on the 6th day of Christmas

one the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

six senseless sayings

words are a funny thing (grammar even more so), and i spent most of yesterday in linguistic purgatory trying to make revisions on my thesis. when i first received my adviser's comments, i thought: "oh, this isn't too bad." which, in turn, encouraged my procrastination because – what the hell,

#1: i have plenty of time.

this is the first senseless saying.

what does it mean to have 'plenty of time'? is it really something that can be grasped or held on to? if a clock is unable to contain time, then what hope do the rest of us have? in fact, time's essential quality seems to be its inapprehensibility; without passing, it loses all meaning whatsoever. this brings me to number two:

#2: everything i say is a lie.

there is, i believe, a special name for this type of linguistic construction but i don't remember it. whatever it is (or isn't), the expression turns back in on itself and renders all meaning absurd. in this example, if everything i say is a lie, then the statement itself is a lie, which means i'm telling the truth. the cleverness of human language never ceases to amuse me, but through various experiments and unmentionables i have lost all faith in words ability to convey truth; therefore,

#3: i promise to never tell the truth.

this third senseless saying is a corollary of number two and suffers from the same exquisite paradox: if i promise to never tell the truth, then my promise is untrue, which means that i may, and in fact just did, tell the truth. greater minds than mine have addressed this issue, and one of my favorites is Haruki Murakami, who draws an interesting distinction between honesty and the truth in this book:

i am still indebted to this friend for introducing me to Murakami

he writes:

"Honesty is to truth as prow is to stern. Honesty comes first and truth appears last. The interval between varies in direct proportion to the size of the ship. With anything of size, truth takes a long time in coming. Sometimes it only manifests itself posthumously. Therefore, should I impart you with no truth at this juncture, that is through no fault of mine. Nor yours."

of course the more i read, the more i realize number four:

#4: i know nothing.

by what measure of hubris do we make this judgment upon ourselves, and does not making it all require some unacknowledged source of wisdom? if we truly know nothing, then we cannot know that we know nothing; and if we know something, then we do not know nothing.

(still with me?)

of course the inverse also applies:

#5: i'm certain this is true.

this one stands out because it requires such monumental vanity as to perceive oneself immune from the vicissitudes of time. anyone over the age of twenty-seven knows that Monday's credo is Tuesday's regret, and the spiral of time swallows everything we think we know as a matter of course. you can ask Moses, Siddhartha and James Stewart:

image from Vertigo

of course,

#6: all this goes without saying.

then why say it all? i've asked myself question more times than i care to count, and the only semi-satisfactory answer i've come up with is that we do it because we're compelled to, because it's in our nature or our DNA or in some damn-where it can't ever get out. as a wise drunkard once wrote, "Long ago, among other lies, they were taught silence was bravery."

this is the drunkard in question

but then again, another of my favorite drunkards wrote this: "The dogs meditated on their paws. We were all absolutely quiet… An absolute cold blessed silence."

in this book

is silence a fiction masquerading as bravery? or is it blessed only for dogs? i don't know how to respond to these questions, but i'm convinced that words can't answer them. it is a thing of sublime beauty: the utter insufficiency of words juxtaposed against our reliance upon them for meaning.

there is an unbridgable gap between signifier and signified, between what we feel and what we say, but our attempt to overcome this distance provides its own justification. the question is the answer, and in this way it is not unlike living itself:

aren't we beautiful in our failure?

on the 5th day of Christmas

on the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

five broken things

well, not really, but our attempt to watch Jean Renoir's The River was foiled last night by a recalcitrant disc and my yin tells me i'm free to use creative license on this one. at this point i'm unable to tell what i think of the film as a whole, except that there's this delightful voyeuristic game being played with the cinematography. it seems to intentionally keep the spectator further away from the Indian subjects than from their colonizers, and i'm especially intrigued by Melanie, whose mixed ethnicity serves as a metaphor for underlying cultural tensions:

Melanie and her father...
i've always been a sucker for a miscegenation backstory

it also has a shot of what is, without a doubt, the greatest tree in the world:

like a giant globe growing out of the earth

appropriately enough, i had been reading about Renoir earlier in the day in my on-going attempt to regain momentum on my thesis. here's what André Bazin had to say on the man:

"But simply being realistic is not enough to make a film good. There is no point in rendering something realistically unless it is to make it more meaningful in an abstract sense. In this paradox lies the paradox of the movies. In this paradox too lies the genius of Renoir, without doubt the greatest of all French directors."

who am i to argue with Bazin?

the argument is beside the point.

the point is that after the deceptively pleasant lull of jute plantations and the colonial Ganges, i insisted on something with tensions more obvious, Stanley Kubrick's 1950's noir classic The Killing:

clown with tommy gun - yikes!

all i know is that Quentin Tarantino should be court-ordered to pay royalties to Kubrick's estate because The Killing lays out as impressive caper-gone-wrong scenario as i've ever seen. the film keeps the spectator hoping against hope until the final moments, and features one of the most unlikeable femme fatales in cinema; a woman who is attractive, but whose beauty is insufficient to overcome her loathsome nature:

parts of her performance reminded me of Nancy

thus concluded the fifth day of Christmas.

on the 4th day of Christmas

on the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

four boding starts

at three o'clock on the fourth day of Christmas, i was startled awake by a dream of a theater in North Carolina. i worked there as an undergraduate, and in the Dreaming i was mid-return. something about this scenario was disturbing, however, and as i lie in the dark my mind began to fill with questions about the future.

barring unforeseen calamity, i will complete my graduate work five months from now, signaling another of those life junctures where nothing is known, and one finds himself face to face with the enormity of endless possibility. every moment is like this, of course, but rarely do we accept it for what it is: exciting, but also frightening, especially at 3 o'clock in the morning.

rather than allowing my mind to spin in circles, i got up and went to the living room. i took out my mala beads and meditated:

vision of the fragile glass shell of my mind. i find myself trapped inside it, bumping from one side to the other. suddenly, i'm outside of it/ti fo edisni – i am the air filling the room and all that lies beyond.

eventually i grow tired again and go back to bed, but this insomnia and meditation stays with me throughout the day. i rewake at 8am, tend to various chores and meet with my half-Canadian friend mid-morning. i go to my yin's hatha class at noon, and in the afternoon i finally start revisions on the second chapter of my thesis.

a frustrating hour passes.

our weekly meditation group meets that night, and we spend an hour discussing the application of yoga-darsana in our lives, which is a medium-pretentious way of asking:

"do you practice what you preach?"

i talk about the conflation of, and confusion between, meditation in the colloquial sense and meditation in the philosophical sense. the former is more aptly described as a sitting practice, which sometimes (and perhaps atypically) results in the latter (what Patanjali calls as dhyana).

Buddhism (at least Zen variety) seems to outline this delineation more clearly than the yoga practitioners i've known, and in my limited, yet sincere, readings of such texts i have arrived at some understanding of the dangers involved with turning one's meditation practice into a substantial object (which can be possessed) rather than recognizing it as a transient, ephemeral process. put more simply:

one gains no-thing from meditation.

with the mysteries of the universe put to bed for the night, we practiced sitting together, and i had another damn vision, this time of a leaf spinning itself (counterclockwise) into a tight spiral, extending lengthwise towards the sky and the Earth. it had the shape of a elongated seed or pod, and was enveloped by a flame burning all around it. i have a blank canvas in my closet, given to me by Saylor years ago, and as soon as i come into some oil paints i plan to attempt a rendition.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that my yin and i came home and finished watching Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire:

Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina

the film is surreal, comical, and features les belles femmes above playing a single character named Conchita. Fernando Rey plays the male lead, of course, and he attempts to bed Conchita with all the absurd enthusiasm one would expect from Buñuel:

i know how he feels

there are innumerable failed attempts to realize his desire, and the film's French title (Cet obscur objet du désir) literally spells out the need for a Lacanian interpretation of these things. right now, though, with more revisions looming this afternoon, psychoanalysis is the last thing i want to write about. besides, these ideas are illustrated with images more forcefully than could ever be accomplished with words:

this poster is available here

suffice to say that terrorist plots by the "Revolutionary Army of the Baby Jesus" wreak havoc in the background, and Buñuel has this magical way of allowing the camera to linger in one place just a little longer than necessary, so that Rey's bourgeois nincompoop exits the frame and a second figure (a housekeeper, a gardener, a homeless man) is revealed to be the actual source of labor supporting his opulence.

visions and revisions,
mediation and surrealism –

thus concluded the fourth day of Christmas.

on the 3rd day of Christmas

on the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

three cups of coffee

as the title suggests, the third day of Christmas was easily the least eventful so far, a sure sign that things are slowly returning themselves to normal. i engaged in all my morning rituals: journaling, reading, showering, a light breakfast and two cups of half-caffeinated coffee.

since my yin had a client coming over, i exiled myself to Dunkin Donuts mid-morning, where i made the mistake of ordering a third cup of coffee. this one was black like the others, but high test rather than the weakened brew i make at home. i sat sipping it, scorching my taste buds without so much as a flinch, gnawing on a blueberry muffin that the woman behind the counter assured me was the best in the house – all in the name of a lousy coupon i had lurking 'round my wallet.

soon i felt the onset of the stimulant, zoning out in that pleasant place of hyper-focus and tunnel vision. unbeknownst to me, my yin's client had canceled and i continued working, totally oblivious to the fact that she had called and emailed telling me it was safe to come home. eventually the message was relayed by foot, and she walked into the place like some Revolutionary War messenger carried an urgent dispatch from General Lafayette:

"Qu'est-ce tu fais?"

"J'écris."

"Mais, tu peux retourner chez nous maintenant."

"D'accord."

on the short walk home i came across two French-Canadian children playing in the courtyard, perhaps made manifest by my caffeine-psychosis. "Salut!" i said to one of them. the child looked at me with a mix of embarrassment and amusement, probably provoked by my shameful accent and painful earnestness.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that i paid for this third cup of coffee for the rest of the day with a medium-grade headache that just wouldn't let me be. i tried feeding it leftover tofu and chocolaty sweets; i tried escaping to the post office and bank and library. it followed me everywhere, dogging my every step until i eventually climbed into bed with an undelivered Christmas present. i sat reading dead men's letters like a common grave robber, pulling out gems like these and wishing i could write like a 17-year old:

"... it has all the melancholy grandeur of Mother Russia, all the borscht and caviar that bubbles in the veins of the Slav, all the ethereal emptiness of that priceless possession, the Russian soul."

- [name redacted], August 1944

but how common can any grave robber be in this modern world? do graves even exist when every chosen word is made available immediately? does any mystery remain, or do we live in an era of endless information? how can we run from the fluorescent omniscience of empty knowledge in a world where all our idols have already been killed for us?

the headache did not recede.

i wrote Saylor, trying to explain these things without saying them, and what emerged was an impossibly disjointed letter of short sentences and unremarkable proportions. even at my most capable, i would be hard pressed to name the things spinning in my mind. tiny fluctuations popping in and out of existence like the quantum tunneling i had read about earlier in the day:

it helps glucose catalyze into hydrogen peroxide... allegedly

in the end it was only my yin's cabbage tempeh casserole that saved me, and the headache receded into the void from which it came sometime after dinner. we finished watching Broken Flowers from the night before, which features Bill Murray as an over the hill Lothario searching for his son:

from here, we fade to black

in the end he finds nothing, of course, and i was well-pleased by the film's lack of closure: the passing broken-down Volkswagen and its slack-jawed doofus of a passenger juxtaposed against the hip, road-wise hitchhiker we all imagine our progeny – be they words or chromosomes – to be.

thus concluded the third day of Christmas.

on the 2nd day of Christmas

on the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

two films by Welles

the second day of Christmas began with Orson Welles' The Third Man, which my yin and i had been falling asleep to for more than a week. this is in no way, however, a commentary on the film, which is everything one could expect (and more) from a post-War noir. rather, the somnolence was a side effect of the inter-holiday hubbub, those hectic weeks between Hanukkah and Christmas when everyone is engaged in the ritual consumptions sandwiched between gluttonies.

gluttony and consumption, of course, are never beside the point, and this was especially true on the day after Christmas, when i woke with a refrigerator full of sweets and a heaviness in my heart from unpleasant dreams the night before.

at least that was my story.

in fact, and in reaction, i regressed to the baccalaureate days of the late Nineties, watching films all day long in an attempt to find its source, knowing all along that it was beyond apprehension. i passed the morning searching for a reason that wasn't there, and it reminded me of The Third Man's beautiful, disorienting sequence in the labyrinth sewers of Vienna:

what danger lurks at the end of the tunnel?
what light illuminates its presence?

i have never seen so many canted shots, so artfully rendered, in all my life. i saw the junkyard of Old Europe in those broken alleys, and the chiaroscuro streets served as harbingers of the world to come, the atmospheric foundations that would come to support the Berlin Wall a decade later:

rubble on the Soviet left, advertising on the Yankee right

i felt Welles looming over me as i marshaled my resources to go out and face the day. it's hard for me to watch him and not see Charles Foster Kane, impossible not see the bloated caricature that lie ahead. Welles' fate is the fate of us all:

handsome, dashing and youthful... this, too, shall pass

the day passed in this way, shuttling between bedrooms and movie houses, and i watched Aronofsky's Black Swan for lunch:

it impressed me, but probably only because i went with low expectations. the sex scenes were cliched; the masturbation scene was both patently absurd and absurdly patent; and the film's construction of gender was problematic, especially in its implication that feminine perfection can only be achieved by disfigurement and death.

perhaps this was done as a critique of our society's dominant beauty standards, but the visceral appeal of Aronofsky's images overpowers any such interpretation. nonetheless i enjoyed it, although i believe two semesters of feminist theory should be required along with a ticket stub.

next came a recommendation from my brother, Exit Through the Gift Shop:

what is the relationship between anonymity, sincerity and gimmick?

which is a documentary by Banksy and, perhaps, about a Frenchman cum videographer cum documentarian cum street artist cum overnight sensation. as the film progressed my yin and i were shocked to see familiar images emerging, and ultimately we realized that Mr. Brainwash, the (presumed) subject of the documentary, was also responsible for the flash gallery we stumbled into at this year's Art Basel. we called my brother to relay the news and ask him what he had to spray:

are Mr. Brainwash and Banksy the same person?

as dinner time approached, we decided to order in Chinese food (a first for us) and watch Woody Allen's Manhattan:

what is the meaning of all these silhouettes?

when he and Mariel Hemingway are shown eating take-out in bed, the appropriateness of our actions was confirmed, and this raised interesting questions as to who was whom: did my neuroses make me Allen, or was this trumped by my yin's Jew-ish-ness?

similarly, my own longing for Mariel's grandfather makes her an appealing metaphor, but my yin's overall comeliness indisputably makes her better suited for the part. obviously, this (imagined) conversation went nowhere.

next up was Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers:

Welles would have used a deeper focus

which was easily the most pleasant surprise of the day. its deliberate pacing and laconic shots of Murray setting on the couch captivated me, and it took all of my will power to shut it off when my yin began dozing off in my arms.

the night ended as the day began, with a film noir by Orson Welles,
The Lady From Shanghai:

ah yes, those reckless women...

i lasted only slightly longer than my yin, and my immediate reaction to his Irish accent wasn't positive. but then again, one doesn't watch Welles to listen –we watch him to learn how to see:

what is a mirror?

collapsing into sleep, i dreamed forgotten dreams and woke in the morning wondering how many films have been lost to the fog of memory, how many more will be lost before i find myself in the bloated company of Welles –

unforgotten, mirrored and fading.

thus concluded the second day of Christmas.

on the 1st day of Christmas

in honor of Catholics and carols, and in an attempt to shed light on my own uneasy relationship with the Christian holiday season, i've decided to write about each of the twelve days of Christmas from now until January 7th, the day after Epiphany. i'm somewhat uneasy about this experiment, particularly the very real likelihood that i'll walk around for the next dozen days with that dastardly tune stuck in my head: "da da duh da da duh duh da da da da da da da..."

but – duh! – this is beside the point.

the point is that school doesn't begin for more than two weeks, and i have more free time on my hands than usual. so, without further ado, on the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

a dead pig by the roadside

my yin and i woke up yesterday morning at her mother's house. she was reading Borges but put it down telling me it was "too heavy." as anyone who has every hoisted his Collected Fictions will attest, this is an apt description, and i found her double entendre especially amusing:

still finishing up my summer reading list...

in desperate need of coffee we went into the kitchen, only to discover my yin-in-law feeding a meatball to her pet macaw, which she inexplicably named Taco. i asked her, "you're feeding a meatball to Taco for breakfast?" she responded in the affirmative, and the rest of the morning passed without incident.

at the appointed time we left my yin-in-law's house and headed north for Christmas dinner at Mme. Fawcett's house. she and my yin have been best friends since the incredibly young age of 18 months, and among other things she is a stellar cook. upon arrival we were treated with all manner of delicious treats: olive/fig tapenade with goat cheese, cheddar butternut squash soup, scalloped potatoes with cream sauce, roasted veggies, baked sweet potatoes with maple syrup glaze, homemade cheesecake and and various other diabetes-inspired delicacies.

first, however, we happened upon a giant dead pig laid out by the side of US-441 with two carloads of gawkers pulled off the highway taking pictures. the beast had to be at least 300 pounds, and i have no idea if the onlookers planned to dig a BBQ pit or were merely snapping mementos. for all i know, it could be some sort of twisted Lord of the Flies holiday tradition, which is exactly what it felt like once we reached Mme. Fawcett's house. there were more than a half dozen toddlers, children and teens running around like maniacs and tearing into the Christmas presents at regular intervals:

don't be fooled by the cuteness...
i nearly lost a finger later in the night

there were several sets of cousins in the mix, and it reminded me of my own youth, opening presents with my cousin Landon and younger brother. we used to resort to all manners of mischief in order to deduce what presents were under the tree, ranging from peeking down the seam in the wrapping paper to weighing the box on the scale and them comparing its weight to the one listed in the Sears & Roebuck catalog.

all that's gone now, and i watched as ten and twelve year old boys opened gift cards with a mix of formality and expectation – but it was an expectation devoid of anticipation. the only uncertainties in the whole ritual were denomination and venue, and it saddened me to know that the cornucopia of online shopping and scaled efficiency of big box retailers have erased the beautifully neurotic fear of opening presents.

i tried to relate these things to my cousin when we spoke, briefly, later that night, but it seemed to have little or no effect on him. perhaps it was just the connection. perhaps it was just my own desire for a connection to a family and a childhood that was never mine to have. it's amazing how many of us find ourselves in families that feel a little off, and i don't know whether:

a) we choose to take embodiment in families that allow us to work
through metaphysical issues (as a half-Canadian might claim);

OR

b) it's a symptom of the bourgeois nuclear family and the breakdown
of more traditional, extended family structure (as one might surmise
from Marx and Freud).

as much as i love each of these men, i doubt any of them really know any more than i do. i didn't feel the sadness so much until the morning after, but snatches of it appeared in the awkward moments when every seat was filled and i stood around the edges, looking for a place tucked out of the way. my brother seems to have less issue with these issues than i, but i wonder how much of his bravado masks an underlying sadness:

illustration by Saylor, to whom i tried but failed speak

eventually the house emptied as the various families left to go visit the other sets of grandparents. those of us that remained took a walk through the neighborhood, admiring Christmas lights that pale in comparison to those back in North Carolina. this is a presumably unintended side effect of South Florida's preposterously agreeable December climate.

returning to the house, i attempted to watch Avatar but was able to stomach only the first hour. barring some drastic shift in the 3rd act, this film is both formulaic and naive, offensive and reductive, trite and unwatchable. perhaps it was better in 3-D, but if stereoscopic tomfoolery is a film's only redeeming value, can it really be said to be worth watching?

really?

as far as i could tell, the narrative focuses on a paraplegic hero (a metonym for his damaged society and obvious metaphor for his impotence) who learns the ways of the land from the exotic inhabitants (the tried and true 'noble savage' stereotype) of some mineral-rich planet. the film's heavy handed treatment of "the Company" (a second grader's book report on Das Kapital) fails to address the complexity and systemic nature of exploitation, which is all the more disturbing when one considers the tremendous economic and institutional forces that must be marshaled and deployed to create a film like Avatar itself.

in other words, the film's superficial critique of global capitalism only serves to efface its actual effect on the world in which we live. it operates as a form of cultural imperialism, colonizing foreign markets and drowning out the space for truly resistant voices. the film made over $2 billion dollars in these markets, compared to $760 million domestically (source), and overlooking these material realities in favor of Avatar's cobbled, hackneyed 'spirituality' only functions to reinforce the inequity most of us choose not to see.

maybe the film turned it all around in the final half hour, maybe this entire rant is based on insufficient information, maybe the impotent protagonist doesn't find romance (or, alternately, maybe he doesn't have to walk away from romance), maybe he isn't the 'chosen one' who can come to the rescue of the indigenous people – but it was all i could do to sit through what i saw.

my yin and i left Mme. Fawcett's a little after 10pm, came home and went straight to bed. thus concluded the first day of Christmas.

on the nature of eves, Christmas and otherwise

yesterday i had a lazy, productive day of candy making, and right now my refrigerator looks something like the marble slabs one finds at Kilwin's or any other purveyor of chocolate, diabetes and fudge.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that today is Christmas Eve, which inspired me to wonder exactly when this phenomenon of marking and the celebrating 'the day before the day' emerged. i'm certain that the Internet has some thoughts on this, but at present i have no motivation to fact check Wikipedia. i have bigger concerns, like whether or not my solstice pickles will be adequately fermented in time for tonight's party. the pickles are also beside the point, but what the hell? here's my favorite pickle joke:

A duck walks into a bar, goes up to the bartender and asks for a pickle.

The bartender says, "What does this look like to you? We don't got no pickles here. This is a bar!"

The duck leaves, but returns the next day, meanders up to the bar and asks the bartender, "Can I have a pickle please?"

The bartender snaps, "Look, Duck, I told you yesterday: This is a bar and we don't sell pickles – so get out of here!"

The duck leaves, but returns on the third day and does it all over again: "I'll have a pickle."

The bartender is incensed and screams at the duck, "I told you yesterday, I told you the day before, and I'm tellin' you now. This is a bar and we don't sell pickles. If you come in here one more time and ask for a pickle, I'm going to nail your beak to the bar!"

The duck leaves, but comes back the next day holding a hammer. This time, he saunters up to the bar, looks the barkeep dead in the eye, and asks: "Got any nails?"

The bartender's eyes bulge out as he throws his hands up in the air. He yells, "What the hell is wrong with you? This is a bar, not a hardware store! We don't have no flippin' nails!"

The duck says, "I'll have a pickle then."

now, that that's out of my system...

eves are an interesting phenomenon because they necessarily reference a moment that has not yet transpired, alluding to a presumed future that will undoubtedly be other than expected. i understand that they help to facilitate travel and various other preparatory rituals, but they also signal some sense of anticipation and, psychologically speaking, i find them to be neurotic.

they appear to serve as a halfway house of sorts, speaking to our primitive need for ritual, but also accommodating the requirements of our market economy. what is the balance between the two?

my gut feeling is that the scale is weighted on the side of commerce, and it would be an interesting to know how many businesses close early today (Friday) as opposed to how many will open earlier than usual the day after (Sunday).

all of these things, except maybe the pickle joke, are beside the point:

this photograph is not an endorsement of the chip manufacturer

the point is that, whatever the reason, eves are one of the only rituals we have left that even attempt to defy the logic of capitalism, Chinese restaurants and movie theaters excluded. this is cause for celebration in and of itself, and i hope that everyone appreciates this day on its own merit, not simply its relation to the one that follows.

True Grit

my yin and i went to see True Grit last night, and having never seen the original, i am completely unqualified to speculate as to how Jeff Daniels measures up to John Wayne:

what is the significance of a blind left, versus a blind right, eye?

the blindness is beside the point.

the point is that my life overlapped with John Wayne's for approximately 18 months, which means i was born too late to have actual memories of his existence, but not late enough for him to exist solely as an icon. as a result his spectral presence infested much of my childhood, mostly in the form of confusion as to why my father thought so much of this clumsy man.

i'm at a loss to describe the experience, but it somehow turned around my father's nostalgia for his own childhood, a subtle yearning for the Fifties, a time when the Duke wasn't dead. subconsciously, this registered in my mind as my father's desire to be more like me (a child) and less like himself, whom i esteemed as he did Wayne. it's a peculiar inversion of the typical parent/child dynamic, which has always left me feeling strangely about the actor, one with which i'm sure a psychologist (or nostalgist) could work wonders.

Oedipus is also beside the point.

the point is that the Coen Brothers' have made yet another artfully accessible film, continuing their task of reworking the contemporary Western (Blood Simple, No Country For Old Men, and even Raising Arizona in its own way). unlike the others, this one is set in the 19th century and features a simultaneously unreal and believable performance by Hailee Steinfeld. the cinematography is stunning, of course, and even Matt Damon is tolerable in his supporting role. also, and at the risk of stating the obvious, casting the Dude as the Duke demonstrates unparalleled genius:

image appropriated, without permission, from Magic Lantern Film Blog

finally, the Coen Brothers' signature quirkiness, mixing the absurd with the terrifying, never ceases to amuse me:

crazed dentist, wearing a bear suit, with dead body in tow

my favorite aspect, however, was the film's refusal to reach closure. i do not know how (or if) the original resolves itself, but this True Grit ends in a profoundly unsatisfying, deeply rewarding manner. the story told is the defining episode of a young girl's life, leaving her maimed, yet empowered.

furthermore, the agents of this encounter are swallowed up by the mouth of time, never to be heard from again. she walks into the horizon missing a part of who she was, a part of her that had to be sacrificed to become the person she is:

how many of our own lives transpire in precisely this way?

as Chris Marker says, events "claim remembrance on account of their scars" and when Patanjali speaks of smritti vritti, i believe he is teaching us the same thing. we usually think of memories as things we gain over time, but just as often they are little more than reminders of the things we lost.

the day after (post-solstice refelction)

two nights ago marked the coincidence of a full moon, a lunar eclipse and the winter solstice. i have friends who set their alarms for 3 am to watch it, and others who reported inexplicable, ostensibly unintentional, mid-night wakings. there is even speculation floating around that 2010 is actually 2012, owing to confusion translating the Mayan, Gregorian and Julian calendars.

i suppose it's an interesting time to be an astrologer or insomniac, but this is beside the point.

the point is that i'm not much of either: my lifelong sleep disruptions rectified themselves about four years ago, and i shy away from both stellar and planetary prognostication. it's not that i don't believe in the theoretical validity of such pursuits; in fact, it seems a necessary corollary of the underlying interdependence of all things that every object and being in the whole of the universe must reflect the consciousness and position of every other piece of the puzzle.

in practice, however, it seems that the desire of the observer, combined with his or her limited perspective, inevitably corrupts readings. the planets and stars were set in motion at a time that predates the intentionality of bacteria and amoeba, much less my own particular incarnation. in my experience, astrological meaning has emerged retroactively, and often in ways i couldn't have expected and would have been unable to comprehend at the time.

perhaps there are people who do not suffer from these shortcomings, but i'm doubtful that they write horoscopes for the daily paper, or post to social networking sites. furthermore, i would be willing to be dimes to dollars that these same people (if they exist in human form) are unable to read their own charts with any accuracy. to do so would be a curse, and as the Cassandra myth teaches us, those who foresee the future are doomed to madness:

2500-year old kylix image of Cassandra

that's why most attempts at prognostication sound more like the fearful wishes to keep uncertainty at bay to me. we enjoy the fiction that, by knowing the present, we can somehow ensure our future desires. when we fall victim to this, though, life becomes little more than a complicated hall of mirrors, projected in the past in all directions and overwriting the potential of the present. it seems more productive and honest to recognize the unknowability of what lies ahead, to embrace each new moment as unique, connected to the past by an invisible tether and leading to a future incomprehensible in its beauty. this line of thought, apparently, was what informed yesterday afternoon's ritual.

each year my yin and i celebrate the solstice by dismantling our altar, wiping it down, doing a sage smudge, and then putting it back together. we write down intentions, we meditate, we chant – we prepare ourselves for the year to come by ridding ourselves of the things that are no longer serving us. yesterday's ceremony was especially powerful, and what emerged was an entity more concerned with what lie ahead than what came before:

our altar, clearing the way for the year to come

the old journals that usually occupy the back row were replaced by a blank journal my yin brought back from India, and the arrangement of the items had a distinctive arrow-like shape, which implies a forward movement:

top and middle sections of altar

we planned none of these things; they simply came into being of their own accord. it was only after their emergence that i noted the shape, that i recognized the substitution of old journals for blank journal signaled a shift from the memorialization of the past to the celebration of the future:

my hubris is inadequate to bear the pretension of pretending to know what these changes portend.

the future may not be unwritten, but it is unreadable, and i take joy in knowing that the year to come will be full of tremendous changes. our wedding and honeymoon, the completion of my graduate degree, and who knows how many other momentous occasions will transpire between now and the next solstice, which is a scant six months away. every day between now and then will grow a little longer, and i have only the vaguest outline of what will come as the days begin to shrink throughout the summer and fall, approaching the next winter solstice. how could one know what will happen?

more importantly,

who would want to?

shoes, absurdity and Macy's

yesterday my yin and i spent five hours in a mall, which is only slightly less painful to me than having teeth drilled. most of this time was spent in Macy's, where we surveyed a bevy of toasters, vacuums, knives and mixers in an attempt to get a little clearer on what items to place on our wedding registry. we both find the concept of a registry somewhat odd, and my yin asked, "i wonder how it started?"

"with the rise of the petite bourgeoisie and breakdown of communities,"
i responded groundlessly. but this is beside the point.

the point is that my head was spinning in less than an hour. the scanner gun was malfunctioning, the department store network was down, and i was completely useless when it came to making decisions regarding the virtues of one coffee maker over another. my yin, ever-tuned in to the subtle fluctuations my mental health, noticed this and suggested we take a food break. this was a wise decision.

we found a vegetarian falafel stand in the food court, and i quickly devoured a half pita with sweet potato fries. the food helped to ground me, and once more we entered unto the breach:

do not be fooled by this innocuous floor plan

eventually we wandered back to Macy's: the scanner worked, the computer system was running, and my yin and i had been in the mall for four hours – the week before Christmas – without buying anything other than lunch ($13.79 for two). after finishing the task at hand, we walked downstairs to the shoe department, looking for a pair of comfortable, attractive sandals that might complement my yin's stunning wedding dress.

it was there that i started to wonder at the wealth of this nation, which is manifested nowhere so clearly as in the shoe department of a department store. we have shoes to make walking easier:

my beloved Merrel

and shoes to make walking more difficult:

the baffling FitFlop

we even have shoes that consider walking ontologically insufficient, and attempt to make the world a better place:

the intriguing TOMS

we have high heels and flats and and pumps and tennis shoes and sneakers and galoshes and basketball shoes and cleats and skate shoes and snow shoes and cross trainers and sandals and flip flops and Roman sandals and boots and work boots and hiking boots. every type has umpteen brands, and some brands make their own type, like Lugz and Chucks and Jordans and Boks. we even have walking shoes and running shoes and jogging shoes – just in case your feet can tell the difference.

how many people across the world are shoeless? how many hundreds of millions of people consider shoes a luxury? how many billions of people stretch a single pair for years on end? how many pair do i have boxed up, unworn, in the closet?

these are the questions that came flooding in yesterday afternoon, as i sat surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of different styles and colors and shapes and purposes of shoes. it gave me pause, and i didn't sleep well last night. maybe these things are unrelated... but maybe not.

ahead of schedule (pre-solstice ramblings)

we finished last night's load-out ahead of schedule, and i got home just before 3am – dirty, tired, and only mildly covered in anti-freeze.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that maintenance workers wielding weed eaters woke me around 7am this morning, and it looks as though i may make it through this day on little more than coffee, leftover pizza, and that bizarre sleep-deprived pride endemic to stagehands the world over. it will be interesting to see how it mixes with Macy's, where my yin and i are scheduled to arrive in less than two hours.

we have a wedding to plan (and pay for – thus the 65 hour work week), and part of the process includes compiling a registry. this seems like it should be a pleasant enough process, like making a Christmas list for Santa, but Saturday morning i petered out after only an hour. toasters, blenders, plates, pots, pans, utensils, onion cutters, garlic mushers, camping gear – how much virtual consumption can one man tolerate before coffee?

the registry is beside the point.

the point is that tomorrow is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and as far as i'm concerned it is the most logical time to celebrate the New Year. so, every time it occurs, i take the opportunity to assess my life, look at the things i've accumulated and make some sort of judgment as to whether or not they're serving me well. with the wedding on the horizon this seems especially appropriate, and it was exactly one year ago that my yin and i decided to get married on just such an occasion.

the tendency in this society is to accumulate, to pack things away and plan for an imaginary future that prevents us from truly experiencing the present moment. there is no security in the future, any more than there is certainty in the past. the winter solstice reminds me of this, and in recognition and celebration, i write a list of things i hope to see transpire in the coming year. this is not a list of resolutions, merely a set of intentions, and i do not look at them in the year that follows.

when the next solstice arrives, i perform my annual ritual and look at the list from the year before. sometimes the things have happened, sometimes not. sometimes they happened in ways i could never have expected, sometimes my best intentions prove to have been far less ambitious than what the universe held in store for me.

part of this process, though, is making room for new things to enter my life, which means going through the apartment and donating clothes and books and kitchen supplies and anything else i can find that i no longer need. i try to discern the things that truly serve a purpose (like my beloved wool toboggan) from those that i'm clutching onto because of fear, insecurity or habit (like the tattered copy of Dostoevsky).

oftentimes these items are cloaked in a veil of sentimental attachment, or prefaced with an ostensibly logical reason for keeping it. these self-deceptions begin, "well, i might use it..." or "i might need it if..."

to which i respond:

how can we be ready for tomorrow if we hold on to yesterday?

how can we see today if we're looking for tomorrow?

(to be continued...)

1year + 1 day ago (we [clarification])

the motion pictures awards season is upon us once more, and earlier this week i had to pass on an offer to go see an advance screening of the Coen Brothers' True Grit. to paraphrase the words of the Dude himself:

"This aggression will not stand, man."

but this is beside the point.

the point is that my theatre holiday work season ends tonight, probably around 3 am, which means that i will actually get to go to the cinema in the coming weeks. fore mentioned remake is at the top of my list, followed by Aronofsky's Black Swan, and i'm curious to see how the ballerina stands up to The Wrestler. this, too, is beside the point.

the point is that i've been too busy to do much of anything other than work this week, and i woke at 7:15 this morning, half-worried and three quarters-dreading tonight's load out. it's a nice opportunity to practice non-anticipation, even in the face of a known (which is to say 'presumed') future. i find myself distracted, wanting it to hurry up, wanting to keep it at bay. i find myself wondering where i was this time last year:

we [clarification]

i watched Rent (the movie version) one year
and one night ago and either:

the bohemian romance of New York
is a clever fiction, a lie we

[Generation X]

tell ourselves in an attempt to grapple
with the fact that we

[Americans]

live in a nation where the indomitable efficiency of
interstates and television has obliterated the
peculiarities of geographic separation. we

[artists]

loathe to believe this, and write musicals
and songs and books

[and blogs]

pretending it isn't so. we

[would-be critics]

watch with a mix of terror, excitement, and
trepidation as a quilt emerges from our collective
musings - a quilt pieced together from pop culture
references, allusion, consumption, cleverity,
pathological irony, and non-historicized personal
experience. we

[the tragic curious]

are left to wonder if it was ever so, or
if it was only a dream we

[the unreformed romantics]

invented in an attempt to keep
from shivering in the night;

the pastiche quilt of post-modernity makes for a poor bedfellow.

OR

i

[the author]

wrote the above in an attempt to
distance myself from the sadness i

[the human]

felt.