Photoblogs: Une Tragedie (7.25.08) et Collage

You may not know this about me, but I'm a little obsessive.

Like, bite my nails, bend my mind until it bends the spoon kinda crazy-obsessive.

Which is great.

But I end up telling myself I should take it easy alot/mellowness is a strength/a "what's the point" mentality only loosely correlates with apathy/having it your way is for fat Americans. And for some self-loathable reason, I'd rather not be American/that kind of American/even though I REALLY am that kind of American, but in a really passive way.

I pace before I put my pants on.
I panic about how my mind is presented on paper (or electronic representations of paper)
I want my coffee.
My way.
But that's it.*
*I bought a new press saturday morning...


Also another picture I took that I really liked (edit:like!) : the Time cover says "Secrets of the Teen Brain"

Nature/Nerdure

I woke up with this in my head and I don't know whether to develop it more it/see how long I can keep it up or just post it as "funny" but, you know, time eats things from your brain:
I need my moisture-bar/light-saber to fight dry skin/the Sith and restore water/balance to the stratum corneum/Force. (edit:Aug 6, 08- I watched a force unleashed promotional today. Looks like fun)

My roommate in high school moisturized. Cocoa butter, as well as, (on top of) Vaseline Intensive Care Moisturizer, the large bottle, with the push-down spout. I, you know, admire his strength, or conviction, or something. Having moisturizer, without the requisite poster of Tyra Banks or Yasmine Bleeth or a black-and-white photo of two women you didn't know making out on a bed was basically admitting, "I jack off when you're not here" to anyone who came in our room. Ez and I, of course, had extensive discussions about his dry skin. I was cool with it. Sure man, whatever. It's not, like, an elephant in the room at all. Semper Fi, Mac.

You remember Singled Out? There's only one authentic episode on Youtube. The rest are UK Channel 5 recordings. Maybe there're some episodes on Hulu.* I started looking for more and I found this: Singled Out: Blah-Blah-Blah--a new -ism to discuss--Blah! So. The reviews are funny. I don't think I'd read the book. The reviews, I suppose, make a case against it's purchase. By reading it in public, I am at risk of being perceived as single, which in case you didn't know, means over-sexed, sad, miserable, lonely, self-centered, and (as a man) messy and likely to rape the first unsupervised child or woman that comes around. And I really can't handle that. It's summer, I want to read in the sun. I bought a hat specifically for these occasions, I'm not going to buy a book just to render that hat obsolete.** I do think it's great that I have another stereotype to stammer around.

Over-sexed is a funny word. (Funny=Strange, Funny=/=Laugh) Kenning? Hyphenated thing. In the past six months I've seen it used to describe the portrayal of black men in films, heard it used to describe a Muslim man's perception of Muslim women, and now I'm seeing it again, describing a very broad group of ~M. (M is Married) Typically, I'd spin this off into a graphical representation, but I think I need to know what old married Eurasian men think the baseline of sexuality is before I parody it. Research...

On the subject of purchases, I called my mom the other day to talk about dry skin.*** She recommended, you guessed it, the Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion. I bought Vaseline deep conditioning body lotion with cocoa butter, which came with a little bottle of intensive rescue moisture locking lotion,**** along with some apples and Mike-Sells Salt & Pepper potato chips, at the self-check-out. I wonder what Ez would have bought, or if he's found some eternal moisture font. Perhaps he only ever needed to change his diet and now he enjoys days free of fear from perspiration and showers.

*There aren't any.
**I have other books, and especially not this hat.
***My mother's been on a cruise with my sister and my grandparents and her sisters. (my aunts, whatever(she grew up with four sisters. I call them "her sisters" as consistently as possible solely in recognition of that)) She got back yesterday. I called her while she was sleeping. Conversation with almost-lucid-mom is awesome. She described her flesh peeling, bubbling even, as a result of the no-fluid policy. I think I would only have gotten, my skin peeled, if she been more awake. It's possible the peeling/bubbling was really uncanny.
****no caps on small bottle. Perhaps caps are put too much pressure on the intensive rescue lotion? Conversely, maybe it is such a cool and collected rescue lotion it didn't care about the capitalization fiasco, as a much more pricey, perhaps Suisse, lotion would, and instead said, whatever, i got skin to save...

"The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." -Come on, you know this one

"There is a town in North Ontario." I must stop reading now & listen. "My apologies, Mr. Young," the waiter says, "the artist prefers to sit with Mr. Cave." Ten O'Clock in the here and now is head-submersion time. Under water I can hear the better world. Mr. & Mrs. Dickson-Parham question the outline for the dog's pre-dinner walking procedure. "Helpless. Helpless. Helpless." What a smug bastard! A picture (black and white, of course) of his "genius grant" face printed on that cheery yellow cover over top of a you know "verdant" or something sun. I'm sure it was the publisher's decision. Indy's cat head comes into the periphery of tiles, "A supposedly fun thing i'll never do again," a green-and-bleach-white floral print shower curtain. For a minute I am in a poorly constructed wet cell with just two bars and reaching ears like fingers that mean I listen to the words "Everybody's got a room/Everybody's got a room" while air drying.

I tell my colleagues, "Always remember, there is no city in the world which has erected a statue to a critic"

Award: first critic with statue

BEST DAY EVER see also: Writing about found objects & zombies: Awesomeness

Call it tradition, call it desperate, call it mundane.
Before I do anything in the morning (aside from hit the snooze button) I boil water and check the e-mail.
Today, the in-box had a Monster.com update with a job offer for "WRITER.*" Science fiction. Humor. So far up my alley it should be in my apartment, not my mailbox. Having recently found my cell phone, I packed that, my laptop, and started transferring word .docs onto my flash drive. I had a class in two hours but after that I was going to totally burn through some last minute editing, make sure my generic cover letter was pertinent, and kick some interviewing butt.
I'd been taking some advice from an alter ego of chuck klosterman's and not doing any work before 11,** instead I just check in with my comics and blogs.
Sara's blog was particularly inspiring. Later I would go to the post office and buy a bunch of "utility mailers" in the hopes of being superwriterman and submitting everywhere. (There's is no point in buying an envelope ahead of time, as you need the postman to set up the postage for you. Drat)
At 10:50, because I've decided I should always be an over-achiever and inspire an emotion akin to but not identical to mental superiority in my class mates, I got to work a little early, and began to read Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood and found a nice passage about death that I'll probably have read when I die,*** "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;/The Soul that Rises with us, our life's Star,/Hath had elsewhere its setting/and cometh from afar;/not in entire forgetfullness,/and not in utter nakedness" The rest us "but trailing clouds of glory do we come/ from God, who is our home:/ Heaven lies about us in our infancy!" I'll probably change that. Sorry Wordsworth! If you beat me to it, I'll read it like that for free.
Class was boring. I basically have to force my opinion on the teacher. He tells me I'm wrong sometimes.**** He seems big on "historical context." I may have to resolve this. "Historical accuracy." "Historical context." The connection. Where is it?
Right, "historical accuracy" is for period pieces (etc) and "historical context" is supposed to illuminate old art in retrospect?

BOORing.

After class, I punched the keyboard for a bit in the SEL. I like working in the third floor. There is so much light. A woman and a man chatted in arabic across from me. This dude with ear buds and vrry square white classes (elvis costello meets kurt cobain) looked burdened. I made a great deal of headway with the argument about advertising and postcard from nowhere. This is when I went to the post office.

Between the post office and my apartment, I called my brother and told him about a dream I had. In my dream, someone had said "hey awesome receding hairline" the way you say "hey sweet dye job" or "sweet pompadour."
"Hah, that's wishful thinking," he said.
"You mean the dream is a parody on my subconscious fears?" I actually said.
"Well, I mean, what's his face has a receding hair line..."
"Bruce Willis?" Bruce Willis does, in fact, have a receding hair line. He shaves it.
"No, uh.."
"Brad Pitt?" Also shaving his head now, though hardly conclusive evidence for MPB
"John Travolta!" he shouted, and started us on a tangent about Scientology and it's deep roots in MacArthurism, ("You think Communism was scary, look at what celebrities get away with now...") Christianity, ("not allowing your kids to use contraceptives is one thing, but medical facilities?"), and Weirdness ("Those dudes are weird. Their eyes are huge all the time.") before finally having it spelled out for me that my brother was talking to me while he was driving but he was stuck behind a Rabid Raccoon Control Truck, so it was cool.
I don't know what you know about Raccoons and Rabies. But there are maybe two better segues into "A Conversation about the Zombie Apocalypse."***** So I pounced like Blake's Tyger onto the possibility that this truck, which was apparently casting pellets haphazardly into the Russelton wilderness, was not trying to curb the rabid raccoon population but raise it.
"You know, more rabid raccoons means more rabid pets, Alex. And more rabid pets means more rabid pets means more rabid humans. You know how you figure out if your pet has rabies? You cut its head off."
"Gross," Alex said.
"Well sure," I said, "But imagine the possibilities. What if Russelton, which we'll call Raccoon City for the purposes of this discussion,****** becomes a den of sin and rabies, Ed, that skinny dude, and you could drive around and shoot the crazy rabid inhabitants of Raccoon City until the National Guard came in to rescue you."
"It would be like Dawn of the Dead." Victory was mine!
"What do you think it would be like if something like that happened?"
"Well, you know, They'd cut the city off and nuke it," he said, as everyone always does, "some place like Japan or Pittsburgh or England."
"I'm sure they would if this were, like 28 day later-type Zombies, but what about traditional zombies. You know, Brooks/Romero 'I'm gonna cut my arm off and pretend I'm A-Okay' infection zombies. What if that happened in New York or Miami. All those fuckers have boats and shit."
"Oh, They'd never nuke New York, it's a symbol. And I guess you can get everywhere from there when you're not drooling and trying to eat people."
"You think They'd try and cover it up" I asked.
"Oh, of course," he said, which began a cost-benefit analysis of full-disclosure, creating equations such as the recent assassinations in Iran and the assassination of Sr. Pablo Escobar.
"Some Scarface shit" or not, "He has nothing on Special Forces"
A bold conclusion, to say nothing of the regional officials of the Iranian government.

As I told my brother and I tell the broad, multi-faceted you, I found a package today.******* In it was a hat. It was branded with the newegg.com logo. About four months ago I built my own computer. It was a rewarding experience despite:

1.The ebay supplier I bought my motherboard off of bait-and-switched me. I do have a functioning Abit motherboard. It was not the one I wanted. I got it later.
2.The first CPU I bought was DOA. It took me about as long to get my replacement CPU as it did to get the right motherboard.
3. One of my video cards was dead. This is the only bad product I got from newegg.

Building your own p.c. is easy. The hardest part is making sure that all the parts are compatible. In fact that the 800 dollar mark-up for a comparable p.c. from dell seems like an unpleasant act that is often done to a person against their will, except this time by request and for pay. I wonder if they're unable to buy in bulk. Are they not able to assemble these things with machines? Are the machines horrifically inefficient and break one part per five they install? Is Dell/Area 51 (same company) hiring a bunch of people to do this? I guess that's good. They should give me a job, with that mark-up I'm sure the wage is above the cost of living well.

Brief detour. I got a hat. I will wear it to the beach once I find sock with suspenders. Does anyone know where I can find these. Perhaps along with really short khakis shorts. I have lots of undershirts and I would like to pretend I am someone's dad, except from the fifties.

Ugh, totally lost in time. OK, I drove out to main st. because I'm protecting my writing like a bonobo momma protects her boys. Guess what TTD stands for.
Two guesses:
_______________
_______________


To This Day Foundation
Flagship project?
"To this Day: a journey from doubt to belief"
(sorry, no more guessing. I'm assuming you've visited tothisday.org)
so I was excited. I was going to mail my awesome cover letter and writing sample to their office, but I don't like their definitions. Primarily skeptic = agnostic. While I may doubt that God is at all knowable, I believe that some things are knowable. So hey there's a footnote down there with a job offer. It's all the multi-faceted you.

Also got pictures, had a bad meatball hoagie from tommy's, assauged some pirate guilt, and bought CDs (the mighty mighty bosstones-Ska-core, the Devil, and more, and PJ Harvey- Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea) and books (CK's IV & Killing yourself to Live, Tim Pilcher's Spliffs 3: The last word in Cannabis Culture? by Tim Pilcher, and Gun Show Nation by Joan Burbick) from HPB.********,*********,**********

*WRITER WANTED Must Be Experienced. For Science fiction, humor. ctive, confidential project. Send writing sample to TTD Foundation, attn CWR, 2770 E. Main St., Suite 8, Cols, OH 43209.
** The alter-ego will not work before 12. As a perpetual-over-achiever Poseur, I begin working at 11. HA!
*** Rich, Famous, and Mourned by Beautiful People Half my Age, of course.
****The Audacity!
*****Better Zombie Apocalypse/Ice Breakers Conversations: (1)So what's John Romero doing? (John Romero co-founded iD software and firmly redeposited video games into the "for boys" category with the ad campaign "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" while promoting Daikatana. Why is this better? Not, but almost, George Romero.
(2) The entire ageless bunch of shitheads from green day. yes. them. looking the same age you were seventeen years ago is a clear indicator of walking deadness. green day, also a big tip. possibly undermined by possession of children. decapitation orders delayed pending paternity test.
(near miss:4) Mention someone's trip to a far away rehab clinic. A considerably more likely and substantially less p.c. scenario for 28 Days Later.
(near miss: 5) Easter-and the dead shall rise
******I did not actually call it that. But come on. Raccoon City? How could I resist? I actually feel guilty for not thinking to say it in retrospect.
*******Everything else in that conversation happened.
********OMG MMB REUNION TOR! STFU RLY! NORLY! RLY! ZOMG!
*********Whatever, Spliffs is a gift. And so what if my thoughts are totally disjointed. (pun intended) I have "a unique train of thought unencumbered by homage to narrative tradition" or something.
**********I should be memorizing this instead:
The Pains of Sleep
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,/It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;/But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,/In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,/No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication;/A sense o'er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,/Since in me, every where
Eternal Strength and Wisdon are.

But yester-night I prayed aloud/in anguish and in agony,
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd/Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, A trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,/And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will/Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed/On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fanastic passions! Maddening brawl!/And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,/Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did:/For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
My own or others still the same/Life stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.

So two nights passed: the night's dismay/Saddened and stunned the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing seemed to me/Distemper's worst calamity.
The third night, when my own loud scream/Had waked me from a fiendish dream,
O'ercome with suffering strange and wild,/I wept as I had been a child;
And having thus by tears subdued/My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due/To natures deepliest stained with sin,--
For aye entempesting anew/The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view, /To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,/but wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need,/And whom I love, I love indeed.

The Hatred of One Thousand Dying Stars

Also, I hate that plastic packaging that cannot be opened without scissors, knives, or finger cuts. Why does it exist other than to fill me with incommunicable rage. I mean, maybe there's some product display going on, to which I reply "eff you, I'd prefer a jar" Maybe the jar idea isn't cost effective, but you know, cardboard works too. And I can fold cardboard. It has tabs. It actually was folded at one point. I feel like I'm restoring some sort of balance to cardboard when I throw it out.

As opposed to mutilating plastic with a knife.

Because I don't own any scissors that are longer than an inch.

Stupid, contoured, cheap-ass, plastic packaging.

Light bulb is nice though.*

*Expect another blog in four years about how it didn't last five years/they should say it doesn't really run for five years, it stays on for x number of hours. (Elliot make no claims to perpetual optimism.)

Can't Write

You: Where you been man?
Me: Eh, Around. My coffee press broke. I took pictures. Bought a new one almost immediately. I make decent coffee with just a sauce pan and a strainer, but it's messy.
Y:That's so sad. I know you got through alot of coffee presses.
M: Yeah, this is like, my fourth one. You'd think they'd make them better, faster, stronger than they were before.
Y: They do, they're called automatic drip. Also, that's the lamest lament to a late inanimate object ever.
M: Whatever. Any Expensive, Cybernetic Adult nod is only temporarily played out due to franchise revitalization attempts. You wait. My referencing schemes will acquire coolness like banknotes acquire practical value. Furthermore, automatic drip coffee pots are neither stronger nor faster. And eff your value judgments.
Y: Would you like to buy some incense?
M: This is an interesting sidebar. Uhm. Sure, but I don't have any money...
Y: Hah, money is for losers. I will trade you incense for a roll of film.
M: Fair enough.
Y: (quickly snatching the roll of film from my gullible outstretched hand, you immediately replace the roll with a bundle of one hundred incense sticks) Victory is mine! Your referencing scheme is doomed to be uncool forever.
M: Nooo!
(I howl, falling to my knees. Beat to the ground by your cackling Laughter of Win. )*

I cannot write. I have started five blogs entries, not counting this one which i will finish goddamnit, and I have been trying to move along "Ideas and Diner Cars" into novella territory. I have made no progress. This is the type of "can't write" I mean. It is experiential.
(Edit: On the subject of not being able to write, my Anthro teacher has approved my "unorthodox" research format of back-dated blog entries. Faking Are-some!)
So here's something I wrote almost a year ago, in Chris Moreno English 201.

Elliot Beter
English 201
Oct. 15, 2007

There’s a great deal of skepticism when today’s readers are given an account such as Beowulf or Marie de France’s Lanval and asked to accept these stories as anything outside of mythical. Content such as faerie queens and a man holding his breath long enough to battle a sea creature while underwater are seen as exaggerated at best and otherwise simply the providence of the author’s imagination. Black Sabbath’s “Jack the Stripper/ Faeries wear Boots” is similarly understood to be the product of the band members’ wild imaginations. The burden of proof is placed on the respective authors’ and writers’ account to turn these seemingly unbelievable experiences into something that’s mundane. Beowulf uses the literary device of “we have heard…” to make the ridiculous commonplace. Lanval is rooted firmly into its role of a folktale, including an introduction where Marie de France explains that the story is simply a metaphor for proper courtly behavior. “Jack the Stripper/ Faeries wear Boots” put the credibility of the account solely to Ozzy Osbourne and allows listeners to criticize the account as true or false based entirely on their opinion of the speaker.

Beowulf is England’s foremost woodsman and a self-reliant hero who performs feats that tax the reader’s ability to accept the story. The tale elevates Beowulf into a hero of mythic proportion and makes him into a brave Christian warrior who is beyond fear. The speaker tells his listeners that “we have heard” tell of such a man and leaves it up to the skeptical listener to refute his claim against the rest of the crowd in attendance. Other devices throughout the story, such as when Beowulf loses a swimming match to Breca the Bronding, allow the speaker to undermine listeners who are reluctant to accept his story.

As a point of contrast, Lanval is presented as a fable told to Henry II and promising a moral concerning freedom from sin. Once again, the unbelievable is presented to the listener. Within the scope of a fable, however, the unbelievable is mundane and readily accepted by any who hear the story. Marie de France tells a story of a displaced knight having a chance encounter with a faerie queen while deep in the woods. He quickly finds himself in a contract with the faerie queen and at odds with Queen Guinevere. The knight is suddenly obliged to present a woman who is fairer than Queen Guinevere while at the same time holding to his contract of not revealing the existence of the faerie queen to others. With his two obligations in opposition to each other, the knight decides to violate his arrangement with the faerie queen and present her to the court. Marie de France shows several examples of the knight behaving poorly and, considering the content of the prologue, doing things which will surely lead him into a life of vice. Since Lanval is presented as a fable, the listener is encouraged to identify and examine the moral presented, accepting the characters and their actions as necessary to the outcome of the tale.

“Jack the Stripper/ Faeries wear Boots” plays with the conventions utilized by the Beowulf orator. Instead of appealing to group consensus, Black Sabbath makes the speaker the sole authority when he claims he saw a faerie dancing with a dwarf. Ozzy Osbourne sings “faeries wear boots and you gotta believe me/ I saw it, I saw it with my own two eyes” and invites the listener to doubt his account. Instead of immediately undermining their skepticism, he entertains it. The last stanza has the speaker visiting the doctor and receiving a diagnosis of “son, you’ve gone too far/ because smokin’ and trippin’ is all that you do.” The speaker’s account is created around his being an untrustworthy narrator.

Why would these three accounts take such different tracks in relating similar material? While the material is similair, their objectives are very different. Beowulf aspires to create a national epic around its eponymous hero. The story is written for Christian listeners in a Christianized England and, despite the fact that it describes Scandinavian heroes fighting in Denmark, serves to unite listeners around a shared legacy. Lanval serves as a moralistic tale communicating a standard of conduct in one country to another. Lanval and other Arthurian fables are French stories that have been fostered by English storytellers. Many of them are moralistically loaded and the unbelievable becomes a device for conveying the crux of these tales. “Jack the Stripper/ Faeries wear Boots” is absorbed in separating the world of the listener from the world of the speaker. Instead of being invested in similarity, like Beowulf and Lanval, it focuses on labeling itself as part of the outside. One thousand years after Beowulf, English literature isn’t focused on bringing its population together. Instead it focuses on creating a niche for everyone.

This essay, along with an essay about the comic book maxiseries Preacher, is fairly unique in my artist's portfolio. While I still keep the Preacher essay** on my desk, the Beowulf/Sabbath essay is pretty close to perfect for me and I keep it in my truck*** which has a bumper sticker that says, "Broprints: You don't have to like Black Sabbath to get your stuff printed here, but it doesn't change the fact that they're a kick-ass rockin' band."

Even so, I don't know what the title of this essay is. I've saved it under "Son, you've gone too far." Not just because that's a lyric Ozzy screams in "Faeries wear Boots," mind you. This is the point writing became fun for me. It is the point I discovered I could write more or less whatever I wanted to as long as there was a quietly cooling logic train behind it. So how had I "gone too far" as the "son you've gone too far.doc" would suggest? I wrote a story connecting Beowulf to Black Sabbath using a tenuous link of faeries and Lanval. On top of that, I'd been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer all summer, and the discovery of it's cavalcade of theses proposals on "the science of vampires" or "Darla's Transformation between 'Buffy' and 'Angel" or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mythology." So yeah: Woo Woo!

*The fact that I'm inventing conversations is better/worse than talking to myself?

**Titled "Finally the Vicar was in the Pulpit," the essay compared the journey Jesse Custer takes to a Jeremiad. I labored for a long time to get comic books examined as literary cannon with "some unique conventions." Comicdom's reader-critics seem determined to continue the tradition of relentless self-reference. (i.e. It is like this comic or that artist's style. There will never be anything new in comics. There will only be imitation. Someday, perhaps, "modified Kirby energy" will become cumbersome and innovation will occur. Those tired of describing something and the backstory of it's creation will describe the art itself. Or maybe the art-as-it-relates-to-the-narrative. None of us will see this happen though. The people who invent this argot will create an interbrain singularity and disappear into it. Perhaps it will spit them out into some progressive-comic-books-utopia. I don't know. (Everything else is Fact.))It turns out that there's no point in consuming something if you don't have an opinion. "It's super" doesn't seem do be a valued opinion for some reason. It seems pointless. Conversely, the real triumph of this essay and the Sabbath essay is, in short, it was the first time I discovered that geometry does not apply to spheres.
I got the essay back with a new office address and a note suggesting I ask for a LoR should I apply for graduate school.
***Yeah, I drive a truck. And whenever we've cruised into the post-peak-oil-paradise of flying cars and an economy that doesn't fluctuate around the availability of a single resource I'll be able to say I had a hand in that and you'll just be able to say, "uh, I saved some cash..." Jerks.