“A person of good intelligence and of sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality - and it’s not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing - it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavoured dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street. ” - George Carlin
Milk
I recently watched the movie Guys and Dolls with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. The original broadway production was written sometime in the 40’s and premiered onstage in 1950. Hollywood was still oblivious to the building civil rights movement, and the traditional roles for men and women had not been challenged. Men drink liquor and gamble, women are homemakers and pretty things to look at. Milk has an interesting role in this movie.
A hardened mobster called Big Jule is seen at a bar drinking a milk shake. Another character remarks, “Do not think that because Big Jule drinks milk, he is a softie.” Big Jule proceeds to threaten Sinatra’s character with the gun in his coat. Sinatra’s character then asks to have a sip of the milk. Later, Brando’s character is ordering drinks in a bar in Havana, Cuba for his religious female companion, who thinks drinking alcohol is sinful. She demands milk. He orders “Dulce de Leche”, which he translates as “Sweet Milk” for her. Brando explains that they have to put some Bacardi in the milk to keep it from going sour in the evening hours.
Drinking milk appears to be for women, children, and men who are weak and submissive. It’s interesting that they use milk-drinking as a trait of significance. I, for one, am somewhat of a dairy addict. I drink enormous amounts of milk compared to the majority of modern American adults. Sometimes I drink nearly a quart of milk at dinnertime. I also eat a lot of cheese and yogurt. Does this say anything about me today, in the year 2009?
One thing that I’ve considered is the technology of milk. These days, milk from hundreds of cows is homogenized, pasteurized, packaged and shipped across the country at close to freezing temperatures. How much energy goes into this milk, from the feeding of the cows to the running of my refrigerator? How many megawatts of electricity does it take to enjoy a milkshake? Or a buttered grilled cheese sandwich? In the future, when we ration our energy usage in a reactionary post-apocalyptic attempt to be “green”, dairy consumption outside of farms and cooking purposes could be outlawed. I’m just doing my part to exploit the current system and consume as much dairy as possible before this harrowed day arrives.
Quotes of the day
“If you cannot find happiness along the way, you will not find it at the end of the road.” - Thomas Paine
“I’m sick of following my dreams. I’m just going to ask them where they’re going and hook up with them later.” - Mitch Hedberg
It’s the end of the (blog) world as we know it
Earlier this week, Nick Currie (aka Momus) announced that he will be ending his weblog in February of 2010. Now, I usually think of Nick as being right on the bleeding edge of a good bit of digital culture, and I’m wondering now if his announcement isn’t the culmination of a a kind of sea change in the blogging world - indeed, blogging as a major creative activity seems to be winding down these days.
I truly think that Click Opera is the best blog on the internet. To me it exemplifies all the amazing things a great blog should aspire to be: excellent daily content that covers both a wide range of personal and public topics related to the author’s interests mixed with interesting graphic design, photography, and video, as well as a kind of digital hub to find other excellent related sites of interest, as well as a digital space for readers to comment and engage the author in discussion about his work (whew!). Really, there aren’t many places on the internet where you can get that kind of specific depth and engaging breadth all in one place. However, Momus does give some good reasons for leaving blogging behind:
Because the LiveJournal platform I’m using is being wound down (it has a skeleton staff of 8 right now, I’m told). Because there’s a kind of tumbleweed feel to my Friends List these days, as people migrate to Twitter (and “ship” their inconsequential tweets back to the old haunt as if to place a big “Nothing to see here folks!” sign over both locations) or Facebook. Because I don’t feel that blogging either can or should be as big a part of the next decade as it has been of this one. Because I wonder what would happen if I put the energy I pour daily into this blog (and I’ve established a great working routine!) into something like a book, or something else. Because I think it’s good to force yourself to change, just for the sake of change. Because I don’t want to be a fifty year old man whose life revolves around a blog.
I’m most sympathetic to his points about the rise of Twitter and Facebook, and also that blogging won’t be “as big a part of the next decade as it has been of this one.” I think that’s probably true. Which is not to say that I think blogging will go away. It most definitely won’t, but I do think most blogs will continue to evolve, which to me means either they will cease or step their game up to a whole different level.
What do I mean by that? People who’ve been blogging for some time are now familiar with the medium. They know what can be done well and what fairs poorly. Blogging has now or is rapidly becoming much less of a fad than it was three years ago. I think that the folks who stick around will probably only become better writers and their control of the medium will only continue to get better. People like Momus have paved the way and have shown what a great blog can and should be. Now, I think their will be other dedicated writers who will blaze down that same trail and continue to push the medium into new territory. But the pressing question for me is, “How/Will I be able to find them?”
I’ve had a couple of conversations recently with friends about how all the awesome stuff I check out on the internet these days is at least two to three years old. I don’t feel like there is a a lot of great new content out there, even though the web itself has come along way in those intervening years.
When I look at the number of my friends who blog, the number has dropped from a high of about 12 in around 2004 to roughly 3 or 4 who keep their sites updated on at least a monthly basis. However, nearly everyone I know including some people’s grandparents are on Facebook or Twitter.
My google reader is littered with basically dead RSS feeds that once piped in some really good content from some really talented writers. How many great livejournals did I once read that now no longer exist?
Blogging has in some ways become more about celebrity: think dooce’s book deals and jason kottke being spotlighted in the New York Times. Some of The Great Blogs have become almost corporate in their scope of influence - they exert a kind of “normalizing” effect on the smaller blogs, either killing them off or reigning them in.
But the blog world will continue to turn. There are many bright spots: academic blogging is better than it’s ever been. Specialized music blogs continue to thrive. And then there are perhaps my favorites, the undead blogs - those unwieldy sites that have been killed by their authors only to rise again with perhaps a new color scheme or different url to feast on the collective intellect once more.
Alas, even my own humble home here on the web continues on in a kind of undead, zombie state. My original pact with Dave (and indeed the original scope of this particular incarnation of dcomeaux.com) was to document our college years. Document we did, and as soon as I was out of school, writing here took on a strange, sometimes unsettling new dimension. After all, our collegiate journeys began together but ended rather separately, so I wasn’t surprised that there was a bit of strangeness in the intervening time. But for me, there is some sense that this blog did actually die (in the sense that it’s original purpose was fulfilled) about two years ago, and yet somehow it carries on.
At first I found all this a bit unsettling, but now I find it somehow reassuring and a little amusing - it’s odd to be writing a zombie version of yourself!
Perhaps what we really need is a re-think of why we are blogging and what we are blogging for. I think Momus’ decision to move on signals (at least for me) a transition point in the still very early development of the blogging medium. Why blog in 2010? I’m looking forward to coming up with some very good answers to that challenge in the coming months.
Dream Spaces
Interior design has been occupying my thoughts lately. Up until last year, I had never really given a second thought to how my home surroundings looked. I guess living in temporary apartment housing will do that to you. However, with my recent move into a nice old house, I’ve started thinking a lot about what my future home space might look like if time, money, and location where not an object - to achieve a dream, you have to have one first, right?
In order to get some visual inspiration, I’ve amassed a huge collection of tumble logs (aka tumblrs) that post pictures of interior and exterior design and I browse them once or twice a week, pulling the pictures I like. Following are some spaces I’ve collected:
Right now I’m really into simplistic modern forms (platform beds, concrete structures, high modern “less is more aesthetic”, maximalist dense urban planning) blended into natural textures (exposed wood, home-made furnishings, books, clutter, rural anti-landscaping) and small housing spaces (cottages, cabins, smaller wood-frame structures, lofts, etc). Also, lots of natural light and plants.
Unfortunately, some of these design elements tend to conflict - I welcome attempts at synthesis. While we are on topic, share your design preferences - if you could create a dream space, what would it look like?
For Her
For Her by Ed Ochester
How sad to be a casual girl,
how sad to be bounced
in the rear of station wagons
along the shores of shrunken lakes.
How sad to listen to the men play
blackjack in the cabin and believe
Kafka’s Castle is a hamburger joint
and Truffaut a kind of mushroom.
How sad never to understand anything at all,
How sad to walk along the lake at night
and not understand why the stars have all
been eaten by the god whose name you
forgot at the moment but whom
Tibetans try to frighten with bells, cymbals,
and hideous dances on the edges of knives.
How sad to return to the cabin
and find the dead goose hung to bleed,
clamps in its nostrils, spinning
clockwise, counterclockwise—
that beautiful body hung like meat,
dribbling blood truly toward
the center of gravity.
To live her life
Before there was Scarlett Jo, there was Anna Karina. We first met when I was a romantically struggling undergraduate, and although other iconic film stars have seized hold of me since, I hold a special place for this particular muse of the french new wave.
Nearly all young men (and some old ones as well) have a kind of quasi-romantic fascination with some or other hollywood starlet (or starlets as the case may be). Although many men are loath to admit it, you can learn a lot about a guy by finding out who his favorite actresses are.
Why Anna, you might ask? Well, because she is beautiful obviously. But not the kind of over-stated, augmented beautiful that seems to be everywhere these days. Her beauty is cool, collected, intelligent, dark. Kind of dysphoric rather than euphoric. There is courage here, but also empathy, and whimsy, and perhaps even a little cruelty, certainly pain.
My first encounter with Anna Karenia was in Goddard’s Vivre sa Vie, a role in which she plays, as per Wikipedia:
a young Parisian woman who abandons her marriage and a child in order to pursue a career as an actress. Faced with financial troubles she drifts into prostitution. Nana believes she makes this choice of her own free will, but the film emphasizes the social structure that forces the poor into such situations, and builds to a tragic conclusion.
Obviously a difficult role, certainly a morally ambiguous role. So, I ask myself, “Could this kind of film be made today?”
And if it were, is there an actress who could hold such an unwieldy thing together by her sheer presence, through the movement of her lips and the tears from her eyes?
Why Anna Karina? Because her work nearly fifty years ago still seems as radically different as it does today? Because instead of the empathetic insinuation of the french “to live her life”, now we have only the infinitely banal american “sex and the city”? Is this where all the identity politics of the last four decades has gotten us?
I’m not sure. But when Anna watches the Passion of Joan of Arc - in one of Vivre’s crucial scenes - and the tears role down her face, I believe it. I believe it more than anything Carrie Bradshaw will ever tell me.
I shall come back
I Shall Come Back by Dorothy Parker
“I shall come back without fanfaronade
Of wailing wind and graveyard panoply;
But, trembling, slip from cool Eternity-
A mild and most bewildered little shade.
I shall not make sepulchral midnight raid,
But softly come where I had longed to be
In April twilight’s unsung melody,
And I, not you, shall be the one afraid.
Strange, that from lovely dreamings of the dead
I shall come back to you, who hurt me most.
You may not feel my hand upon your head,
I’ll be so new and inexpert a ghost.
Perhaps you will not know that I am near-
And that will break my ghostly heart, my dear.”
Birds and Love
“Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
C.S. Lewis
25
Brief reflections:
- I’m living in the nicest place with some of the best people I’ve ever lived with here in the Capital City.
- I’m working on a collaborative music project that I think is going to be some of the best work I’ve done yet.
- I’m working in (albeit an indirect way) in an industry I dreamed about being apart of all through college.
- I’m as independent and free as I’ve ever been and have been lucky enough to take advantage of that freedom and travel and meet people that have really been positive influences on my life.
- I have the best, most loyal, most loving group of friends a person could ask for.
- I’m healthy and my loved ones are too.
- I’ve got plans for the future, more goals to accomplish, more places to go and things to see and people to meet.
I think life at 25 - despite all the uncertainty, despite all the usual setbacks of “being young” - is the best it has ever been for me, and probably in all but a few ways, the most meaningful it has ever been as well. It’s not the easiest kind of life, but it is a meaningful one, and one that I’ve had a hand in creating.
This Longing
“This Longing” by Martin Steingesser
… awoke to rain
around 2:30 this morning
thinking of you, because I’d said
only a few days before, this
is what I wanted, to lie with you in the dark
listening how rain sounds
in the tree beside my window,
on the sill, against the glass, damp
cool air on my face. I am loving
fresh smells, light flashes in the
black window, love how you are here
when you’re not, knowing we will
lie close, nothing between us; and maybe
it will be still, as now, the longing
that carries us
into each other’s arms
asleep, neither speaking
least it all too soon turn to morning, which
it does. Rain softens, low thunder, a car
sloshes past.
I go to work in a pirogue too
Jess had an “only in Louisiana” sighting at PetSmart recently.
Reminds me of all the ill-advised pets she and I have shared over the years. For as much as I’ve complained about them, I’m still a sucker for a critter when I seem them standing in front of me.
Sometimes, though, it really is best for the small furry creatures to share the outside with the people, rather than for the people to share the inside with the small furry creatures. Not hard for me to imagine the kind of destruction that little chaoui (pronounced something like “shah-wee” for those not familiar with the vernacular) could get up to when the, ahem, “owners” were looking the other way…
