Weekly Pretty

Hey all. I have been inspired by (i.e. shamelessly swiping from) Tom and Lorenzo’s blog to just give you something pretty (sadly, unlike those two fabulous gents, I am not quite able to get away with referring to my readers as unborn fawns… yet). Here is Adele at the 2011 BRiT Awards performing Someone Like You.

Lost and Found

A single keystroke. The gentle clacking of keys for the first time in over a year. A slightly pompous opening to a blog post about nothing. Kind of like when someone pronounces “Othello” like “Oh-tell-o”, it just sounds silly. The fact however remains: It has taken me forever and a day to do anything with my blog. I am sure I could have put up something in the intervening year, but such is life. I have gone through two(!) jobs since then. I have had a slight personal renaissance over the last year while losing my full time job, culminating in a new relationship for the first time in over three years. Hell, today I learned that there is a chance that I might be moving back to New York in the near future, causing the snake that is my life to consume itself a bit further, coming full circle. It is so odd coming back to this forgotten little bit of the world after all of this time. Forgotten like a dog sitting alone in the corner after its owner wandered away so long ago, patiently waiting for the owner to return someday. Why am I back here, typing away? I gave up writing mostly because I felt like I had nothing else to say. I still feel I don’t have anything of real importance to add to the internet, although one could easily argue the merits of everything else I have ever posted on this blog. So why bother? Good question. I’ll let you know when I find out. Maybe this is just one person yelling into the wind. Whether or not it will be heard is irrelevant, it’s the act itself. The release of thoughts and trying to order them onto a page of so many pixels. Thoughts that swarm about like so many angry, petty bees, growing more and more violent until they burst out of my head. Little things like how sometimes I feel alien to everyone and everything around me. Like a detached viewer, watching someone else play me in my own life and more often than not, doing it poorly. Or just how annoyed I am at the sheer existence of the Jersey Shore. Seriously, Snooki is an Oompa Loompa and I refuse to believe that no one else can see this. Needless to say, these little nuggets may or may not have been said already and more cleverly or eloquently than I could ever hope to, but they are mine and need to be expressed somehow before my many strained metaphors go berserk and destroy us all. So let’s hope it does not take me another year to come back to this. I will try not to be a sad sack all of the time, and hey, you might even learn something.

Some stopping, Some starting

…

Hey all.

Sorry to have been gone for so long. I am lazy, I had LSATs, an internship, and a job hunt taking all of my time and energy. Fortunately, all four of those are either over or ending, with the sole exception of my laziness, that’s a constant. Now my priorities are shifting slightly, I am looking for places to live, law schools to apply to, and God forbid, a date. That’s right, now instead of hearing me whine about the Russian play that was my job search, you will be hearing me whine about the Greek Tragedy that is  my love life. But on the bright side, it will take something actually happening for me to write about it, so you are all safe… for now.

 

I just play one on TV

It was right there, taunting me. Daring me to buy it. $7.50 for a movie I have seen and loved? How could I say no? Apparently quite easy, for one very good (to me at least) reason. That reason being that my older brother was there. My older brother, who had attended Marine OCS and would currently be an officer if it were not for a knee injury. My brother who voted for Bush and McCain, and tried to throw me out of my house when he even suspected I had voted for that pinko John Kerry. Let’s not even start on his reaction to when I got Brokeback Mountain. Needless to say, Hairspray would have to wait to be purchased another day. Don’t get me wrong, my brother and I get along as well as two siblings can, all things considered, but then again I wonder how much of it is because I do things differently when he is around. The way I act, the people I interact with when he is around, even the words I say are very different when I am around him. It begins to feel like I am playing a version of myself when he is around, I become someone more in line with the younger brother he expects, rather than the one who enjoys the ever-loving hell out of Hairspray.

I am the Awkward Turtle. Goo Goo Gachoo.

One of the more interesting short stories I ever read was in a collection by Thomas Disch. It was about a future society where one needs a license in order to socialize with others. It chronicles this one man as he goes in for examinations to make small talk with an examiner to see if he is qualified for basic human interaction. As I have dip my toes into the real world of social interaction, I am beginning to realize how badly I would fail that examination. I can’t remember the last time I had a substantive conversation with someone I was not already good friends with. Every time I try to get some momentum building by asking a general question, there are a few sentences of dialogue followed by this lurching silence. I find this silence of awkwardness to be rather special in that no matter how loud, crowded or busy it is around you, the awkward silence, like Monty Python’s animated foot, crushes everything.

This was driven home for me in a major way at a party last weekend where I was chatting with two other people. The chat went on for over an hour over multiple topics and various grilled foods, it was funny energetic and interesting. Now, you may ask: “what is wrong with that? That sounds amazing.” It was amazing, mostly because I said maybe five words during that entire hour. It was the other two joking and being well adjusted human beings while I sat across and listened. When I did say something, trying to contribute to the fun stories and witty bon mots, I was met with five to ten seconds of dead air. The other two, being very gracious people gave a polite nod and a pained smile then promptly ignored me again, to the benefit of all involved. At the very end one of the interlocutors had to leave, thanked the other for the hot dogs and the good time. He then looked at me and said “Well Andrew, thanks for… uh, just… thanks”, before he headed out. I am pretty sure that is the conversational equivalent of the pity clap. The truly perverse aspect of this is that next week I will inflict my special brand of awkwardness on a bunch of new people that I will meet either at a bar, or at a baseball game or some other random place.  The truly sad thing is that if one of them mentions that they are interested in anything nerdy, I am pretty sure we could talk for hours about the emotional complexities that comics books convey in the form of kicks to the face. I am not sure if this means I am going about this wrong or i need to stop being a nerd, but either way, I got to talk to someone long enough to figure out that they love kicks to the face as much as i do. And well, you know how that first part goes.

Sketches and Scribbles

Oh god, its been over two months. Sorry everyone, kinda left you hanging on a rather depressing note. I honestly have not forgotten the blog. I actually blame my last post in a way. It’s not because I was depressed or anything, it was just that when I looked over it, typos and all, it was (and still is) easily one of the better things I have written in quite some time.  Feel free to laugh at my perception of good writing if you want. I just know that I  happened upon a metaphor that described my situation perfectly. So afterwards I was sitting at the computer, trying to come up with the difficult second album, and it just was not working. I kept going in expecting for another odd essay/story to be perfectly crystalized in front of me. Today, however, I have hit the “fuck it” stage and have decided to ramble, and hope something substantitive comes out again. Ok, the apologies and explanations are done with.

There is a problem with trying to polish things sometimes, be it a piece of writing, a drawing, or even a piece of music. By trying to get rid of the imperfections and rough edges, you lose the inherent energy of the work. the personality, the emotion, the original intent of what you were doing in the first place. Sometimes it is that imperfection that is what saves you. For example, one of my favorite movies is Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, which by most accounts is the equivalent of a cinematic clusterfuck. The story is aggrevatingly obtuse at times, there is no real (intentional) thematic thoroughline throughout the film, as it jumps from idea to idea without having a coherent thread tying it all together, leaving most people who see it wondering why they spent money to see it. If you are looking for a good time, try read the imdb plot synopsis, as this movie is ridiculousness pushed to 11 and then fed into another AMP. Kinda like my hyperbole. But it is for that reason that I love it, because from what I can tell, it is Kelly’s view of the world around him during the latter years of the Bush administration, taken to its illogical extreme. It is a singular vision, seemingly so untouched by focus groups or studio execs that actor/playwrite Wallace Shawn  admits in interviews its the first movie he has done where he did not understand his place in the actual plot. It is something that I could not see anywhere else. If i wanted something that had been force fed to focus group and polished to a blinding sheen, I would go watch Transformers again. Its the same reason the live show is almost always better than the album, because there is an energy and enthusiasm that can’t be captured by recording the same song multiple times to find the perfect version of that guitar lick. Its the flaws and sketchiness of it all that is so much fun. I am tempted to try and expand this idea to how it affects my life, but I do want to write again sooner rather than later, hopefully on more topical things. Nite!

On Disintegration Loops

Its been a year since I graduated. I find it interesting to compare where I was then and where I am now. Last year, I was eager to get out and go make videogames, something I had spent the last for years learning how to program in order to do. I was going to be out of my parent’s house by September, living in a city, meeting new people and doing new and interesting things. That was last year. Of those initial ambitions, I achieved very few of them. Immediately when i started looking, I realized that i did not know the appropriate languages to be a programmer in the videogame industry. I managed to move out to New York in September, but due to the collapse of Western Civilization, I couldn’t stay there, and moved back to my parent’s house in January. While that technically could consider that attaining my initial goal, the movement was lateral at best. On jobs, i gave up on programming, deciding that I would try being a paralegal before going into law school. After several more failed attempts at getting a job in that field, as well as a very good discussion about my prospects with a friend who was already in law, I tried to move to the nonprofit sector.  After moving back to DC, I continued to try looking for a job there while also eyeing Capitol Hill. Finally, 10 months after I got my diploma from a well respected college, I have managed to get an unpaid internship with a Congressional Representative. When I compare this to my friends who have been working and on their own since the afternoon of graduation, it leaves me feeling somewhat lacking as a productive human being.

Earlier today, I was listening to my iTunes while wasting time, and I heard a song I have had stashed away since Sophomore year. It was a disintegration loop. A disintegration loop is a sound loop that, while being transferred from tape to digital storage, started to fall apart as it was being transferred. The musical loop is very simple, several gauzy notes and and ambient fuzz, but as it disintegrates, it transforms. The music takes on an air of melancholy as parts of the loop dropp out, very subtly at first, so much so as you can only hear it if you listen very closely. But over the course of time, the missing tape flecks become more and more pronounced, the sound clipping as the recorder tries to make up for the loss. The loop also changes, it transforms from what it originally was as it keeps repeating and decaying, becoming increasingly gaunt and piecemeal until eventually there is nothing left of it. The whole effect of listening to them is akin to witnessing the dying breaths of a colossus, or watching a house fall into ruin and eventually fall apart in the rain over time. It is not a happy thing.

As I listened to the long forgotten loop on my computer today, I came to the realization that I had begun to feel like the loop. The plans I had made for myself one year ago, which were fairly grand for my idea of adulthood, slowly decayed as the time wore on. Bits and pieces of them fell away as everyone I knew got jobs and moved on with their lives, while it felt I was merely in a holding pattern. And as this pattern kept going, my plans fell apart, changing as each piece was scraped off. Looking at it now, I would never have seen myself here a year ago. Things have changed so steadily that I didn’t even realize it until I remebered that graduation season was coming around again. I wonder how I will look back at this point next year. Will I still feel like i am in a holding pattern, things falling apart with the steady passage of time? Or will I manage to get out of my rut? This is not me trying to be completely self pitying, although it does sound like a whiny emo teenager. Its a rainy, depressing day, and I just want to get out of my disintegration loop.

On Musicals and Queen

Why has the music of Queen not been turned into a musical? Seriously, why not? If you can get the gloriously ridiculous camp out of the music of Abba, why not Freddie Mercury and co.? What does Billy Joel have that Queen doesn’t? Hell, just rip the storyline from “Bohemian Rhapsody” and pad it out with all the rest of the catalogue? C’mon Broadway, this is the least you owe us after putting Clay Aiken in Spamalot.

P.S. Bonus points if you guys could somehow, some way work Queen’s Flash Gordon theme into it, then all is forgiven.

UPDATE! Apparently this musical has been in fact made and performed in England. The website may be found here.

On Waiting for Superman

Full disclosure: I am a rather large comic book fan. I am that dork in glasses who will sit in a superhero movie and tell my friends that “this is totally wrong”. They all love me. Really. Anyway, I love them, especially superhero comics. Oh I like my fair share of those quirky indie comics, noir comics, and whatever the hell Dave Sims is doing with “Glamourpuss”. But superheroes are my bread and butter, simply because it as a genre can completely disregard reality and run wild with whatever comes out of the creator’s head. Giant flying squid that shoots lazers from its tentacles and craps candy? Bam! You got it as a villain in a five issue Green Lantern miniseries. Ultradimensional Sphinx? No problem. The only limitation to the insanity is the amount of high end hallucinogenics that the writer can afford. And when it comes to the stash size, I am almost positive that no one has as big a pillowcase of the stuff as Grant Morrison. To wit: the man created a character in an early series which was a sentient, transvestite street named Danny that could teleport from place to place. Yeah, this is not your run of the mill comic book weirdness, this is comic book weirdness kicking back several tabs of acid and a hit of PCP and then engaging in a multi-state freeway chase from the authorities. All of which is great, but weirdness only can go so far, without anything to ground it. By and large, while the craziness and fierce rejection of banality is a large part of why I love comics, but without any emotional grounding is just like a Bruckheimer movie: sound and fury with little else. Morrison has an uncanny ability to be able to smoothly shift from the crazy to the real in a moments. All of which leads to the panel above. Recently Morrison wrote All-Star Superman, for DC comics. For this 12 issue series, Morrison could wrote an out of continuity Superman story, wherein the Man of Steel is actually poisoned by the sunlight that powers him, and he is dying. Towards the end of the series, Superman is engaging in a series of labors to try and make sure the world is alright when he is gone. He manages to perform incredible things by the sheer fact that he is Superman. He uses his advanced scientific knowledge to even create a miniature universe. Even while he is doing all of this, he manages to catch a girl frantically to her therapist, who was delayed, of course, by the onslaught of a giant mecha which Superman had to stop. The girl is standing on top of a building, looking down, crying. She drops her phone off first, watching it fall. Then closes her eyes as she prepares to step off the ledge. And then a hand grabs her shoulder. Your doctor really did get held up, Regan, a voice tells her. Its never as bad as it seems. She turns around to see Superman, as he says one of my favorite all time lines: You’re much stronger than you think you are. With that one line, Morrison manages to boil the character down to his very core. For that moment, 70 years of history, continuity, writers and gimmicks are all wiped off the board and Superman stands as what he has always been: Hope. The hope of what we can accomplish, and what we can become. A gentle, calming embrace telling us that everything will be alright.

One could argue that this is not real, it’s nothing more than a platitude by someone unwilling to face reality. One could argue that by waiting on a Superman, we are just deluding ourselves that things can get better, cause no help is coming. One would also be a heartless Grinch. But them’s the breaks. Very rarely will a big, blue, boy scout going to fly down and help us. A superhero can’t get you a job, keep you from feeling lonely, or help you escape a situation that you can’t stand to be in. And that is perfectly true. Sometimes there is no one to help us out, but hope is still there. Its the refusal to give up, because we are capable of so much more than we think. Hope is that hand keeping us from stepping off the ledge into despair, telling us we are so much stronger than we think we are. And I defy anyone to tell me otherwise.

On Traditions

When I was younger, I would always go to the Outer Banks in North Carolina to visit my mom’s family for Thanksgiving. After the epic rush that was dinner for anywhere between twenty to thirty people and seating for six, accompanied by the annual watching of the Washington Redskins getting rolled over by the Dallas Cowboys, and then the annual game of Trivial Pursuit. While the dinner itself was relatively civil, or as civil as a mass migration through the kitchen would allow, the Trivial Pursuit was the highlight of the evening. Since the genders were roughly equal in attendance, the teams would always be my uncles versus my aunts, with the occasional smattering of nephews (yours truly) and nieces to roll dice or finally find a useful outlet for their vast deposits of random facts and ephemera (for instance, that Johnny Appleseed was really named John Chapman, because knowledge is power!). Now, it is a common conception that old school board games, such as Trivial Pursuit, are calm, quiet affairs, with the players acting with some sense of decorum. The truth is,  after a few drinks and watching your once idolized team get crushed by the unwashed heathens from Texas, there is alot of frustration that needs to be vented subtly, quietly throughout the game, upon an less hated enemy that you could actually win against for a change. Unfortunately, my family’s stock being an odd mix of Italian and Irish, subtlety was nowhere to be found in this game. What started off as a friendly rivalry of the sexes in this game rapidly became outright hostility, each team taunting and jeering the opposing side, ending only after one team had won, gloated throughout desert, and then finally had to stop because they were tired and their throats hurt around an hour later. More recently, as my family has aged (but not mellowed), they have come to the consensus that they rather like being able to talk to each other the day after thanksgiving, and as such have decided to not play the game. As such, the annual tradition of Trivial Pursuit is no more.

The thing about traditions is that while they are by definition a repitition, they are not immutable. Traditions give us a sense of stability and comfort, which is great. On the other hand, traditions are not immutable. They serve their purpose until they are no longer necessary to do so. I had a tradition of drinking out of a sippy cup for a while way back then, but I grew out of it once lunchtime started to get really awkward in my high school cafeteria. People used to have a tradition of sacrificing virgins to various monsters/spirits/deities to ensure a good crop for the coming year. Note that we stopped doing that once it no longer became necessary. This is why it really strikes me when people are resistant to something because it is not considered “traditional”. It is almost a conversational deus ex machina, because once it is said, the conversation is over (and won) in the mind of the speaker. For them, tradition is something that always has been and always will be. And when you boil it down, this is the crux of most of some of the most of, if not all, pertinent social issues right now. The idea of a tradition versus the idea of change. For me, the marriage debate across the country is probably the best example of this. On one side of the debate, there are those who want to protect what they see as the traditional definition of what can constitute a marriage, and on the other, we have those who would very much like to change that tradition. While I could go on at quite some length on where I stand on this particular debate, with quite a few choice words for choice people, I really am fascinated by the obsession with tradition that is always referenced when talking about it. I get the impression that many people don’t understand that we have been retooling traditions as needed throughout history. Our current definition of marriage was only came about in the last 40 years, during the civil rights movement.  Not to mention the many little tweaks, like what age both parties had to be and the conditions of marriage. As society changed, so did its definition of marriage. Same could be said of science, where a scientific paradigm can be replaced by another, more appropriate paradigm as technology and our knowledge base expands. So too, as our sensibilities change and our social awareness change, we replace social traditions with new ones that better fit our ever evolving attitudes. Any other way, I would still be playing Trivial Pursuit at Thanksgiving every year by myself as my family would have long since stopped speaking to one another, or be on the beach sacrificing one of my less fortunate cousins to Poseidon in hopes of good waves for the next year.