Performing Music

Earlier in the night,
the golden retriever
never a winner,
dashed backstage to cool them off

It’s nice to think that we can have guns and butter
People are increasingly seeing themselves caught between these two trends
Don’t think, just go
it’s not that easy

Free with valid ID
The real economy
seen as liberal in some circles
the violin shop
Enrich your life in 2010
electro, techno

come up with a novel approach
Quality, selection
I fully intend
Intentional failure

I applied for everything, found nothing
Two years of knowing I was approaching it the wrong way
placing them in the vanguard of a new approach
turn mammoth rolls of paper into folded dinner napkins and toilet paper

Do you think you could do it
Do you think you could handle that
Give people true perception

colleges today operate like businesses
American accents
vote of no confidence

Extremely constructed self
we’re getting from the public
absolutely breathtaking
How to reach us

it’s not that easy
Solo roadtrips
“blind” tasting
conductor, featured artist
big controller, no contest
appeared to dance in place at times

playin' around

This, written today has no point, but I had the idea of "public" and playful writing in mind:

Let me start over, let me repeat. I need to look at the screen, even if I want to close my eyes. Closing my eyes helps erase the mind so that the picture goes black and blank and black again. Then sometimes the scene is white, the void and the absence is what actually makes the completion, the presence. Writing is fun. Time is fun. Writing takes time, and time is money but what is the relationship with writing and money?

Can we somehow transcend time so that money, appearances and facades are irrelevant? Maybe the journey is cyclic and we do go back to the beginning. Maybe linearity is constructed and commodified. Maybe cycles and lines co-exist. Maybe….

I have so many questions about the world


This other blurb was written sometime in the past two weeks:

Art is dead this thought instilled in my head
yet i still return to the word, the spoken word
when other people's troubles crumble my world

the pain of realizing that i've been selfish
and only functioned within the realms of my head
now listening to the pain, the memories of strain

how do i come to seek out when i've only looked in
this paradox has strained my relationships thin
in confused volatile thoughts i sink

still the little girl scared shitless to swim

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

I skimmed through the first chapter of “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” today, which was entitled “This is Emo.” The author begins by saying he will never be satisfied by a woman and women he finds desirable will never be satisfied by him. He discussed how people find fake love in media, and examples are “When Harry Met Sally” and Woody Allen. The first because people refer to falling in love with one’s best friend as a “Harry Met Sally” deal and the Woody Allen figure (of being goofy) enables nerdy men to get with beautiful women.

He also stated the most dynamic and nonretarded Americans are aware of this notion of fake love.

Has mass media set up impossible notions and ideals about romance? Romance in the realm of fictionalized media and “real life” is saturated with sex images in today’s ever expanding visual culture. Romance and sex is intertwined, especially in a social environment such as undergrad college.

Maybe this is the reason why Stephanie Myers, author of the Twilight Saga, has become so successful despite flaws and lack of crisp description in her prose, her “style” if she has one. Because she latches on young female teenage notions of desire and lust and the constructed “ideal” of a perfect man.

A perfect man, or a perfect woman for that matter does not exist. Yet it is difficult for me to emotionally absorb this as I can in logic.

Art and Space

Vis art is so political, even without words. If music is too, and writing is for sure, and aesthetics is everything to me, then politics is a much more loaded word that infusse into every aspect, facet of life and “the social.” Perhaps something political happens or is implicated even in the simple act of grocery shopping, hopping on the school shuttle.

Art is everything, art is nothing. The ability to write stories and poems may not apply to a job, but developing this intrinsic and intense ability has changed me forever. The most memorable sentence from the Dadaism article perhaps is that emphasis should shift from the art object to the personality of the artist behind the work.

Dadaism's critical view, that people put art and its beauty on a pedestal, reminds me of what Laura Mulvey says in her famous article on Visual Cinema and Pleasure, that “analyzing beauty destroys it.”

library walk cube

I had a million things to think about when I had a half an hour break on campus, and also, it seemed, a gazillion things to do in my mental to do list. Instead, I sat down on a cube on library walk, and sprawled myself out with my ipod and notebook to journal -- I came up with fifteen rap lines. My training in poetry, at least at this school, consisted of consuming works of extinct, white modernists. For that reason, sometimes I’m insecure about producing current, street hip hop rhyme. Funny how both forms are still poetry that pays attention to syllable and meter, just that the delivery and performance of it makes the distinction. Anyway, on that gray granite cube, I realized that I had been neglecting to do the one thing that keeps me sane and at peace with the world. Which is writing.

I’m chillin’ at the school
Where I bend rigid rules
Trippin off my power
Thinking of the trip
When times are hard as steel
I wanna yoke & dip
The dip is like butter
Yet my roads ain’t been smooth
Sometimes I swear if I were a dude
My problems would dissolve
I’d have physical prowess
Like an underground duchess
You don’t wanna know bout me
Reality I can’t rely I rely on trees
The haze is my shit
Confusion is my theme
When I sit and right this shit is serene

final hour: life time and karma

(I wrote this last month, sometime in late September, just posting it now)

It’s my final year of college, and obsession with time is at its climatic peak. Every event, thought and thing seems like it’s been shooting at me ever so rapidly. Now, some of the most important decisions need to be made, some of the most important relationships need to be established, negotiated and grounded, and unfortunately, some relationships will grow distant and even become non-existing, particularly since everybody’s geographical placement will be uncertain in the next few years.

Life is so deep, multi-faceted and stratified. It’s layers seem like several hundreds of feet into a sea, thus, contradictions and paradoxes are prickled rocks in the water gush and mess.

Lauryn Hill says “you might win some, but you really lost one” and that “hypocrites always wanna play innocent.” I’ve started to reflect on how people claim victim to appear innocent but be very hypocritical, then for one of the few times in my life, I applied it to myself. I swallowed the fact that I have probably conducted myself in such a way to reap some kind of advantage and fake façade. Because I care about what people think of me a little more than I would have like to in the past few years.

And as for you might win some, but you really lost one, I’ve been delving into that quote and realizing that the interpretations are infinite. OF course, it is grounded in karma. It could mean that whenever you win or think you’ve achieved some status you are losing sight of something else. It could also mean that you can have everything you want, but not at the same time.

I have strived hard in this life in attempts to win… god dammit. It is unfortunate that I have been an intense perfectionist, thus, neglectful of ways in which I’ve hurt people in trying to win, all the time.

There was a poem that is memorable from a poetry class, about losing objects, people, places and things and it occurred to me that writing is and may be one of the few ways to “retrieve” lost things, fake stimulation of retrieving it.

I do miss old friends, memories, and in trying to be social I haven’t been the best in keeping in touch and hanging out. Maybe in writing a poem or two I can let go of all past bullshit and drama and find this spiritual, peaceful space that brings me back memories with some of the most wonderful people in my life, past, present, now.

Until I have one of those poems, here one from the anthology of modern poetry:
Elizabeth Bishop
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
So many things seem filled with the intent
To be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something ever day. Accept the fluster
Of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
Places, and names, and where it was you mean
To travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! My last or,
Next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
Some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

-even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
The art of losing’s not too hard to master
Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

My Microsoft Word program and/or disk drive is not working, so I figured that I might as well write in this blog since my word program is not reliable right now.

I almost lost 35 pages of single-spaced journal writing today. I thought my heart leaped out of my skin! We are so dependent on technology these days that an accidental click or mistake can lose a chunk of writing files.

Anyway, I don't know why I have been abandoning this blog. I guess because it would force me to start exposing more of my writing and making it publicly accessible.

I gave up on my Spanish paper today, making it the first college paper I turn in late. I spent from 6:30-10:30 in the library and I could not come up with a thesis. I was brain dead, confiding in Juan while we were stogin'. I felt dumb, like I was lacking critical thinking skills.