The Adventures of Dusky Panther

To My Hypothetical Children

2012-02-16T03:18:00.002-05:00

To Emma and Eric (subject to change),

I will forgive errant ways. I’ll likely encourage them if it’s all for the best.

While I have thought of you for quite some time, it has only occurred to me fairly recently that you may actually exist, and whether with the increasing knowledge of this I’ll think less about what I think about now and more about, I don’t know, car seats and baby formulas and what TV shows will make you a genius and other garbage like that. So I’m writing from now, 2012, while I’m a 20 year-old college sophomore becoming increasingly aware of his own ignorance. I fear this is going to get flowery, but it's crazy how much you end up teaching yourself the more reminders you leave behind. Maybe you guys’ll do stuff like this when you’re older, but believe me, I will by no means press you to blog. A few hundred views a week is not enough to live off of.

I’m afraid and aware that when I get older, I’m going to act like I know more than you, which 95% I will, because babies are dumb and I have a college education. I might even wave it above your crib, if provoked enough. However I’m afraid I’ll likely not see when you have a different perspective the other 5%. After all time moves on and I can’t be a cool person and a good father. It’s just something parents do, so I think it’d be dope to talk to you the only time I’m not that. Plus, there’s a lot I struggle with with people right now. There are those who hate me, I hate, and those I feel so much love for I struggle finding an appropriate venue to express it (it’s often here, with words).

This isn’t to say that this is my guide to life, because if this is didactic and inappropriately wishful, then I will be a terrible father, the type of father who is calling you at 9 pm to get home from the roller rink because I’ve watched the news reports and I know the crowd that Jenny hangs around with and I KNOW her joke of a mother isn’t doing anything about the matter. Psh, parents are pretty LAME-O. Cowabunga.

A single tulip. It is difficult to suggest to others to care about things, especially in a time when caring is positively correlated with knowing how much things suck. It requires a certain faith, a believing in one thing with all knowledge pointing towards the opposite. With this said, you’ve got to believe in people. Or else you’re totally boned. It’s only then can you care about anything else. I’m taking a class right now that’s essentially about my cynical generation, about how we’re too afraid to engage with anything so we distance ourselves with reservation and condemnation and satire. When it comes to others, they’re not all that different from you when it comes to needs and desires. They deserve the amount of respect you give yourself, even if you disagree with the manner of which they pursue. They’re gonna smoke pot and fuck around and expect what they don’t deserve and lie and cheat and get wasted and reject critical thought more than you will. You will expect too much of them and they will hurt you, but you need them and you’ve got to be kind, you’ve got to care, and you’ve got to know how different those are from one another. It takes constant pain and work and reminders, but it makes life better. I’ve got to believe that love and respect makes life better. Keeping in mind there will be those who will never like you no matter what you do. I guarantee that you will not have the sperm count to fuck all the haters. If you meet someone new don’t don’t don’t mistake them for being perfect. That’s a setup for disappointment and hatred. People lie more in the middle of goodness than we want to let ourselves believe. "Hatred never ceases by hatred in this world. By love alone it ceases; this is eternal law." It’s not that you kill people with kindness. You murder them in the first degree with no damn witnesses. Do you want to go to jail?

A couple roses. Build schemas through deductive reasoning. What I mean by this is to create models in a complex reality in order to describe relationships between objects. I’m being abstract on purpose. Thinking like that helps you understand the concrete and not enough people do it.

I should stress that while this is preachy and about life, this isn’t my preachy guide to life. These are things I think about and struggle with every damn day. I can’t stress enough how much of a moron I am. I suck at the following things- baking, science, keeping my mind right, running, making art, handwriting, jealousy, crossword puzzles, sports, dancing, maturity, flirting (something that could prove problematic as far as you existing), reading, letting go, self-efficacy, and there are others, but this is getting sad and I’m supposed to be a superhero figure of sorts. The point is I’m working at it. While there are plenty who are, there are those my age who aren’t and you can tell if you’re looking. Most things aren’t that hard to see if you are. I want to be a good person so that I can be there for you, because compassion always ends up being about being there, and it takes a lot of living to learn what that even means, living that I haven’t done yet. While it is likely that you will face what I have a hard time with, know that you are not alone, that I was a person who is not all that different from you, and that I love you intensely despite the fact that you are presently products of my projections. What I know is that life is the guide to being a good person, and it’s entirely up to you if you choose to read it. I have a feeling you will.

I’ve spent half of my life wallowing in love with the idea that we can create something that myself and others will be able to continually learn from, look up to, live from, and I intend to remain stumbling. There’s something clumsy about faith, and I can only hope you’ll have the sight to fully appreciate the hopelessness of it, to flail your arms rhythmically and move your feet without regard for proper and appropriate directionality over what is certain is stagnant, uninterested, despondent, erringly concordant, merely correlative, tentative and seemingly small. I’d much rather the act of getting there to be a surprise than an accident. I will always be in love, but I fail to find reason why that should be a sad thing. I will watch you watch it grow. Bouquets of flowers.

-Brandon Walsh

Favorite Moments of 2011

2011-12-28T19:59:00.001-05:00

It’s impossible to distil life. It’s why The Tree of Life is ultimately a failure. Still many (including myself) admire it for trying. Here are some of my favorite moments from 2011 that I just now brought to memory (in no particular order (really- I mixed them up on purpose (which I guess puts them in a particular order (crap)))).

1. Writing these two sentimental and honest essays about September 11 and the death of a friend that tried not to be gross.

2. Seeing Arcade Fire and the National live with Katie Alex Kacie dancing how I do way too much. I made a list of albums I liked this year, but none of it compares to the experience I had with this song that I daresay is life-affirming. I would throw everything I heard this past year in memory-trash just so I could cherish this song of profound cherishment.

3. Leaving my night class this past semester, speeding my bike downhill through the heart of campus, smelling the water of Showalter Fountain while passing the cascading lights of the art museum. It’s a scene plucked out of a Teen Vogue essay contest entry and it’s magnificent.

4. TV- All of Friday Night Lights, season 4 finale of Breaking Bad (the moment I realized what the ENTIRE SHOW WAS DOING), season 4 of The Wire

5. Seeing a picture of Kinsey petting a goat. I won’t post it here out of respect, but I look at it regularly. It’s beauty.

6. Going to the Museum of The Moving Image in Brooklyn with Eric (really this whole vacation with my family). There are mind-blowing film artifacts, like huge miniature pieces from Blade Runner and Chewbacca’s costume and pages from the Network and Citizen Kane screenplays and so much more than there’s room to mention (this isn’t true). However, the only reason I went there was because it’s the only place in New York they have a functional, public 1981 Donkey Kong machine. Played for around 35 minutes and got all the top scores. Donkey Kong is a beautiful game.

7. Undeservedly earning my EGOT on Videogum, joining a group of funny people I admire and respect / making Gumby tell dick jokes.

8. Pounding a little girl in Pokemon at the Pokemon Nationals with Mike and Alec. I made this thing. It isn’t that good.

9. The Tree of Life - I usually don’t like talking about movies with other people studying film. Often I’ll get the sense that they’ve boiled their opinion of an entire piece, however extensive, down to a damning sentence blowing up a single complaint that they wouldn’t even have if they took more than five seconds of reflection in their brilliant evaluation outside of whatever blog they took their opinion from. “It’s ambitious but it’s preachy and pretentious” is an unfair assessment of a work as dense as The Tree of Life. I think criticism can be much more discursive and evaluative than that while still not having PhDs in talking about movies. This movie in particular has become the biggest recipient of this damnation, and is the same reason it’s my favorite movie of the year. This movie is dense and requires viewing upon viewing and background knowledge and self-reflection and profound empathy, and that is merely what is required for internalizing the thematic elements. These kinds of things are what I look for in a movie (although not all) and something I realize isn’t for everyone. At the very least, this is one of the most beautiful movies you’ll see with your eyeballs. I also had nice experiences watching Warrior, Moneyball, Tabloid, Super 8, Certified Copy, Drive, Win Win, 50/50 and Winnie The Pooh. Also, Meek’s Cutoff is up there with Elephant as most chilling movie I’ve ever seen (meaning I’ll never ever watch it again despite its greatness).

10. Hank.

11. Watching Children of Paradise for the first time. I’ve watched it five times this year. More here if ya want.

12. Couchception – We put a couch on top of another couch.

13. Jamie and I put on a fancy dinner party.

14. Talking with Hannibal Buress after a show he did in Bloomington. He’s just a great, hard-working comedian and I really look forward to what he does.

15. Finishing a book freshman year that was harder to type than it was to write/learning from and completely moving past all of that.

16. Gettin some of my shit shown at the cinema on campus. Am not all that crazy about some of my stuff, but still pretty cool! It seems like everything I’ve done and seen at the cinema has been cool, like talking to the producer of every Batman movie ever. You should all go sometime.

17. Skyrim is such a beautiful and full game that requires a certain transported state. It’s the Star Trek reboot of RPGs- the people who don’t like it are PC gamers who like things to be boring and terrible.

18. I chased Dobby around the movie theater at the premiere of the last Harry Potter movie dressed as the ghost of Harry Potter.

19. Walking around Half Price Books. I just like the smell.

20. In Moneyball – There’s a great montage showing how Billy Beane plans to reconstruct his team with quick cutting shots of statistics and graphs flying around, the voice over changing the way you think about how professional sports work. This then cuts to Jonah Hill’s character sitting alone in his silent office, printing out the final roster.

21. Watching The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Pt. 1 and then writing about it.

5 Worst Memories of 2011

1. Learning to exist in a community I often do not respect nor have the same interests and motivations and the pains of having that attitude.

2. Writing an impossible 12-page paper about the depiction of race on the first season of The Hills (a show only featuring white people), getting a 93 on it because of bullshit non-reasons.

3. Spanish with Shades.

4. General sadness at the beginning of the year, related to 1.

5. Realizing this year is going to end.

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Well that ended kind of flowery.

My Favorite Albums of 2011

2011-12-06T03:27:00.013-05:00

Music is important to me, and I feel I listen to a good deal of it, although I don't think my tastes are that far out there. These are mostly popular bands that are sure to be on many year end lists. I'll say that these are ordered by how much I enjoyed and responded to them- that's all.

(If you listen to any of these, make sure you up the quality on the video so you don't listen to the songs at the worst quality. All you have to do is fullscreen.)

1. Bon Iver – Bon Iver, Bon Iver / The Roots - undun

These are two incredibly powerful albums that are masterpieces in storytelling, both magnificently arranged, are both beautiful and tragic. This music makes you feel something profound and recognizable, one whispered, the other shouted, both with their hearts and lyrics in the right place. The fact that "undun" does the whole Memento thing is also really effective.

2. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy

My favorite video/song of the year.

3. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues

4. The War on Drugs – Slave Ambient

First time I heard this band was live. Hash tag humble brag. This band cuts through the sonic like none other. It's no coincidence that the guys from The National love these guys.

5. Radiohead – The King Of Limbs (with Supercollider EP)

At first I thought it was way too short, then I was reminded of how long Hail to the Thief was, but then I heard the songs they cut, and was like, "Why did you cut these." Also, this is by far the best rhythmic album of the year.

6. Cut Copy – Zonoscope

7. Holy Ghost! – Holy Ghost!

This is likely the next LCD Soundsystem.

8. Neon Indian – Era Extraña

9. Justice – Audio, Video, Disco

10. The Black Keys – El Camino (of what I’ve heard so far)

11. Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto

This album is in one key, and that is the key of "Ooooooooooooh."

12. Jay-Z & Kanye West – Watch The Throne

13. Washed Out – Within And Without

This song isn't on this album, but I really only gave them a fair chance this year so I caught up.

14. TV on the Radio – Nine Types of Light

I think a lot of music videos that are clearly storyboarded tend to be tacky and dumb. Yet, this one just gets at me even though I can see right through it.

15. tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l

I can't listen to a lot of popular music because I can't escape the thought, "Goddamn, I am listening to the same shit time and time over. This is just boring." It's because it is and people who only follow the radio have short attention spans and little knowledge of the past. For people like me who think this, a band like tUnE-yArDs comes around and all you can do is smile. Like, how often do you listen to something and say, "This is actually interesting."? Merrill also has a tremendous respect for rhythm. I feel she would get along with the folks from Efterklang.

16. The Weeknd – House Of Balloons
17. Real Estate – Days
18. Black Lips – Arabia Mountain
19. Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes
20. Lady Gaga - Born This Way
21. The Vaccines, What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?
22. Feist – Metals
23. Beyoncé – 4
24. Panda Bear - Tomboy
25. Atlas Sound – Parallax
26. Wilco – The Whole Love
27. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
28. Beirut – The Rip Tide
29. Childish Gambino – Camp
30. The Strokes - Angles

Albums I Don’t Care That Much For (worst are at the top)

• Lou Reed & Metallica - Lulu
This is garbage. Suffer yourself through 30 seconds of this.

• Nicki Minaj – Pink Friday
She's annoying.

• Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More
They're fluffy.

• Tyler, The Creator - Goblin
He's mean.

• Lil’ Wayne – Tha Carter IV
He's dumb.

• James Blake – James Blake
He's boring.

• Florence & The Machine – Ceremonials
She's whiney.

(After this point, this list consists of much more respectable artists, I understand.)

• The Horrors – Skying
• Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost
• Paul Simon - So Beautiful Or So What
• Adele – 21
• Drake – Take Care
• Wild Flag – Wild Flag
• The Decemberists – The King Is Dead

This is great, though.

• Bright Eyes, The People’s Key

My favorite Bright Eyes song of all time comes from this, though.

• I also hate LMFAO more than most things on this Earth.

(If I could give #1 to Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" again, I would.)

Of Children of Paradise and Freedom

2011-12-02T14:47:00.005-05:00

I love Children of Paradise for the same reasons I love The Tree of Life- its beauty and impenetrability. Here's my attempt to in the only way an undergrad knows how- clumsily making love to it.

"Triumph of The Free"

Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise is not commonly regarded as the greatest French film of all time for its gargantuan, lavish sets, poetic realism, metatextual narrative blurring between cinema and theatre, obvious influence on modern cinema, whimsical soundtrack, poetic dialogue, historical accuracy, groundbreaking acting, nor it’s disciplined and stylized cinematography, but under the conditions that it was first made. The filming of the picture took place during the Nazi occupation of France. It was released shortly after the end of the occupation and shortly before the end of the war. Due to the funding the film received by the Nazis, who effectively reformed the studio Pathé, the Jewish set designer and composer both worked in clandestine. Several Nazi extras were hired, unknowingly working alongside resistance fighters. Reels of the film were hidden before its completion. Despite these circumstances, the film can be read as an anti-occupation film, an allegorical piece of film history that works to boldly assert France’s freedom.

Children of Paradise operates differently from many films following it that similarly use the past to talk about the present in that its allegorical devices work at multiple levels. This essay will deconstruct these messages from the top down.

Children of Paradise is framed as a story of four men who all love the same woman, but differently. Baptiste the pantomime loves romantically with the heart, Frederick the actor with the body, Lacenaire the thief with the intellect, and Count Eduard with the purse. Early in the film the audience is led to side with Baptiste, but as the story progresses, the well-intentioned love for Garance leads each of the men to a certain demise. Baptiste ignores his family and abandons his stable life, his poor wife Natalie believing he is merely suffering from a dream state. The Count owns Garance, his love knowingly unreciprocated. Frederick’s jealousy actualizes his Othello role (on stage and off), pushing him to duel the Count. Lacenaire satisfies his pride by murdering the Count. Garance doesn’t foresee these destructive effects of love, interacting with each character gaily, becoming more restricted of her freedom with each of her interactions, just as was the case of Paris during the occupation. Under the hold of the Count, Garance, while beautiful, is fully clothed, hidden behind a veil, claiming to be “not sad, but not cheerful,” resembling the paralyzed state of Paris during the occupation. This sordid sequence of events culminating in tragedy for many characters begins with the best intentions, and the film does not initially damn these intentions as wrong. With this in mind, the film doesn’t merely exist to damn the Nazi occupation as a wrongful act, but empathizes, working to lead the audience to understand how an undesirable state of living comes to be.
The message of freedom is implied throughout. Early in the film, Garance is first presented on display in a sideshow attraction, sitting naked in a bath holding a mirror. Right from the start, she is presented as “truth,” a truth that is desired and fought for throughout the film and eventually set free. Yet, the film is told from the perspectives of the men who are ultimately at fault and made fools and cuckolds of. By doing this, the film doesn’t simply damn the oppressors, but presents their points of view while also making the case for Garance’s freedom. Despite each having fundamental psychological faults, there is no clear antagonist in Children of Paradise, but the audience is led to love Garance and her admiration for the poor French people (referred to as “the Gods”). The only individual we are led to love is the one who rejects her individuality and reserves her love for Paris alone. As she says, “I adore freedom,” which is later satiated with her solitary carriage ride away from the Boulevard of Crime, through a sea of her people, towards freedom.

The obvious parallel between the theatre and reality in the film comments on the purpose of roles in the film, and how each character fulfills their role. Acting is in no way confined to the stage, permeating in nearly every character, as is seen with the blind man who certifies diamonds. Baptiste is proficient in making the visual understood without the aid of dialogue. His voice is muted, just as dissenting voices of the occupation were muted at this time. The film acts as a strong voice for these many silenced Parisians, all the while concealed from oppressors. Allegory here provides social criticism from a distance, which amazes considering much quieter criticism at the time often resulted in death.

The authority figures in the film are brash and error-ridden, such as Baptiste’s father and the police. Jerico, an enemy to many characters, collaborates, informs, and spies on several of the characters, “selling friends” for personal gain. These figures can be read as a critique of Nazi informants in Paris at the time. These characters are despised for their parasitic nature and are given no explanation for their dubious actions, unlike others. In doing this Carne does not ignore the existence of pure evil, although none of these characters cause the main conflict. Rather, they work to complicate the story and direct the characters towards crisis, which is a unique, more realistic approach of representing evil, let alone Nazi informants.

Film scholar Brian Stonewall notes in an audio commentary of the film that the cast of extras, filled with Nazis and resistance fighters, was a model of the French nation at the time. Much of his oral essay is devoted to Carne’s use of poetic realism as a stylistic representation of allegory, of “illuminating the invisible with the visible” (Stonewell). When talking of the film’s message of setting truth free, he claims that “skillful allegory could keep it hidden but hint at its shape,” which is just the case when reading the story arguing against the occupation (Stonewell). The use of allegory is more than mere concealment or subtlety, but of embodying an idea, in this case a temporal, political one, through filmic creation. This is further hinted at when commenting on Baptiste’s mimed performance of Lacenaire stealing the pocket watch and freeing Garance from judicial error, saying, “Art can liberate a captive from tyranny” (Stonewell). Tyranny is used in this quote broadly, as is seen in Garance’s various forms of captivity. Yet, the specific idea rings true throughout the piece despite its variances, and this is accomplished through Carne’s poetic realism. Poetic realism is the stylistic lens of history Carne chooses to construct the film’s world through. Carne uses history (19th century Paris as well as historically famous actors who lived then) in order to write his own of Paris in 1945. That Carne stylizes the past to critique the present speaks to the communicative quality of not only the staged performances of the stage actors in the film, but also of the film itself as a staged performance.

In another commentary track, film scholar Charles Affron notes the importance of setting the film in 19th century France, as he claims distance from the present allows it to be critiqued. This statement serves as an interesting assessment of the use of allegory as critique, and is especially applicable considering the heavy censors the Nazis placed on films at the time. This does, however, render the film illegible to those who it critiques, which initially appears self-defeating. Only does this distance become understood when considering Children of Paradise a film not for a Nazi audience or even for the casual viewer today unaware of its history, but for “the Gods,” the actual children of Paradise. Thus, the film itself is not an agent of change, but a beautiful love letter to the common Parisian, to those who let the work of change begin. However, Affron does not read the film as chiefly anti-occupation, but rather as a reflection of the film medium and the boundary between life and art, emphasizing the film as a work of metafiction, also mentioned by Stonewell.

With all this said, to say that Children of Paradise is merely an anti-occupation film is to greatly disrespect the multitudinous and at times ambiguous messages. While arguments can be made (as one just has) about the film’s central theme, whether it is calling for 1945 Nazi-occupied France to be free, commenting on the boundary between life and art, warning against the dangers of unbridled love, or nostalgically recreating a Shakespearean narrative in the context of the lost 19th century France, the use of characters, dialogue, props, settings, theatre, and cinematography as allegorical instruments permit the simultaneity of these ideas and require the film be viewed repeatedly and analytically essayed to reach its meaning. Children of Paradise is still a relevant piece of film and history because it is not a one-sided recounting of a right that is wronged by evil, but an empathetic meditation of why freedom must triumph.

I Watched Breaking Dawn Pt. 1. - Tell Everyone I Love Them And That I Regret Nothing

2011-11-18T21:09:00.001-05:00

-“Why are you writing about it? Why can’t you just enjoy it?”
-“I won’t enjoy it unless I write about it.”
-“…Oh.”

It’s obvious that making fun of Twilight is no longer cool. I’m obviously doing that also, but that’s not what this is doing. I only have a little interest in making fun of Twilight. Like most things I’ve been making lately, it’s up to you to figure out what it is I am doing.

Six or so years ago, I went to a lecture and book signing for Emerson Spartz, a lanky shit super nerd who founded mugglenet.com, a fan website capitalizing on the success of the Harry Potter books and films. Also, he did this.

To Azkaban with you! 25 to yuck with no parole! Although I had read all of the Harry Potter books and quite enjoyed them, in all honesty I only went because I had a crush on this.

Despite her, that still didn’t mean that I didn’t have an opinion on how the Harry Potter saga should have ended, it was just that I didn’t really give a shit about what this squirrelly-faced kid speculated about a fictional teenage wizard. The setup for the final book couldn’t have been more perfect. They set the stage for the larger than life battle between good and evil. Lines drawn and stakes set. Let’s go. Who would later become my high school newspaper advisor speculated that Harry would destroy all magic, so that the possibility of evil through magic would cease to exist. The more I thought about it the more it made sense. There was nothing indicating that Voldemort was particularly special, or that someone else couldn’t repeat his legacy with the same social awkwardness, hunger for muggle blood and stack of Megadeath albums. I thought of stories like The Lord of The Rings, Narnia and Star Wars. The protagonist never just won. Something had to die in the hands of good in order to change everything forever. Harry couldn’t just kill Voldemort; he had to kill magic. He had to destroy what was most beautiful and precious given to him in order to end the darkness that overshadowed it. I approached Emerson Spartz with this theory. Little did I know he didn’t give a shit about what I thought. He basically called me an idiot because magic good, destroy magic would be bad. There used to be a video of this exchange online, but it has since been lost. What a tragedy that is.

While in the actual ending Harry did not destroy magic, it was by no means simple. Quite honestly, almost everything thematically happened that would have happened if Harry had destroyed magic, except that there was no physical collateral (save around 8-12 minor characters, that is). I feared a complete happy ending and felt that was what I got. Happy endings have the hardest time being great. Although I ended up liking the ending to Harry Potter, I have never escaped that feeling that Harry got off a little too easy. Perhaps later in life I will learn to love that ending more. Maybe someday happy will be ok.

(I just looked at the release date for Breaking Dawn and the fact just DAWNED on me that this movie won’t come out for over a year. I am going to shove this .docx in a dirty cabinet and revisit in in a year. We might not even be using .docxs anymore! As a reader, this jump won’t appear to be all that long. I would just like to say that I am very sad right now and hope I am happier when I revisit this.)
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You guys have no idea how long I’ve been this Twihard. I am so much happier now, but sadly this does not change the fact that this movie is coming out tomorrow, and that I am going to watch it, while sad.

Three things in life confuse me more than anything else- adolescence, vampires, and Mormonism. Twilight has all three. It was for this reason that I chose to tackle the task of watching three movies in that "saga" in one horrible day, documenting my sorrows along the way in a desperate attempt for both enlightenment and attention, one of which I succeeded at attaining much more than the other.

To recap, because I know we all need a recap, because even the thought of not having a recap at this point in this essay would be insane, Twilight is a heartwarming story of an uninteresting, emotionally ambiguous girl enamored with the undying affection of an emotionally torn vampire and a beefcake werewolf (insert picture of beefcake werewolf). The story teaches pre-teenage girls that even in the event of what is most emotionally trying, jumping off a cliff is always an option. Never rule out jumping off a cliff, pre-teenage girls! At least, Bella didn’t. In fact, that was the first thing that came to her mind. "Now this'd be a beautiful death," said Bella as she jumped off a cliff. Let's just watch the movie.

Breaking Dawn – Pt. 1 (2011) – From the director of Dreamgirls

It should be said that it has been years since I have been exposed to Twilight. I had to prime myself with my own writing before watching the movie, which you’re free to also do right here.

The movie opens to a nice quote about leaving adolescence, which the rest of the movie will try to convince us that Bella is an 18-year old big girl now. Then the movie jumps into full-on wedding mode and all of us just start squealing like guinea pigs for the next 40 minutes or so. So Bellward are getting married and have just agreed on the invitations. Upon receiving the invitation, Jacob is furious that they ignored his suggestion and printed it on engraved cardstock, so he rips off his shirt and heads for the hills, assumedly the nearest Hallmark Store to DEMAND to speak to the manager. When we last left Jacob Black, a werewolf who is also an overt rapist and big time dickbag, he was hmph-ing around. He spends most of the movie doing pretty much that. Meanwhile, Edward checks on Bella to see if she has cold feet. “My feet are toasty warm,” says Bella. In classic Edward form, he begins to feel guilty for something that’s not that serious (he used to eat out murderers, don’t ask it doesn’t have anything to do with anything). Suddenly all the Vampire Boys show up to take Edward to his bachelor’s party, because after all, 10,000 year-old boys will be boys. Bella dreams of her wedding, the Volturi (who don’t show up in this entire movie and are in no way a part of the conflict but undoubtedly will be in the final part) are there, and suddenly Bedward are standing over everyone’s dead bodies, a shot almost entirely lifted from Maus. Not soon enough comes the wedding, which is a doozy. A cutesy Iron and Wine song plays over the wedding vows and the two kiss as if (literally) nobody’s there, which is very teen paranormal romance.

An aside about Edward – I think I wrote about my dissatisfaction with the movie’s unrealistic expectation of love before, but this movie certainly takes it to new heights. I mean, shit, Edward takes Bella to Rio de Janeiro so that he can take her somewhere that is even MORE ROMANTIC. John Cusack didn’t have Expedia, but for fuck’s sake. Even Coach Taylor miscommunicates with his wife. Edward Cullen is denied negative human attributes, and him simply being a vampire in love is no excuse for this.

There’s a montage of wedding toasts, which doesn’t serve any purpose, but is actually funny. Jacob shows up after pacing around in the woods for a bit and says to Bella, “kind is my middle name,” which is just a cool thing to say about yourself. Then they get to talking about vampire fucking, and Jacob Kind Black is suddenly christened Jacob I’m Super Shitty The Rest Of The Movie Black, who doesn’t leave the movie until he [spoiler alert] falls in love with a baby. Now, I’m not even going to pretend to know the rules of vampire fucking, but apparently everyone knows that it’s not a good idea if you’re a human. As with so much in these movies, I found myself just going along with it.

Bella is nervous about having sex, feverously brushing her teeth and shaving her legs, which was a genuine depiction of human timidity that made me care about Bella as a character more than anything else previously. AT THE SAME TIME, she was not concerned that having sex with a vampire might kill her, which seemed like a glaring omission. The movie undoubtedly holds some weird conservative views of abstinence and abortion. Take this quote- “Abstaining from human blood makes us more civilized— lets us form true bonds of love.” -A real quote from Breaking Dawn (the book) It made me remember my elementary school WRE (Jesus) class I would take in a trailer outside of school where that one homeless person would break into and sleep at night. (He had mason jars of his urine and rolls of toilet paper stashed on the dashboard of his pickup.) The teacher/pastor once spoke with vague, sappy language why abstinence was inherently special and acceptable in the eyes of God, in her eyes. I was a kid and didn’t know shit about sex or love, and certainly didn’t feel I knew any more after she told us that. Not that I’m saying the movie is doing this, necessarily, but I will say that I find neither incredibly instructive concerning sex nor love.

In a next couple of surprisingly sexy scenes, Edwardella end up sexing. Bella wakes up to a bruised body and ravaged room, because vampires will be vampires. Edward feels bad that he’s kinky and as a result puts Bella in the friend zone, and they do friend stuff. In the greatest stretch of belief required for the movie, we see Edella deep in thought over a chess match.

I almost fell asleep in every scene with Jacob talking to his family, because I somehow cared less about that storyline. But anyway, Shitty’s mom or aunt or maid says to Jacob, “Being any kind of happy is better than being miserable about something you can’t have,” which is a very bold statement that I’m not sure if I agree with. I’m always suspicious of anything that ignores the potential positive benefits of a healthy dose of sadness. I mean, if happy is happy is happy in Twilight, then everyone’s life sucks, and I don’t think life sucks as much as I don’t think happily ever after is something that actually happens.

But before we have enough time to think about it, Bella eats some chicken and throws up, thinking it’s the chicken and not the vampire baby growing inside of her. Then *ding* she realizes her period’s late and *dong* she’s 18 and vampire pregnant. A postulate in the vampire-fucking guidelines states that the baby will kill Bella. We are officially out of the friend zone frying pan and into the baby fire. It has taken well over an hour for us to get to this point, and still there is arguably no conflict in sight. Classic The Twilight Saga.

Everyone debates just what it is inside Bella’s uterus, and it seems like this is meant to be a stupid discussion about abortion that I realllllllly don’t care to read into at all. Jacob tries to convince Bella to have a vampire abortion, which they don’t underline the logistics of (for instance- where is the Planned Parenthood for vampires?)

Back in the Black reservation of Cougar Town, the werewolves all suddenly want to kill Bella, breaking the treaty between the two warring families. The werewolves hang out around the house, because they want to attack when they have the upper hand, or something stupid. The point is Bella has to stay put. Pretty much the last half of the movie is at the house. Edward Yahoo image searches “vampire baby” on his iMac and comes up with Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son,” and Edward is all, “My life is Twilight.” Alice Cullen, the hot manic pixie dream girl, tells Bella that “your fetus isn’t compatible with your body” like it’s a hard drive. Bella’s health worsens because the baby is thirty for blood, so Skeletella drinks blood. Edward even gets her a straw because he is so sweet. She likes the taste, which I found a little odd that the movie would hint that she SHOULD be a vampire.

Bella chooses a dumb baby name that Edward obviously thinks is great, because he’s the “perfect man.” Oh, and while we’re here… “I should be treated like a princess.” –Heidi Montag, The Hills

Bella enters vampire labor and Edward eats the baby out of her stomach, killing Bella. Jacob Shitty Black says to Edward literally seconds after she dies, “You deserve to live with this,” which I thought was cruel, even for Jacob. Upon everyone learning of her death, everyone gets really shitty with the baby. Jacob walks up to Renesmee, intending to kill her, and instead is hit with love at first sight, which is the greatest rebound of rebound king Jacob Black’s life.

5 Things Jacob Black Will Say to Renesmee Cullen-

1. “You kiss just like your mother when she was your age.”
2. “I fell in love with you when you were five minutes old. They don’t call me Jake the Snake for nothing.”
3. “I only date girls my age divided by two plus seven minus 20.”
4. “Your mother used to bite her lip just like that. All the time.”
5. “What do you mean you can’t make it to Tuesday’s NAMbLA meeting?”

Edward is trying to save Bella, injecting her with his venom in order to make her a vampire, but she’s already dead. He bites her all over her body, but with no luck. Jacob goes outside and reveals he fell in love with a baby. Edward says something to effect of, “It’s their most supreme law!” The werewolves leave. Bella wakes up a vampire.

Yes, the resolution of The Twilight Saga- Breaking Dawn: Part 1 is a Deus Ex NAMbLA.

Stray Observations -

• I forgot Anna Kendrick was in this. She’s the best actor in this movie and has the least screen time.
• This movie clocks in at around two hours! That’s pretty long for a movie where not much happens.
• There are a lot of rack focuses in this movie, more than there were in Dreamgirls.
• I was thinking this entire time, “Why doesn’t she have a vampire c-section?” I hope God will be ok with the whole non-vaginal vampire birth.
• Jacob – “Don’t do that.”
Bella – “What?”
Jacob – “Smile…” I’M GONNA STOP YOU RIGHT THERE, JACOB.
• THE ANNOYING PIANO LINE IS BACK. I HAVE NEVER HAD SUCH A NEGATIVE REACTION TO MUSIC IN A MOVIE EVER BEFORE. WOW.
• I do not have many stray observations about this movie.

I was trying to remember why I began writing this essay over a year ago with the story of how I spoke with Emerson Spartz at the now closed Borders, and I think I remember why. It wasn’t to compare the two series. Everyone always does that and it doesn’t make any sense. It was the setup of the end of Harry Potter that I found beautiful. "The Half Blood Prince" will always be my favorite book of the series because there was so much that book made me want to happen, so much that it overwhelmed me and made me believe that everything I wanted was impossible. That's a pretty amazing thing for any book to do, let alone a children’s book, and something that I obviously don't feel entering the last chapter of the Twilight Saga. I found it easily the worst movie in the saga as far as storytelling. I now realize why that doesn’t matter, why anything I write will not deter those who care about Twilight. It’s because they care about these non-characters. I used to regard those reasons for caring as stupid, but I’m beginning to think they’re far more intentional. Edward Cullen is hyper-specific because nobody can be Edward Cullen, just as nobody can be Howard Roark or a prince charming character. Bella Swan is vague because we can all be Bella Swan. Many of us have mothers and fathers who will have to “let us go” in the most cliché, Twilight way possible. In the wedding scene, no young woman watching is thinking about Bella Swan. I know I wasn’t. Those who care about Twilight care about themselves, and there is nothing wrong with that.

With that said, here's my video review of the movie.

I Love You Thomas Imel

2011-11-10T01:53:00.006-05:00

I wanted nothing more than to sleep tonight, for things to be as they were, but they’re not. I prayed to God that they would, that the insatiable feeling of a feeling kept in a hardened self would be loosed, but I’ve always had a hard time letting go. Here’s an attempt. I’m not sure what to do, but I’m trying so goddamn hard.

A couple days ago we were unpleasantly reminded of Thomas Imel’s birthday, a man who was at one point in an early part of my life my best friend. He’s dead now, and I have never come to terms with that, not when I stood by Jamie and learned the news of his coma, nor when I stood by Jessica and learned of the news of his death, nor when I stood over his open casket next to my father while the casket of my childhood was lowered, weeping like a baby while he held my shoulder.

At this moment I am faced with the difficulty of comparing the person I am with the person I used to be. I used to wake up in a room with NASCAR wallpaper, shelves filled with Hot Wheels cars and action figures of superheroes, Nintendo 64 connected to the TV with Mario Kart ready to be played again, and VHS tapes of movies like “The Phantom” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” laying about. My clothes were thrown next to my sleeping bag because it got hot at night in the summer. It was always Sunday, but I never was obligated to go to church if I didn’t want to. I would wake up and call my parents and they would drive me home from my best friend’s house. Accompanying the drive home were the questions, “So what did you do? Who else was there? Did you have any fun?” And while the answers to the first two questions changed, the response to the last always remained the same.

We used to have sleepovers. I remember when Michael Kohlmann locked me up in a dog crate, later feeding me Ritz crackers between the bars. We played stingpong, for whatever reason. We used to take off our shirts and fight one another without managing to hurt ourselves or deal any pain unto each other. We would play videogames until it was midnight, when we would start watching videos on tape and fall asleep in the middle of them. One time we stayed up all night and pretended to fart in Will’s face because he was first to bed. We’d trade Pokemon cards but never play the game that was designed for them. Basketball in driveways, street hockey in basements and soccer in backyards not only served as appropriate sports venues, but also the preferred ones. I would be lying if I claimed to not love every second we wasted.

Somewhere along the way we made mistakes. Things changed, and I pushed away some of my friends and who I used to be. Others chased others, a few picked up addictions and some just got some shitty new friends. Regardless of what we did and whose fault it was, we gave up something we previously loved and that changed who we were. We still look back and think fondly of those times, but still we let it die. We exercised our only viable option, and then we continued to grow up together, but separately.

Thomas Imel was different. What pains me the most is that I don’t know where he ended up after the drift. I can’t remember the last time I talked to him, nor the last MySpace photo comment or time I mentioned him with someone else before I heard that he died.

It was junior year and we were pretty deep into putting on the play when we learned he died a couple days following his accident. It seemed as though we were all pretty close to him in our own ways, or at least it upset us all.

I’m trying to remember what I was going through, and I’m not doing a very great job at that. We had been so close for a sizable portion of my life; my memory of him was frozen in time for so long. I can’t even properly finish the thought, and that’s how I felt. It was empty. For a long while my Mom would have Earla over (his mother) to console her and comfort her. She would ask me to tell Earla about stories I had of him. I contested, “But that was only who he was.” My Mom essentially told me that was all Earla could hold onto, now. My memory of him won’t ever change. It doesn’t even have the option to.

When our bodies go cold and our blood stops, that’s supposed to be it. I’m starting to think it’s only this way if we allow it to be. All we really have is the time we spend together, what we choose to do with that time, and the memories we decide to keep. That’s where life happens. So of the memories I hold of the people I love, thoughts that are in no way up to date or completely accurate or even sometimes realistic, I wonder what makes any of these memories wrong.

I’ve struggled to write about Thomas not only because of my own fear, but also of the fear of impeding on the memory others have of him. I can’t count how many times I have been asked to write about him, and it required a crisis to push me to share this with everyone. I do not wish to make it appear that I am the only person who cares about him (so many do), nor solicit pity merely because I am in grief, because we all grieve sometimes. I merely wanted to present my life with him and what he means to me. Life, because while the knowledge of what was in the face of what is may not yield the act of living any easier, or meaningful or beautiful, it is what we have. I don’t understand why I should feel alone when we have that. Thomas is still the curly-haired kid in his messy room because that’s all I know. And all I know—it’s enough.

what it's like here

2011-11-02T22:28:00.001-04:00

For a production class I'm in, I was assigned to make a city film in the style of some old filmmakers about Bloomington, where I live. Below is the film and a reflection I wrote about it. It'd be a better experience if you watched it in HD and with headphones, or something that's not those shitty laptop speakers they give us.

In communicating the perspective of Bloomington as a space of conflicting and overwhelming stimuli without the crutch of narrative, many stylistic choices of filming and editing were made in the style of Ruttman and Vertov, their thematic elements at time affirmed and others opposed, but recognized.

The three broad topics covered in our film “what it’s like here” are the nature, people, and city of Bloomington, how they interrelate, brush up against each other, and in the end, synthesize. The film is structured similarly to Ruttman’s “Berlin,” the shots of the character in front of the mirror (implying that the mirror is a window to the images) serving as breaks in acts and noting important moments. The man in front of the mirror is James Donald’s man of the crowd, a “kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness,” (Donald, Modern Spaces, p. 84). Assumedly, it is his psyche we are witnessing.

The opening minutes of the film are devoted to displaying these different facets, each wondrous and unconnected. It is only after the character brushes his teeth do these worlds begin to cross through match cuts (the bicyclists, the square door and the rails, et. al.). These interconnections hope to accomplish Vertov’s “progressive reality hidden below the surface details of experience,” that the abundance of these elements can overwhelm (Beattie, City Symphony, p. 11).

Every shot following the chaos displays life in the spaces, be it animals, people, or statues (life preserved through art). The synthesizing of the piece culminates in the last shot of the crows, where we hear diegetic sound that expresses all three facets of Bloomington in the same space. The audience hears the crows, followed by the ambulance, followed by the bell tower. Immediately following these sounds is a cut to a girl sleeping in a dark room, illuminated by what could easily be the previous shot. This shows that she exists in this environment peacefully, choosing to turn towards Bloomington rather than away. The film expresses the harmony of where we live present in chaos brought about by “not only the massive proliferation of buildings, but also by their simultaneity” (Donald, “Modern Spaces,” p. 85). Such a message opposes that of Vertov by expressing a harmonious connection of people with Bloomington. At the same time, the city is not merely held in a romantic regard, indicative of how Ruttman displays Berlin (although we used subtle, stoic stress over suicide to express this). There is mechanization, industry, personal strife, human interaction and isolation, unoccupied nature and occupied spaces (pun intended) all present in Bloomington. The film is an amalgamation of these stimuli, portraying how they psychologically affect people, which is arguably the purpose of every city film.

Considering the ambitious thematic elements of city films, I considered the project predominantly a practice in editing. Much emphasis is placed in the film to clever match cuts and juxtaposition, rapid jump cuts, and other stylistic devices indicative of the city films of the era. While laden with aesthetic devices, few to none of them are used for mere aesthetic value. Even some of the more peculiar elements can be explained- the character doesn’t use shaving cream so that he may be cut later in the film; the edit of the young man to the statue expresses the temporality of life; the slowing of cars as they cross each other denotes interaction; the crossing of lines on and off the bus show mechanization. There are more examples than there is space to mention.

The original sound composition perfectly fits the slow-morphing mood of the film, all-the-while staying relatively the same. There is no tempo or ham-fisted key changes, but the sound never-the-less progresses with the film from being marveling, to more involved, to complicated and droning, to loud, harsh and mechanized, to something serene and beautiful. The sound is unlike the music used in city films screened in class, but experimental and bold, which fits with the choices of films at the time. We agreed that what was bold then is now cliché, which we didn’t care to replicate in that regard.

Attempting to communicate these ideals within the context of a group project was met with great challenge and even opposition. I attempted to work as closely with the group as I could, spending a day shooting with one member on-campus (independent of my nature shots), hoping to see match cuts that could be made, as well as accepting much input with editing, which greatly improved the project. This collaboration appeared to be similar to Vertov and his brother wandering the city.

Especially with city films, editing is simply decision making. Due to the extra effort I spent in labs outside of class (particularly sound mixing), I feel a heightened responsibility for the film. However, I don’t think my leading this project resulted in failure, but an effective piece that I feel is creatively satisfying in its risks, representative of a popular psychological perspective of Bloomington, and most importantly, moving.

About Living Without (and not wanting to) ----- An Opinion

2011-10-29T19:40:00.007-04:00

“What matters about myth and magic is not their truth, but their effectiveness."

For a sizable portion of my life I have thought that depriving myself would make me a better person and I am increasingly led to believe that this has been completely wrong.

While leading the life of a moralizing religious prude, I miraculously have not ending up stuck with any of those labels. If I were to give one, though, I would call myself a non-practicing moralist… but enough about me. *

It’s odd to learn that in the pursuit of being good and being happy, one must usually be compromised to benefit the other, especially when realizing that what is good is stupid and what we want is nonsense. Then you find yourself sitting on the couch, babysitting stupid so that it won’t choke on its own spit while nonsense is in the other room sluggishly eating dick-shaped desserts and playing videogames that congratulate you for murdering other human beings on a screen that is unnecessarily large and probably in 3D, or something. Y’all’re free to mangle this example to how you see applicable, but I think you’ll likely agree that this is the typical, probably wrong way of thinking about it. And because this is the manner that it is understood, it is by no means uncommon to see folks in joint custody arrangements between good and happy. Obviously, recognizing the nonsense doesn’t yield us good just as knowing it’s stupid doesn’t make us any happier, or even smarter. It’s an impossible position everyone is aware of if they think about it and I obviously won’t solve by saying anything, but I'd like to think about good and happy differently.

The position of depriving depravity is not only to pursue one facet of life unwaveringly, but also to wholly side with it. Consider those who can’t stand, can’t understand those who do not live as they do. ** Make sure to not just consider the first group that comes to mind. Think about the moralizing, never-ending assholes as well as the assholes that are only appeased when pleased. These people exist, but most of us live in between, in joint custody. The mistake to be made is to see that we’re in the middle and mistake this for not being on a side. Living sided calls for depriving, demanding condemnation and polarity and unbridled odium. I have been sided, constantly questioning how I could possibly hold contentment for those on a side I wish I could understand more fully. *** Example- I had previously rejected (in a tweet on a soapbox from the top of a nearby mountain) any form of “assisted happiness” because of reasons. **** Since then I have failed to bring to mind any happiness that isn’t assisted, and why the fact that it is should not be beautiful.

What sides us are our motivators, who we choose to live for. We believe we know who they are. On the list of yourself, others, and God, we either do great at helping one, work at serving two, or completely fail at capital L Living for all three. Never can we handle all three and difficult it is to cross one off entirely. Pray to God I made the right pick(s).****

What we require is to engage an uncomfortable honesty, to grossly prioritize our motivators more so that we may grossly prioritize our actions less; because we aren’t afraid of wanting to be good or happy*****, but of choosing whom we live for. Fearing as we do hinders us from both, and facing that truth requires a incalculable daily faith, inasmuch as faith is a currency, inasmuch as spending requires spending, inasmuch as we are never promised anything in return******, inasmuch as there is so much to be lost, inasmuch as it sometimes appears we’re more faulted than compassionate, inasmuch as expectation too often squalors reality*******, inasmuch as we have no choice but to lower-case l live, inasmuch as lower-case l living is easy, inasmuch as lower-case l living without really isn't capital L Living, inasmuch as love is an alternating current, inasmuch as being there is just as hard as it is easy, inasmuch as faith is fearlessly moving forward equipped with the knowledge of having lost some infinite thing (and being OK with that), inasmuch as wanting is so much different from needing is so much different from getting.

But still we spend. We need to because we live with when we capital L Live.

___________________________________

*This, of course, is a lie.
**Also accept the possibility that you may belong to this group.
***This, amazingly, is not a lie.
****Yes, I realized what I did just there. No, don’t ask.
*****We do this most of the time
******It wouldn’t be faith if we were.
*******Inasmuch as 500 Days of Summer isn’t complete bullshit.

___________________________________

Filling Books With Color

2011-09-11T02:54:00.002-04:00

“I shall keep asking You.”

My first remembered memory is of falling, terrified. The second is waking up. I’m not so sure if I just made up the second part to feel better.

Across the street from my childhood home is a court where my brothers and sisters and the neighborhood kids and I would ride our bikes and play sports. The court is still there, but the jungle gym in our backyard where we would also play isn’t, nor is the large oak that was cut down having been struck by lightning months after moving from the house. It was the same tree that I had fallen from several times, canopied us without question in needed moments, the kind of unrecognized compassion that is only felt when unwillingly hollowed.

Too often beloved memories as these when written nostalgically are wrote off by outsiders as a contrived manner of convincing oneself what they simply want to believe, but while it is undeniably true we selectively archive the past, the popular opinion remains that this choice defeats the alternative- letting go. This is the defense of journaling, a branded term as silly as it is confusing. Our present self lacks journalistic integrity and will likely continue to do so so long as the act of climbing requires holding onto something. I offer that more than mere opportunity colors our glasses rose, and what is more is the only reason to live. I’ll let you figure out what that is. Still, I’ll begin to explain what is more to me, for it remains a hazarding truth that what we have will be lost, most of all our precious cargo.

I wore a Joe Cool Snoopy t-shirt when I watched the second tower of the World Trade Center collapse live on CNN the morning I was late for Mrs. Hansel’s 4th grade English class, a wretched woman I rightfully hated.

Those who actively strive to be good are deathly afraid of the “default,” the natural, sinful, unconscious, unlearned standard of failure. The idea quite simply is that it takes work to be good. Even those who would claim to believe people are naturally good would attest to this, likely because they’ve thought enough to somehow justify the goodness of people. Like so much else that doesn’t deserve it, the popular opinion is to politicize the act of just trying to be better, when reality is far more nuanced. The nuance is reaction, consequence, inflation, misunderstanding, inarticulation, fear, and too many others for a lifetime. Still we want to be good, equipped with limited knowledge of what that is.

Often we shape recollections to agree with how we wished we had thought then, and 9/11 is the worst culprit of all. A horrible feeling takes over when those around me talk of their experience and where they were and how the moment affected the national identity through their experience, and how we were all so terrified and alone, uncertain if the world would be around the next day while aware that it would, at the very least, never be the same again. This is how we all felt when we talk about it now.

But how did I feel? I was a child. I likely didn’t even think of the attacks that entire day, not to mention fully understand fear, hatred, terrorism, murder, politics, and innocence. I still don’t. I don’t think any of us do. If you read this thinking I’m trying to persuade you of something, it would be to accept what we do not understand so as not to dishonor those who died and are still suffering.

I have never understood 9/11 and that will forever bother me. I don’t know if honor really means anything, if it actually makes the never-ending act of living easier for those who have suffered. It forces me to contemplate how easily the distance between people can be bridged, if our recollections are constantly lying to us. I begin to question if I had any real emotional connection with the large oak in the backyard of my childhood home at the time. I don’t know if the fact that I feel for it now changes anything. I have to believe I have woken up.

Now there's the job of deconstructing the line between actions and the way we say we acted. I want so much to clad them with empathy, to flank the default with love. The alternative is falling, and I can see no reason to regress to that. I may feel that I have no real right to say anything about 9/11 and what it means to me or anyone else, but I still agree with that ineffable truth that we needn’t be afraid, needn't turn away, even from this. Homeward.

Greatest Summer Hits Vol. 2 (also tweets)

2011-08-22T00:47:00.003-04:00

Pencils down! Time's up! Fine, finish your thought, but hurry up.

Before I put this list together of my top posts this Summer, I kind of felt like I barely blogged at all. It was obviously much less than last year, but as it turns out it wasn't too bad! I also thought that nobody was reading, but after checking the stats there've been a few thousand hits in the past couple months. That seems crazy to me considering I don't promote this at all and pretty much only people I know read it, so thank you. Here were the best things I did here this summer.

Watership Down Prologue

This is my favorite thing I made this Summer, but I'm biased because I didn't make it? It was the only thing I remade? Please watch it. It took forever to make.

Axioms of Shadow Theory

I think about this a lot.

Snorlax Like Me

This experience made me like people a little more, but I'll admit this edited home movie (at best) is hard to watch.

An Essay For Anyone Who Watches Television

Friday Night Lights is my favorite TV show. It may always be. Here's an essay I wrote while I was in its excellent 4th season.

Dusky Panther's Saturday Morning Cartoon

I stopped doing my feature over at MOBFD (great website, the best website) at the start of Summer, so this was my last one of my weekly series. There are 13 or so, which you can watch here. I think it was a cool little project that I may do more entries of in the future.

10 Recent Movies That Were More Impressive As Trailers

Being There and Other Letters

A couple things I wrote on my own freshman year of college, each in different parts of the year and in very different mental states.

My Perfect Game of Call of Duty

The only video vlog I did this Summer.

To Be Forwarded to the Neighborhood Association

This is an example of something that has nothing to do with what I was writing about. I think this was a dumb way to try to understand all of my frustrations and fears. It's a failure, as any attempt to do that is, but it's interesting to learn from yourself, so I do not regret writing it, nor do I regret calling that poor woman a bad person.

To the hypothetical graduating high school class of 2014,

I wrote this self-mocking thing because of how many people out of high school condescend their youngers. It's a superiority I definitely feel, but perhaps by recognizing it, I can feel it less so.

Songs about Sounds Stuff Makes

Ghost

This is a video that got lost in the fray and none of you watched. It's ok. I'm not mad, or anything. It was just a practice in editing. You either feel it or don't.

Summer of Somnambulism

This wasn't a bad kick-off.

Ultimate John Boehner Fan Video

The best part of this is the YouTube comments people left. I tried to make a very honest John Boehner fan video, except that it's scored by the Bee Gees.

25 Notable Tweets

I enjoy Twitter. It makes you work at word economy, which people should be teaching themselves anyway. As I replied to someone who told me I tweet a lot, "With my tweets, I go for quality over quantity, but the quantity comes when you've got so much quality." That said, there could be much better ones, but I just looked through a list of tweets that other people retweeted and picked a couple. Hope you like 'em. In almost no particular order,

Thanks for liking shit I do.

Until we meet again.

to be forwarded to the neighborhood association

2011-08-17T19:31:00.006-04:00

We need to talk, residents of Emerald Highland Suburban Complex. I would first like to emphasize that I’m not angry, but disappointed. I'm disappointed in a society that you have been a part of that has failed to teach you the common logic behind the knowledge that I am about to present, the same logic that you have shown to me time and time again that you lack. This logic I speak of may also be referred to as humanity.

Bluff Road divides the two halves of our neighborhood. Bluff becomes rather busy when those who commute downtown return home from work in the evening, so crossing from one half of the neighborhood to the other at times proves difficult. Therefore, crossing this gap already requires a substantial threshold for patience. Patience and humanity are required virtues for both driving and life. One of the more important objects of life, before self-fulfillment and prosperity and love, is to not die before it is appropriate. Cars drive on roads to go places. These are words that you read from left to right. You may find my priming you with this knowledge insulting, but after this recent incident, I have learned that it would be presumptuous of me to assume that you know anything. Although, perhaps it may simply be humanity that you do not understand. If this is the case and you are aware that cars drive on roads, simply disregard this paragraph.

Earlier today, while driving home, I came to a halt at a stop sign, waiting for the path to clear so that I may move straight, crossing Bluff so that I may enter the half of the neighborhood where I live. There are two unmarked lanes, so I waited in the left lane with my turn signal off. Later, a lady pulled up in the right lane, just as the traffic cleared, and we both accelerated forward into the entrance of the neighborhood, where a man was waiting to turn right. Surely you must see the dilemma, but if you don’t, I’ll reveal to you now that it is a problem for three cars to be in the entrance of the neighborhood, which are two wide lanes at best. I sped ahead and none were injured.

By choosing the right lane, she restricts access to those wanting to turn right. In order to move straight, the car must also have the ability to turn left. I am restricting no one by waiting in the left lane. In fact, the left lane is lined up directly straight with the other side of the neighborhood! I could understand if there was a stoplight with the usual “turn right or stay straight” lane, but this clearly is not the proper scenario for that. The reason those lanes exist is because if one were to travel straight in the left turn lane, they would be travelling into oncoming traffic, which, at the moment, I would not have put past this woman.

This is why I think that this woman is not only fundamentally wrong, but also a bad person. So she chose to go straight in the wrong lane. “Big deal,” you say sarcastically, “she just didn’t think about it.” “Yes,” I agree earnestly, but deliver sarcastically. Let’s say she did make an honest mistake (one that any of us could have made), realized it, and decided to cross the road anyway. She is selfish because she felt entitled to stand in front of line, entitled to her false assumption that what she was doing was right. God hates people like her. This is assuming what I do not know, so let’s not go there. She just didn’t think about it. By not thinking about it, she endangers those who are doing what is right, her own well being, and those who have nothing to do with the decision. As a driver, you don’t have the right to not think about it, just as you don’t have the right to drive drunk or (hopefully soon in Indiana) text. There are no honest mistakes with the sin of rudimentary selfishness. Case rested.

Watership Down Prologue

2011-08-02T22:03:00.000-04:00

This is a near shot for shot remake of the prologue of the 1978 movie Watership Down, which is dear to me. I thought it’d be a fun challenge, and it was. It's about 4000 pictures stop-animated.

ghost.

2011-07-14T20:24:00.000-04:00

Snorlax Like Me

2011-07-11T12:12:00.000-04:00

I don't play the Pokemon card game, but this didn't stop me from going to the 2011 US Pokemon National Championships. To my surprise, most there were really kind and awesome people, and it made me wish there were more groups who accepted one another without reservations. Before everyone in the Pokemon community falls in love with me, I will say that this was interspersed with the unavoidable, insufferable, parasitic fucking hipsters.

So if you want a taste of an outsider's look in, watch this makeshift freeform documentary thing.

Art That Makes Me Cry Like A Reserved Bitch

2011-07-10T12:22:00.007-04:00

I think it’s cool that people invest emotion in art. That’s pretty valuable capital.

Friday Night Lights – “The Son” - (spoiler)

(Also see: most episodes of Friday Night Lights)

Toy Story 3 (duh)

Where The Wild Things Are

Finding Neverland

Bright Eyes – “Lua/First Day of My Life"
This album beat the shit out of me. Probably in ways that are impossible now.

If you’re really listening, I honestly don’t understand how you can’t be moved by this.

Mad Men – “The Suitcase”

Anything John Irving writes

John Mayer – “Gravity”
Did I studder? While I’m at it…

Dashboard Confessional – “The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most”

Winesburg, Ohio

Sufjan Stevens – “For The Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless In Ypiasffsdaljk/Romulus”
Same as the Bright Eyes era

Hannibal Buress

…and that’s it. That is it.

What Your Tastes In Pop Culture Say About Your Personality

2011-06-28T22:43:00.002-04:00

Nothing.

Axioms of Shadow Theory

2011-06-10T18:58:00.002-04:00

Axiom 1- Light cast on a bar creates a shadow.

At times it frightens me the amount of effort I exert in revisiting experiences and viewing them as confluential, but is that not what we are taught? “Learn from your mistakes,” says everyone, but not what we mean when we say it. What we mean when we say that is, “Be better than when you fucked up.” This assumes- A.) learning is important (because it is), B.) learning is important because learning is therapeutic, C.) Life is linear in terms of knowledge. The third point is one of the untruths about life that everyone seems to know is an untruth, but denies up until a certain point. Life seems so goddamn linear because its been cleverly structured with the uniform act sequence of birth, life, and death, the second act always being the best with the most conflict and lack of resolution (same goes with The Empire Strikes Back). In terms of knowledge, we are all afflicted with Huntington’s. So often knowledge is defined as the end product of learning, which is so dumb of us. We’ll put anything in capitalist terms. “Learn from your mistakes so you can spend that moral bread.”

The ageless cliché ignores how easy it is to regress to not only more things we have to learn from, but the same damn ones. Let’s call these “instinctual mistakes.” I’m trying to phrase this in a way that I’m not doling out moral bullshit, so forgive me if I end up doing that anyway. I hope to just talk about how we take in moral bullshit. Obviously, it’s up to you what shit you would like to eat.

I could read a thousand stories preaching the moral of empathy, but I’m confident I would still suck at empathy at times, that people who are close to me would still beat me out on the empathy scale, continuing to be disgustingly pregnant with empathy. Right now, somehow, somewhere, I am sure I am not being as empathetic to someone as much as I should be. That doesn’t bode well with the country’s The Wealth of Nations-like approach to learning.

Axiom 2- Light can’t travel through a bar

Perhaps why I’m reacting so strongly to this now partly results from the freshness of the problem to me. I’m coming up to the third decade of my life, and I’m starting to make the same mistakes. Even through the lens of my public persona, the pattern could easily be seen in my works. It’s the scourge of the productivist. When I wrote 300-600 word opinion pieces on the back of my school newspaper a couple times every month, I responded to the problems of the administration taking away our fucking benches for no damn reason (still bitter), school spirit, website blockers, rap artists, the role of the school newspaper, school spirit, Hollywood movies, vitriolic political rhetoric, the global energy crisis, all the way to supreme court decisions. I intentionally ordered that sentence to be more and more ridiculous, but that’s how I thought about it, met at the end with the horrible feeling that I had accomplished nothing. “Take it on and then move to the next one. Fix it and move on.” While many of the 3 to 600 word articles failed to change many students’ political opinions, let alone pieces of national legislation, the ones that were seemingly about so much less were the best ones, the ones that meant something to people, the ones that mean something to me. Emotional economics is a beautiful market to corner.

…but that was the OLD me. The NEW me knows not to ever write outside of my limited reach. The new me doesn’t make those mistakes. I said I could read a story with the same message a thousand times. The thing is that we do, otherwise there would be no reason for new stories to exist. This isn’t a reason to lower our standards and be worse people because of that, but it does challenge the always-feeling superior to our old self, defeatist mentality. Watch, before your very eyes, as I magically transform from an A student to a C student- it may do us some good to not learn from our mistakes, just for the sake of letting the learning begin.

Axiom 3- Bar B creates shadow Y.

Question- What creates the shadow between A and C (x)? No light is cast on A, and light does not travel through B to create X.

Problem- “No matter what we do to solve this paradox, we have to give up something we previously believed to be true.”

After explaining to our class of freshmen taking a philosophy topics class this concept, 90% of the students either didn’t understand it or just wrote it off as stupid. Obviously bar B creates a shadow that overlaps A, but what those who claimed this didn’t realize they were assuming something that was outside of his axioms, which is where I differ from my professor. We don’t give up what we believe to be true to simplify the unexplainable. We create more axioms.

The likely truth is that this essay never ends, always presenting a Hegelian antithesis, but must be stopped for a fairly simple reason- it’s getting late, and there’s a lot I have to do tomorrow. Hope I learn something.

My Perfect Game of Call of Duty

2011-06-09T14:36:00.001-04:00

The vlog is back! Fullscreen it in HD, whatever that means anymore.

Songs About Sounds Stuff Makes

2011-06-07T07:30:00.003-04:00

Morning Bell – Radiohead

“Release me.” From the lyrics, the bell is an omnipresent force imprisoning everything, or something. This song’s about escaping…. or about cutting children in half. Who knows, really. That wasn’t a question, so I didn’t make it a question.

Super Bass – Nicki Minaj

Ok, so about Nicki Minaj. Based on this song, doesn’t she seem very materialistic and possessive? Also crazy? The selling point of the song is that this man, who potentially deals in narcotics, owns powerful subwoofers, and that magically puts him pretty high on the sex scale. I’ve been doing love wrong, or maybe I’m just more into treble. Also, her hair looks like a slutty cup of Trix yogurt. I’d rather put this than that stupid, stupid video, anyway.

Yes I did, yes I did.

My Mathmatical Mind – Spoon

If this is what math sounds like, then put me on the waitlist for M307!*

*To any of my advisors reading this- please, no.

Boom Boom Pow – Black Eyed Peas

This song isn’t about anything. The video is gross, too. Forget I even mentioned this. 2000LA8.

Bees – Caribou

I like bees.

Zap Zap – Cut Copy

This is probably the saddest song I would want to dance to, possibly because the zap sound is something of the dying past? Pretty rough for a dance tune.

Loud Pipes – Ratatat

This song also isn’t about anything. Who cares. Also not a question.

Satan’s Saxophones – Sufjan Stevens

The way you make this sound is by taking your bottom row of teeth and scraping it on the reed of a saxophone. It is the most horrifying sound in the world. The times I made it were very likely the most power I’ve held over a human being. Listen to this entire piece, just to say you did. The ending is actually kind of beautiful.

Songs not on the list, but probably wanted to be:

Comforting Sounds – Mew

I didn’t want to include any songs that were about music on this list, which I still don’t even know if music is what the lyrics are referring to. As with most of Mew’s songs, the lyrics make sense in the middle of the line, then there will be something that’ll throw the entire thought off its axis and leaves me scratching my head.

Moth’s Wings – Passion Pit

You guys did a pretty good job with the sound on this one, but think again before using an overt simile in your lyrics. Nice try, but I won’t let that slide. Also, your voice is obnoxious. I said it. (This is a good song.)

Dead Sound – The Raveonettes

Nice try. We all know this is about washed-out garage music, which is a sound that is clearly dead BOOOM. (This is a very good song.)

Pow Pow - LCD Soundsystem

I just couldn’t think of anything clever to say about this great song. Plus, probably not a pow sound.

My Doorbell – The White Stripes

Yeah. Doorbells go ding-dong. Duh.

The Sounds of Silence – Simon & Garfunkel

Now this just doesn’t make any fucking sense. Stupid.

An Essay For Anyone Who Watches Television

2011-06-03T13:47:00.002-04:00

The original post for this essay was “Why ‘Friday Night Lights’ Is Great.” I think the one I chose will reach a larger audience.

There’s an interesting divide between those who write and actively think about TV and the mass population- each have a different definition of what is great. A similar argument could be made for those who talk about life and those who live. That alone astounds me. Any person could undermine the writings of Sartre if he were to say, “Sure, buddy. Fine. Now go get a day job and get back to me about all your existence shit.” We tend to think those philosophers, or really anyone who pays thought concerning anything than the mass population, operates on the fringe of reality, or perhaps not even a shared one. Perhaps they do. To bring this back to TV watching today, I find the debate over form and expectation that is diving audiences. It didn’t always used to be like this. If we look at Primetime Emmys, the bag of winners is insanely mixed between major sitcoms, sleeper hit dramas, and even some shows that are quickly cancelled. I say it’s odd because the Primetime Emmys is supposed to be culture’s reference point for what we’re watching, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to say that is what it exists as. Once we throw out that definition, which many have, the Emmys become a measure of what is great on television.

Damn it.

If the Emmys are a measure of what is great, than why are they not awarding the most popular programs? Why have “CSI” and “Two and a Half Men” not swept the awards up? Really, though, why does population not equal quality? Oh, then those who think about TV have a definition of great which conflicts with that of the massive population. Ergo, the massive population doesn’t think about TV and is stupid. My tastes are better. I have just outlined a wildly popular opinion among those who feel they actively think about television. Many of them love “Mad Men” and “30 Rock” and “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire” and could readily quote lines from “Arrested Development.” For a few years I associated myself with these people, and it’s rather obvious that everyone hates snobs exclusively consuming media. So why is the choice between idiot and snob? I personally don’t believe this is the choice, but rather believe that our varying levels of comfort lead us to believe it is. This A.V Club article talks about how “Glee” and “Community” are pretty much the same show, but with entirely different formats (the article is a bit confusing at first read). The strongest point in the article made was that “Glee” features changing characters in the same situations, where “Community” features changing situations with the same characters. Because of this, different audiences may call “Glee” “lazy” or “consistent” and “Community” “innovative” or “random.” It all just depends on how comfortable the viewer is to take that logical leap of deciding what they’re comfortable with. As the article also says, with an episode of "Glee," whatever happens, you pretty much know what you’re in for. It isn’t as threatening of television as “Community.” If I were to spend enough time searching for programming that would make me that kind of comfortable, then maybe I would laugh hysterically at "Mike and Molly" and not just write it off as a traditional sitcom about farts.

This leads me to constantly question myself, “Am I more pleased knowing I will be pleased, or do I want to go for something more than that?” I honestly don’t know for myself. People are clearly more prone to judge others when they are content with what they know, but I always wonder if the goal of searching is more searching.

When I look at the decisions of what kinds of media people choose to consume, it is often an indicator of what kind of person they are. At the same time, I don’t use it as a scale to gauge the intelligence of others based on what media I deem “good.” We know those types of people, and I think we can agree, all together now- fuck those people. Great. That had a sweet timbre to it. While I will concede that those on the other side (the expectation-satisfied) get a bad rap for being a passive audience, and I have even accused them of such in the past, I am not a fucking hipster.

I could take my audience expectation theory of media to inappropriate lengths, as most theories of media do, but I trust that you understand what I’m talking about, as consumers of media yourselves. I didn’t write this to talk about my audience expectation theory of media, but instead prefaced those ideas to talk about why I love “Friday Night Lights” for a little bit.

"Friday Night Lights" is a strange show if you consider the mentioned topics. It’s about a high school football coach and the lives of some of the best football players in Texas, but what it’s about with quotation marks is arguably up to the viewer. It could be seventeen different coming of age stories, the changing relationships of those in a close community, a period piece of high school, about family, a love story, a crime drama, a war story, oh yeah, or about football, I guess. The audience has a lot of choices of what to fixate on, so the expectation across the audience is varied. Some critique the show for being soap-operatic, an argument that those who write about the show despise, defending the show by mentioning its cinematic production values and layered storytelling. The thing is, you can watch the show as a soap opera if you want to. I’m confident many do. I’m sure many want to know what Tami will do to Julie based on what she heard Landry said to Matt in the supermarket. (The show has so much gossip, if that’s your thing.) And if you must know right now, this amazing scene is what happened (played by Judy and Jane Jetson).

I probably watch it most as a period piece, except the period is a part of my life that I tiptoed around. While Friday Night Lights isn’t the life I necessarily had, or even wanted, for that matter, it feels like the life that I should have had, the life I expected. My cousin who watches the show once told me, “That’s what high school was like.” I can’t really relate with the characters at all, but my cousin and I probably enjoy it equally.

By gum, the show works on layers because it’s layered, which isn’t something you see on major TV shows so often; And when there are shows that are, they become cult hits and mostly on the Sci-Fi channel or AMC (maybe that’s why the show eventually moved to Dish Network, which is the first time most of you have even heard of that). "Friday Night Lights" did a great job of making the audience get it. (All this, plus quality. It always feels like people who write about TV always take that for granted.)

Oh yeah, and my favorite Sufjan Stevens song was on the show. I promise that this whole post wasn’t just a veiled excuse, and that my love for this show was solely decided by my crass, sentimental taste for indie folk music.

…but it didn’t hurt. Clear eyes, full hearts.

Ultimate John Boehner Fan Video

2011-05-31T22:48:00.002-04:00

My last post was too wordy.

being there and other letters

2011-05-29T15:31:00.001-04:00

This past year I wrote a lot of things that you won't ever see because I didn't write them for any of you. Nevertheless, here are a couple things from that very long period of time. The first piece was not so subtly influenced by Gil Scott-Heron, who died a couple days ago. The second is a likely inaccurate account of when I went to Paris as a child. The third is a letter to everyone I've ever known, and I wrote it almost a year ago. The fourth is the prologue to a story, which I wrote recently.
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"Being There"

Well the first thing I want to say is that I am disgusted by what we’re trying to do, and that I was there when we started doing it.

I stood by and did nothing while the reasonable manner of our discussion packed up and moved away; just didn’t think about it and texted to 1-866-IDOLS-08.

I became a statistic in popular opinion when we were all shouting that terrorists were the enemy and not the people who were shouting.

I forgone my privacy by virtue of the attention I would extract from a glowing screen and watched my friends follow in succession.

I sexted and was sexted without knowing anything about sex.

I was there in the repulsive public school, as it lied starving, whimpering, hysterical, begging those passing by for water, and I watched them watch it die.

I yelled out “present” to my grade school teachers when I was mentally absent.

I abstained from voting on the grounds that the next movie star in line would do just fine for now.

I panicked and prepared for the end of the world, disappointed when January 1, 2000 passed and nothing happened and when January 1, 2012 passed and nothing happened.

I never loved anyone but myself, ignoring the only kind girl who loved me while I traded Pokemon cards and settled with the woman I knocked up.

I wore blackface and did a song and dance for my employers and I wore a suit while doing it.

I was taught war from the television screen, and it made sense to me.

I stood next to my father, arms shaking and knees trembling when lowering the casket of my childhood into the ground, and I wept for days.

I was there when Phaedrus was there, when Daedalus forged wings for Icarus and when he flew too close to the sun, marveling at the sight of him falling to Earth.

I broke the 10 commandments in order by Saturday and was forgiven by Monday.

I danced with the stars, idolized the Americans, made and didn’t make deals, survived and wiped out.

I saw all these magnificent children running about, naked, neighing like sheep, surprised that I was following along, nearly removing my pants.

I hoped for the world to be better, for things to be different, and this was all I did.

I made the world what I wanted it to be, and it was. I wanted to be saved, and I was.

The world will not end with a bang, it will not be televised and nobody will give a damn. We will revolt by teaching our family to care, to respectfully disagree with what is wrong, by letting go, by working 8 to 5 for money and still meeting the cost to pay attention to our children. We will arm ourselves with the knowledge of love, we will riot, and we will be there.

Because what the children want, more than the ineffable urge for those around them to love and nurture and care, is to be understood.

Blessed be to life we magnificent children.

______________________________________

"Ceci Ne Pas Une Croissant"

I woke up cramped and tired in the motel, sitting up to see my family scattered around the room, still asleep. I was bewildered and amazed at how orange the sun looked coming over the elaborately designed city buildings and the villas within sight in the distance. We packed silently; our parents helped us pack our bags that were too heavy for our backs. In the lobby I sat on a couch too big for me watching Pepe le Pew dubbed in French, which while was probably appropriate proved impossible to understand. Still hungry having only eaten one croissant and drinking one cup of orange juice, I asked my Mom for more food. She called over a woman, and told me to tell her what I wanted. I couldn’t pronounce it, so I said, “I would like a cwah-want, please.” The woman laughed at me. She called her co-worker over and had me say it again and they both let out hyena cackles. I had never felt so helpless; I was ashamed. We walked for hours in the sun. My parents were stressed from extraneously planning country-hopping and constantly keeping an eye on us. I was wearing a sweater and was sweating, but I didn’t speak up because I was too afraid to stop or even say something. A place so beautiful, rich with life that I would not see again until decades later, quickly became my hell. I hated the people on bikes, odd-looking buildings, frightenly tall people, and of course the pickpocketers. My parents gave us a slight warning, telling us to hold onto what we had with us, which my siblings construed into scaring me into thinking pickpocketers were all over the city. I walked the streets with my hands in my pockets, sweating, baseball hat on straight, looking forward to the unfamiliar terrain, never knowing when it would end. My back hurt from carrying the weight, so my parents carried my bag for a little bit. We were all complaining, asking if we could just take a taxi. My parents weren’t familiar with the currency and didn’t want to spend more than they had to (they had all expenses planned). We eventually came to an open courtyard with a large glass pyramid sitting in the center, surrounded by large fountains. We sat next to one fountain, setting down our bags, relaxing for a breath and a splash of water for our faces. My dad, always emphasizing productivity, soon mobilized us, rising us to the occasion when we really just wanted to give up. We went into the pyramid, down an escalator, past counters and lobbies to empty rooms with lined walls with paintings, pictures, sculptures and stone carvings. I didn’t understand and thought it was awkward when we stopped at a naked woman with her arms cut off. The same went to the man sitting with poor posture, the woman barely smiling and the (naked) man with wings embracing the (naked) woman. We walked on, out the pyramid, through the streets, to the train station where we waited for a couple hours. We boarded the train and entered our cabin, finally freed from our bags and our legs. I lied down in my mother’s lap, tears falling from my face from thinking of how I failed to pronounce “croissant,” why those women were so mean, how exhausted I was, how I wanted very much to be home again. My mother turned my face around, scouring my tears until I was better, and I fell asleep right there, all the way to Denmark.

______________________________________

"Start Walking"

Sometimes the cardinals outside my window will wake me up when I sleep too late to remind me that I was dreaming and that what I was feeling wasn't real. At least I think so, and that's my problem.

I get into the habit of getting into habits. I'll base what I believe with what I think to be true and choose to not understand what I don't want to, and I guess everyone does this. I don't really like that we do that, but I can at least understand.

But before me, before anything even existed, there had to have been only one truth. I hold on to the notion that this single truth was accepted until someone didn't understand it. It wasn't that they didn't want to or find a reason to or failed to see it as important, but that they couldn't understand it despite all their wanting to. Maybe it was because they thought or maybe it was because they felt or maybe it was because they loved, but it created a truth that wasn't true that hadn't existed before they made it so. They based their lives on this separate truth-- and then they lived. They lived linearly with everyone else but within a parallel reality that didn't exist before creating an original thought. Someone finally had to have noticed and rejected what he rejected, creating something entirely different but nonetheless contrarian. And then their friends would go to the dinner parties these others would host and hear about these truths and decide for themselves what they felt or thought or loved and what they would embrace for their own. And then these people had children, sometimes together, and their children would hold dissenting truths from their parents merely for dissension's sake, and they would live dissenting everything that was true, knowing what they didn't feel in their heart held the truth. The kids made rock records that spoke their truth that nobody seemed to be thinking about. They mellowed out when they got older and then they had a reunion tour. Military men would scold non-military men for speaking of military matters with such ease. Traditionalists viewed everything dissenting, commenting, or otherwise as nothing more than negativity. Observationalists would write books about the accomplishments and trials of great men, trying to capture which truth made their life so important. Dreamers would read these books and go into politics. Opportunists would damn these men as opportunists. Activists would rally behind the truth, against some other truth, and passerbys would continue to exist as such (without the need for any). But while this all happened, everything that once existed continued to exist, only in different forms and manners. And so on.

I watch everyone around me I know and don't arguing about what is true and what isn't true and how we should be feeling from my nice little perspective. The truth always sounds like such a logical and clear choice. They've found ways to compartmentalize everything that I think and feel and love to be true into identifiable sides and quick sound-bytes and medical terms using political parties and applications and buttons and lights and sounds and money. And I understand why they try to make it so simple for me. It's because they want to believe that's the way it should be, that's the way it was before me. But I know that it's not and it wasn't, but I'm not sure if it never was.

When I was younger, I used to think that everything could be true to a certain degree. I tried to be polite, picking through shit for a sliver of reason that I could hold up to whoever I was talking to and satisfy them. For some people, agreeing with the slightest nothing can convince them that you wholly embrace their (often) bullshit world view, and they only do this because they want to think you like them. But the more I think and revisit, the more I see I change, am wrong, find ways to abhor myself. There is no reason to not suspect that everything that I'm saying is absolutely wrong, even if everything I say is voiced through reason and merit. "It's just not right." "You just kind of get a feel for these things after a while." "It's hard for me to make you understand." "You can't know what I know."

I got a little older and tried to find perfection, and that didn't work out so well. The more I looked the more I found wrong, the more I found I couldn't love the world for what it was. And while I hate to think that I'll ever stop looking, I realize that there are no ends. This doesn't, however, mean I have to search alone. I casually walk alongside everyone who's trying to figure it out, and it's nice to look around sometimes and not always forward. The writers seem to be trying the hardest and feeling the most miserable about it; the kids are running and it's hard to keep up; the tough guys are taking it at their own pace; the egoists think they’re the only ones walking; the religious can be the kindest but the biggest pests; the atheists can be the most sound-minded but the biggest assholes; the activists feel they have a purpose, and want to get there before anyone else; the druggies think that they're already there; the depressed don't know which way they should be going; the comics are doing it their own way; the existentialists are pushing their rocks along while the nihilists walk merely because it's better than not walking; the individualists are confidently marching in the direction of their dreams; the collectivists are carrying along those who can't walk; the poets are laying stones for people to walk on; the pessimists are walking on their knees; the optimists are skipping and hurting their feet; the tired are considering taking a break; the adventurers don't really care about getting there; the explorers walk about; the escapists never really get out; the engineers are thinking of the fastest way to get there; the laid-back aren't looking back; the worrisome are watching every step; the good are walking; the bad are walking; those who've felt love don't want to take another step alone; the forgetful can start over whenever they want to; the extremists never seem to be alone; the families are always remembering and forgetting how much they need each other; the anti-social would never let anyone know that they're looking for someone to walk with; the artists are always thinking of strange ways to walk; the athletes are distracting the rest of us; the lazy don't seem to be bothered at all by time; the parasites are being dragged behind by their betters; the kind are teaching us how to walk; the infants are crawling; the content are sitting; the talking heads are going the wrong way; the animals are trying to walk and we keep cutting their legs off; death seems to be stopping people along the way, but it's hard to tell; the idiots are walking just as we are; the haters are hating; the seasoned walk more confidently; the stoics break; the lively dance.

There are others, but there are so many that it's hard to see.

I don't really know who I am and I certainly don't know what I believe to be true, but I'm starting to figure out what it is that I'm doing, and maybe that's enough for now. And if it's not, then perhaps I'll take up jogging.

______________________________________

Prologue to “Magnificent Children”

His darkened silhouette outlined in the doorframe, Mr. Steak said to his class, “Turn on the fucking light. I can clearly see you.” His students emerged from under their desks, devilishly pleased with the response. They pulled bad jokes like this on him all the time. They were more affirmed by his frustration than they would if he had laughed.

At Twinsburg, the younger teachers were always assigned the worst classes with the most deplorable students, a job that nobody took pride in nor felt encouraged to wake up in the morning to go to, especially someone with the potential of John Staek. He had fast-tracked through an outstanding educational career, graduating in the top of his class at Grover Cleveland High School and magna cum laude at Bowling Green University with majors in English and History (he had finished college in three years). After dropping out of law school after a semester, Staek accepted a teaching job at the first high school that would have him, and he was optimistic at the prospect of sharing his knowledge with receptive, developing minds. His class schedule, which hasn’t changed since starting his teaching tenure, consists of five “tech-prep” English classes, which is just Fillmore Township’s way of lumping together the kids who have little interest in graduating, the group that is kept (physically) away from the C to B students, who are (also physically) kept away from the kids who are in the START program (which stands for something, although few actually could recite it). The START kids run the school newspaper, National Honor Society, class offices, student council, thespian society, morning announcements, robotics team, international languages club, civics club, book club, spirit club, chess club, environmental club, and there are others. It was the kind of mandated segregation with a doctrine writ in water. Three of Staek’s classes consisted of seniors and two juniors. The juniors- it was the juniors that he hated. Luckily for this year, enough students dropped out that the two classes of juniors were combined, thus creating “the children.”

Staek knew his dilemma with the children wasn’t unique whatsoever. So much of the time in the teacher’s lounge at lunch was devoted to sharing the day’s horror stories (who sexted who, which students were pregnant, who was written up, which urinals were pooped in, et. al.), a practice that Staek hated to participate in during his brief moments away from the children.

Based on two years of secondhand intake of these conversations, Staek gathered that the standard method of combating the problem of TP classes went as followed: follow the syllabus, review no less than three times, teach to the required state standardized test, make sure they’re awake, tell them everything they need to know, give them the test, take their phones until the end of class, hope for the best, and move on to the next, hateful batch. Staek welcomed that the last phase of the process was upon him and wished to do nothing that would complicate it. Three weeks remained in the school year.

Staek made his first attempt of the day to win back the class’ attention, saying, “Alright, you guys. Settle and sit down, you little shits. We’re reading Eliot.” His constant cursing was something that the class expected from people, not an abnormality that yielded him any cooler. “Now, did any of you read the poem for today?” Staek expected the silence and didn’t allow it to linger for too long, but long enough for the students to feel guilty, an attempt that he knew failed. He continued, “Then I guess we’ll read it aloud. It’s called, ‘The Hollow…”
“MOO,” one student interjected. The children laughed. Staek thought it must’ve been a recurring joke that he didn’t understand.

After taking a moment to realize what had happened, Staek said, “Did you just interrupting cow me, Omar?” Omar had just interrupting cowed him. Across the room, Antoine said, “Yeahhh, you my nigga, Omar.” Omar and Antoine were the only two black kids in the class.

Omar replied, “Hahhh, nah nah nah. I’m sorry, teach. You can go on tryin’ to fix us and shit.”

“I do not have the time nor the effort to fix you, Omar,” said Staek. Some students interpreted this as racist, though it was not.

After popping her gum, Emma said, “Spoken like a true teacher.” The children laughed.

He looked over the room, at his students who were absolutely pregnant with apathy. He felt nothing for them. After a breath, Steak said, “I’m not sure you all realize the state that you’re in right now, or even, better yet, the state you’re going to be in this summer, when you realize what little you have done with your lives up until this point, up until you face the moment where you’re working at an underpaying job when you will be forced to realize, “Yep, this is what the rest of my life is going to be.”

Steven was texting his girlfriend. Madison was asleep. Eric was paying attention.

He continued. “And you’re all going to feel so bitter about it, that everyone along the way has been working against you, that things would be different if you were in charge, when you’re just too stupid to not realize that there is nothing to be in charge of.”

Staek paused for dramatic effect, an attempt he knew failed. Someone farted.

“You’re not there yet. None of you are. You’re dumb and confortable with that, so happy with what little you know, and I guess if you ignore enough, you can be quite happy. I have no interest in teaching T.S. Eliot to hateful students.”

After saying this, he had realized that only a third of the class was remotely paying attention. Another third of the class was distracted and the final third were asleep. Not moving, standing leaned against his desk, Staek lifted his stapler, forcefully launching it at the chalkboard, creating a noticeable crack. The loud impact, which could be heard from 15 different classrooms (although they all just ignored it), awakened the class, a considerable victory for a public school teacher. Staek remained still and the class sat in silence, not sure what to do next. One student spoke up, “C’mon, teach. Nobody likes a crazy person.” Steak ignored this completely and made his way directly from his desk to the board, stood in front of the crack, staring at it for a moment. “Oh SHIT,” said Omar.

“This is the way the year ends. This is the way the year ends. This is the way the year ends,” said another.

Staek took the chalk and feverishly wrote one sentence, underlining it. He turned and said, “Your final project will count for 70% of your grade. You can do whatever you want. I will remind you that this class is a Fillmore Township requirement in order to graduate your junior year and if failed you will repeat the course with me at summer school. This will be graded tough.” The children knew that he meant what he had said.

The board read, “Make something that actually says anything.”

______________________________________

10 Recent Movies That Were More Impressive As Trailers

2011-05-23T17:49:00.001-04:00

Movies are worse than their trailers all the time, but only sometimes do trailers stand alone as clearly more impressive than the movie itself. Some people have lists like this, but they suck. Bla bla Sucker Punch 300 Watchmen Sin City Battle Los Angeles blab la blab bla. Go watch ultimate fighting and watch Spike TV if you want to be among people who consider those great, you manly man, you.

Where The Wild Things Are

This is probably the best example of this I can think of. This trailer promised the world. Admittedly, I love this movie. It’s a tender meditation of childhood, exploring the blablabla. It’s very good, but not what to expect from one of the tenderest montages ever made. Did you see Max come out of that adorable hole in the ground? Look at him running! Little did we know, he was running to a giant fort to listen to giant animatronic/CG monsters talk about how sad they are. Eek. Kids movie!

The Social Network

Both are amazing, but not for the same reasons. The movie is far easier to categorize than this trailer, and I think that serves to the trailer's credit. They say so many words! Like Inception, I think of it as more traditional trailer, in that its primary goal is to question what the movie even is, which can stand alone as a work of art. Traditional trailers don’t give a shit if you know at the end what kind of movie it is, much unlike most of the movies on this list. This is a big IMO, I understand.

A Serious Man

Never has a trailer been so accurate at representing the act of watching a movie, in that it was painful to watch. That said, I hated A Serious Man. Like Burn After Reading, and pretty much every other Coen Brothers comedy, the whole point of it is that it goes nowhere and you’re just supposed to enjoy the offbeat characters and non-sequitur instances (talk about selling short Coen Brothers movies). Well let’s just say you have a hard time doing that. I could’ve easily had Burn After Reading on this list, although I laughed violently at the end of that one/was really pissed off that the whole movie was a "fuck you" to the audience. But this trailer!

Up

I just don’t like Up. I’ll save this fight for another time. Up is the worst. I rest my case. Where the movie was annoying and grotesqueness masked as tenderness, this teaser trailer was so cool. Balloons!

The Darjeeling Limited

I’m never really sure how to explain this movie to myself or others, namely because a ton of stuff happens that has nothing to do with anything other than making the movie look pretty (and the movie does look very pretty). Some people have simply written this off as Wes Anderson’s and Roman Coppola’s vanity film, which may very well be the case, because the story was all over the place. That said, this trailer was very pretty! Mission accomplished!

Cloverfield

“Cool. Cool cool cool.” – Me, after watching the Cloverfield trailer for the first time. Stupid people really hated this movie because it didn’t have a satisfying ending. I call them stupid because I feel those people always put too much importance on endings. There are a lot of good moments in Cloverfield, but it’s a bit overlong, which is strange, because it’s really short. Also, I feel District 9 destroyed any lasting impact this movie had. Sometimes I leave movies like this feeling I just watched an awesome short film, if I could just forget half of it. This trailer didn’t really make me want to see the full film, but made me quiver because I just saw the trailer.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Many people I know hated this because it was almost three hours. We had to know what we were getting into. The trailer promised A LOT, which the movie certainly delivered, but lacked what the movie suffered from, which everyone noticed- lingering. Benjamin Button is basically Lingering- The Movie. To be honest, I doubt directors even think about pacing when making a huge movie (see: Apocalypse Now Redux, The Thin Red Line, or pretty much any other war movie).

The American

This one’s tough. I would say this is a pretty good example of conflicting marketing. Based on the trailer, this looks like Michael Clayton as an action film, which would be awesome. Pretty much every line that is said in the movie is in this trailer. Nobody says anything the entire movie! Not that that’s horrible, but Taxi Driver already treaded a lot of similar ground, and it ended up being a bit boring with a poor payoff. I think that’s just the risk this movie takes with what it’s trying to accomplish, which is pretty much a portrait of a solitary assassin with a minor political message. I would write similar words about Syriana, except people wouldn’t shut up in that movie.

Howl

This is one of my all-time favorite trailers, and is, like many of these, very different from the movie (which is still very enjoyable). I mean, I can dog on any trailer for being selective of the footage it shows, but you would have no idea from this trailer that a third of the movie is an animated interpretation of the poem itself, which was admirable and forgettable. That's a lot of the movie to ignore in a trailer! Despite this, the trailer is similar to Ginsberg's poetry- insanely rhythmic and defiantly smooth.

Juno

Quirk quirk quirk quirk quirk stop quirk quirk QUIRK STOP. That was Juno to me. But in the length of this trailer, it all seemed tolerable (and very enjoyable). Plus, I thought Rainn Wilson was going to have a bigger role, but is that shot where he’s handing the bags even in the movie? This question is important to me.

To the hypothetical graduating high school class of 2014,

2011-05-22T13:56:00.002-04:00

Good evening. You may be wondering who I am, why I have been chosen to speak to you during this hard-earned, perhaps defining moment in your life, privileged with the task of providing soaring words of encouragement for your impending future, and why, above all, I have written this speech three years in advance. Save the questions, asshole. This is a speech. Show some respect and don’t potentially interrupt me again.

Your graduating class is the very first that I have nothing a part of. This means I have no “emotional stake” invested in your success. In this sense, I am the opposite of your parents. In another, to you I am some elder ghost, wholly detached from your experiences and culture and adversities and triumphs. However, what I lack in empathy and actual relevancy to your life, I can provide the service of telling what we all think of you. Believe me, it is not that good, and I’m sorry I’m the one who has to say it to you. Have a seat.

We honestly doubted that you would ever get here, and probably doubt you’ll be able to get any further. But are we really the ones to blame? Maybe I should reserve these words I have to share with you to let you know why we’re so antagonistic, of all the local news reports of you guys getting over-the-pants handjobs in trashy roller rinks, of the practice of sexting which you’ve been held responsible, justly or not, of inventing, of your shitty standardized test scores, and so on. The fact that someone of my age thinks of you at all isn’t a good sign. Maybe it’s not fair to attach you with that. You might just be a product of the culture, and, Occam’s razor permitting, most of the culture really sucks and makes you overconfident. It also doesn’t help at all that you defend your culture so violently. Believe me, you will not still be listening to Justin Bieber or Waka Flocka Flame in ten years. If you are, your peers will make fun of you. Take a look at the track listing of “Now That’s What I Call Music! 10,” released about 10 years ago.

That’s your future- nostalgic memories of Nickelback and Baha Men. I think you now understand why I had you sit down for this. You’ve never heard of anyone standing for bad news, have you? Don’t be stupid. The worst of it is, there’s nothing you can do about it! That’s just the way fashion works, it’s either hip and new or old. What I encourage you to do is the opposite of what I just did- feel superior to your old self. Allow your id to let those proverbial dogs out, or something. Things are going to change, so please, feel free to go ahead and be better than your old self. Honestly, you suck right now, but don’t look back on that person with scorn. Every poorly lit sext, passive aggressive Facebook message, pointless tweet and furled aggression loosed in the worst possible way contributed to who you are now. Don’t bite the hole that shit you, or something. Aphorisms have never made sense to me. While we’re talking about that, could we talk about risqué pictures you put online? I can’t do this without sounding 80 years old, but why would you do that? Admittedly, my peers did the same, but not at your age. It’s like you were poorly weaned off of bikini pictures taken in your bathroom. Believe me, 97% of people older than you are not sexually attracted to you in any way, it’s just that we see it and think about those 3% and it grosses us out.

Your principal is wildly waving her arms and making a line motion with her hand across her throat. Not sure what that means, but I imagine I’m running up on time. Ok, ok. Parting wisdom…. Parting wisdom…

Don’t fuck this up.

Andy Rooney Interviews President Obama

2011-05-15T21:46:00.000-04:00

60 Minutes recently interviewed President Obama after what was probably the most celebrated murder in American history. Believe me, I think it’s great when murderous assholes die! But still, I think we can agree that was a weird moment in American history.

I thought Steve Kroft did a good job, but couldn’t help feeling it was still a missed opportunity. So you could read the hypothetical interview below, or just look at this picture and pretty much get the same message.

Scott Pelley – And now, Andy Rooney, speaking with President Obama.

Andy Rooney – Mr. President?

President Obama – Yes Andy.

AR – I was just checking. You never know these days. (stares at notecards for several seconds, eyes squinted)

PO – Do you need some help?

AR – Mr. President, what is your favorite color?

PO – Ahh, well I guess I’d say-

AR – My favorite color is blue. (pauses for several seconds)

PO – Hey, blue is a great color.

AR – Now don’t avoid the question, Mr. President. How do you plan to balance the budget?

PO – I’m apologize, Andy. I didn’t realize you were asking that. Just a few weeks ago I released my budget outlining the cuts across the board, forged by republicans and democrats working down the aisle. It’ll work to decrease wasteful spending, move our country forward, and invest in the future. This includes a massive increase in spending towards ensuring social security.

AR – How do you respond to those who criticize you for the proposed cuts in discretionary military spending?

PO – That’s a very valid complaint, but at the same time it cannot be ignored that-

AR – Where are my shoes?

PO – I don’t know Andy, but the choice to step back from some of that military spending derived from-

AR – I was just wearing them a minute ago. (stands up, walks around) Would somebody find me my shoes?

(crew man gives Andy Rooney his pair of shoes)

AR – These shoes are too big. I don’t like them. Don’t help me sit down, you putz. (sits down, farts)

PO – I’m sorry Andy, but if we could move this along.

AR – What country were you born in?

PO – (sigh) This country. I’ve been through this.

AR – (writes "America" down on napkin) Got it. That was just out of my curiosity.

PO – I think the sad truth was many people were curious, and it adverted us from the real issues.

AR – Why is it that so many Americans are curious these days? Back in my time, a marriage was between a man and a woman, and that’s the way we liked it.

PO – I’m sorry, was that a question for me?

AR - Osama Bin Laden is dead.

PO - I would say that might very well turn out to be one of the proudest moments of my administration. For many Americans, the news provided closure for an atrocity that had lingered on the nation’s conscious for too long.

AR - Actually, that was also a question, but thank you for talking more about it (jots down on napkin, slowly says while writing) Osama… Bin… Laden… dead…

(interview continues for two hours)

_______________________________________________

Summer of Somnambulism

2011-05-10T16:41:00.001-04:00

There’s a reason I fucking hate my generation as a whole. It’s because most of the time I try speaking to it earnestly, it always feels like this-

That’s from a group of middle school kids, publicly voting whether some anonymous child should continue operating an online burn book (a la Mean Girls) and continue to be needlessly horrible to her peers for the sake of attention. Because it has felt hopeless, I have preferred to do my preaching through places like here, my school paper’s opinion page, pestering Sydney Meyer on Facebook, and so on. Some of it was all right. I’ve done this so that I may speak to either no one or everyone, and the reality never really mattered to me.

It’s hard to say ,“I have a lot of thoughts” and be taken seriously at the same time.

I don’t do so much preaching anymore, but I have a lot of thoughts.

This is my place for you to see them, but I’ve been away for some time now. The kind of thought tossing hasn’t, but it’s only been directed towards three people, one who I probably won’t have read it and another who has been dead for hundreds of years (you could guess, but I’d doubt you’d be close, unless that guess is Iphigenia). I did this because I having less and less of a desire to do the same thing twice, so I wrote a book for them. Some of it was all right. Maybe that’s why I’ve been afraid to make a video or short film after I finished high school. It’s been strange, and I’ve been frighteningly aware of this.

What this means for my friends, “fans,” members of my extended family, lovers, strangers, Japanese bot accounts on Blogspot- I’m going to be making things that are very different this summer. There won’t be a schedule, and the variety of things won’t make sense, so I would urge you to not attempt to understand why one week I may write a 5000 word essay about the writing style of superhero cartoons of the 70s and the next a hand puppet remake of “The Fox and The Hound,” because I wouldn’t mind doing either of those right about now.

I will say, however, there are a number of things that I want to make this summer. Hopefully I can get to them some time or another. I'll continue to do my weekly column over at MOBFD and comment every once in a while at Videogum and text tweets every so often, but I'm going to change my routine a bit, do some traveling, get my act together.

The blog format is dead. Long live the blog.

So... Yeah...

2011-02-28T23:36:00.002-05:00

Long time no see! Like, a really long time. This is an abnormal time to no see.

I'm just here to link some high quality uploads of the movie I made last year and the New Orleans trip document I made last summer. Sorry this isn't an actual return to blogging. I may post every now and then on Monster Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick (in fact, you can keep up on my weekly cartoon posting there right here).

While I haven't been blogging, I've been writing a shitlot. Like, you don't even know. More then I ever have before.

I'm gonna get back to blogging this summer. Dusky got plans.

Greatest Summer Hits

2010-08-19T23:28:00.007-04:00

I figured that since I'm going to take a little time off, here are some of my favorite and best recent posts. (I know-- I know. I hate it when people do this, too.)

(P.S. - This break is indefinite, but I'm still writing.)

"Let The Work of Change Begin" - Sometimes I'll look back at something I did and wonder, "When was I ever there?" I love this, so much so that I put it in a movie.

"I watched all three Twilight movies in one day and wrote about doing that / My Suicide Note" - Despite this being a horrible experience, it was a lot of fun to do. Oh, and this is the longest thing I've ever written, which is pathetic.

"What We're Doing" - The Habitat for Humanity New Orleans trip short I did. I like this because I feel that people who didn't even go on the trip can watch it and feel loved, if only a little.

"Conerning Pathos" - I'm glad I wrote down this little reminder.

"The Adventures of Dusky Panther" - This essay feels formal to me. Maybe it is.

"Si Vis Amari Ama" - This is a diary entry I did at a pretty low point, but I guess people liked it.

"Thoughts on Toy Story 3" - I punched this out right after I saw it. After doing that and feeling special, I saw that's pretty much what everyone did after seeing this movie, so I no longer felt special. I still feel I made some point with this.

"Of Jersey Shore, My Dougie, and Other Things" - I did two video vlogs this summer. Glad I had an outlet to let out my silly/frustration. I think satirizing can be the best/worst way to do that.

"Ceteris Paribus" - Pretty much nobody talked to me about this short remake I did of the old 60s TV show "The Outer Limits." People probably didn't like it. I understand why, but I still do.

"It's A Party" - Kind of a ragtag account of college orientation tied together with my political view.

Thank you. I probably love you.

Funny Sufjan released an album now. That's not fair. (I like tracks 2 and 5.)

<a href="http://sufjanstevens.bandcamp.com/album/all-delighted-people-ep">All Delighted People (Original Version) by Sufjan Stevens</a>

A Review of (part of) "Return to Danger Mountain"

2010-08-15T00:42:00.004-04:00

Long time no see, you guys. There's a reason for this, of course. It's been an emotionally and intellectually trying Summer (both of these were self-imposed). If you've been keeping up here, you'll probably know I haven't really stopped. After finishing the New Orleans short and finishing "The World According to Garp" (which is really something special), I pretty much gave up. I'm floating right now. It's an odd place to be. For instance, I watched three movies yesterday (I haven't watched a movie for a while it seems). "The Warriors" is as amazing as I remember it, "Greenberg" can go be miserable for the shit I refused to give it, and "Hard 8" is very oddly suave. What's stranger is revisiting something that I moved past what seems to be a long time ago-- "Return to Danger Mountain."

I submitted a 10 minute version of it to a Heartland film festival contest (which was probably a stupid idea). I knew I wouldn't win. The target market for that one is far slimmer than anything I should put up for review or expect to win anything. There's too much context that I couldn't explain. That said, here is the first professional review of "Return to Danger Mountain." I already agreed with most of the points anyway, but I really only got to tell part of it, of which I feel a little bad about, but I did appreciate that they got back to me with so much. However, I vehemently disagree with the last sentence and always will. Despite everything, I still love "Return to Danger Mountain," but it's just something that I've moved past. I doubt I'll write again on here until college. I need to keep drifting. See you at the bottom of the river.

"• At least 5 films and a fine narrative poem going on here; however, they continually canceled each other out. Focusing on one would have caught the viewer's attention. The animation was particularly good. So was the poem, but both together prompted loss of interest. A movie about everything is asking too much from an audience. Obviously talent here, but no focus. Separate, focus on a theme and work with what you have here.

• I think this film would work better as individual shorts or as shorts organized in a collection with a single theme. It was a bit all over the place.

• When doing a collaborative film and using a collection different images and work consider the over all arch and tone of the piece. By shifting greatly in style, a film can become disjointed and pull the audience out of the experience -- fine if that's what you want to achieve, but if not, be careful. Images on the screen often communicate more than the words, people can drift in and out of what's being said while they absorb the image in front of them. Is it saying what you want it to say? Is it relevant to the piece? Does it juxtapose and if so, why? What are you trying to say? What story are you trying to tell? What is the film about? Ask yourself these questions and strive to answer them while you're making the film, your job as a filmmaker is to have the answers to those questions and to communicate them to your audience in visuals, poetry and story.

• I liked the images of the fox in the chair and the man having water thrown over him in reverse, what are they from? I wanted to see more of that!

• This film does demonstrate that the filmmaker can represent stories and visions through different types of film approaches. The fifth and final scene did provide tie back references to preceding segments which was important.

• Overall, this film was very choppy and disruptive as the viewer saw diverse styles and approaches through the five different segments. It did not tie together very well to tell one story or deliver one message. The final line of the film is "This is about everything" which does sum up the film. Unfortunately, in attempting to represent everything from the filmmaker’s view, the final film suffers from not representing anything. It is a list of thoughts and ideas, which in the end fail to tell a story or lead the viewer to any conclusion on what the list all means."

(You probably don't listen to these, anyway.)

What We're Doing

2010-08-07T20:27:00.004-04:00

I’m in a place. I guess I was yesterday, too, but that was a different place. Until now I’ve never had a moment where I went away, came back, and returned to thinking that I was tired of this old pattern, tired of these old folks. I’m tired of sucking from a tube of photo albums of drunken parties that I never go to and watching videos that serve no purpose and accepting friend requests from people I’ve never met and exposing myself to a culture that doesn’t concern me, so I’m changing subscriptions. I was shown freedom and I want it back. Tomorrow I won’t be where I was yesterday because I’m already not there. I’m not here, either. I’m in New Orleans with the people I love.

Ceteris Paribus

2010-07-24T14:45:00.002-04:00

Here is a short film that I made in my closet called “Ceteris Paribus.” I would suggest watching it in full screen and in one sitting. It’s a remake of part of a show that was called “The Outer Limits.” Hope you enjoy it.

Odd thing happened. A little bit ago, realizing that my intensive week of blogging and filmmaking was at an end, I wasn’t sure what to do, but it was a really freeing moment. All I could do was crack open a book and relax. I usually don’t try to talk about my life too much on here outside of the things I work on (because I don’t care for that kind of attention and probably because they are tragically one in the same), but I’m leaving tomorrow for a Habitat for Humanity trip for a week. I’m going to document some of it with my camera.

If you don’t care to revisit anything I’ve written this week (they’re all on this page), then here’s something for you to oogle at while I’m gone.

Bye bye when the morning comes.

Why Playing “Picross 3D” Makes You A Better Person

2010-07-23T23:52:00.006-04:00

For the second time in two days, I plan to draw a parallel between a means of well-living and a videogame without sounding too heavy-handed.

I’ve never been an empathetic person. As far as comfort in the material world goes, well, let’s just say I’m sitting on a couch typing on my laptop which gets a wealth of knowledge through our wireless internet connection in my room which is always kept at a nice temperature which is in my nice house in my safe neighborhood in the relatively crime-ridden state of Indiana (don’t tell that to the Black Expo shooters). Common logic says that I can’t feel empathy for anyone who isn’t a well-off white kid. A lot of people live this way and regard Sophia Coppola movies as the gospel. Everyone has the option of living within the realm of his or her experience or faking it. This “faking it” is called deductive reasoning, and we all do it.

For the past couple weeks, before I go to bed, I have spent about 30 minutes playing this video game called Picross 3D, which is pretty much a meta-Sudoku. You are given a blob of three-dimensional blocks with numbers either on the side, top or both. The numbers indicate how many blocks in the row are included in the final product. Therefore, when tackling a puzzle, you usually get rid of the “0” rows, highlight the rows with every block included, and so on. You deal with everything that must be true. These become the things you know. Based on the first stage of thinking, you then move onto what changed because of what was removed from that first stage. If there was a row of six blocks with four included in the final product and one was deleted, leaving the row with (block (empty space) blockblockblockblock), then it is now true that the one isolated block is not in the final product. For the first 60 puzzles of Picross 3D, two stages of thinking is all that is necessary, and is all that many people choose to function with in a respectable livelihood.

Eventually, Picross forces you to play empathetically, thinking from both sides and considering what absolutely must not be true. If there is a row of five blocks and three are in the final product, then it must be true that the very middle block is in the final product. This is when Picross starts to implement deductive reasoning. Eventually, and at the point of the game where I am, you are given a block canvas with almost no giveaways, and the process takes heart. It gets to the point where you begin and think to yourself, “There is no way I can figure this out. I just don’t know anything,” and that's completely OK. That’s when the deducing begins.

This is what’s beautiful about deductive reasoning — you only have to know a little about anything to talk about everything. You can understand without having to be an active participant. This is what’s ugly about deductive reasoning – you don’t know about anything. It’s the same reason we get into the habit of speaking and thinking in contrived truths based on our experiences and assimilating them to everyone. I felt this least when reading “Things Fall Apart” for my world history class. While I am mildly interested in the history and legacy of social justice depredated by trans-atlantic traders, I don’t know shit about yam farming (spoiler alert: the entire book is about yam farming). I’m not supposed to know what it feels like, but I can read a book that tells me what it feels like and get by.

Chuck Klostermann said that John Cusack and Coldplay created unrealistic expectations for how guys act in a relationship. For me, they merely indicated the type of person who I don’t want to date (someone who has those expectations). Culture obviously influences culture (see: any college paper written ever). When talking with someone, it isn’t all that difficult to root out who is living and who’s being told how to feel. Or you can deduce it. Either way, you’re doing the same thing- preemptively judging someone.

I don’t mean to speak pejoratively of deductive reasoning. There really is so much we can know. We all have to be teenage girls who want to be anywhere with anyone making out because Chris Carrabba sang it so. We all have to logic ourselves into believing that our decisions are both the appropriate and right one. We all have to make life easier or it’ll consume us, but people are certainly more than logic. You can’t logic someone into loving you, logically cry, logically watch the rain fall or logically go to Cracker Barrel. The ideas simply clash. Maybe you can’t logically know anything important, but as much as we suck at it, we can always work on empathy, learning it from MTV shows and weepy songs that we have nothing to do with. We get better at faking it in order to be better people. I suppose the rest is all yellow* while we’re figuring it out. Yeah, I ended this essay with a Coldplay allusion. I know.

What Treasure Mountain Means to Me

2010-07-22T01:43:00.001-04:00

When I was an older kid, between third and fifth grade, I would always find a way to manage my parents’ run for errands to make a stop at or near Half Price Books. I would do this so that I could shift through boxes of $0.25 comic books there for titles that I liked or thought that I would. I have a basket in my room full of around 500 comics bought from these trips, and from these comics I accredit all of my creativity, inspiration, and desire to know anything. I rarely read them today, foremost because they’re comic books and they don’t offer much to me. I read books now. Manga is for people who never grew up. I imagine most other kids read “youth literature,” meaning “The Hardy Boys,” “Harry Potter,” “Little House on The Prairie,” “Twilight,” and so on. Often people go as far as to say that these gateway books “raised them,” and even developed aspects of who they are. I never had those books growing up. I had Treasure Mountain.

Growing up (as just a kid, this time) my family computer served as our source of entertainment. The first computer for anyone in our family ran on Windows 3.1 and didn’t seem slow at all. Among the games installed on it were Minesweeper, Roger Rabbit, Mixed-Up Mother Goose, and our favorite, Treasure Mountain.

In Treasure Mountain, you play as a guy who’s trying to get to the top of Treasure Mountain. In order to climb Treasure Mountain, you must climb ladders with the first couple steps missing, which appear if you find the key. In order to find the key hidden behind one of the many pieces of nature along your path, you must catch elves in your net and answer their questions, which they then give you clues. The elves are scattered along the side of Treasure Mountain happily dancing along and whistling. This is until the haunting tall dark figure that you are captures the peaceful creature in a net, forcing him to ask you what animal has hooves so that you can answer him correctly, he can give you the clue, and may be set free to continue on his merry way. (It’s supposed to be an educational game, by the way (although it’s only educational if you’re severely retarded).) So you reach the top of Treasure Mountain, where a wizard attempts to throw you off with his magic wand that casts magic beams of magic. If you get past him, an item of treasure escapes his chest, goes down a slide, and you then follow it to the bottom of Treasure Mountain. Repeat. This is Treasure Mountain.

I have yet to tell you that the goal of Treasure Mountain is to collect as much fucking treasure as humanly possible. At the bottom of Treasure Mountain lies your treasure room where you can walk past shelves and shelves of your collection. At the time when every one of my siblings played this game for hours a day (each), we had over ten rooms filled. It was the type of game that made you care about the ends rather than the means of getting there, but the means was actually the entertaining part. If comic books sparked my creativity, then I will go as far as to say that Treasure Mountain made me who I am, because it made me who I’m not.

Until high school, my parents never pampered me. I was never allowed to buy extras at lunch (I always wanted a Fruitopia), I never went clothes shopping regularly, and I was sparsely allowed a penny for the horse ride at Meijer. This was all because my parents saw trends in other kids that they didn’t want for us (also my mom is a coupon addict). I’m thankful for this, but without Treasure Mountain to balance my materialistic vice, I would be severely fucked up in the head.

Capitalism is best in situations where it’s harmless, and we all want to be a part of it when we’re a kid. We want to spend money to get something that we want at the time, because it’ll satisfy our temperamental desire. It’s true that some parents simply give up, give in, and buy a gumball or ice cream or a Hollister shirt for their whining brat. While I did get two of those three things growing up at times, it was never because I asked for it. My parents made sure that everything I received, I would have no doubt in my mind that I didn’t deserve it. I would feel grateful but guilty, and without Treasure Mountain I would have probably guilted myself into Catholicism by now. Treasure Mountain taught me that there are things in this world that work can give you and that you can show for your body of work, see it, and feel proud of it. You may figure that basing my world view on a materialistic driven videogame would warp me into some individualistic meta-conservative, and you’re probably right. Both my parents are fiscally conservative and socially indifferent (but probably leaning liberal). If our hard drive hadn’t deleted, I probably would have followed in their footsteps.

We lost everything. All our treasure was wiped off the shelves and thrown back into the chest. I was devastated for a while. Everything I had worked for had simply gone away. It was all for nothing. It was nothing. Yeah, it was nothing! It was then that I saw what I had worked for didn’t take away what I had once felt. I could see the halls of treasure when they weren’t there, just as I can know the world continues to exist when I close my eyes. Although I’m sure many would dispute this, this realigned my egocentrism.

I don’t play videogames as much anymore. I mostly play to talk with people that I know in the real world online. But when I play videogames to play videogames, I play games like Red Dead Redemption, Bioshock, Fallout 3, Star Wars Knights of The Old Republic, and Pokemon Snap. I’ve always enjoyed videogames where you work to give yourself the illusion of growing, when you’re really staying the same. Such is life, often. We’re much too proud and invulnerable to change our ways most of the time. But the goal isn’t to be constantly changing or adhering solely to our beliefs. It’s about filling up our shelves and then burning them to the ground.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go scare the shit out of some elves.

Sprawl II

2010-07-21T15:34:00.003-04:00

I’ve come to embrace that while blogs may not the best way to get across the table my ideas and my words accompanied by my thoughts and feelings, the medium certainly includes the least distractions. I don’t like what the poem has done, mangling words into structure and format while claiming to despise them both like a contrarian teenager, forcing a set number of syllables and stresses and unstressed, confining feelings into recycled devices, clumping legacies into quatrains and sestets and stanzas. I do not like the poem, no. I don’t like the page, forcing when to stop and turn but somehow keep going in the same direction, making spaces with paragraphs and telling when to pause with commas and his periods – and – always – dashes. I don’t see eye to eye with Microsoft Word and his double spaces, 12 point text and Times New Roman font trying to make unprofessional words look professional. I’ve never enjoyed my teachers telling me to write about something that millions of papers have been written about, fully knowing that our words won’t possibly change our lives or their lives or anyone else’s life, and how many pages long we should spit this meaningless out of at the minimum. I hate the paper we printed them on, left in stacks and waiting to die. I hate the staples that we stabbed them with and the red pens which left them stained. All I care about is the word; the word that carries ideas and feelings and attempts to make something new from them for someone else, the word that I write and you read and skew and interpret. I won’t pretend that’s not the only thing that has ever mattered to me, but perhaps it should be. I do not give time to the format, the rhythm, the beat, nor the rhyme, no. I love the internet. It’s gets it. Nothing is really anything without someone to share it with, and if a book is on a shelf with no one to read it, then it’s just wasting space. The internet doesn’t judge and contort your work in order for it to be published. It doesn’t even care if you make mistakes. I have the right to change my finished product or kill it if I don’t like it. I talked with this kid recently about an English teacher he once had. This teacher forced his students to write in pen and never fix their mistakes until the end, claiming, “You may not think it, but you meant what you said at one point, and you don’t have the right to change it.” That may be true, but that doesn’t make it any less horribly abhorrent and wrong. The internet gives us the right to think about what we thought about, and because we do this does not make our sentiments impure, only reasonable. Our thoughts can be wrong; our thoughts can be scary; our thoughts always change. I have never listened to anyone who has told me I can’t change and doubt I ever will. I do not adhere to my primal instincts and I do not like the pen, no. I don’t have to sell my words or compromise to your interests and you don’t have to buy them if you don’t want to. It’s a marketplace where everything exists in perfect imbalance and you can have your own piece of the cybernetic American dream (and you don’t even have to claim citizenship). The internet doesn’t care about the past and the future. We fall into the habit of worrying about the past and worrying about the future, but the internet knows what’s important. It chiefly concerns itself with right now, the only thing that is real. And now and now and now and now and now and now and now and never then. The internet has given us the blog, effectively murdering the entire newspaper industry in 20 short years, an endless scroll where we can see and freely respond in the same space and make a reputation of our own. Like this post, it’s unstructured and it’s ugly and it’s a blob of words, but it’s freeing. We’re free. Now sprawl.

It's a Party

2010-07-20T01:45:00.005-04:00

“Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? “No,” says the man in Washington, “it belongs to the poor.” “No,” says the man in the Vatican, “it belongs to God.” “No,” says the man in Russia, “it belongs to everyone.”

As the charitable and compassionate society that we are, we claim that the stuff we own is not to be included in our genetic makeup. And in that sense, we’re right. You can’t look at a man’s face and estimate his worth. A good argument could be made that people would be less afraid if everyone was naked all the time. The appearance, the apparent socioeconomic class would be brought down (or up) to the same playing field. This would be the case everywhere except public schools and malls, where people look pretty much the same already. But we are afraid. Of ourselves—of everyone.

I returned from orientation for college today. The situation presented itself with one that I frankly haven’t seen since grade school. I’m sure this was a similar experience for many others. “You’re all here. Make friends,” they essentially told us. We were expected to make connections with people with developed experiences, world views, traumas, and psyches (well, some of them) and bring them to our level. It’s an impossible task, so we don’t even try to do it. Therefore, every conversation we have is artificial to some degree. It never felt like this when we were kids, but it was.

When I moved to Glenns Valley Elementary School before third grade, I was sad person. I never understand why I had to move. It felt like everyone I was friends with at my old school had died, and everyone I was meeting was their murderer. I had the option of being sad or angry. I remember my first day the principal gave me a tour of the school and introduced me to students. It was lunch and she sat me down at a table with several people who are still my friends today. I had just gotten back from a family vacation to Europe and my Mom told the principal this beforehand. The principal mistakenly construed this, telling my new friends, “This is Brandon. He travels the world.” This immediately sparked their interest in me and spawned many questions. Erik Knapp asked me, “Have you been to Africa?” I replied, “Not yet, but I’ve always wanted to.” Even though I used that as an opportunity to start over and build memories off of that, I lied to myself to make friends. I never felt guilty about that until now. If we’re to think about how we met our best friends, then we’ll see that it’s all built from nothing. “I like your shoes.” “You seem like a cool person.” “I like you.”

Looking around I saw meat. Meat everywhere. Meat wanting to jam itself in bread. It reeked of cheese. At orientation, pretty guys would approach pretty girls that they were sexually attracted to and talk about pretty nothingness. The underdeveloped conversationalists twiddled their thumbs (I talked with several), having more to say than those who would talk and talk and talk. I am not sexually attractive. I didn’t approach girls I was sexually attracted to because it would have felt stupid and cheap so I didn’t. I didn’t make any friends. I will in college, but not like that. I won’t allow myself to undermine what I believe or else I won’t be myself. If I really am myself and not someone else, then maybe I won’t have to lie. I don’t want to, but I’m alone, and I’m afraid.

We say that the man makes the suit, but the moment that a passerby even looks at and claims there even is a suit, there is a growing population who is calling that passerby a communist. I would argue that it’s because our fear precedes our existence. We are born with the fear. I watch Fox News and all I see are the pretty girls in second grade that would call me gay (this simply annoyed me). I am aware that most of these girls either ended up near the end of high school: shit-faced every weekend, tragically aborting a child, abusing drugs to escape. Everyone holds vices, but these are dictated by whom we surround ourselves with and of how afraid we allow ourselves to become. Pretty girls never understand me because I don’t let them. People like those girls, like those writers for Fox News and MSNBC pundits and those who simply can’t stand to live with reality that not doing drugs isn’t an option, are so afraid that it swallows their mind. The words above in the quote are pretty strong coming from a philosophy drowned in fear of the world.

Fear biases, not politics. Reporters tell their truth. This much is true. But what is always overlooked is the intellectualization of recounting what happens. It’s never a fight between swords and pens, right and wrong, or God and Satan. It’s within and not out. All those political arguments and talking points cast into pejorative gladiatorial generalization? They’re about how to spend what money and not much else. If you don’t agree with me than you are a gay child rapist who is known associates with terrorists.

These eyes have seen fear take over and lead lives to greatness and despair. I have been afraid all of my life, and I may take a crack at not.

You’re there and I’m here and I’ve wanted to talk to you again for some time now. My name is George Willard. I've traveled the world and it’s nice to meet you.

What I don’t like about the FIRST Robotics League

2010-07-15T00:00:00.007-04:00

In my 8th grade, freshman and sophomore year, I was a member of Cyber Blue 234, my high school’s award-winning and highly esteemed Robotics team. And for a while, I loved it. Eighth grade, the middle school team travelled down to St. Louis where we placed 4th in a competition of mostly high school teams. It was fast and exciting, and I even got to meet the guy who started the league (the guy who invented the segway and robotic prosthetic arm), Dean Kamen. I especially prided the accomplishment because I drove the robot for many of the rounds and our rank simply felt earned. I celebrated with the team, joined robotics in high school for two more years of enthusiasm for robot obstacle courses, grew annoyed with the type of people involved in it and the excitement built around it, and then I grew up and quit. At the time, I felt that I just grew indifferent to it. What I see now is that the motivation for Robotics derives from socioeconomic bias and negative aspects of capitalism.

For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) is an organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen in order to encourage competition in youth through an unconventional medium, science and technology. Every year, a game is revealed to teams across the world. The teams are given six weeks to build a machine from scrap with the help of mentors. Because these machines cost a significant amount of money to make, teams are encouraged to come up with a business plan in order to entrepreneurially earn sponsors and responsibly appropriate funds to different facets of the team. In order to persuade sponsors to support them (and out of the goodness of their hearts), many teams participate in outreach initiatives in the community in order to further prove their value to the community and humanity. At regional Robotics events, teams are awarded trophies and medals for both their accomplishments on the field, on their business structure, as humanitarians, et cætera. All in all, FIRST teams must become businesses first and sports teams second and humanists third in order to be successful. In order to balance the three, many teams elicit help from professional engineers as mentors to the team, fully creating an enclosed world where the creators build, adapt to problems, compete, thrive, and succeed in the realm of one competition.

So ideally, it’s Atlas Shrugged. I’m not sure if Dean Kamen would be offended by this remark. He is the very product of individualistic achievement and has even criticized the national government for holding back people from reaching greatness at his World Robotics Championship held at the Georgia Dome. Kamen actually lives on a private island off the coast of the New York (which he calls the “Kingdom of North Dumpling”) where he invents and can be great all by himself. Kamen invented a constitution, flag, currency, and national anthem for his island. In my eyes, he wants to be Howard Roark/John Galt/Ayn Rand’s lovechild.

Mind you, in high school, I was in no way whatsoever involved with the making of the robot. I feel this gives me an outside look in. Other people might argue I don’t “get it.” I feel if I remained on the inside of the team “getting it,” I’m sure that I would buy into all of it. Instead, I was in charge of a team responsible for making a website in order to win awards for making a website I MEAN INFORMING THE COMMUNITY OF THE TEAM’S EFFORTS.

This is not the debate between Randian Objectivism and parasitic Collectivism. That’s what those in favor of FIRST would argue I’m doing. FIRST holds very collectivist motives, and indeed does the work of good people. But it’s the “Why?” that my Robotics mentors, and I would argue FIRST, have always refused to answer. Motive is the chief indicator of self worth, and the road to hell, is indeed, paved with good intentions. What has infuriated me most is that Dean Kamen has portrayed his Robotics competition as a paradigm for constructive competition and the human spirit though technology when it’s really just mock capitalism. I'm afraid an experience through FIRST does not necessarily yield good people.

Corporations give millions of dollars and hired professionals to help specific teams and not others; not all teams are built the same, or are even at the same socioeconomic class. This would be fine if FIRST acknowledged this. Alas, here lies the deception. Many of the same teams do well every year are paid thousands of dollars by Rolls Royce, GM, Allison Transitions, Delphi, Motorola, and NASA. Coincidentally enough, these corporations also offer internships to sponsored team members and later become their employers. Teams often complain that mentors from other teams build the robot and the students simply watch (at least Cyber Blue did). Occasionally a poorer school would place well, but often not. It’s not that it’s bad that the Robotics league became monopolized, but it’s absolutely abhorrent that it was founded with the expectation of this bullshit pretense that entrepreneurship is the means of being successful. It’s materialistic and selfish, but you would never derive this from their Gandhian mission statement.

I hope I’ve done a good job of establishing FIRST as a system. It’s the type of system that doesn’t recognize itself as a system, which is the scariest type of system. At one competition, teams were becoming frustrated with this rule called G22, which was the equivalent of a back-court violation. That’s all fine and well, but eventually other teams were exploiting this rule, causing other robots to get G22s, almost to the point that there were several G22s every match. All-in-all, the rule was frustrating and stupid. As people have been doing for hundreds of years, I decided to poke fun at the rule in order to encourage improvement. Thus, I printed off several signs which read “G22” and had members of our team sitting in the stands (for 8 hours a day) to raise them up whenever one was called. I thought it was funny, and at least gave something for people to amuse themselves with. However, I was chewed out by one of the adults on our team for disrespecting the event and jeopardizing the team from winning an award. I may sound like Glenn Beck here, but do we become so afraid of the system that we really say nothing when we think it’s wrong? Only a little bit? This was everyone’s attitude that I encountered towards FIRST. Nobody seemed to voice their disapproval of the hierarchical structure of teams and the required selfish motive and corporate sponsors to achieve. It’s like if Thomas Payne was the commissioner of a sports league. Marx would probably run the fairest sports league — ever.

If they were to remove awards from the competition, something that should ultimately mean nothing, FIRST would be worthless. They know this. It’s manipulation in the highest sense possible, in that the manipulated earnestly believe their efforts are purely accomplished by their own merit and aren’t influenced by money and directed by the pursuit of nothing. It’s really a trend in all professional sports. The Miami Heat is favored 5:2 to WIN the 2011 NBA Finals now that Jebron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh were recruited in multi-million dollar deals. Yet to the wide eyed kid I once was who will be sitting with a bowl of popcorn in his family room watching the NBA finals, none of this will be apparent. For those imaginative children and the future engineers ecstatic to be in FIRST marveling at their collaborative accomplishments, it’ll be magic. Magic doesn’t exist, and FIRST doesn’t want anyone to know that. It’s really just science. That’s it. Sure, they’re the ones who will be changing the world, but they’re sure as hell not the ones writing the checks.

At least I made this when I was a freshman. This made it all worth it.

...and this my sophomore year.

I am John Galt.*

Si Vis Amari Ama

2010-07-07T03:17:00.001-04:00

I am going to reserve this space for sentimentality. I don’t do this often and will understand if you’ll want to shy away. I am going to start and then I’m going to stop and then I’m going to publish it. This’ll probably be pretty raw.

It would be too easy for me to say that I had a sad childhood, because I didn’t. I remember falling and being chased, waking up, sitting in front of my glass door looking outside of my family’s first house. This is my first memory. I remember my mother’s day care service, and never caring to make friends or sleep during nap time. I remember the block across the street’s block parties where they would play baseball in the road. I remember being chased by my neighbor with a real chainsaw while trick or treating and crying. I remember our first computer (which ran Windows 9.1). I remember that our second computer worked much faster. I remember learning how to emulate Nintendo 64 games on Windows and feeling like a genius. I remember consciously stealing a pack of gum at Cub Foods, giving it back when the alarm rang on our way out, and feeling guilty about it to this day. I have no other feelings of guilt about anything else I’ve done. I remember playing sports and enjoying it, despite clearly having little athletic ability and not caring much for sports. I sucked at baseball, where I was given “most improved” because by the end of the season I wasn’t afraid of being hit by a wild pitch. Eventually, I learned to stand and take it. I remember getting this award and going to the Pizza King where they had Nintendo 64s and the toy train that would bring you your drinks by railway. I sucked at football, where I played safety on the caliber of football team that doesn’t really require a safety. I remember my greatest achievement was returning a fumble for a touchdown that was called back as an incomplete pass, and going out for ice cream later to celebrate. I even sucked at soccer, one of the only sports at the youth level that nobody can suck at because nobody even knows what the hell they’re doing, anyway. I remember thinking that I was good at soccer. Even up until high school, I sucked at tennis because I cared enough, but not enough that I cared to get better. But still, I was a captain of my team and took them to eat disgusting fast food after most practices, at some times to later throw it up at the next practice that day. In my free time, I did well in my piano lessons, despite being unable to read music (I memorized it) and hating playing piano that I would sometimes cry while practicing (I stopped after four years). In school, I had it easy. I performed above my peers and got all As. My parents would let me buy one book at the book fair but never a Fruitopia at lunch. I remember moving to a new school and being sad for seemingly the first time, begrudgingly making new friends of whom I still care for. I was placed in a lower math class because I was sad during the placement exams and didn’t perform well. But still, I doubled up on math on my own and eventually caught up, of which I kept up until my junior year when I finished Calculus and decided that I hated math. I couldn’t double up on English and remained behind, of which I went into a deep depression entering middle school because I felt superior but held down. This terrible misfortune that I would never wish on any child is the only reason I have any work ethic, of which I would argue is the only thing that has separated me from my peers in high school. It was then that I learned that I had to work for what I care about because nobody will ever give me what I want. I remember directing my first video with 12 year old kids through a headset on Xbox Live (which to this day was the hardest thing to direct). It was called “Halo 451” and was a sketch comedy piece that wasn’t very funny. My second video, the sequel, “Halo 452,” was horribly titled but had fresher material. I remember Xanga and Myspace and writing and having no idea and learning ideas and making ideas even without having any idea. I remember Myspace bulletins and feeling indifferent to everyone’s vague approach to saying they liked someone. I remember falling in like and love and never falling out of either and remembering what that felt like after it didn’t go anywhere. I remember not wanting to remember and I also remember not wanting to forget. I remember writing letters and throwing them away and wanting to write an awesome suicide note but ending up making portraits with stick people in Microsoft Paint (201, to be exact (192 still existing)). I don’t remember the summer before my freshman year too well. I remember not being afraid of high school when everyone around me was, with some of the same people afraid of everyone when they graduated. I remember Creative Writing Club saving my life. In fact, I remember CWC my freshman year more than my freshman English class (which is supposedly important). I remember helping with (doing) projects for Ms. Sheehan’s freshman English class because I wanted to be in it so badly. I remember working on a website for six hours a day on Robotics and nobody giving a shit (including myself). I remember winning a bunch of awards for the website and everyone suddenly giving a shit (not including myself). I remember my Journalism teacher Mr. Wall talking about what is good and what is not good and what everyone is doing wrong and what I should do to be a good person. I remember listening to him, and I remember the people who didn’t were the same people who were always affirmed of their behavior and always will be. I remember learning from him that you could never be content with yourself. I remember starting to want to be a good person. I remember my Mom firing the superintendant (for reasons that were published years later on the front of The Indianapolis Star that proved my Mom right) and people hating me who I didn’t know for reasons they didn’t completely understand. I remember hating Spanish and cheating to get an A in my third year second semester (my last semester in Spanish) and not feeling bad about this. I remember I pooped in a urinal once. I remember trying to start a Baking Club with Katie and making a Scrabble club with Jamie and being in other clubs. I guess I was in a band, kind of. I remember dating some people, it not feeling the same, and stopping it out of nowhere (probably appearing to be (being) an ass). I remember Andrew killing himself and making a video the next day about making something important, of which I’ve been trying to do since. I remember Thomas dying and everyone really sad at play rehearsal (we all knew him). I remember everyone in school claiming to be his best friend (even though he was mine when I was much younger). I remember not talking to people about Thomas and crying like a baby at his viewing. I remember making a movie, but really watching it make itself and being pleased with it. I remember when everyone starting reading senior year and start writing and using words in the way they thought other people thought was smart, but were really saying nothing and sounding forced. I remember watching people I respect fall and not feeling anything from that. I remember staying at school longer than any teacher or student (with the exception of maybe two people) and not getting a single scholarship or earned accolade at honors night. I remember Mini-O, “planning” Prom, the end of CWC, Senior Issue and English. I’m sure there was other stuff, too.

These memories aren’t terribly successful (especially near the beginning). Then again, not many childhoods are. (And you know those that had successful childhoods and they’re pompous assholes. They all play tennis and go to North Central.) In fact, memories of childhood can seem pretty unsubstantial. Memories of us growing, happily or not, are meaningful. Maybe this is just because most of mine involved food. I feel like there are these huge divides between who I was and who I am and what I will be. I think I turned out better when I was afraid, and I certainly am now. They certainly aren’t the only things I remember. It’s not that they’re things that I care to remember right now, but maybe they’re just the things I care to share.

Until we meet again.

Goddamn Jackrabbit

2010-07-04T05:43:00.005-04:00

It’s five now, and that’s better than four.

I don’t like four in the morning. I don’t enjoy existing when it’s four in the morning. So when my parents informed me that they required a ride to the airport at that hour, I was disappointed to find that all of my siblings would be somewhere else on that day.

Mornings don’t work for me. I prefer the night for the same reason why most people avoid it. People are sharper, more intellectually developed when they’ve been conscious for longer. Most feel fine when they wake up because they can fall into a routine without really thinking about it while time goes on. It’s at night when they drink, fuck, smoke, sleep, or really do anything in their power to sabotage the cognitive development they have undergone in their conscious hours in order to open their channels of awareness. If we were really consciously aware of ourselves all the time, we would probably all be disgusted with rather than in love with ourselves—but we’re not. I don’t like the feeling of waking up because I don’t like starting over, so this is why I stayed up all night and drove my parents to the airport today.

Driving on empty freeways doesn’t feel right. It’s like an empty time square, a sort of vacuum with spurts of unwelcoming fog. It doesn’t sooth the soul knowing you’re living while everyone you know isn’t. They’re unconscious and they’re aware of this and they don’t want to be disturbed. They left the world in just the way they want it and you’re stepping right through it with your muddy boots. These thoughts are with me when an adventurous white-spotted brown jackrabbit decides to bolt out in front of my car which A) I’m not consciously thinking about driving (because it’s four in the morning and I’m not consciously thinking about anything I should be consciously thinking about) and B) I don’t wish to be a bringer of death at this time. But while I’m thinking of this at the time, I’m really not. All I do is say, “Goddamn Jackrabbit,” and luckily miss him.

So I’m rattled and a little shaken up (but you could never tell) and suddenly am in the mood for cottage cheese. I don’t care to intellectualize this. Instead of the route home, I keep going forward to reach Kroger, where I find what I want and get it. The tired cashier asks if I have a Kroger card (I do) and I say that I don’t in hopes that there’s something worth liking about humanity. My $1 gamble pays off, of which I am gracious for (she scanned one for me).

I came home to my dog looking at me with wide eyes. She knows her parents are gone and she doesn’t know what to do, and neither do I. She follows me to my room and rests next to me while I eat a plate of cottage cheese. It tastes milky and sweet and rewarding. I have the house to myself, for now, and I’m going to do something with it. I’m just not sure what I’m doing yet. It’s five now.

I watched all three Twilight movies in one day and wrote about doing that / My suicide note

2010-07-01T03:03:00.002-04:00

Happy 75th blog post!

(Yeah, there are spoilers, but it’s Twilight.)

Hey there, my vampires! Before I embark into Edward’s arms, I want to really get down the purpose of my masochism.

I don’t really know that much about Twilight. I think the first one may have been playing at someone’s house at some point, but I wasn’t really paying attention to it. Anyway, that was before we knew about 2012. Everything is different now. What I do know is that it’s about a girl who nobody can seem to like falls in love with a vampire who’s impossible not to love—and he’s Mormon, or whatever. Oh, and there’s also a Pagan werewolf… and Dakota Fanning.

Because this new “Book of Mormon” (or whatever) has become so popular among a group of tween girls most well read people find to be intellectually immature, it doesn’t surprise me that it has come under public ridicule. I even structured a parody around the effects of reading Twilight (having never read it, of course).

But that end of the social spectrum doesn’t confuse me. No one is ever confused with understanding just one end. The challenge I hope to tackle is to understand why so many find desirable what the rest of us interpret as inherently stupid. This means that I will be intellectualizing what many find to be inherently stupid. Take me away, Edward.

Twilight (2008) – Winner of no awards, from the director of Lords of Dogtown

Bella, the most ambiguous portrait of the teenage girl ever, moves to a new school where every boy wants to have sex with her. This will probably be the whole story. I will move past this. Bella sits with Edward in Biology and he almost CAN’T TAKE IT. Bella doesn’t show a lot of emotion because everything embarrasses her. This probably works well for a book, as I imagine there’s plenty of room to relate and delve into her thoughts. But all we’re presented with in the movie is a girl who bites her lower lip a lot and looks “complicated.”

I’m starting to see why people are Edward haters. People deem him invasive and possessive. I’m sure I’ll revisit this.

Hello, mythology! So the vampires and werewolves have a pact, that I’m SURE won’t be broken over Bella. Slow down, monsters! Get to know the girl and find out if she’s worth it before killing Tybalt! I’m getting ahead of myself. It could turn out different than this (it won’t).

Edward protects Bella, which is important because everyone wants to rape/eat her. Edward then watches Bella eat mushroom ravioli. Bella assumes Edward is bulimic (I assume).

I don’t think that tweens find the two’s interaction necessarily typical, but it’s almost an ideal fantasy. A guy who can understand you by trying? This has officially established itself as escapist entertainment. I’m a little surprised how heavily this relies on science fiction’s formula. It’s as if this is an expanded “Star Trek” episode written by a college girl who was broken up with one time too many.

Anyway, Bella thinks that Eddy is a vampire, has a stupid monologue, and whispers “vampire.” Unnecessary camera angles. Whatever. I’m just gonna look past this.

Edward feels guilty because he wants to drink her blood. Bella doesn’t care, because of course she doesn’t. I don’t think that drinking her blood is so bad, since everyone else in the movie wants to have sex with her.

Alright, we’ve established characters and love interest. Cueeeee conflict! (10 minutes of vampire explaining pass.) While I’m waiting for the conflict, I’ll try to tackle why people don’t like Bella. In a lot of people’s eyes, I bet they think there’s no reason to like Bella. I mean, you’re not really given one, but that’s kind of the point. A lot of this movie requires an unconditional investment (much like Edward’s unconditional love for Bella, or whatever). It just depends on how much you let yourself like an entirely ambiguous character. It’s either enamoring or retarded. All or nothing.

I am a little interested as to why Edward isn’t more emotionally mature, having been in high school for 100 years. For instance, he likes watching her sleep and he’s barking orders when he’s kissing her. But hey! They’re overcoming obstacles just as any relationship would, I guess. Their obstacles are just vampire boners, and ours aren’t.

Vampire baseball scene. Oh, 2008. It seems so long ago. The time certainly seems to have had an influence on this movie. Specifically the Hadron collider, because this movie threatens to create an infinite black hole that will suck everything out of the universe if it doesn’t take a sharp turn very, very quickly. Where is the conflict?

There you are, evil vampires (oxymoron?)! Bella was mean to her Dad and symbolically leaves her friends behind.

There’s a Butch Cassidy like chase scene. Now a fight scene (which is surprisingly not overstaying its welcome). Bella is bit. What? Is she a vampire now? Is someone going to have to make a decision? Called it! Oh, get over yourself, Edward! Love is sacrifice, which apparently vampires know nothing about. Except he eventually does and Bella wakes up to Sarah Clarke smiling over her. Hi, Sarah Clarke!

Now Edward is trying to push her away again. WE GET IT.

Jacob throws a curve ball! LINES WILL BE DRAWN. “I leave you alone for two minutes and the wolves descend.” SUBTLE. To be honest, the Jacob part is the only one I’m really interested in, which I guess is a good thing; because that’s probably all the second movie is about. Bella doesn’t become a vampire. I think that shows some selflessness on Edward’s part. Right? Right? This movie was kind of stupid.

It’s hard to judge this from my perspective. I’m not a girl, not the target age, and not stupid. I do like the Tuck Everlasting aspect to it because I liked Tuck Everlasting growing up (shut it). I don’t think they dwell on that nearly enough as they should. It lingers too much on the whole blood and desire and restraint theme, and tween girls don’t know shit about sex, but this isn’t helping a generation who already glorifies it to the max. But make no mistake, this movie is not as intelligent as I’m making it. It is pure escapist entertainment (unless you’re a young girl, of which this is just “entertainment”). Only a Mormon… Harry Potter is a lot better. I’m interested to see what happens next.
Can’t wait for New Moon!*

Stray thoughts:

Washington, where everything is tinted blue.

Jacob’s long hair.

Jacob – “Oh, I go to school on the reservation.” HAHAHAAHAHH WHAT A LOSER.

“I’m just trying to figure you out. You’re very difficult to read.” They have plenty of books in prison, creep.

The doctor is a vampire? Is everyone a vampire?

People are making a pretty big deal that Bella didn’t get hit by a car.

Stop making faces. Everyone makes the dumbest faces.

These girls are one bite away from being in a Tennessee Williams play. It’s tough to agree with the assessment of women without sounding misogynistic.

“I really just want to go to this book store. Because I’m deep.” – Bella, who is not deep.

Bella has the steadiest hand moving the cursor on her laptop—ever.

Sparkling in the sun is better than most vampires have it. Most of them burn alive.
“Here comes the human!” Oh God.

Over half of the movie has gone by, and we have yet to see the conflict. If this is how it is in the book, I have no clue as to how it managed to be successful.

Edward kisses Bella, he gets a vampire boner and almost CAN’T TAKE IT.

Cars seem unnecessary at this point.

The whole “hunt” part seems stupid. It’s a shame that’s the whole basis of the conflict.

Are vampires always this dedicated and persistent? Aren’t there, like, billions of people on Earth?

If she’s in Arizona now, why is everything still tinted blue?

STOP PLAYING THAT FUCKING PIANO LINE, GODDAMN IT. THAT IS NOT A SOUNDTRACK.

Jacob looks like he’s enrolled at Hogwarts with that tie (not the hippie hairdo).

Radiohead in the credits? Really? That’s rude. I really like that song. Stop that.

New Moon (2009) – Winner of hundreds of MTV Movie Awards, from the director of American Pie (really)

The only association I have with New Moon is the soundtrack, which features a lot of artists that I like. I realize that this was a ploy to make me watch this movie. So it… worked? I don’t really know.

I grilled myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, have a glass of milk and now I’m ready to go! Vampires!

While it’s starting and nothing is happening, I think I’ll tackle why people hate Twilight. Other than the obvious reasons, people always have this fear that the generation growing up with a romantic figure will have no means of competing. This is totally true. Last generation had John Cusack, mine has Harry Potter, and this young one has Edward (or Jacob, whatever). I don’t see this as warping a generation more as I see it creating a divide. If pop culture has no hyperbolic figure to dictate what is good and what is not good, then I think pop culture isn’t doing its job. The job of the audience is, then, to determine what’s bullshit. And while it fears me that more and more girls are looking for the Edward in their life, it doesn’t irk me all that much. My generation has Harry Potter, and I apparently strike a resemblance. Disaster averted. My life is perfect.

Bella is running over the river and through the woods in a dream sequence to grandmother’s house… she goes. Edward emerges and is lookin’ snazzay. But wait! The grandmother is Bella! She’s old! Whuttt? WAKE UP TIME.

Bella is afraid of getting old, which is completely retarded (fitting). Bella also admits to Edward’s pedofilia! Jacob’s hair is still retarded but he’s been working out (TEAM JACOB, LADIES!).

Edward has to visit the Medici family of vampires who rips peoples’ fucking heads off.

Bella bleeds and everyone freaks out. The ordeal (somehow?) makes Bella want to be a vampire. Edward is 50 times more responsible than Bella. Bella and the entire tween population perceive this as Edward being a jerk. Edward basically asks her not to get raped, continuing his responsible streak.

Bella goes soul searching, has a girl moment in the forest and falls asleep. A Native American’s pecks carry Bella to safety. Clever time passing shot with more appropriate music! Good job, director of American Pie!

Bella goes through a screaming phase, like every girl does. Her Dad wants Bella to leave but she, likes, swears to God she’s doing stuff with her friends, and stuff. Edward’s ghost protects Bella, which is sweet. Like, Patrick Swayze in Ghost, sweet. Meanwhile, Bella is begging to get raped. Bella surprisingly doesn’t get raped (thanks to Edward, again).

Bella jumps into rebound mode. Hi, Jacob! Nothing is revealed to the audience as to why Bella likes Jacob other than him “being there for her.” Jacob is clearly the “reckless” choice that Edward was talking about, especially since Bella says, “I know this is kind of reckless, but…” Werewolf drama. Edward shows up in ghost form but instead she gets Jacob to take off his shirt. Jacob goes for more rebounds than Charles Barkley.

I know only a third of the movie has gone by, but is there going to be a conflict in this one at a reasonable time? Classic Twilight!

Bella goes on a double date with Jacob and the nerd (they both want to have sex with her). Bella continues to tease because she’s rebounding and he’s Charles Barkley. Jacob is completely AOK with that. I don’t think I’m being sarcastic. This is all actually happening.

OK. I AM NOT ON TEAM JACOB. RIGHT NOW. “I will never hurt you.” I will never hurt you? OK, now you’re fucking with us. Jacob is the kind of guy who would never apologize. At least Edward maintains a level of self awareness that he recognizes his destructive nature. Jacob just says, “I’m perfect, now kiss me.”

Back in Crazytown where everything is crazy, Jacob has a hot haircut and is confrontation happy. Oh, suddenly Jacob feels guilty! Is everyone in Twilight Catholic?

Suddenly, Sullen Sally sulks back to a flower bed where the bad vampire from the last movie is waiting to kill her (her meaning Bella, sorry). Out comes Jacob! Conflict, and only halfway in this time!

OK. I can see how people see this as Jacob “protecting Bella when Edward abandoned her.” Or, like the movie date, is this another REBOUND. STOP PICKING UP SLOPPY SECONDS, JACOB. You aren’t in love. Put on a damn shirt, wolf-boy.

Speaking of, this “is he or isn’t he” a wolf better not go on for much longer, because we all obviously know. Even I knew that Jacob was a wolf before I saw the first movie.

Oh, I see. Well at least that transformation part looked cool.

This is getting interesting! I wonder what Edward’s doing this whole time? The pacing is a lot better than the first movie.

Alright, so now I’m seeing this is a race relations/Shakespearean love triangle story set in the realm of modern teenage adolescence with vampires. That’s fine.

Now Bella’s going to kill herself so that Edward will come back and turn her into a vampire? That’s some pretty rock solid logic, Bella, meaning your head is full of rocks. Nothing really happened in that scene.

If I was Edward’s ghost, I’d be pretty shitty right now.

The heart to heart the two are having in Jacob’s car feels like it’s reiterating the first half of the movie.

HAHAHAHAHAH I loved that Alice showed up just to call Bella a moron for jumping off a cliff. She just said what we were all thinking, Bella! Alice is the best!

Jacob says something in Native American (I think? It was really quiet) and almost kisses Bella, but Edward calls! Whutt? Jacob tells him off! Edward thinks Bella is dead so he’s going to show himself to humans, effectively killing himself! Saucy!

I’m going to take this time to outline the biggest problem with Twilight. I don’t understand why they approach teenage love in such a dramatic regard. I mean, teenage love is certainly a real thing that is important, but other things are important, like world conflict, self-realization, and taxes. But none of these things exist in Twilight, only teenage love. That’s it.

Flash to Castle Grayskull! More vampire drama! Edward isn’t wearing a shirt and the movie is still surprisingly interesting! The Medici of vampires wants to run tests on Bella and Edward won’t have it. Dakota Fanning uses her scary eyes to run Bella through a test, of which Bella passes (and I can’t comprehend Bella passing a test). The Medici of vampires still chooses to kill Bella, and Edward will have none of that. Slo-mo fight scene.

Now we know Bella is going to be a vampire eventually! The Medici family of vampires lets them go. That was easy. Edward affirms why he left her (what she should have recognized all along).

Now Bella wants to be a vampire, going through a life-changing transformation which would leave her with everlasting life. How should she decide this personal decision? Let’s put it to a vote! The Cullen party passes the motion 5-1 (shove it, Mom)! Mazel tov?

Jacob makes some stupid rules because he wants to protect humans because HE CARES FOR THEM SO MUCH. Jacob almost attacks Edward, but Bella pretends to be the demilitarized zone. Edward is finally on board with the vampire idea, as he should be along with anything this idiot wants, but he asks for three years? And then he’ll marry her.

Well, that doesn’t seem much of a stretch, seeing as he’s giving her everlasting life. Hahah, “’Til death do us part.” Sucks to be Jacob!

But anyway, this movie was a lot better! There were many parts that weren’t horrible! I didn’t mind the stupid mythology; it was kind of an advertisement to all of the teenage love going on. I felt that it somehow managed to be more angsty while introducing better conflict. I think they just upped their game on this one. The werewolf stuff seemed a little tired after a while, but nothing that a trip to Italy didn’t fix! I mean, still pretty bad, but not that bad!

Do I really have to watch another one of these?

Stray thoughts:

First shot: IT’S A MOON. NEW MOON. I GET IT.

Good music that isn’t forced in or a stupid piano line!

Everything isn’t tinted blue!

Edward comments on Romeo and Juliet? TWILIGHT ZONE. GET IT? TWILIGHT.

This Bon Iver and St. Vincent song is so beautiful! That was a pretty short sad montage!

This one is shot much better and feels slightly directed. Take that, director of Lords of Dogtown!

“Quite frankly [all this screaming] scares the hell out of me.” Hahahahahah, Bella’s Dad.

Jacob is 16? Fine.

“You’re sort of beautiful, Jacob. You also sort of look mentally challenged.” This is all beside the point.

“I knew you were dating sparkle face.” (Something I wanted Jacob to say.)

“I guess the wolf’s out of the bag.” Oh God.

Hahahahahahahah, more wolf puns!

“Are you guys hungry?” HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLF? OH MY GOD DID THEY MAKE A DURAN DURAN REFRENCE? HAHAHAHAHA.

A Thom Yorke song! A little less appropriate, but still.

A Grizzly Bear song! I love it!

I’m sorry, but Jacob isn’t that threatening. “Things are going to get very ugly here.” Whatever, Jacob. Your nose is congested.

Michael Sheen is the lead Medici of vampires? That’s actually pretty cool.

Dakota Fanning is scary!

This movie had nothing to do with a moon. At all.

Eclipse (2010) – Future winner of the Oscar for best picture, from the director of Hard Candy and AFI music videos (I have got to be fucking kidding you).

I REALLY don’t know anything about this one. I haven’t even heard any of the songs on the soundtrack (with many artists that I like and several that I hate!). Since I can’t take my laptop to the movie theater, I’m just going to take a notepad and jot down notes, because that seems like the appropriate thing to do while watching the third installment of the Twilight franchise. The hope is for there to be a moment in the middle of the screening where I can look at the twelve year old I am sitting next to and say, “We are one.” AVATAR STYLE. See you later tonight, monsters! I hate this!

So I went to dinner after leaving home, which turned out not to be an inconvenience because the movie was playing on a screen EVERY HOUR. I sat with my notepad ready for punning.

I got to the theater (alone), and sat down in the back with my notepad. Hoping to be isolated, a flock of three 13 year old girls sat next to me, firing me questions like, “Isn’t going somewhere alone hard? I don’t understand how you can go to a movie alone! Why are you going to write about it? Just sit back and enjoy it!” But as much as I hate my life for engaging in such escapist entertainment, I am confident that every girl in the theater despises their life even more. I might be the most content person here, and I am certainly the least excited. Merry fucking Christmas.

The girls kept annoying me during the movie. (These girls were mostly Team Jacob, by the way. Normally this wouldn’t be an important detail.) They would not. Stop. Laughing. When I wrote that last sentence you just read? Laughing. I kept saying to myself, “My life is amazing. Everything is perfect. Don’t punch them. Oh my God, she just asked me if I was gay. I am probably going to jail. My life is great. Breathe.”
Finally! Hi, vampires!

(Harry Potter trailer WIN. Tell Twilight the score.)

Also of note, every guy who is here is with a date and wearing a Tapout shirt. That’s kickboxing, or something, and the sign of douchbaggery (sorry). I imagine that their dates are on Team Jacob. If you’ve seen the movies, you know what I’m talking about. What is happening to me?

When we left our blood-sucking adventurers, we were supposed to be surprised that Edward Cullen, the vampire who will eventually spend eternity with future vampire and bottom lip sucker Bella Swan, wished to become united with his lover in the mortal institute of marriage. Apparently, this was a shocker. It took Bella’s breath away, but then again most things do. Shirtless werewolf and dirty whore Jacob Black, the last descendant of the Sioux tribe, was cast to the Trial of Tears without the accompaniment of his true love* Bella Sacajawea.

So the movie actually starts with this guy who is about to get VAMPIRED. As it turns out, this scene is pretty much unnecessary to the film other than establishing that (yes) there are vampires and (yes) they kill people. Flash to a picture of an ECLIPSE (again the title has nothing to do with what actually happens in the story, so shut up).

Edward and Bella are sitting in a lily field, or something, and Bella just CAN’T MARRY EDWARD. Again, spending eternity together is easy but HOLD UP THERE, MARRIAGE? WHAT YOU TALKIN’ BOUT, EDWARD? (R.I.P.)

Cut to Bella’s Dad reading about a murder in town. Murders are always happening in this town. I haven’t seen the front of their newspaper and it wasn’t covering a murder. Bella’s Dad wants her to spend time with Jacob. I repeat—Bella’s Dad is on Team Jacob. OH COME ON. I LIKED YOU.

Bella tries calling Jacob him when she should’ve just howled. Am I right, guys? I’m sorry.

Once again, Edward is responsible and Bella is not. Vampire drama scene.

Bella gets a quilt. This apparently matters. Vampire chase scene.

Vampire/Native American race relations are at terror threat red, probably because of the Rodney King case. Again, Edward is sweet and Bella is dumb and impulsive. OK, everyone is impulsive in this world, but Edward at least has a 10 second delay.

Jacob talks about imprinting, which is like like-liking, but like, so much more than thahhhht.

Meanwhile, Jacob says he wishes she was dead. What an asshole! Later Bella says to herself, “Edward is right, and I am a moron.”

More vampire drama. I don’t understand why they keep having these scenes. We all know that they are not the point of the movie. Again, Jacob is a douche.
Werewolf drama? Werewolf drama. STOP IT.

No conflict yet? Nope. More origin telling in the third installment of a four part saga? Yep. Classic Twilight!

Ooh, vampire army! That’s actually interesting.

Edward finally plays the experience card over Bella. Later, Jacob tells Bella what she does and doesn’t feel. He honestly spends the whole movie doing this because he is the worst. Then he commits statutory were-rape (just a kiss, really). Bella punches his face and breaks her hand. Jacob tells Bella’s Dad all of this and it is hilarious. “I kissed her and then she punched me in the face and it broke her hand,” or something.

Vampire origin flashback to the Mad Men era. Or the 1930s? I don’t know. This whole part is unnecessary. Vampires are mean. I get it.

Dakota Fanning suddenly becomes the leader of the Medici family of vampires because they probably couldn’t get Michael Sheen to sign on for another vampire movie. Dakota Fanning displays her mind control, and I smell a conflict! Finally! Good job!

We are supposed to believe that Bella Swan graduated from high school. Surrrre. She would fail her parenting class—also basic skills.

I’m done with you, Jacob.

I’m gonna take a break in this impossibly dark theater. These movies don’t really feel like standalone installments of a series. They seem like one, long movie broken up at odd parts. That might be because I’ve just watched them all today, but I think I’m on to something.

The “newborns” are after Bella. I keep imagining the vampires punting actual babies. Everyone is freaking out about the babies, so the vampires train the werewolves for the Triwizard Tournament, or something. One of the 13 year olds tried to take my notepad and I swatted her hand away. She is now giggling, saying, “He touched my hand.” I don’t think you can blog in prison, so I’ll just keep writing.

I think I understand the Edward/Jacob divide. When I look at those on Team Edward, I see people who aren’t afraid of commitment, and those who solve problems with reason and embracing uncertainty. Those on Team Jacob are afraid of commitment, act on impulse and only think in their interests. Jacob is a bro, and I have just iced him.
Everyone is gearing up for a war. Mind you, they wouldn’t have to fight it at all if Bella was a vampire, but nobody seems to care about that.

More vampire mind control. Apparently, Jasper never learned occlumency.

They talk a lot about the fight but the fight doesn’t happen. Nothing ever happens in these movies.

Alice has a sleepover/is hot.

Bella’s dad awkwardly starts the sex talk, forgets to mention anything about vampires. Soon after, Edward and Bella come this close to having sex to Keyboard Cat, I mean Claude Debussy.

(I made that video. Sorry.)

Why is Bella pressuring Edward to have sex? Bella suddenly became a guy, apparently. Edward says he’s abstinent and that’s his “one rule.” Hahaahahahah. Oh, vampires. Having sex before marriage is impure, but ripping people’s heads off is AOK. Again, sex is placed in way too high of a regard in this movie. Everything stupid is glorified (like Bella!).

Edward proves for the millionth time that he’s genuinely sweet. He proposes to Bella and she accepts. I can hear someone crying in the audience. OH, COME ON.
More vampire drama. Jacob continues to be a bro. The big fight continues to not happen.

Tent scene! You are nothing to me, Jacob. “You’ll warm up faster if you feel my huge boner, Bella,” thought Jacob as he warmed up Bella in her arms. That’s how the book read, right?

“I could’ve made her happy,” says the douche.

“I wouldn’t have wished it [vampirism] on anyone, Jacob,” says Edward, who is not a douche.

Jacob hears that Eddie and Belly are engaged and acts like a seven year old who didn’t get what he wanted. Bella is a moron and asks Jacob to kiss her. Jacob is, like, “Durr, OK,” but Jacob still leaves after kissing her, like a bro after a one night stand. Jacob probably likes Asher Roth.

The fight continues to not happen. The fight happens. Heads rip off. Edward finally gets angry. All of a sudden, the whole movie is about Riley. Who’s Riley? Riley dies. Bye, Riley!

Edward pisses off the creepy Ginger.

Bella cuts herself (typical). Creepy Ginger is distracted by Bella’s mudblood and loses her head in the process. Suddenly, I have no idea what conflict could possibly be left in the whole saga. Oh yeah, the Medicis of vampires. Shit. They want to kill everyone, of course.

The vamp/wolf truce is broken, for some reason. Jacob hurts a lot, but I don’t feel bad for him. “I’m exactly right for you, Bella.” Whatever, Jacob. Go play Gamecube.

Bella starts talking about herself, is stupid. “Bella is a strong woman,” says Bella.

Bella’s ring looks dumb. The end.

So Eclipse, despite everything I’ve said, not bad! Really! It’s a lot like the second and shares a lot of its flaws, but it was overall a better show than the first two. Actually entertaining if you want an escapist movie (because we are in a HIGH DEMAND for those!).

Stray Thoughts:

Pregnancy joke! Tasteful!

A Beck song! Cool!

Edward has chest hair, and he will always have chest hair. Team chest hair. Just sayin’.

Do werewolves age? I feel like if I’m asking this question, they didn’t do a good job. I think they do age.

Do werewolves have boobs (when wolves, I mean)?

Imprinting. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHH. THAT IS SO STUPID.

Bella claims to be “Switzerland,” probably understands nothing of global politics (or anything else).

“Doesn’t he have a shirt?” Haha! Good one, Edward!

Werewolves have “magic in their blood.” Good to know.

I know they’re talking, but there’s a Band of Horses song playing, and I like it.
Do vampires vote? Vote or die or not?

I can’t stand Muse. Stop trying to be Queen all the time. You’re garbage.

They made the training scene more campy and fun then the baseball one. Odd.

OH, YOU THINK YOU’RE CUTE ALL OF A SUDDEN BECAUSE YOU’RE AN ANIMAL, DON’T YOU JACOB? I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE SUCH A MANIPULATIVE BITCH!

We get it, Taylor Lautner is strong.

“You can love more than one person at a time.” SPOKEN LIKE A TRUE MORMON.

The choice between Edward and Jacob is going to be Bella’s choice. SHUT IT DOWN. THERE’S NO POINT IN TRYING ANYMORE.

Bella, hyphenating last names is weird.

Edward should make Jacob a vampire! That’d piss him off!

Today was long! I will never have my day back! But in the grand scheme of things, this is Twilight. Do I understand those who love it? Probably not. I know that there is a place for teenage love, and that’s in your pre-teenage years and in Twilight. Love it and leave it, but you’ve got to move past it, go onto bigger things, and realize that the events happening in the world are bigger than Twilight can ever be. Right?

Shit. We’re all vampires, and the world is going to end.

Concerning Pathos

2010-06-23T12:47:00.002-04:00

I should preface this by saying that by no means should anyone ever do or think or rationalize what I'm about to propose, because it is bad.

There's a terribly unpractical way you can gage how unhappy you are. A couple times when driving down a long straight road at night without any cars in sight, I used to close my eyes and count. Despite knowing I would be safe from crashing, the situation would immediately intensify. If, in that moment, you feel enough affinity for the world and life and people, three seconds is all you can do. 1 Mississippi. 2 Mississippi. 3 I want to live. After three seconds, I would begin to doubt if the car was driving straight. I began to fear and shake and question what I was doing. These four seconds are for those with a great indifference to the world, life, and people. 4 Avocado. 5 Stromboli. 6 Iguana cage. 7 I want to live. I can't describe the last three seconds. I only got there one time. I can only say that the whole period of time didn’t make much sense and I’m glad I didn’t hit that pole. It was the worst possible, most intense feeling of anxiety I’ve ever experienced. The numbers only go so high. It will always be agony, and my day will come when I will face it and move on, but that day is not soon. I could never put myself in that position again. If we all did what I did, we’d all eventually die from it, and I want to live.

People have told me that they don't "understand" me, leading me to believe that there are even more people who would claim to not "understand" me but merely haven't informed me.
I don't really understand that. In my eyes, these people either haven't tried very hard or just suck at understanding people. Yeah, yeah, people can't completely understand people, but people can understand people enough so that they can fairly claim that they understand people. I know this because I understand people. Now shut up.

This generalization is how we base our judgments and convictions of the world and its workings. What is also fair to say is that people suck at this process of compensating for another aforementioned process that people suck at (see: racists, over-generalizers, people who claim to know everything, people who HAVE to know everything, ego-centrists, 14 year-old girls, selective listeners, retards of emotion, Sylvia Plaths, texters, libertarians, et. al. assholes). What people do well from the process is probably what seems like what we shouldn't be doing at all, which is what I just did.

What I just did was outline the type of person who I don't want to be, without identifying who I do want to be. That's because it's easier to remember more specific details of undesirable attributes. If you were to try to think of things you would like to be, words like "trust-worthy," "kind," ”empathetic," "creative," "hard-working," and "enthusiastic" may come to mind. Those are all great aspirations, but those are also all words. It's hard to wake up in the morning and think, "I am going to be creative and trust-worthy today." As much as we admire words, we never really exist though them. People would argue that this is because people simply ARE, but I call
bullshit on that. People “aren't.” Our resilience to “aren't” is so much more powerful than our will to “are.” Kudos to thoughtful people, but mad props goes to those full of thoughts. These are those who are doing the work of good people. I'll back up.

Easiest example. Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy were great people. They did the work of good people, despite personal decisions pointing to what the general public would point to their being not only not “great people” but qualities of "bad people." But as history has shown, it's not what you do, but it's what you do. History never makes any sense, and we are all going to be a part of it.

For my entire life, I and everyone I have known have been encouraged to find role models. I could say I have five people who I can look at their worst moment and think, "I love and respect and want to be like this person, even now." You marry your role models (watch out, Jacqui Sheehan). That’s why most people marry their mothers. There are also those who you look at their best moment and think, "I can find no desirable characteristics about your personality and I will never be envious of you." These are who I call our role supermodels, and they deserve to be shown respect for shaping our lives just as much if not more so than our role models. I've always admired the, "love your enemies" aspect of Christianity. That's why those “great people” I mentioned before had sex with supermodels, apparently. Of course, all of my pastors have interpreted this as, "Love your enemies in order to piss them off and confuse them into becoming Christians," but I feel my interpretation has made myself and those around me better people.

(Un?)Fortunately for me, I will never be a great person and a supermodel will never have sex with me.

I can find no discernible reason why every person I meet should not be an experience of which to cognitively and socially grow off of. The more you look really is the more you find, and peace of mind is the single most important objective of life (or at least of the Sims, but there you achieve that by buying things, not introspective growth— this is beside the point).

People usually find peace of mind through love and Marriage. Maybe that’s all there is to it, but I doubt that Jacqui Sheehan would date a student. Sigh. This is going to be so much more difficult than it has to be.

Having “role supermodels” isn't some affirmation to the asshole lifestyle. "Truth will out," as an asshole once said. People know if you’re an asshole, for the most part. There’s no masking asshole. Again, it's about what you do, not what you do. It's not about whether you wake up in the morning and think, "I'm going to do something out of my ordinary routine in order to make someone else's day by sacrificing part of mine," but that you eventually will on your own if you're living the right way. And these people who live the “right” way live each day as a standalone unit of life, abiding to the unshakable and inexorable creed of, "Live today or don't." Because if you aren't "living," then what are you doing? This is what a person who is alive would ask himself-- every single day. It’s about what you are, what you aren’t, and what that makes you.

Keeping in mind, what makes you is always an ongoing process. We’re in such a hurry to get to wherever we’re going that we rarely end up going anywhere. Patience is certainly a virtue reserved for the virtuous. Sometimes I wish I weren’t so patient all the time, but it has its advantages.

Mr. Wall, the other teacher who made my role model list, once straight-up told the newspaper staff a couple years ago what love entailed, and half of them weren't paying attention and probably never will.

He told us that love can only exist when one person makes a clear and conscious effort beyond what anyone would ever expect to treat and interact with another person with kindness; the other person finally catches on and responds with an equally clear and conscious effort; the two find that they've moved far past each other, turn around, and realize they have made themselves room to build a relationship. He actually said it with the words, "You have this person who comes this far and this person who comes this far, and then you have room to make a relationship WORRRK. People don't think about it this way anymore." He made a drawing of it while explaining it to us. Then he scribbled all over the heart. We kept it up on our board for months, at a time where we averaged 14 or more hours of school every day working on the paper. I like to think that we kept it up to remind us that love exists when we feel we feel nothing but frustration.

Many are turned off to love's give-and-take relationship, but I see love’s dilemma as an essential indicator to life’s.

It's about knowing when to give and when to take, about when to know and when to forget and forgive, about feeling and empathizing, about sacrificing much to receive little in return, about the best/worst of times, about trials and tribulations, about misunderstanding and lying, about dying and living and existing without while holding onto the faintest living memory, about door holding and satisfaction, about sex and realizing it's one in a list, about seeing that it's always and never and nothing without promise, about leaving, about the mundane and the monumental, about getting what you want and then not wanting it anymore. At least, this is all that I gathered from this one picture.

Of all that I doubt and question, of this and only this I am completely sure.

I’m still figuring it out, but I want to live and I want to love.
All the same, really.

Thoughts on Toy Story 3

2010-06-21T23:36:00.001-04:00

(Spoiler alert, I guess. It won't be as good if you read this before, so don't.)

Watching Toy Story 3 was a delight. Everything about it was a joy. Beautifully comprised, perfectly paced, written by pros, inexorably fun. K, we agree? Good. Now we can move past that shit.

Watching Toy Story 3 made me realize how much I didn't like Up. Grab a tissue.

Even after finishing Up close to a year ago, I had the oddest feeling after its credits. It wasn't that it wasn't insanely clever or lovingly tender. I realized how beautiful it was, but still I felt nothing.

I cried a little at the beginning of Toy Story 3. I found it infinitely more beautifully tragic than the beginning of Up. This is a credit to Pixar's pathos-knapper (seen in both movies). A lot of movies (Pixar, in particular) rely on a certain emotional attachment from the viewer to the characters in order to have the story really make the viewer experience something. Toy Story 3 had this easy. For people who have watched the original (I hardly remember Toy Story 2 and for this won't refer to it, although I remember it being good?), the fondness felt for the characters was already there. You might have felt what Andy felt. You were supposed to. You had enjoyed the toys a long time ago, but now you're revisiting them just when it's time to say goodbye. People feel this when a grandparent or friend dies or when a love leaves at the wrong time. Or you might feel for the toys. At first, I thought the whole movie was about death, but now I see that it's about so much more than that. It's about leaving. Maybe it's for a lifetime or five minutes, but it's that feeling. Where The Wild Things Are hit where it felt like once at childhood, but Toy Story 3 is about how you might feel almost every day. For displaying this through Andy's mom's home videos, I cried, and of which I feel no remorse for.

Up tried the same shit on me and it didn't work. Haha!

For me, Up was so all or nothing. It was tragic. The characters had flaws that could relate to viewers. It tackled the issue of death. Why didn't I care? I'll tell you why I didn't care. Because I didn't care! To be honest, I was given no reason to like the old guy. No reason. I liked the dead wife better. She was deeper and more interesting. Again, I know, his flaws, whatever. And after the tragic montage where everyone in America was balling their eyes out (apparently), I was wondering how these suckers bought into caring about a character we knew virtually nothing about other than a horrible thing that happened to a person. Gripping.* And since I started off on the wrong foot, the annoying as fuck dogs, the irrelevant and brain dead comedic asides, the constant bringing up of the guy's dead wife (which was sad but seemed manipulative of the filmmakers), and the LITERALLY linear progression of the story did not help me enjoy it. In the end, I felt that Up tried to force emotion down my throat through a nostalgia that I refused to buy into.

But man, did I buy into Toy Story 3. It's because they did it without words, without seemingly any tactics or manipulative devices. It was almost as if I got there on my own. This obviously isn't true, as millions of people had to have "got there on their own," but at least the tragedy felt real. And in the end, all the toys can do is say goodbye after one last play and look ahead. Such is life. Sigh. Clouds. Sniff. (It really was beautiful, though.)

OH, AND DO WE WANT TO TALK ABOUT THAT PART WHERE ALL OF THE TOYS ACCEPT THE GRIP OF DEATH? WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?

I mean, another beautiful part in a flawless movie, but the protagonists accepted death in a children's movie. Heavy. And then there's an immediate comic relief just when you are holding back tears and resolving an existential battle waging against the human psyche and Mephistopheles.

It really was great. Have I mentioned that? Up is also well done (Haha! See what I did there?). Of course, while there is no way I could possibly emulate the feeling of watching Toy Story 3 for the first time, I'm not sure if I would want to. Like the end of the movie (and of Lost, for that matter), it's about remembering, letting go, and moving on.

Sniff.

(P.S. - I wasn't that wild about Spanish-speaking Buzz. I know, kids movie.)

Leaving Danger Mountain

2010-06-19T02:49:00.000-04:00

I re-cut my movie today and posted it online. Well, "re-cutting" is a dramatic way of putting it. I love the full thing. I just posted my favorite scenes online for people to watch who maybe didn't buy it. Yet somehow I feel as though I'm finally putting this big project of mine to rest, also a part of my life. It's an odd feeling when you realize that the primary goal of the spirit club you were a part of is changing the world. You've been good to me, Danger Mountain. I will remember you fondly.

Return to Danger Mountain was personal. Hopefully personal for a lot of people. Saying I'll never make anything personal again is like saying I'll never love again.

I finished "writing" my short film for this summer. It'll be less than 10 minutes and I'm going to film the entire thing in my closet. I'm trying to broaden my horizons, of course. I'll have to buy some equipment online before I can start, though.

I'm ready to fall in love again.
Maybe a love all the same but still undeniably new.

This one is my favorite scene in the movie (but I wrote it so of course it is). It's a love letter to rapists, at least my Dad thinks so. He was particularly disturbed by this scene, asking, "What? They're not all that... yes they are! Who wrote that?"

Happy birthday, Mom. Good night.

An Intellectualization of Something That Was Meant To Be Inherently Stupid

2010-06-06T14:09:00.000-04:00

Batman was arrested today. Or maybe it was yesterday.

I know this because the news has come to me as the headline story on my AP news feed. This is how the story read--

As part of an LAPD crackdown on people who dress up as superheroes and cinematic icons, then troll Hollywood’s Walk of Fame while illegally charging the errant tourist money for a photo, KNBC managed to capture the immortal sight of a shamed, arrested Batman as he was hustled into a squad car.

Upon reading that story I knew that the national attention it was given was utterly trite, unnecessary, and entirely important for our culture. I mean, it's so stupid. I understand that attention is paid to what isn't important. A fair argument could be made that television is a coping device. Well, pretty much everything else, too. I'm completely AOK with that because I see more and more that people blend the two. I would like nothing more than to over-intellectualize Jersey Shore. The juxtaposition of doing that is just hilarious to me. I've found that people notice the comedy in that, too. Because of this, I've recognized that the world isn't inherently stupid, but that we (close to) equally enjoy things that are both thought provoking and Ke$ha.

I thought people simply liked fighting robot movies because they thought they were fucking art. This has rekindled my hope in humanity.

But I know, I know. People are still pretty stupid. There are those who live on one end of the scale, entirely satisfied in not actively pursuing what people who claim to be actively pursuing important things are pursuing. To make it easy, they stereotype. We do it, too. Often the terms "idiots" and "intellectuals" are thrown around, but I don't feel the two are mutually exclusive. For the rest of this essay, I'll call the "idiots" "Wookies" and the "intellectuals" "Ewoks."

I am an Ewok. Fully, bonefide, pretentious, wannabe, greedy Ewok. At times I feel disgusted and indifferent to the Wookies. I make generalizations about them and damn their way of life as the lesser path. But I do like pretending. I listen to Ke$ha and watch Jersey Shore and fighting robot movies and respect the nuclear family. I don't take as much joy from the experience as Wookies do (occasionally I will), but I like to stay involved and at least understand what the fusses are about. I used to think I had this all under control, but now I know I do.

If one is to look at the world, to see everything that happens and everything that is paid attention to, it could be deduced that everything is horrible and there is no hope. Sometimes there isn't.* We are absolutely helpless in regards to the BP oil spill. There's nothing we can do. Nobody can end the war in the Gaza Strip.

At least not without enough people paying attention. Attention, attention must be paid.

More and more Ewoks are becoming plunderers of attention; absurdism is the new television. It makes everything tolerable, or at least copable. The promise of absudism remains that its efforts intend to progress society in the right direction, even though that direction is nowhere.

I've always realized that, but then again I have never been able to find someone who hasn't claimed that the notion of absurdism isn't bullshit. Because, come on. The Stranger is bullshit. The Fountainhead is bullshit. Books like that craft characters within the confines of bullshit, hyperbolic philosophy and ideals, never admitting that people can not be made up of solely philosophy or ideals. They present duality, so that's what the Wookies and the Ewoks make so. We craft real issues around this pejorative narrative so that little can be done in the matter. We start classifying people as “Wookies” and “Ewoks” in order to cope with the fact that we don’t understand each other and that we really are alone. We're so unsatisfied with the status quo because it always sucks. We don't want reality. We want Howard Rourke and Albert Camus and Charizard and Ke$ha and Batman.

We're all trying to be Jedis. That's not all that bad. Jedis are awesome.

Thus, it remains the role of the absurdists and the comedians to keep us all sane/sometimes be wrong. I've never really tried my hand at that before making my vlog, and I didn't even know I was trying that then. I just thought I was making fun of things I didn't like. I think now I feel I was maybe trying to talk to a person I don't understand. I'm still an Ewok. The world is just as it was and oil is still gushing out of a pipe somewhere.

But for whatever reason, I can't help but uncontrollably laugh when I watch Brodyquest. One would suspect that it's a Wookie's vice. Another would say it’s overlong and stupid. Part of me knows that it is, another thinks it’s the most important thing I’ve ever seen, and part of me wants to punch that other part in the face.

Now I'm actually going to take that break I was talking about.

I'M ON A VLOGGING FRENZY

2010-06-04T23:50:00.000-04:00

I'm gonna take a break from vlogging, blogging, and the internet altogether.
Gonna read, write, and spend some time away from home.
How long do I have to figure everything out, again?

Edit: I edited the "Shit I Like" section to your right. It seems about right, now.

Wellenburg Dr.

2010-06-04T00:49:00.000-04:00

-“I want to talk to you about something that happened a while ago, okay?”
-“Okay.”
-“And I seriously mean this. You can’t laugh.”
-“Fine.”
-“So I was driving home and I felt like shit. No, no. I felt like shit and I was driving home.”
-“Got it.”
-“Yeah, and it’s late, you see. It’s, like, 2 in the morning. So there are no cars on the road. Keep in mind, the shit.”
-“Let’s not harp on the shit.”
-“So I’m tired and, and annoyed and tired. So I took my hands off the wheel, placed them on my lap, closed my eyes and let my inhibitions take over, or whatever.”
-“Jesus! Man, what the fuck-“
-“I know, I know. But I figured that if I lived through it then my life actually had a meaning and that everything would be OK.”
(…)
-“…well what happened?”
-“Oh yeah, I hit a pole. Miracle I didn’t die.”

Hey Blaggers! Check out my Vlag!

2010-05-31T02:17:00.000-04:00

Like sand in the hourglass, this has been one of the more frustrating days of my life.
Glad this exists, though. Now I can cherish this day forever.

I just sent another letter to Xbox's support website. This is how it reads:

"I emailed this service yesterday and received no help, only an automated response containing information I already knew. I called Xbox's service and was put on hold for 40 minutes before I decided to hang up. Realizing the lack of regard for customer service, I spent 8 hours attempting to fix my Xbox myself. It is now ruined. I made this video for you to watch.

I would appreciate it if you could send me an Xbox for free. You can have my old one. This is a desperate plea from a broken man."

My letter/video combo didn't get me on Fox News when I gave my speech attempting to ban heterosexual marriage, but we'll see how this pans out. I would really like to be in contact with people again. Today was terribly lonely because of all of this. Good night.

"Let the blind lead those who can see but cannot feel."

2010-05-29T23:31:00.001-04:00

That is all.

"Welcome back to the land of the living."

2010-05-29T01:37:00.000-04:00

I do. What do I want to do? I guess I'll tell you what I want to do.

I'd very much like to create. I like how that makes me feel. Sounds pretty stupid, but I feel I could argue that I would be very unhappy if I followed a career where I contributed nothing to the world or myself. I get that feeling when I create, even if it's entirely self-serving. Stories are good and well, but I'd be lying if I said I really "cared" about them. What I have always been attached to is those stories which have achieved the difficult blend of mixing entertainment (because I like to be entertained) with something that's intellectually demanding. Because movies show no sign of becoming less big and spectacular and stupid, I doubt I could easily find a way to slip in and do what I want to do (and I desperately want to do). But when I think about it, despite the resurgence of the musical and variety contest shows, television really is getting better. I'd be quick to point at Lost or House, and the effect they will have on the future. They say that dramas won't get as much funding as a show like Lost, but I gotta call bullshit on that. If people like fighting robot movies, then the people making them will get more money to have robots fight each other. And if not, people find a way. As negative as I feel about humanity, I do believe in people. I'm not sure what I would do if I didn't. I don't feel as though I am in a position to complain about how everything sucks. 90 people died in India a little bit ago because a train derailed. I was sitting on a couch drinking mango Juicy Juice. My life isn't bad. Again, I'm not a good person and I don't do good work. But for now, I'll just try to do the work of good people. Si vi amari ama, if I were a Latin Bright Eyes. Let's not shit ourselves.

This idea came into my head last night and I wrote a draft for a story, and I've never done that before. I'll leave it on a shelf for a long time and maybe revisit it in a couple years (like Avatar!). It's a love story that isn't stupid.

I'm pretty tired. You can tell? You can tell. When did we become so tired? I've never seen the big dipper until tonight. It's really mesmerizing. Oh yeah, I'm going to have a pen pal. I'm sure we'll be talking less like this, Internet and random fake Chinese accounts who randomly comment my blog posts. Sweet dreams, all you fake people.

Hey, it's a song not by The National! Although I did actually buy High Violet recently and it is good. Reading good books. Eating good food. Talking with good people. Good night.

I started writing my thing about aliens.

2010-05-21T14:02:00.000-04:00

Getting ideas together. Making something good while trying not to make it more than it is.

"The guy in your apartment building obsessed with his new new-media job. The trivia hound at the bar who's so sure Hanna-Barbera cartoons are art. The guy in film school who used to be a jock who made fun of film schools. The guy you slept with last night who hasn't called. The guy who wants you back. The guy who looks depressed and lonely as he reads novels you think you've heard of on the 2 train. The guy who says he loves you and means it; the guy who says he loves you and might not. The guy who hates himself but loves his biker rights. The guy who feels so alienated in a big city, finds the bright lights blinding and the noise deafening, but will never leave because he's too afraid to live anywhere else."

"This Is Happening is about the way the things you love can ruin your life. It's about getting what you want and not wanting it anymore."

Iago, Iago, where did you go?

2010-05-17T23:21:00.001-04:00

I'm having a hard time deciding whether or not I believe if there is any karmic justice in the world or if the end of The Lovely Bones is complete and utter bullshit. We are encouraged to do good. That's good. But what if we weren't? If what isn't right natural, then why do we go against nature? What's the point of empathy if it's optional for everybody? Why do good deeds to combat terrible crimes?

I think we learn to hate before we can learn to love. I know what I hate and I think I know what I love. It's just the rest that's missing. Cetera desunt. I'd like to be good, but for now I'll just try to do the work of good people.

I'm starting to think the question doesn't even matter, and that I'll be completely fine being weak so long as I'm loved. (Not needy, there's a difference.) Hopefully infinity is God, because that's what I'm going with.

My project this summer is going to be a short film about aliens.

Heartland Film Festival

2010-05-16T12:08:00.000-04:00

I submitted a 10 minute cut of my 42 minute movie to this new high school competition for Heartland Film Festival. I was able to write a forward to it, but I doubt I'll win anything just because they'll view it as an incoherent pretentious mess. I still wanted them to see it.

Bye Bye When The Morning Comes

2010-05-06T23:49:00.000-04:00

If I were to look at the world for what it is-- meaning everything that happens in it by everyone that makes it up, then I would see that all is miserable and that there is no God.

But the thing is that I don't.

If you ever try to get outlogic'd by an asshole asking, "When did you become such a fucking humanist?" then the right answer might be, "When I started acting human."

This is the last CWC video I'll make. People have been telling me how sad they find it, but it's just beautiful to me. I can't express how grateful I am to have been a part of it all. In all likelihood, I'd probably be dead without CWC. Instead, it made me live. Funny how that works out.

Things That Are Good Make Things That Are Bad Worse

2010-05-02T23:12:00.000-04:00

I've an antic disposition.

Don't really want to go to college. Don't see the point.
The really only difference between now and all other times are the things that'll be lost have jumped on the sentimental scale. No no. Don't wanna go. Have a few months to make some make sense.

The Adventures of Dusky Panther

2010-04-12T23:08:00.008-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about love lately. Not really the enamoring, cutesy aspect of it, but of what the fuck it even means. So for my English class where we were assigned to write an inductive paper, I tried to write as personally as I could. I really haven't written personally since I went through a pretty bad mental breakdown a couple years back, so I really wanted to. I'm pleased with it. I also adapted it into a cartoon which I put in Return to Danger Mountain.

Also, this was the first time I used the name Dusky Panther.

"The Adventures of Dusky Panther"
by Brandon Walsh

Note: Due to the legal stipulations of the local and federal judicial systems, all of the following should be examined and interpreted as hearsay.

El Pájaro del Dios. Or, if we are to speak in its own tongue, Rab Tanri Kus.

My father served jury duty last month. There were two waves of people in the jury pool to be interviewed and selected to serve in trial. Of the ten in the first wave, five jurors were selected. In the second wave of twelve, four jurors were selected. My father was one of the four selected from the second wave. The details of the case concerned a woman who confessed to a nurse that after an argument with her boyfriend, he beat her several times around the head, strangled her, causing damage to her eyesight, and forced her to remain in a closet for three days as she slowly neared death. Reportedly, the strangulation was caused not by the man’s hands but by the gun he forcibly shoved down her throat. The woman rose again on the third day, the door opened, and she was admitted to a hospital where she confessed all this to an attending nurse. Subsequent legal action was taken. The jury was apparently ready to hang this man. With the facts already against him, he could look forward to six to twenty years in prison at best. Guaranteed. The first witness called to the stand was this woman.

Meanwhile in the Kalahari Desert, a panther named Dusky rides solo. In fact, the majestic beast avoids all contact from the tempting pleasures of a materialistic world. Dusky Panther keeps it real. Every day a meerkat would peek his head and watch Dusky run by in sun. It certainly seemed odd that the meerkat in question dearly wished to embrace such an untamed beast. He would envision endless days free of lusting for the beast. “Oh, if Dusky would come out to play. Come out to play!” he’d say. But Dusky gave no time of day. The meerkat should have taken this for a sign, but he was engrossed in what he could not understand. He only saw the playful beast, his golden dancer; for he did not feel for it. It was as if his eyes had seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. God help him.

It’s 1974. President Richard Nixon is wondering what happened and probably wondering even more who the hell set off the smoking gun. At first, anger sets in. He feverously makes phone calls to powerful men for a couple hours, chats with his chief of staff, and then is left alone to think in his office. The president flashes back to when he was a child. What he felt at this moment was the kind of awkward feeling he experienced when he had finished an argument with his mother. Nobody speaks, probably because the hurtful words have already been said. The child wishes to refute his statements and just mouth, “I’m sorry,” but can’t. He holds to his words but can’t understand why. His inner turmoil cruelly transforms into self-loathing. As they say, “What had intended to be a homicide turned into a successful suicide.” The child cries in his bed. The President resigns.

It’s 2009. Tyler Scanlan is balled up in the middle of a tennis court and writhing in pain. Across the void is a rich white kid adjusting his racket strings, doing whatever he can to ignore Tyler. The home crowd will never feel anything but hatred toward this person. This is the nature of high school sports. It is nearing the end of a long third set with the rich kid edging his opponent by four games when Tyler suddenly loses motor function of his arms, legs, and torso. A combination of rigorous activity, dehydration, hyperflexion, and hypoxia has initiated muscle contraction. The coaches come to his aid, a break is taken, Tyler swallows antacid tablets, downs a jug of water, stretches most of his muscles, and returns to the court to not only win the match but not give up another game. One would suspect that this was done for a reason.

The meerkat grows frustrated. Dusky will not come out to play, at least not with him. “How selfish, Dusky! Why, I wouldn’t even want to play with someone who stinks!” he’d think. “But oh, where to go from here?” The answer became clear. A cage- a cage! The perfect stage to engage his rage! “But then,” he thought, “what would come from that?” Greatly saddened, he went to sleep that night weeping, asking, “How can a panther play in a cage?”

The defense attorney asked the woman, “Can you identify so and so?” Yes. “And can you tell us who that is?”

“My man.”

And when asked how her injuries came about, she claimed she was hurt in a bar fight.

There’s a certain aura of finality when something dies. A malignant round of applause for the end! If we are to “follow the money,” we’ll find a man who has done everything right for his whole life and has received nothing in return, another who has done everything wrong and is happiest, a small Mexican baby who has died in the arms of his mother because not enough blood is able to reach his lungs, a future alcoholic downing his first drink, a pensive teenager who drives a bullet in his head because someone else did something stupid, a President who finally realizes that nothing has changed, a tennis player who has won his mind but destroyed his body, and a woman who has given up to the might of “her man.” Finally, we have a meerkat disillusioned with unrequited love for a panther. He is aware that the pain in his heart will be unturned and now doesn’t know what to do.

These misfortunes happen all the time. Dusky Panther is quickly becoming one of those things. But no, this is too important to be “one of those things.” This, please, cannot be that.

Life dies at all stages. What we feel to be most dear is dying all the time.
The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the Rab Tanri Kus, was pronounced as extinct in 1944. This was accepted in the bird watching community until in 2004, when two separate sightings of the bird were found in two remote areas in the southeastern region of the United States. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is now commonly referred to as “The Lord God Bird.”

Death isn’t the end. It’s a word.

I been busy.

2010-03-17T15:10:00.000-04:00

5 new CWC videos are playing this week.

Things I learned from my IU visit

2010-03-12T20:36:00.000-05:00

1. The Communication and Culture Department seems like a lovely department with cool courses run by a well articulated faculty and administrators who are immensely helpful.

2. The Hutton Honors College is headed by foolish cowards who don't understand how to handle customers or properly tell the truth.

3. The Hutton Honors College is something that I would never lower my standards to be a part of.

4. I should probably apply for housing because I doubt I'll get much money to Emerson College.

5. I am 100% OK with that.

6. I really want to room with someone who is tidy. Can't I just room with a woman?

7. My couch won't be able to fit in a dorm. Bummer. I really like this couch.

8. Libraries are cool. Like, 50 more libraries than I would ever need is also cool.

9. Walking makes me really tired.

So we made a short film yesterday.

2010-03-07T13:56:00.000-05:00

For this English project we're to present a lecture on a short story we picked. We chose John Steinbeck's, "Flight," which is concerning a boy who accidentally kills a man, becomes "a man," and is set on a horrendous journey only to die in an avalanche. It's pretty much about false titles and futility. You can read it here if you want.
I didn't really want to adapt it exactly, so instead we crafted what we're calling a "thematic adaptation." I like to think that some of the girls in our class will have nightmares after watching it. It's pretty much an exercise of objective correlative and symbolism, which I've never really done entirely. What happens isn't all that important. I like it for what it is.

One of the last shots is entirely lifted from Daft Punk's "Electroma." I'll admit that.

This is going to get old.

2010-03-03T19:53:00.000-05:00

Fast. I figured I'd beat the rush.

Now, I love deaf people (really-- big turn on).
So you can imagine that I was ecstatic when learning that YouTube had a new "automatic subtitle" generator. As you can imagine, it is not without flaw. Hilarious, hilarious flaw.

Lots of laffs!

Edit: OH, IT LOOKS LIKE I CAN READ THE FUTURE, VIDEOGUM.

Bitte Orca, Orca Bitte.

2010-02-25T17:22:00.000-05:00

Did you hear about this? This is so crazy.

So get this. My grandparents were there, at that last show of the day.
Apparently they were having some problems with the whale before the show so my grandparents left before it happened. They actually met the woman before the show and talked to her a bit. My Grandma told me on the phone that the lady seemed quite nice.

I'm rather glad they didn't have to see that.

Well, whatever makes you happy.

2010-02-25T00:20:00.000-05:00

I promised, I swore to the highest of heavens (my Facebook status) that I would not Chatroulette.

Well, I Chatrouletted. If you don't know, it's a website where you are paired with a random webcam. It's like speed dating and that horrible MTV show Next thrown on the interwebs.

I came in with the preconceived notion that it would be mostly awkward men looking for boobs who would skip me immediately. I thought that it would simply be a portal for lame people to meet other lame people and have lame conversations about nothing. But hey, who am I to judge that? Everyone should have something in this world that makes them happy. OH WAIT UNLESS THAT THING IS WANKING OFF TO COMPLETE STRANGERS ON CHATROULETTE. I honestly am telling the truth when I say that the first penis shocked me. There it was, present on my screen, there not long enough for me to comprehend it but enough to burn into my memory forever. I nexted him to another handful of weiner. I no longer Chatroulette.

Is there no courtesy? No disclaimer that the guy could hold up and say, "I'm about to show my dick. Leave if you want." I feel like there should be a place where people can Chatroulette with their weiners on their weinercams. Maybe that's just Chatroulette.

I considered posting in front of my cam a picture of Justin Bieber just so when a veiney sausage popped up I could print screen the image and put the word "PEDOFILE" in large type.

Just, forget it.

"Let the work of change begin."

2010-02-18T23:42:00.000-05:00

This is a response to the post below this one.

To those eyes that have seen history, to those who unwillingly carry the duties of yesterday and today and tomorrow and forever more, to who have shunned from liberal conspiracy and romantic drivel, to mothers who have lost their sons to war and daughters to glowing screens, to those who countdown to something different, to the few glad to be where they are, to the inhabitants of a broken world and those being mended, to those who don’t get it and those who want to, to lovers, rapists, abusers, and drug users, to the forgiven and the forgetful, to the investors and the gamblers, to those who are holding on and those who’ve let go, to the working class and the workless, to the drones and the liars, to the hearth and the salamander, to everyone around here and everyone we don’t know yet, to the defeated, to the cows and the poor, to those who want for more and those who don’t know what they want, to the just, to those who ask for too much and those who have yet to ask for anything, to the subjects, to the helpful and the helpless, to the collectors, to the spectators, to all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, to the child that cries when innocence dies, to those whose attention spans beyond election cycles, to thinkers who provoke, to the provoking and the provoked, to the idols and the pathetic, to the women who bear children and the children who know not what they are, to those who can not read this, to the door holders, to the history buffs, to the self-important and the humble, to the children who wish to share with their parents, to those who can’t sleep, can’t write, can’t eat, can’t talk to people, to the absurdists who think that you’re the weird one, to the clown and the poet, to those who say nothing and those who won’t shut up (yet have nothing to say), to the responsible, to the meaningful, to the feminists and the chauvinists, to the unqualified and the overrated, to the anti-social, to those who still take baths, to the old and the new, to the dead and the living, to those who don’t know what to do anymore, to the lawyers, employers, creators, and destroyers, and to the evangelicals who damn all of these sinners –

You are not all that different.

Things That Happened

2010-02-18T17:28:00.000-05:00

My Dad served jury duty last month. There were two what I guess you would call waves of people in the jury pool to be interviewed and selected. Of the 10 in the first wave, five jurors were selected. In the second wave of 12, four jurors were selected. My Dad was one of the four selected from the second wave. The details of the case concerned a woman who confessed to a nurse that after an argument with her boyfriend, he beat her several times around the head, strangled her, causing damage to her eyesight, and forcing her to remain in a closet for three days. Reportedly the strangulation was caused not by the man’s hands, but by the gun he forcibly shoved down her throat. The jury was apparently ready to hang this man. With the facts already against him, he was looking forward to six to 20 years in prison.The first witness called to the stand was this woman. The defense attorney asked, “Can you identify so and so?” Yes. “And can you tell us who that is?”

My man.

And when asked how her injuries came about, she claimed she was hurt in a bar fight.

Upon hearing this story, I knew immediately that this would be forgotten, like everything of this nature is.

Stare decisis.

Closer, closer

2010-01-28T22:48:00.000-05:00

My movie type thing is almost done. I would say I'm a month away.

Edit: I can't stop watching this. I feel like this song is everything I love about music.

Edit Edit: This is pretty, too.

Some Shit

2010-01-20T00:36:00.000-05:00

So one miserable night I sat down and wrote some things that were on my mind. I eventually fell asleep while writing it and actually have no memory of working on it at all. I read it the next morning and shoved it into a cluttered file folder. That was a while ago. I don’t think I’ll use any of this for anything, because it’s mostly shit. I didn't even try to make it take any form. It's a blob. It's also pretty long. Feel free to take a whiff, if you’d like.

I have a couple theories of how this story is going to end. There is the distinct possibility that I will learn some higher truth in some abstract form and this will somehow change my ways.
Sure- whatever. That seems pretty lazy.
Of course, nothing could happen to me; and in this not knowing of some higher truth, you'll learn.
That seems kind of boring.
I could explicitly learn something, change, be happy, and change everyone around me- forever and ever after.
I see that as sort of stupid.
…and then there's always tragedy. I am fully aware that tragedy does happen. I'll still learn something, but it'll be too late. At least you'll learn something. I won’t.
...or I'll just get the girl. That would be nice.
However, I've already broken enough rules for this to be a proper story. My diatribe has proven far too self-aware to be taken seriously. I should give up now. It is not worth it if I'm going to be that disrespectful of the rules. However incoherent or misleading, something is still happening, right? I'm sure something is happening. Something's got to be happening.
Wait. What am I talking about? It is so worth it. What makes whatever I’m saying not worth it? I am saying exactly what would be said in the proper form of writing, except not in the proper form of writing. Does this mean I'm not saying what needs to be said? Hell no, it doesn't. I have decided that these rules are pointless.
But what about what happens? Should we disbar every minute and building instance, event, happening, misunderstanding, tragic flaw, comedic break and emotional aside from any higher meaning that is seemingly reserved for the end?

It really only matters how it ends.

I asked my beloved to quench my fear of the darkness.
And then she kicked me in the face.
I fear the dark no longer.

For far too long have I sat in my own stupid thought wishing for things to be different. Share a thought with some person. Not to be so alone. And for too long have I thought why what I believe to be beautiful is. In 2005 I sat on a train going down to Georgia without any wish to live. I listened to three songs on loop. All of these songs included clinging lines which directed my miserable mode of thought. It sucks when something tells you that love is like two blindfolded people running towards each other. You run far beyond the person and they run past you. When you open your eyes and turn around, you can see them there and walk up to them and finally say, "Glad you can make it." That's never happened to me. My legs ache from running so far, only to turn around and see that nothing's there. It wears me out. Then running becomes the sort of thing that you don't really want to do. Isn't the whole goal of running that you won't have to be running any more? Why not just cut out the middle man? I chose not to because I know now that beauty is alive. A thought is a weapon against the human psyche, and these thoughts of what we want, what we think we want, what we need, who we love, everything we've felt, everything we've done, everything we deserve, and everything we have feared war with every artifice of hope, human kindness and servitude that has been strained, leaving us wet noodles out to dry in the hot rays. We have lost the need for enemies. The world is not too much with us. We are too much with us. But it is for this very reason that we are not meant to be alone. The act of existing is imperative in that it develops a sense of beauty and wonderment that can only be seen in the human quality of our betters. "...still it's the memory of our betters that is keeping us on our feet." There is a standing room only for joy. It is the active process which does not acknowledge our temporary conditions and yearns for unrequited love that saves our souls. It's the loyalty to our well being that we escape our well being in order to better our well being. For the being well in the sense of wellness that we see in those well enough for us to consider "well off" we shove in a well, well aware that while the well wails, we wane in comparison to our beloved. It pains when the sentiment returns opposite yet unequal. It pains and it does not relinquish. Please go away. How I would serve for you to go away. We reject the pain. Comfort is a vice of the forgetful, for those who desire to escape the burden of thought. It can be done, and indeed is quite effortless, but the burden does not escape. Such feeling merely asphyxiates. Last dying breath. Writ in water. Pleasant smile. Whisked in batter. Lovely skin. As above, so far, so below, we are. It is from such a moment that the power of learning from mistake may take hold. For to learn! Oh, that can be a learning experience, to learn! Learn to destroy! Learn to create! Because what else can beauty do? The constant attempts to create beauty have passed unmet, unrequited, in despair, in longing, distanced, at the worst time in the most inopportune instances that the prospect of something truly beautiful seem so far away. We destroy for this reason. We clear the field, emptying space for what we will build next. And we will destroy that, too. And we will build once more and we will destroy. I fear the dark no longer because I know how to embrace it. I can be comfortable in it, setting me better off than those who do not "bother themselves with such matters." To these people I merely note that adolescence is a vengeful bitch who will have her way with you. She will make you destroy more than you will ever want to. It may never end, but we will construct, none-the-less. The war to win our thought can be won, and we are not alone. Beauty is alive. It lives. It lives. It lives. seFfjsEIt lives.e It lives. It livesse. Iveslijjjsae Irsijse ainiside eberything i iesjlkj but can not sat in the worksa that can't even look at the screen the fucking nlinkinsf screen soija en whti love
is the hopewf tahat thes ounf of the felelinfs of what has passed and what has happpened and eberutjing that will later come to pass will be beautiful.

I am truly sorry if you read that.

In other news, I have been binging on Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is a damn good novel and this woman is crazy.

Peter Bjorn and John have written many of my favorite songs.

Later.

So I haven't posted in a while.

2010-01-13T21:21:00.000-05:00

...THAT'S BECAUSE I DIDN'T MAKE A RESOLUTION TO BLOG MORE.

I'M MIXING SHIT UP.

HELLO, VLOGOSPHERE.

Happy New Year, Y'alls.

2009-12-31T19:34:00.000-05:00

Happy new year!
Happy 1000 blog views (or whatever)!
Happy 20 minutes of Return To Danger Mountain finished!
Happy every Creative Writing Club video that I'll ever write written!

To the upcoming decade: Chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug like a chu-chu train.

"I'm not going to step on your head just to make you feel better!"
-Carol from Where The Wild Things Are

The Incoherency Series

2009-12-19T16:33:00.000-05:00

I was thinking about Avatar.

What we have here is a film which attempts to blend a world made with crazy crazy visual technology with storytelling. I haven't seen it yet, but this insane attempt has got me wondering.

Every time a film like this rolls around, the director totes that he has created "a world." Whether literal or not, almost all films frame a story in a "world." For James Cameron, he's taking it rather literally. Most other filmmakers create a world in the perspective of a distinct character which is a part of our world that we don't think about so often. So if every story exists in a realm of a distinctive "world," then it relies on the filmmaker to craft the world in a way that seamlessly intertwines the story with their vision. Wes Anderson does this rather beautifully. Even though The Royal Tenenbaums mostly took place in one house, the house became an integral part of the story. Everything was so rich and detailed that it was overwhelming. Not that Avatar won't be, but I can't help but feel that the world on the screen is nothing like the world James Cameron imagined. Avatar is, in all likelihood, the manifestation of hundreds of artists and designers who all read the script and came to a consensus with Cameron. This may not put the film at fault. The script might just be crafted so that it doesn't really matter how it looks, but just that it looks amazing.

Hopefully the script isn't that awful.

Then again, not everything has to be personal. Gus Van Sant filmed a movie about a school shooting without any apparent emotional attachment to the subject matter (he even kinda seemed like an asshole in interviews). Paul Thomas Anderson crafted a beautiful rise to fall story in the frame of the 70s porn industry. Whatever works.

But I'm finding that I take much more to images carefully thought out, and even help me comprehend the intent. Where The Wild Things Are certainly was close, but I feel that Fantastic Mr. Fox totally took the cake for this year, and I think I understand why.

Wes Anderson incorporates a style in every image and line he creates. There aren't really any ugly shots. The visual department of Fantastic Mr. Fox incorporated his style. What resulted was basically a Wes Anderson movie made by people who watch Wes Anderson movies. If Wes Anderson movies are a homage to François Truffaut, then Fantastic Mr. Fox is a homage to Wes Anderson. This works a lot more than it sounds. Many of the shots in the film replicate shots from his other films- exactly.

With the exclusion of Up In The Air, Up, An Education, The Lovely Bones, Cold Souls, Jennifer's Body (shut up), Terminator Salvation, The Road, A Serious Man, Avatar (all of which I still want to see), here are my favorite films of this year.

1. Fantastic Mr. Fox
2. Star Trek
3. Where The Wild Things Are
4. District 9
5. Black Dynamite
6. Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Nigga
7. Moon
8. The Hurt Locker
9. The Hangover
10. 500 Days of Summer

Films I didn't really like:

Inglourious Basterds - It's true that I don't like Quentin Tarantino. He's got a style, but I feel his movies spend a lot of time to accomplish nothing and are liked chiefly by assholes because they think they're smart. That's just from my experience. As far as this one goes, I could write a paper on why I didn't like it. However, I feel that The New Yorker voices my feelings best. I enjoyed watching it. It's certainly not "bad." Hell, I thought I was going to like it after the opening scene. As it progressed to the basterds' (pointless) excursions, I saw that the film brings out the assholes in people in a grossly inappropriate setting.

Synecdoche, New York - I just really have a hard time saying that I liked it. Am I supposed to like it? I'm so confuuuuuuused! Well, I also watched it after surgery and half morphine'd up. I'll give it another watch, certainly.

Gran Torino - I watched this in a theater. The experience went like this: Clint Eastwood says something racist; the audience laughs like crazy; we're supposed to think he overcomes his racism; he makes another racist joke; the racist audience laughs. The dialogue is so wonk, even worse than Revenge of The Sith's wonk.

Watchmen - I read Watchmen the night before I saw it and loved it. I read the whole thing in one night, but it was the film that overwhelmed me. I thought it would be much more succinct, not to mention the style seemed a little off. Perhaps a little too clean. I'm not gonna be one who says it couldn't have been made into a movie, but it really could have been done better.

The Ugly Truth - It's so good. It's so good.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop - Yeah, I saw it.

Wolverine - Adamantium bullets.

Oh yeah, and I'm filming four videos on Wednesday, hopefully. One of them is part one of what I call "The Incoherency Series." That's why this blog is titled that.

Some things about music in 2009.

2009-12-14T20:15:00.001-05:00

I lied. This isn't about movies in 2009. I'm pretty much done with school, but I still have a little more time to procrastinate something.

Albums I thought were great:

Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
This record is just so warm to me.

Mew - No More Stories Are Told Today...

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
This one had to grow on me - big time. But once I got there, I understood what most of the fuss was about.

Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

St. Vincent - Actor

Mos Def - The Ecstatic
Because I really enjoy white black music.

Peter, Bjorn and John - Living Thing
I love Writer's Block, and this is nothing like it. Shoot, "The Feeling" isn't on YouTube. Look it up. It's great.

M. Ward - Hold Time

Bon Iver - Blood Bank EP

Delorean - Ayrton Senna EP
So awesome.

Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career

Dark Was The Night

Passion Pit - Manners
I think I enjoy very different parts of this than most people. For instance, I think "Sleepyhead" is a pretty bad song.

Tanya Morgan - Brooklynati
Again- black music for white people.

Albums I thought were OK:

Neko Case - Middle Cyclone

The Antlers - Hospice

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!
Hysteric is still one of the best songs of the year.

The Fiery Furnaces - I'm Going Away

The Raveonettes - In and Out Of Control
Fuzz fuzz fuzz fuzz.

Sufjan Stevens - The BQE

Wilco - Wilco the Album
The songs just seem pretty empty, but I can listen to it.

Andrew Bird - Noble Beast
Better than OK- but as a whole...

Albums I hate:

Discovery
Fuck Discovery. They're fucking garbage.

Sun O))) - Monoliths and Dimensions
I have listened to a great deal of metal, but I don't listen to metal. Even so, this disgusts me. I will take an eternity of Megadeath over a year of this.

Jarvis Cocker - Further Complications
Eh.

Conor Oberst - Outer South
I liked him more when he didn't want to live. I also got a speeding ticket listening to this album.

The Flaming Lips - Embryonic
Never been a fan. :(

Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms

The Mars Volta - Octahedron

Tegan and Sara - Sainthood

Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport

DM Stith - Heavy Ghost
Creeps me the fuck out. He looks like Peter Petigrew.

Sunset Rubdown - Dragonslayer

...and I really like this.

This happened.

2009-12-12T20:02:00.000-05:00

Wa Pa Pwa. During Mock Congress, with multiple teachers watching, I got an affidavit passed to move my bill to the top of the agenda right before we finished our last day. Here is my speech to ban heterosexual marriage.

I destroyed the ACT today. Somebody's (probably) gonna get some money for IU (probably).

My next post will be my top films from this year with some essays to boot. I'll do it after this week when school is over.

There has been stress.

2009-11-23T23:06:00.001-05:00

...and quite a bit, at that. I need some release, but I do not want to spend much time. I spent a couple hours writing a 1200 word dinger about the persuasive aspects of Keith Olbermann's special comment on the passing of prop 8, and it has made me utterly depressed and caused me to lose a great deal of respect for humanity. Maybe it's just because I've been writing a lot lately, and I'm not used to that. Last night I had this idea for a short story while I was in bed. I knew I would never write it unless I did right then, at one o' clock on a school night, so I did. That felt alright, but this is all just so paining. I am so tired and sick of oh so many things. My, oh my. This break can't come soon enough. It feels hard to be alive.

While I'm optimistic, here's something I wrote for a college application about an event in my life when I became acquainted with humanity. Ohz the humanity. Some things are worded kinda silly, but yeah.

A robot taught me how to be a human.
I have deduced in the first eighteen years of my existence that I have a consistent tendency to expend ridiculous amounts of effort to complete a product; even when I am entirely indifferent to the outcome. I entered high school with the hopes of doing everything, asininely chasing eternal happiness. No club, organization, society, team, play, band, honors class, or office was free from my reach.
I have had the experiences of pouring over the esoteric work of archaic men late into the night, forgetting who I was while acting on a stage, and the unfortunately vivid memory of vomiting profusely during summer tennis practices. I waged existential warfare with myself in my spare time; I eventually concluded that I was not truly accomplishing, that I was not truly being human.
My least favorite activity in school was working on the website team for the robotics team. For six weeks in winter, every member was required to return to school, into the busy, cacophonous shop room, and work at least four hours a night, six days a week. For some on the robotics team, this room was a second home for them. I did not share such enthusiasm. I sat on an old couch, laptop at my knees, and typed code. It was a mind-numbing practice: organize files, fix mistakes, become one of the most award-winning FIRST Robotics website in the country, code, look out to watch the robot being made, manage profiles, win more awards, update links, write CSS, code, watch them put the chains on the robot, code, the wheels, code. There was no escape.
Each year we would take a bus down to Atlanta for the national robotics championship. This left me time to battle with myself, listen to dreadfully depressing Elliott Smith songs, code further, and occasionally watch a film. It was one of the busses which sported a DVD player with screens over the seats. This group of engineers and mathematicians found films like The Guardian, Shrek 2, and Sweet Home Alabama to be the most original films made; they watched them ad nauseum. Like many times in robotics, I tuned out.
One time when they popped in the dreadfully silly Hitch, I watched The Royal Tenenbaums on my iPod. The cartoonish, weird, intricate yet seriously depressed film reflected a vision of humanity that I thought was exclusive to my pubescent psyche. At one point in the film, the hero of the story releases a falcon on a rooftop, setting a creature free that he had owned and cherished for so long. I looked up and saw the robot, ready to be used in absurd robot competition, prepared to be tainted by the ramming and force of other robots. I felt like it didn’t want to be here, on this bus, half-listening to Hitch, anymore than I did. And while I did not abscond with my robotic friend, I soon quit the robotics team and joined my school’s Creative Writing Club. I gained a role model who led me into writing and direct videos, solidifying my love for film. It was there that I found a purpose for my existence and started acting human.

Just, fuck. Winter be kind.

The next post here will be different than this.

I'm gonna let you in on a secret.

2009-11-07T23:15:00.000-05:00

I've been playing a game over the past day.

You know how to ruin your favorite movies? Or at least solidify your hatred for one?

Look up foreign movie posters.

I got rid of them because the space they took annoyed me. Sorry.

"Hope you enjoy the future. -1973"

2009-11-06T21:59:00.000-05:00

"Motherfucking cocksucker motherfucking shit fucker what am I doing? What am I doing? I don't know what I'm doing. I'm doing the best that I can. I know that's all I can ask of myself. Is that good enough? Is my work doing any good? Is anybody paying attention? Is it hopeless to try and change things? The African guy is a sign, right? Because if he isn't, than nothing in this world makes any sense to me. I'm fucked! Maybe I should quit. Don't quit! Maybe I should just fucking quit. Don't fucking quit! I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to fucking do anymore! Fucker! Fuck shit!"

God, I feel like shit and I'm really not in the mood to talk about anything. I guess it's rude to shit an empty post on here.

So I was driving away from school and feeling like shit while in a desperate need of a nice shit when I saw that a local Blockbuster was shutting down and everything was on sale. The following two hours consisted of me blindly shifting what had to have been thousands of titles, coming this close to purchasing Grumpier Old Men, the sequel to Grumpy Old Men (which was the next logical step after creating a film like Grumpy Old Men,) Glitter, Crossroads, Bratz, The Fox and The Hound TWO (which is the next logical step after making something that should be left alone in it's own, beautiful form). But in all seriousness, I walked away with Wristcutters and Casino Royale, which I always feel morbidly enlightened after watching the former and cooler after watching the latter. Oh yeah, and they had Inland Empire for $4. I almost got that, but was afraid of watching it and... I don't know. That trailer freaked me the fuck out. And it's three fucking hours long. Maybe I thought it would leave me so afraid that I would have to move it to some other room because I feared sleeping around it. I mean, look at this.

Doesn't that scare the shit out of you? Yeah, it does. Apparently it's just a part of a dream sequence, and that's all the face does, but still. Can not live with that ugly.

This part of the movie scares me, too.

Shit, I feel like shit. Shit.

I didn't feel better after leaving, and I don't feel better after writing about it.

Oh, and last week I saw Sufjan Stevens screen The BQE with my favorite people to be around. I have decided that the film is what it is, and nothing more or less. A string quartet named Osso played some songs from Sufjan's Enjoy Your Rabbit, and this was wonderful.

Listening to Conor Oberst is a grim sign, but he doesn't make a lot of songs under the Bright Eyes name I grew up with and love.

I'm gonna watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie on VHS, Pizza Hut ads and all.

Ya know, this one.

P.S.

Just Some Videos

2009-10-31T12:42:00.000-04:00

So I don't have much time to say anything because I'm very quite busy, but believe me when I say there are. Things are in desperate need of slowing down.

Here are some videos I showed this past week.

And I'm in my school play on November 12th and 14th at 7! It'll probably be my last show, and it's not a horribly written one.

Some Things Not Really True Concerning Death

2009-10-17T18:08:00.000-04:00

Television has always instructed me to, "Live like you are dying." It has never occurred to me until rather recently that this goes the other way, too. Nobody wants to die old. Nobody wants to lose a long battle against cancer. Nobody even wants to be flung out of a car nowadays. That's just boring. Commonplace. Typical. Someone who used to be my best friend died in a boring manner just last year, and I have been thinking of this since. I asked some friends of mine of what would be their "Super Sweet Death." I find that many deathventures include a certain Humpty Dumpty complex. That is, of the prospect of never being put back together again, be it by a rocket launcher to the face or less grotesque dismemberment (though most were explosive). I myself have never thought deeply of the day of my death, nor have I bothered to spend time to wonder how it would happen. I do have fears of death, however. I have gone through high school without anyone "understanding" me, in particular, and my greatest fear is going through the rest of my life like this.
But if my death was chosen, then it would be the most baller shit ever. I'll give a crack at it. Here's how my final day would go. I would have this jar of peanuts. And all I'm doing the whole day is just monching down on these peanuts, so much that the taste of them makes me vomit profusely. Except the vomit will be peanut butter, I will direct my mouth to nearby slices of bread, and I make sandwiches out of it. I gather together everyone who has ever wronged me in a room where I will provide each with a sandwich. After a minute of eating, I inform the group that they ingested my vomit, and this results in further vomit. Real vomit, this time. The room fills up in it and I drown. My wrongdoers are fine, but they forever fear the taste of peanut butter. My ghost returns to my corpse and says, "I have left quite a mess."

Where the Wild Things Are was precious.

This is a teaser for a film I am making.

This song is lovely (just press HQ to make it play).
Does personally connecting with a song on the New Moon soundtrack make me like Edward Cullen, in any way? Either way, here's Bon Iver and St. Vincent's "Roslyn."

P.S.

P.P.S

I deleted my myspace. I think I want to be a good person.

I miss you, Thomas.

An Eluardian Instance, or Whatever

2009-09-27T11:14:00.000-04:00

Yesterday the tennis team traversed to a far-away school to bout in some obscure, meaningless tournament we take part in every year. We ended up placing third out of four teams, receiving no recognition or physical acknowledgment of even going there. For the most part, the air was chilled, making everything beautiful miserable. I tried as much as I could to disconnect myself from the drab, slipping buds into my ears leading to a shuffled up iPod. This was eleven hours of my day. On the twelfth hour, we rode home. I began worrying about time- all the stressful things that have yet to be done, whether I will ever see my friends past high school and what I will do with my life. Like in all of my other moments of desperation, I fell asleep. When I woke up, "Indiana" by Cymbals Eat Guitars played in my buds, the bus was passing by a corn field where a Peregrine Falcon was flying low over the corn. I think of myself as a logical person and takes this for what this is, but it still invoked an emotion, and not many things do. If anything, it was a sign that everything I'm going to do may be worth it and everything that's going to happen will happen.

Winesburg, Ohio may be the best book I've ever read.

Oh, and I'm applying to colleges. My number one choice is this school called Emerson College in Boston. So far, it's the only school that requires a short piece of work, so I worked this up today and hope that they like it.

Top Ten Albums of This Decade from Someone Who's Only Been Listening to Music for a Decade and is Unaware How to Properly Capitilize Titles

2009-09-23T18:17:00.001-04:00

I stress the album part of it (sorry, Kid A).

Sufjan Stevens – Come on, Feel the Illinoise!

Radiohead – In Rainbows

Arcade Fire – Funeral

Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning

Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

French Kicks - Swimming

Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha

LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver

The National – Boxer

Here are some close calls that I felt were worth mentioning.

Dashboard Confessional - The Swiss Army Romance
Peter Bjorn and John – Writer’s Block
Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
TV on the Radio – Return to Cookie Mountain
St. Vincent - Actor
Phoenix - United
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Sufjan Stevens – Seven Swans
Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
Jens Lekman – Night Falls Over Kortedala
Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

I'm gonna take a nap.

A Quick Post

2009-09-15T19:34:00.000-04:00

My sleep schedule has run town, been sleeping around, and isn't coming back any time soon.

I'm going to talk about tennis again because it's the only thing going on in my life.

Today we beat Pike in a close 3-2 match. Our one singles player, Tyler Scanlan, lost a tough match. For every match, for whatever reason, someone makes cookies for the players. I usually don't feel well enough to eat them but today I wanted to eat them with some dinner (Easy Mac and cottage cheeeeeze). Tyler, meanwhile, is talking to some people who I think are college scouts or whatever.

And here I walk by, carrying five cookies and looking like a moron.

I've decided to put a song at the end of my movie.

Spoiler alert. Edward Cullen dies at the end.

This is not the song.

Rise above. Rise above.

2009-09-03T20:46:00.001-04:00

I haven't posted on here in nearly a month. Most nights I'll slump home around seven, look up some blogs or listen to music, and then roll around to nursing my school work. It's a nice little routine, but I don't think I'll keep it up much longer.

Today at my tennis match Michael Kohlmann and I took on these two kids, one tall and skinny and the other bigger. We took an early lead and eventually took the match. The two weren't really that into it, and were mildly getting themselves down. It was pretty subtle though. I mean, I've played kids who scream at me for no apparent reason. On one changeover, their coach called them over and began yelling at the tall skinny kid, asking, "If you're going to have that attitude, then you can just get off the court!" The kid didn't even say a word the whole match. My mom called out to the coach yelling at the boy, causing him to turn around and squabble with her. Later, my mom was speaking with the big kid's mom. She said something to the effect of, "Oh, he should have been kicked off the team a while ago. He never performs and always has a bad attitude and cusses." I remembered that this team's coach had a big problem with cussing, especially saying the Lord's name in vain. It is true that I am religious in nature, but things like this are why I am so cynical in respect to the culture.

Here's the good part.

She capped it off with, "I mean, his dad died not too long ago and that was a big messy deal. He's just been sulking on the court. It's a shame coach is having my boy play with him." The coach's dad, who is their assistant coach, later approached my mom to tell her off. The two coaches and this kid's mother would later congregate and gossip about my mom and her Perry Township school board seat. The coach called our home not to long ago to argue further. A grown-ass adult.

I frankly couldn't give a shit about the reasoning for why the coach was angry. He would probably object to my language, but I can sincerely say that there is a special, freezing circle in Hell for a fucker like that who has such little regard for human life.

This reminds me of another story concerning my dignified language choice. I was working on homework on the floor in my room when a spider came crawling across the room. It startled me, opting me to grab a nearby shoe and smash the beast several times, yelling with each strike, "BOOM, MOTHER FUCKER! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!" That was pretty bad, but I feel as though saying horrible words probably speaks less about my character than having no sincerity for a kid whose dad died.

Those cunt muscles.

More and more I'm feeling as though high school is a synthetic environment that I am above.

I fucking hate spiders.

I do, however, love Keyboard Cats. I made this for you.

Creative Writing Club is broadcasting its 50th video tomorrow. We have a long way to go before our work is done. I'm sporadically working on my movie Return to Danger Mountain. It's very exciting and rewarding. I deeply hope that it isn't awful.

Here's our 50th video. Cheers.

Here's where we started. I get sentimental when I watch some of these.

Mew's new album is great- and an actual album.

This jingle's been on my mind, as well.

Sleep tight.

Much Ado About Twilight

2009-08-15T18:19:00.000-04:00

Something silly happened today.

I was driving home from tennis practice, taking a shortcut through a neighborhood. I turned a corner to see what was possibly 30 geese standing in the middle of the street. I came to a stop and sat for awhile. After about 20 seconds I started laughing and figured I would just stick around.

This was until Tyler Scanlan, a fellow teammate, sped right by me, honking wildly and making the creatures run away, wings flapping. This, too, made me laugh.

Oh yeah, school started. I doubt that I will be able to keep my head above water, but that's not really bad. I think people try too much to exist outside of the cacophonous.

That's probably a moral code for all things metal.

Best get climbing.

Oh, and I'll upload something on Vimeo soon.

Edit: Told you I'd do it.

The Adventures of Dusky Panther

To My Hypothetical Children

Favorite Moments of 2011

My Favorite Albums of 2011

Of Children of Paradise and Freedom

I Watched Breaking Dawn Pt. 1. - Tell Everyone I Love Them And That I Regret Nothing

I Love You Thomas Imel

what it's like here

About Living Without (and not wanting to) ----- An Opinion

Filling Books With Color

Greatest Summer Hits Vol. 2 (also tweets)

to be forwarded to the neighborhood association

Watership Down Prologue

ghost.

Snorlax Like Me

Art That Makes Me Cry Like A Reserved Bitch

What Your Tastes In Pop Culture Say About Your Personality

Axioms of Shadow Theory

My Perfect Game of Call of Duty

Songs About Sounds Stuff Makes

An Essay For Anyone Who Watches Television

Ultimate John Boehner Fan Video

being there and other letters

10 Recent Movies That Were More Impressive As Trailers

To the hypothetical graduating high school class of 2014,

Andy Rooney Interviews President Obama

Summer of Somnambulism

So... Yeah...

Greatest Summer Hits

A Review of (part of) "Return to Danger Mountain"

What We're Doing

Ceteris Paribus

Why Playing “Picross 3D” Makes You A Better Person

What Treasure Mountain Means to Me

Sprawl II

It's a Party

What I don’t like about the FIRST Robotics League

Si Vis Amari Ama

Goddamn Jackrabbit

I watched all three Twilight movies in one day and wrote about doing that / My suicide note

Concerning Pathos

Thoughts on Toy Story 3

Leaving Danger Mountain

An Intellectualization of Something That Was Meant To Be Inherently Stupid

I'M ON A VLOGGING FRENZY

Wellenburg Dr.

Hey Blaggers! Check out my Vlag!

"Let the blind lead those who can see but cannot feel."

"Welcome back to the land of the living."

I started writing my thing about aliens.

Iago, Iago, where did you go?

Heartland Film Festival

Bye Bye When The Morning Comes

Things That Are Good Make Things That Are Bad Worse

The Adventures of Dusky Panther

I been busy.

Things I learned from my IU visit

So we made a short film yesterday.

This is going to get old.

Bitte Orca, Orca Bitte.

Well, whatever makes you happy.

"Let the work of change begin."

Things That Happened

Closer, closer

Some Shit

So I haven't posted in a while.

Happy New Year, Y'alls.

The Incoherency Series

Some things about music in 2009.

This happened.

Top Videogames of This Decade

There has been stress.

I'm gonna let you in on a secret.

"Hope you enjoy the future. -1973"

Just Some Videos

Some Things Not Really True Concerning Death

An Eluardian Instance, or Whatever

Top Ten Albums of This Decade from Someone Who's Only Been Listening to Music for a Decade and is Unaware How to Properly Capitilize Titles

A Quick Post

Rise above. Rise above.