on Art Basel, 2011

My yin and I traveled down to Miami Beach for Art Basel yesterday, just as we did last year and the year before. It was the festival's tenth anniversary, and like always, the area around the Miami Beach Convention Center was awash with collectors and wannabes, artists and artistes, Europeans and Eurotrash, and enough Maseratis, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis to single-handedly solve the Eurozone Crisis...

But this is beside the point.

The point is that my yin and I began our excursion by grabbing a free map at the Convention Center, then leaving immediately. The copious amounts of gawkers and art inside the Center provide far too much stimulation for anyone this side of amphetamine, and the $40 entry fee seemed egregious considering the numerous public art installation and temporary galleries that inevitably accompany Art Basel. That being said, here's an overview of the free art we saw...

One of the first things I noticed was the number of pieces explicitly referencing the Occupy movement. Some of them seemed rather obvious:

all apologies for the glare

While others appeared to be completely random, like this sticker affixed to a utility box:

 Boone, really?

Considering the fact that I hail (more or less) from Boone, I found the above especially rewarding, and I wondered if my brother, who recently told me he had become a supporter of the movement, had flown down to Miami unbeknownst to me.

With regard to the first Occupy picture, it served as a welcome to a gallery full of quasi-political, quasi-pornographic artwork. Some of the pieces were interesting in that thread and canvas were the primary media, which implicitly gendered the works and created a tension between the images of nude (often bound) women depicted by the artist and the undeniably misogynist gaze through which they were seen. Nonetheless, some of the text accompanying the pieces was clever:

a true and valid point

From there my yin and I continued our trek to Collins Park, which was hosting a couple dozen larger scale pieces. Since part of this year's experiment was to document our night using our fancy new iPhones, I found myself engaging with the pieces in ways I normally wouldn't:

Gargantua by Feinstein

 All in search of the perfect angle to share and post on Instagr.am:

comme ci

In the park we found interesting several interesting pieces, like this one that resembled a cross between Jenga and a crucifix:

Strain by Antony Gormley

And this one, which emulated the ocean wave by leading patrons around in a giant circle:

 photo, amazingly composed, by my yin

There were some PVC tubes set up on the beach:

That became infinitely more interesting with my yin standing inside:

In fact, the above piece was one of those artworks whose artist's description was actually far more engaging than the piece itself.  This one began:

"'Untitled (Apparatus)' by Gardar Eide Einarsson is a sculpture based on prison exercise equipment. Prison design and architecture represent a zero state of design, where all traditional design considerations are jettisoned in favor of a design that exclusively seeks to prevent certain behaviors, generally focusing on not lending itself to the infliction of bodily harm..."

I always feel ambivalent about these types of pieces because, on the one hand, it makes the realm of high art seem accessible to anyone with the capacity for critical thought and imagination. On the other hand, it seems kinda lazy. As I told my yin last night, "This Gardar must have himself one hell of an agent."

Other notable sights included this piece by Anish Kapoor, whose combination of concreteness and the void spoke to my most noble metaphysical aspirations:

 Black Stones, Human Bones

These giant cowboy boots, which reminded me of Mardou and had a killer title: "Snake Skin Boots with Snake Head. White Quarry Stone 21st Century. North Mexico" by  Eduardo Sarabia:

 

these boots were definitely made for walkin'...

And this silhouette of the palm trees outside the Bass Museum at dusk:

 artwork by Mother Nature

Another found piece of brilliant was the burger stand at the east end of Collins Park, which is (presumably) not intended to be artistic at all, and yet lends itself to images such as this:

my photograph from last night

By the way, what time was sunset last night?

my second favorite photograph from last night

Anyway, we left the park and headed over to Mr. Brainwash's gallery, which was set up in exactly the same location as last year. The only difference is that this year my yin and I knew whose work it was we were seeing. As fate would have it, just as we approached:

the MBW gallery

Mr. Brainwash himself was exiting. Unfortunately, though, I was slow on the draw and managed only to take this photograph of his taxi as it sped away:

And yes, that was Mr. Potatohead two images ago:

I still go back and forth on Mr. Brainwash's artwork, which combines elements of Warhol with a graffiti sensibility that incorporates cultural references ranging from Gandhi and Mickey Mouse:

 

To Michael Jackson:

And Colonel Sanders:

 the chickens have most assuredly come home to roost

I feel he's at his best when he's either at his most obscure:

how now, graffiti cow?

Or his most playful:

 my yin and Felix

Compared to the images of Gandhi and MJ (not that MJ) and Einstein and Dylan, these comically absurd pieces seem more authentic, assuming one can even use such a word to speak of an artist whose oeuvre seems predicated upon the utter absence and impossibility of any such concept. Nonetheless, as we were leaving my yin and I saw this haunting image of Steve Jobs tucked above the door:

The piece was barely visible, and its positioning may have been the only incidence of subtlety within the whole gallery. It was illuminated only by ambient light and a nearby exit sign, which eerily spoke to the man's passing. Perhaps there's more to Mr. Brainwash's work than meets the eye...

Perhaps not.

promising results (experiments from first weekend with new camera)

I've spent most of the weekend playing with out new camera, trying not so much to create art but to simply familiarize myself with the machine before we leave on Wednesday. I have to say, the early results are promising:

grated cheese bokeh

This image was taken Saturday night at our friends' home. Their daughter (the blurry child in the background) turns four at the end of this week, and unlike last year, my yin and I will be unable to attend her birthday party. Producing these blurred backgrounds – at least with a stock lens kit – is more challenging than one might think.

The dog, however, was unimpressed.

As the night progressed, a Scrabble game appeared, and I took the opportunity to add exposure and composition to the mix. This idea was stolen from a photograph I once saw in either Tricycle or Ascent.

wisdom, overexposed and losing focus

One thing I like about this photo is its ability to communicate complex ideas with mundane objects. So, while the referent in this photograph is nothing more than a board (bored?) game, its true subject is the effect of time and context on our understanding of knowledge. This idea could undoubtedly be developed more thoroughly by staging additional words, but we were there to play Scrabble, not photograph philosophy or explore the epistemology and teleology of space-time.

Speaking of, during our game CNN reported the world had not, in fact, ended as predicted by some millennialists and true believers. This didn't come as a surprise to me, but I was somewhat perplexed by why the network was reporting on it at all. It seems that, simply by being alive and watching television, the viewing public already knew that the rapture hadn't come; therefore, this information seemed both redundant and unnecessary.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the experimentation reached its pinnacle last night. My yin and I had spent the afternoon filming a short, simple hatha yoga video for one of her clients; and although the camera performed admirably, I found myself running into several potential future problems. So, once we were finished, my yin went to overdub vocals while I searched for tutorials on how to smooth out pans and build a makeshift Steadicam.

The amount of information is truly overwhelming, though, and I soon found myself frustrated. It's tantalizingly easy to fall into the Black Hole of How-To, so much so that one can spend more time looking at instructional videos than developing his or own expression. Certain in this knowledge, I walked outside, set up my painfully inadequate tripod, and pointed it our front door:

I stared at it a little harder, waiting for it to open.

I remembered the words of Gaston Bachelard, which I would not read until before sunrise the next morning:

"Words... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in 'foreign commerce,' or on the same level as the others, the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves - this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low, is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together. Must the philosopher alone be condemned by his peers always to live on the ground floor?"

Then I realized:

Images are no different than words...

and perhaps even more so.

long days, Faulkner and Hemingway

Yesterday was the first day of an experiment: 14 hours on campus, 8am - 10pm, every Wednesday from now until the end of April. I was a little uncertain about the whole endeavor, worried that perhaps I would run out of steam before my 7pm seminar on Faulkner and Hemingway. This is the only course I'm taking this semester, and the first time I've taken an English class since Hasan Malik's "Introduction to Fiction" class in Chapel Hill, fall semester of 1996.

To my knowledge, Malik wasn't a professor, merely a lowly graduate teaching assistant like myself. He was a skinny man with wild eyes and a sparse beard, and he was crazy about literature. I had never seen someone so passionate when he spoke. He would stand in front of the room, sweating and flailing his arms about like some ridiculous octopus in an Ed Wood movie. It made no difference to him if it was Stendhal or Borges or Nabakov; he was in love with each of them, and listening to his rants I fell in love with each of them. Most of all I remember the way he described every writer, no matter who is was as "mad" in his clipped Pakistani accent.

Hasan Malik was my first and, up until yesterday, last literature instructor. The lure of the moving image (and the threat of long boring novels expounded by long boring professors) pulled me away from the written word. I still read of course, and in retrospect it would have probably been wiser if I had sought adult supervision for some of the books I read; Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment comes to mind.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that last night I stumbled into a professor worthy of the seed sewn by Malik nearly fifteen years ago. In the interim I have witnessed all manners of calamity and glory: despair, delusion and delight. Sometimes the distinctions between them were indecipherable, other times they were indelible. Each of them was perfect, each of them was unique, each of them prepared my for the coming months' study of these shirtless drunkards:

'Papa' and 'Pappy'

[lapse]

The professor walks in wearing a yellow bow-tie and tweed jacket. I had heard rumors about him, that he was obsessed with Faulkner – so much so that he chose to be born in Mississippi. He opens his mouth to speak; everything I heard was true. It is the voice of a 70-year old man coming from the mouth of a 35-year old body.

"Perversion," he tells us. "Misogynistic... Racist... Disturbing."

He pauses.

"Disturbing."

He taps his fingers on the table like my great grandfather.

"But..." He connects three imaginary dots on the table with his index finger.

"When it comes down to putting one words after another..."

He shakes his head... reverently... disbelievingly.

"They were pretty good, they were pretty good."

a little over two years ago...

The poem below was written a little more than two years ago, and although I didn't know it the night I wrote it, tiny cracks were beginning to appear in the facade of my would-be romance. At the time I was engaged in an experiment with celibacy, which taught me many things, but few of them were what I expected. The mind's ability to project inductions and fabricate deductions is truly stunning.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that growth, change, and shifts of consciousness always happen just beyond our ability to see them. The precursors, however, become visible if we practice placing our attention on them. For me this primarily comes through dreams, poetry and meditation.

Unfortunately, waiting for a dream to reveal our next step can lead to a long time waiting (believe me, I've tried), and even when they do arrive interpreting them is a hazy proposition. Poetry is more reliable, but inspiration follows its own timetable – not to mention the dangers inherit in mistaking the muse for the Muse.

not this Muse

That leaves meditation, which is far and away the most reliable source of clarity and wisdom I have yet to discover. (And by 'discover,' I mean stumble into.) One of the interesting things about meditation is that its benefits are realized through practice, not the practitioner's belief of its efficacy. This mean two things.

First, practicing meditation will provide grounding, improve focus, and offer peace of mind even if the practitioner doesn't 'believe' in it. My own experience with mantra and japa mala has taught me this. Second, believing in meditation without practicing is no more useful than believing in reincarnation or the Big Bang or the price of tea in China. For me, although rare, this lack of practice usually results either from a perceived lack of time (inevitably false) or pleasurable distraction (self-explanatory).

image from Godard's Pierrot le fou,
one of my favorite pleasurable distractions

Anyway, a little over two years ago I was doing a hell of a lot of meditating. There were flashing lights and revelations and cosmos-shaking insights, but the true benefits of this practice were beginning to show up in more subtle ways. All the flashing lights in the world don't make a difference if we stay stuck in the same patterns, and what good is an insight if we don't integrate it into the way we live our day-to-day lives?

The poem hinted at this process of integration, which was happening in spite of my mind's best efforts to twist the actual situation around into a story worthy of John Hughes or Lloyd Dobbler:

Cusak did for stalking what Madonna did for Kabbalah

I hold meditation responsible for what happened, and more importantly, for all the things that didn't happen. I could have stayed spinning in that cycle for months or even years longer, delaying – or perhaps even denying – the peace, happiness and fulfillment I now (don't) take for granted. And all because...

I didn't listen

When we met she told me she wanted to be alone.
But I didn’t listen and soon I was in her bed until
one day she said she needed to be alone. But I
didn’t listen and this was repeated many
times until one night she told me that
she didn’t not want to spend the
night with me. I looked around
her room and saw the cat on
the bed, a stack of books
on the nightstand and
I realized the only
thing in her life
saying she
wasn’t
alone
was
me
.

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 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.

push/pull

the semester is nearly over, and by the time December rolls around, i'm usually at my wit's end from all late nights and deadlines and juggling. this year is different, though. i'm taking only one class (mon cours de français) and rather than writing until 2am five nights a week, i find myself in the enviable position of putting in six and eight-hour days on my thesis.

in spite of this, i'm starting to feel the familiar push/pull of ease and anticipation, with my natural proclivity towards excess and productivity finds itself pitted against the holidays' unique ability to bring out all manner of vices. while best known as a time of gluttony, the time between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day also inspires an impressive amount of sloth, which happens to be among my favorite of the Seven Deadly. it seems that nothing much happens during these five weeks, and the promise of easy days and late mornings whispers to me in the night. and yet...

i feel a gnawing in my gut, a gnashing of the teeth, a gnosis of the coming solstice and the persistent awareness that the gnarled tree of knowledge is ever wakeful:

the Joshua tree was named by Mormons

oftentimes we speak of balance as if it was a fixed thing, an object, or something to be obtained. in fact, however, it is exactly the opposite.

(an experiment:
close your eyes and
stand on one foot.
what do you notice?)

as this simple exercise demonstrates, balance is always changing, always shifting, always unstable. this is one of my favorite things about balance because it speaks to the underlying, impermanent nature of all things. Marx and Hegel would call this a dialectic, Lao-Tzu would call this yin and yang, the Tantrists would call this the dance of Shiva and Shakti:

i call these things 'potato, potato'

the very activity that promotes balance one day may be the thing that causes us to fall the next, and events that blindside us might end up being the experiences that ultimately allow us to stand tall. you can try to control it, or figure it out, or deny it; but, as a half-Canadian friend of mine is apt to say, it's usually best just to:

analysis of yesterday's word association

Part 1: analysis

(the linear mind)

my yin and i took a walk on the beach Sunday afternoon. it has been an especially chaotic and confusing time since our return to Florida, and we walked to the water seeking solace.

what we found were Germans and drunkards.

we turned around and headed home under overcast skies, and it was if the tides themselves had been thrown from their natural rhythm. i imagined what would happen to the Earth if its moon were to disappear and began playing word association in my head.

Part 2: analysis

(the circular mind)

_the
wo(___)rd
assoc(______)iation
turned(_______)back on
itself, le(________)aving me
just wher(___________)e i started:
our apartm(____________)ent, our pool,
our kitch(______________)en; all these
things se(____________)emed near
and far, p(__________)resent and
absent. i(_________)heard the
sound o(_______)f thunder
but the r(_____)ain never
came.

Part 3: analysis

(the plagiarist mind)

"Still, you grasp human existence in terms of these rather absurd activities resting on relatively straightforward motives, and questions of right and wrong pretty much drop out of the picture. That's where memory takes over and fiction is born."

- Haruki Murakami

Part 4: analysis

(the elided mind)

the most interesting thing about this experiment is the fact that the word association:

"rubber, glue, horse, thief, Genet, Ramsey"

has a total of six linguistic items, and yet the pictogram contains seven images. this empirical evidence effectively demonstrates the unstable nature of the written word and calls into question the validity of all testimony, internal dialogue, and scripture.

(sorry Patanjali).

from where does this surplus of images originate?

furthermore, the movement from one thoughtform to another is predicated upon both idiomatic familiarity ("i'm rubber you're glue") as well as colloquial folk wisdom ("that horse is ready for the glue factory"). in another social or linguistic context, it would not be possible for me to arrive at the images in part 3. this fact leads me to ask:

how much of our thought is really our own?

even now the collection of information and motivation and dedication that inspired this rant have ran their course. i no longer feel the desire to type these questions, only the need to close my eyes...

Boston was like...

my yin and i have arrived in North Carolina and find ourselves staring out at the expanse of the Blue Ridge Mountains from a bedroom slightly larger than our apartment. the trip up was eventful, the layover in Atlanta was inspirational, and i have much to say about both these things. but this is beside the point.

the point is that my latent obsessive compulsive tendencies require that i take tasks to completion; and therefore, as part of my annual homage to New England, i offer the final installment of things i've said before (with pictures). and so...

Boston was like:

waiting for the other shoe to drop

waiting for the train to stop

transfers from green to orange and
ice cream parlor experiments

flirting in art galleries

trying to impress Stephanie Schneider

with out of print paperbacks

and vegetarian meals in Chinatown.

cannoli and cappuccino with

a handful of Hanover holdovers
sandwiched between the sandwich shops

guided through the North End by
the social security Irish of Arch Street

and whispering confessions to St. Anthony

about where the bodies are buried.

thronging south

on Newbury Street in chic boutiques



and sliding

velvet walls

f
a
l
l
i
n
g

in love with girls on sofas,
long talks with Mardou in the park

dodging weddings and avoiding
the marbled gaze in the courtyard shade of the library

l o n g i n g

for my pen.