read aloud in one or many funny accents

Left alone in the tumbling mass,
Up smoke and hopeful hate,
Ahead is not the past,
Tomorrow was my fate.

Ahem:
There is a dream where
hyenas rain in catfish dance
in pitter-patter lockstep gears,
twitching, clutching -
and sniffing tells the inescapable truth
of the tornado
which is just a hyena catfish,
after all.

Alas-
In inter-strung webs I weep.
What it means is up to the lantern,
but as of now straight laters toss up angled, noble heads
and open gnarled, able mouths
and unleash the call of honest complaint,
but it's hidden - drowned! out
by a mile,
out by the shush-a-rush and that old thing, the frown,
old and solid like a smell in the dark
until next time when it'll be just the same but you know -
I'm here and I write what I hear.

Clearly there are tunnels with
purpling wispy fingers and
other stalks which extend,
in boom and bloom,
and then heave up from out the ground.
And when they heave out, unbeknownst to them,
they also heave in,
for all is tunnels, and all tunnels look alike.

Ahem.
You have a cushion
I have a cushion
Your voice is orange-green crystal tubes
and full pitchers of sangria seaglass
My voice is ash.
If you squint and tilt your head just a little,
like this,
you'll see that my name is Gerard,
my nose is courageous,
my hair is wispy and fair,
my glasses askew,
and I come bearing baguettes.

tonight i took time

to say hi-hellow to each of the trees
and most of the stars and a snowdrunk deer
...and they said hello back!

coconut milk coffee

mucus spittle dirty snow exhaust fumes, stolen glitter to glisten on our black black shoes our pale faces and the frozen black bananas.



Proposition Hawaii: PEOPLE ARE HAPPY IN PARADISE. Everything is one (what do you mean? a tree? a root? how do you see it? no, just everything. you don't see it, you feel it. what kind of feeling? pre-conscious, conscious? just a feeling, a giant crashing wave)



The organic farmers here are young and dreadlocked, beaming with the quiet energy of having sat by a fire for a week brewing shamanic potions. debord is shrinking in my pocket, theft has been replaced by eating coconuts and papayas from the trees, smoking abundant bird-feeder weed with papaya branches.



the next few months are going to be exhilirating. why fight capitalism when you can escape it? (HOHOHOHOHO)

nastiness, critical theory, anarchy, sm have been saving graces in a cold world whose pleasures are not in the stars or close to earth. but it's been a bubble all the same, university but also cities, having always lived in mega megalopolises.

I can't imagine that digging my hands into the earth for two months will entirely replace years of twisted fascinations with funeral oratories to president bush, singing transvestites, slapping, clowning--- the CULTURE AND SOPHISTICATION OF CITY LIFE. but but but my body is ready to get off the grid.



baohaus love! A different altar that even in paradise shoves itself up my ass. detox detox detox (ahi fish? chicago? paradise?)I miss each one of you hard.

too quiet too long

i'm wondering how many deaths i've learned about through facebook. might have learned about them anyway, should i even be surprised or fascinated that i'm stumbling into not-yet-autopsied pop corpse accounts through an online social network that i'm now told amounts to "5% of collective internet usage worldwide?" im fascinated. it was brittany murphy today, last was michael jackson. my curiosity rarely sticks long enough to follow up when there's further information. he is dead, his family is sad, he did a lot, special people are trying to figure out why he died to satisfy destiny/fate instincts/cravings ingrained in the sad people.

ive said for years that when i die id like a close friend to sign into my account and post the status "____ is dead." the idea is less apt now that the facebook format changes all the time, but i'm still a little obsessed with the idea. what the fuck does that mean? kids i knew in high school would probably learn about my death via facebook. someone else's status update posted on their "newsfeed" trickles down the digital shitstream and they receive it...where? just after waking up? in a subway? in an airport? "_____ is dead." oh shit! did you even know him? you've learned about it so quickly that you can't read my obituary (would i have one?). you could maybe find an account of someone's intention to figure out my cause of death. i imagine someone with a set of dentist's instruments delicately lifting up sections of skin to see what's inside. oh shit! it's a kidney. but chances are if im dead it was a car crash, a freak fall off the roof. maybe a riptide drowning. hows the weather in LA? it's so great it's pulling me under the surface and im dead. oh shit! it's a lung, and it's full of salt water.

speaking of death, i might go see the most expensive movie ever made today.

free glitter for all

phew...i tried to talk to my sister today about paying for glitter at a huge chain (or anything, really) is dumb.

she kept asking: if everyone stole, wouldn’t they shut down the store and then the people who worked there would be worse off? she said she could get on board with liberating bread/food (the necessaries) but not glitter since i make well enough money to buy glitter.
(of course, this isn’t quite the point...nobody should be paying $5 for glitter, unless they want to.) she was into the idea of gift economies, freestores, how dumb it is that all of the excess of clothes/craft supplies/etc. in peoples’ basements can’t somehow be put back into a free exchange system...but the idea of liberating glitter “made her stomach turn.”

any tips on sharing the pleasure of freeshopping? connecting these liberal-altruistic principles to a sense of injustice/outrage/subversion? or even just talking about “liberation” and getting past the stigma/fear/shame...? (do you see it as a way of coping in a shitty capitalist world and/or a strike against the chain itself?)

i imagine this is something many of you have talked/worked through in your own thinking or with others...any advice or zine/reading recs i could pass along, by comment or email, would be much much appreciated.

seven feet, four inches, five hundred and forty pounds

a quick shoutout (from my realm of pittsburghian sneakitude and snowaccrued) to the new squids and inkful mammals in our midst...heather [can fly], margaret inglosolunbe/terr[or]ence, and foxfur-beee[ankh]uh, welcome to this strange dwelling which perhaps you might return to enough to call some kind of home.

tmo's post about being home resounded a lot with me--the sneakitude, the stars, the weight of rules, regulations, and roofs in the name of "love." (here's a thought, snatched crudely from politics is not a banana: we kill each other more than we kill our enemies, and that's a problem.)

my attempts to break through the layers of gardentalk, jobtalk, schooltalk with my mother have resulted in the repeated prod: "whew, you like these deep conversations. i just want to enjoy your company while you're here." i turn over and over in my mind what kind of "pleasantry" is possible when every domestic conflict is a painful-to-watch-[for-me] spectacle of miscommunication, money money money and a desire to feel attached and together, gone about in all the wrong ways (faith, malls, movies...)

concretely, then,
i've been chilling with the lelster a lot, finding our way around the quiet pittsburgh nightlife scene (funny, since the last time i was here pittsburgh was full o riot-ready cops) looking for the loud queermos whose voices don't quite echo as far as the suburbs. on thursday we went to lawrenceville, in and out of bars too loud for talk and we played a game of pool at remedy. yesterday, we organized a meeting of families, went to the warhol museum and saw this exhibit on shepard fairy (OBEY/andre the giant has a posse/etc.) i wonder if my sneakers will ever be in a museum. my parents/sister had bought tickets to the pittsburgh renaissance choir (a gay men's choir and gay women's choir) show, which turned out to be a spectacle of charity and money and balding white sweatervested gay couples. i watched the ASL interpreter and learned the signs for "king" and "lord" and "christmas day." then i darted off to explore lawrenceville some more, danced a little to gaga et al at brillobox and then had a beer with some gorgeous drag queens at blue moon.

so-though,
as easy as it is to be critical, i've been struggling to find optimistic reframings. i've been fighting regret, refusing to entertain the concept in myself and rooting it out in others....regret (and the resulting shame, guilt, self-pitying, self-hatred, loss of agency, complaining, sadness) seems to me to invite a sense of paralysis. life is not as easily accessible and editable as a google doc. in lieu of existential "back" buttons, i'll keep you updated on my campaign against regret.

6. somehow half my clothes are too clean and the other half smell like pee and come. hmmmm.

7. i miss the baohaus already.

8. i hope you are all alive and in touch with your vitality. to new squidlings: post without thinking, don't wait for the "right" idea to strike and instead strike with something bumpy and malformed. (anyway, that's how i like it.)

love,
elz
(soundtrack: something bollywood...)

AHH SQUIDSTERS

ESPECIALLY MEG TREP

NEK CHAND FANTASY ROCK GARDEN

http://www.nekchand.com/

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=nek+chand+rock+garden

my own pictures, forthcoming wowowowowoww

dead leaves and the dirty ground

so that cigarette you thought you wanted
and eventually got in a pure act of sneakitude
didn't fix that headache
and now you're not sure what's wrong with you
or if you'll ever be un-tired again

but

now we don't put much stock in the poets
in their iambs and so on
but oh
oh
oh
oooooooh
have i told you about the sky out here at night?

f u c k i t i s n ' t o r a n g e
saw every single constellation you could think of last night
pinhead clear and sparkling
the swan and both dippers
orion and the bear
all up there twinkling
like twinkling is still a thing you can do in this day and age

so much that if john donne or even that idiot wordsworth
were to sneak up behind me
and whisper something about the majesty of nature
i would hear it
and
possibly believe it

the veins of twigs and branches
the slashes of trunks across the sky
thrown up against the convex lens above us
AND THE WIND
the lone voice in the silent woods
roaring down the backroads with something to say
shouting

hey! hey! hey!

be afraid, be very afraid

there's something coming out of the trees

put that cigarette out behind a rock to hide the evidence
kick your boots off at the door
wrap yourself up tight in that blanket
and watch the creeping woods
til you can watch no more

lesson learned

life is long

but this moment is short

"guilty robots"

check this out-- scroll down to "guilty robots" on time magazine's "year in ideas"

"This July, the roboticist Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech finished a three-year project with the U.S. Army designing prototype software for autonomous ethical robots. He maintains that in limited situations, like countersniper operations or storming buildings, the software will actually allow robots to outperform humans from an ethical perspective...but being an ethical robot involves more than just following rules. These machines will have something akin to emotions - in particular, guilt."

the chunk on "gourmet dirt" is pretty good too.

a small anecdote of utter unimportance

figure A: toward a theory of soap (1)

personally, i find foam much less intimidating than soap. perhaps not quite spiritual, but certainly pleasing. on the other hand, i have some concept that it is altogether fake and therefore not to be trusted. when i have encountered foamy things in nature, i tend to also think that they are unnatural--faux-mold and faux-mushrooms, cheaply made, placed by the invisible armies of civilization to make the forest experience more photo-friendly. (the same armies who are responsible for mobilizing bird to move from tree to tree and slowly plucking leaves from trees to preserve the illusion of autumn.)

i suppose there's something in the idea that people relate to their own dirtiness differently based on the soap they choose (or avoid).

mostly i would like
to fill your mouth
with my foam
and your foamy saliva
inject with my lips-o-suction
until we are dry
and curseless
and all of the jargon is gone,
replaced by oooooooooooze.
(say it say it do it do it)

and preemptively, expectantly i will add: corey where are you? are you here yet?

oh and also, i hope ev's last post can create some reallife conversations here at the bao...i'd rather tackle feelings in realtime sometimes rather than commenting on posts, but i think we can collectively agree that we are all in the habit of seeing/reading/consuming more than we can acknowledge or are expected to/expect ourselves to engage with. the blog is perhaps the closest place i've seen on the web to some kind of reciprocity. and i like how it weaves in and out of conversation and life. so i'm glad you posted ev and i hope it can be a bridge between webworld and the living room to have some kind of further conversation or something.
< / meta-mediation-of-mediatedness >

back to the paperbox, bye!

1. internet, the. "useful knowledge for useful people or psychoanalytic queries into banality or !!!???)0()(;;;;!!!." baohaus living room: "roland barthes on dirt," google search engine, MILK TIME and republished at the end of the world. link to full exploration of the luxuriousness of foam here.

2. at right, figure B. "foam or shit?" from "the abbreviated index of poor materials for sharpening giant pencils" (2)

This is how I heard it.

I spent a lot of time thinking last night.

It's the little things, it's always the little things.

Is it a big deal for one of us to ask another person to stop doing something if it bothers them? No. Of course not, but for the record, I felt like I was talked to last night for a split second like a dog or a stupid child. Even if it wasn't intentional, even if maybe Eliot or Tamara or Eli don't "see" it that way, I felt humiliated and angry because I felt like someone had said, "BAD DOG" to me.

I know I have a short fuse, I know that as a result, I "ruined" the rest of the game, which I had been thoroughly excited about, and I'm sorry about that, sincerely. I know that my anger was perhaps disproportionate to the offense, but I felt belittled and disrespected. The room felt tense immediately after I was yelled at.

BAD DOG BAD DOG BAD DOG BAD DOG

and yet no one said anything until I had made a fool of myself. So I felt doubly stupid. Stupid child feels humiliated because teacher yells, "STUPID CHILD" but none of the other children say a word.

"Hey, Evelyn, could you stop doing that, it's bothering me."
"Sure."

I spent a really long time trying to figure out how I felt about this, and I don't like that when I tried to explain it this afternoon, I was told that how I felt wasn't valid. That only reaffirmed that I was being treated as lesser, invalid, and like a stupid child or dog. It doesn't matter if you didn't mean to make me feel that way, you succeeded, triumphantly.

insights from the world of cultural studies

weed + acid =
postmodernism

deep deep deep in an underground vault with no walls: a short essay on essays

figure 1. extending boundaries to enable depth

alack, alack!
the hail earlier today hit my face sharply, a welcome relief from the nebulous cloud of nonsense (see fig.2) that i breathe in when i try hard to focus on the cloud without thinking about its units of nonsense. (but what is a unit of nonsense? and would not the cloud bring me greater nourishment than a tiny unit thereof?)

figure 2. the possibility of borders

fuck time, i will refuse to disintegrate and somehow forge forward.

figure 3. a question of borders

it is hard to remember to take pleasure
in contradictions
when they begin
to melt
all over
my
glasses

figure 4. on the edge of concern, there is just one more thing

enough, i say! enough!
i demand more!
it's too much! do you really need to--
totally overlooked.

figure 5. the desire to draw boundaries induces dilemma

now is the time.
(how can the time be now? i'm not ready yet!)
the world is as it is because it is as it should be and
all is how it should be because it is how it is
(***reference proof for "why giraffes go up in lifts," car cemetery 12(4):2009)

figure 6. the recent discovery of additional dimensions to the problem has dire implications for the accessibility of shimmering intergalactic portals to contemporary youth culture

and of all possibilities
we are left with the comfort that:
all things are possible
which we can conceive of as possible!

figure 7. a statistical abnormality suggests the need for new methods of analysis



comment!, e.g. with your favorite little screenshot of brain2.0?
(these invisible mediators, these quiet prompts)

film updates

i cant believe i havent shared any of my film experiences (of which there aren't many).

here's one:

I was in a dance class this quarter where I learned some stuff, first we learned one minute of choreography to a song "Hadippa!" from the movie Dil Bole Hadippa. Preeti (our teacher) told us the movie was bad and we shouldn't see it, but samantha bought it anyway and we all got pretty obsessed. it's a bollywood version of "she's the man" featuring the beloved amanda bynes, which was based loosely off of twelfth night. with rani mukherjee alternately as Veera and Veer. oh and playing opposite shahid kapoor, sigh. anyway the music is awesome, especially "discowale khisko." we told Preeti that we liked the film, and asked why she said it was bad and she said "that's not believable that she could be Veer, how could he not notice she has the same face?"

anyway, if you can get your hands on it, it's lovely mindless entertainment and good music.

ALSO

try to watch "Aladin"... with amitabh bachchan as the genie. hilarious.

ALSO

twilight and new moon just came out here but i didn't see it

ALSO

amitabh's movie coming out this weekend is "Paa"-- he plays a 13 year old boy who has Progeria, so he is dressed up to be an octegenarian, and his son, Abishek Bachchan, plays his father. the tagline for the film is "a unique father-son-son-father story"... only here are off-screen relations actually interwoven into the plot of a film; i don't think you'd ever see this done so explicitly in the states.

ALSO

this weekend a movie Kurbaan came out, where kareena kapoor and saif ali khan apparently have sex (!!!!!!). i read the plot and it looked way to complicated to understand without subtitulos. the tag line is "some love stories have blood on them" because the twist is that he's a terrorist. and her dad warned her not to marry a muslim.

okay। that's all; just doing my share.

boarding a train in 4 hours (at 3am) to head to chennai. goodbye pune, hello leave of absence!

ക്യാ ആപ് വ്ഹോയ ഐ അം വ്രിതിംഗ് ഇന്‍ തമിള്‍

வெயிட் தட் இஸ் மலையாளம்

థిస్ ఇస్ తెలుగు

ದಿಸ್ ಇಸ್ ಕನ್ನಡ -- ವ್ಹಿಚ್ ಇ ಸವ್ ಅ ಲೋಟ್ ಆಫ್ ಇನ್ ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ

चेविंग गम है जा पि जा, हैण्ड पुमप है जा पि जा, लाइफ सा जूस है करती जा, फिकरे करे फिकरे , हरिप्पा!

wow. i didn't know i could do that. first is malayalam, then tamil, then kannada, telugu, then hindi. i wrote mostly in english and it transliterates it... shit that's cool. okay good night. or good morning.

Exhortation now that we're older

Goal One: Learn to love structure or perhaps the destruction of it or perhaps knowledge of it to reconstruct it and make it new again. Resist the common urges of your synapses to wander and wiggle through the world of your brain stew. STRUCTURE STRUCTURE STRUCTURE IT. Not in a necessarily WMP-y kind of way or a bell curve or a Aristotelian tangle but enough to say exactly what you mean. Spill no more milk, tumble no more tunes from lips, button up. Will you be able to say in a year "Limitation inspires creativity" when you do not believe it now? Probably not (secretly you will still believe that you yourself already contain so many limitations that further limitations would only offer less and not more). Think about how rules that you could make up could be AWESOME. Is this subversion or is this acceptance of a rule-based, competition-driven, have/have-not societal mode? In a year, will the opposite be true and will you cycle back to where you are now?

Learn to interact with, face up to, acknowledge, and form opinions on

• borders
• edges of bodies
• skin and cell membranes
• tripartite religions and storylines and how every bullet pointed list must contain more than three bullet points
  
• spacing in text
• silence and noise (John Cage and his listless mumble)
• line breaks
• the place where exhaling ends and inhaling begins or the other way around
• lines, queues, waiting
• age

Goal Two: Ask yourself - "When the words come out and on to the page, why do they come out in a block?" or "Why do you like things that are parallel as opposed to perpendicular?" Really answer these questions.

Goal Three: Stop ignoring these questions. Stop ignoring structure. You must decide whether or not it is your friend. Prose is not the only model of living. But also, don't jolt awake when your dreams follow some semblance of reality, when there is story-line. Regard every impulse with suspicion. See if you can reformat not only your words but your very neurons.

basically
unlearn your functions

hop over here
and here

and over there
because
well
the thing is

there isn't enough time to stay the same.

for your consideration...

i think this is a pretty interesting article that conflicts interestingly with this whole line of thinking i've been doing about alienation, labor exploitation under capitalism, greed, excess, money...for me, this makes me want to think more about the language i'm using to describe the system and where i'm placing (or depriving) people of agency/desire to do good. (what is the desire to "do good?") anyway. i'd love to hear your thoughts.

whole text is at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2007/02/army-of-altruists.html

"Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good
By David Graeber
Harper's Magazine 2007

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq. -- Senator John Kerry (Democrat, Massachusetts)

Kerry owes an apology to the many thousands of Americans serving in Iraq, who answered their country's call because they are patriots and not because of any deficiencies in their education. -- Senator John McCain (Republican, Arizona)"

(continue reading here)

from the warm&quiet isolation of the regenstein,
elz

fuck all states

i cant, i wont, i dont have time. im supposed to be writing, or thinking, or sleeping, or buying a plane ticket to singapore, or dancing,  or or orrr or

my visa expires in six weeks. i dont want to leave. i have to leave and spendspend spend sending my money to jetairways or kingfisher so they can buy petrol and shoot me over to the land of fast bureaucracy where visas are fast and plentiful, 

if i can

if they allow foreigners to put their life and lineage and intentions on a PDF and pay $150 and get a stamp in a book and get punted back across the bay, sea, ocean to the land of slow bureaucracy and classical dance festivals and trains to the mountains

at this point it's just cheaper to come home in six weeks

fuck everything

i have a 10 page paper due about ________ by sunday morning (it's friday night). i have one paragraph written. all my friends are leaving tomorrow by 7pm. alex and chloe are ready to go, samantha never wants to leave, hannah is going to delhi to meet her parents and "do" rajasthan. i'll see her in chennai later. then pondicherry, ooty, and back to delhi? names names names and places i've seen so many places. im writing about temples... when they are sacred and when they are not. ive been in 9 active temples, 9 places of ambiguous or informal worship, and 18 abandoned temples. if there is no image in the center shrine, and if the image is not bathed and fed and adorned daily by a brahmin, there is no normatively sacred space but i still take my shoes off and stay quiet like a museum. why are ruins museums? 

hannah has returned to use her computer

now my room is hoppin

life is complicated

i hate a lot of things

but am confused and feeling so many thingswordswordswordsss

from my journal, laden.

stoned rantings 12/4/09 1am

building on last week's lengthy show
and all being equal (compared to what?)
certainly headworms' collidyskope sighs
collect, suspect in fortune and blue
as surely as the bureaucrats
turn cartwheels in the dew

anti-globalization + conditions of possibility

from across the world, or something, here's what i'm listening to...check it out. (listened to in reverse order, ideally with lots of instruments around)

(all available on youtube.)

kala - ali farka toure and toumani diabate - in the heart of the moon
mouse on mars - diskdusk
uske orchestra - mouse on mars remix
aphex twin - rubber johnny - (with movie by chris cunningham)
von sudenfed - fledermaus can't get it - (movie by chris cunningham)
aphex twin - windowlicker
aphex twin - come to daddy
christian zehnder - wat i no
concerto for violin, mvmt 1 - debussy
mr. ozlo - flat beat
stimmhorn
micheal herges (guitar)
summertime - sarah vaughn (sp?)

add 1 bottle of wine per person, or substitute.

love,
elz

dead birds

My grandmother is crying.  She has been crying since my cousin decided to leave unannounced and move in with her boyfriend in Texas.  She has been crying since her friends moved into hospitals and nursing homes, crying since I shaved my hair in some places and let it grow in others.

Everything about her sags—skin sagging off the bone, sagging until it sways and dips into the gravy that I cannot and will not eat.  This is her first Thanksgiving without my grandfather.

The new baby is all badsmells and bugeyes.  My little cousin sings politcally-incorrect songs about Indian chiefs.  Oh, happy day of mass genocide!  Oh, happy day when aunts and uncles gorge themselves with beer and birdmeat!

And they ask me how is school and I say "fine."

I dreamed that you were stringing dead birds onto a thread.  They were small and black and their eyes were like shriveled raisons.  I think they were crows.  And you were peering at me from behind those too-round glasses and smirking like I knew what you doing.   You tied the string around your neck and tried to kiss me but you smelled like death and I pulled away.

word vomit

hum hum hum hum of the machine in my room in my brain
churning burning twirling whirling
fucking my shit UP
there are scratches at my door and scars all down my left side
from impromptu costume design when feeling feels hard
grasping at straws, trying to breathe,
trying to ease into some happiness here,
smooth pill-shaped, bed-shaped, hear under the cracks of the door
the life that is still desired to be living

scuttle my way to catville
a place of dirt and spit and dry food spilt on the floor
where my shit's cleaned up
and i can't walk two feet without some motherfucker picking me up
moving me, touching me, dirty hands grabbing me, wanting me
what, dude, i just gotta be chasing ghosts in the hallway
protecting your shit
and you're messing with me?
one night i will purr subliminal messages into your ear
and how will you like feeling turned on by vegetable human?
yeah that's right, gotta go sleep.

an alpine rendezvous

ingredient list:
50 academics/pedagogists/PhD students
3 teachers
3 nervous undergraduate students
a team of cute submissive students
1600 wires, any color*
a wide diversity of ideas (5 or 6, max)
7 handfuls of laptop
5 cups of meta
a buffet
30 clementines
a bootful of snow, boot included
1 part "i'm not advocating for the destruction of schools, it's just..."
6 more than 2 many cigarettes, handrolled

the recipe:
add 12% german people in authentic bavarian dress. mix with beer and pour into a boot. then spit in it and pour it out of the boot into your throat, toe up (this is the trick for splashing it all over yr face/being a true bavarian man). vom it all back up and add the rest of the ingredients. put it all into a seminar room. mix until thoroughly beaten and sufficiently nebulous. pour in all other ingredients. if the 1 part radicalism is still chunky, extract grant money from the bootcider. climb a mountain. find a torch. drink gluhwein, sprinkle liberally with jokes about blondes, bitches, and whores, untranslatable words in french/spanish/german/portugese....and have a rendezvous. add web 2.0 if desired. enjoy with contradictions!

deLICious.

emily and i arrived here, in garmisch-partenkirchen, on tuesday morning by train and then a long walk down hauptbahnhofstrasse. garmisch is a tinyish town, super touristy/expensive looking, full of ads for permanent anti-aging makeup and hats for ruddy aryan men and their sons. we-ord yo. the hotel perched, full of precarity, on a hill by a ski jump. this guy named gerhardt gave a pretty sweet lecture on "cultures of participation" and how the education/university system produces this discontinuity between passive learning and then the expectation of self-motivated learning/living. lots of graphs and shit here. they're kind of pretty i guess...still amazing to me that people do this stuff full timeish. (that is, transcribing, coding, studying cooperation and collaboration in technology/educational settings...etc.) and i think i forgot about how just absurdly some people can question and jest about women's intelligence and all these smart smart people being so dumb dumb in some ways. don't try to tell me that "that's what she said" is a feminist joke, asshat. that night at the bar almost made me sick/cry, i didn't know what to do and then people were turning to me, "so how do you feel about this? what's the difference between sex and sexuality? why? how do you tell if it's time to clean the kitchen? is this a sexist/racist joke? if i tell a racist joke it means i'm NOT racist, you know? do you hate men? oh don't talk about that now there's a feminist in our midst."
dumb dumb dumb. come on. i forget to expect this from the world sometimes.

i do like the mountains here though. looking at them, that is. and there's a fair amount of snow; when we climbed up to the top, there was a ton of snow and lots of free food. i still stick things in my pockets, collect clementines and rolls for later or maybe tomorrow...mmmmm.

the workshop-y stuff today was kind of cool and kind of exhausting. my presentation is over and i survived. i have a lowlowlow tolerance for sitting still for a long time, so i squirmed a lot, slept a little bit, and had a lot of cigarettes and munched in the lobby with the student organizers from LMU. i've slept like 4 hours in the past 2 days...was up till 5 or so last night finishing up this presentation. blech blech blech.

but now it's done! i'm in a working group on "design principles for a utopic educational setting" tomorrow and then head back to munchen to hang with christian for another day and then to homeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. this presentation was freaking me out--> not sleeping, kind of panicking all the time about how much i have to do. in lieu of weed [zum kiffen] to manage my stress, i've been breathing a lot and collecting moments of ecstatic calm...now i have a lot to write/do but blah blah blah.

wow i loved reading the baohaus housemeeting notes. you guyz. i'm missin you allz (official baohausers and otherwise)...speaking of which, where's corey?

xxxich-will-auf-dein-gesicht-spitzenxxx
that squiddly dutched-up batface homofreak


*must be produced by Mac