yesterday's headlines blown by the wind

Idealistic, in a Very Twisted Manner

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:16:00 -0400

When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he

pondered o’er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever

know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:

“Thru Time I’ll save my love!” he said … yet Beauty vanished

with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead…

Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her

hair:

“Who’d learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before

his sonnet there” … So all my words, however true, might

sing you to a thousandth June, and on one ever know that

you were Beauty for an afternoon.

(F. Scott Fitzgerald)

One of the greatest performances I’ve seen in a long...

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:53:00 -0400

One of the greatest performances I’ve seen in a long while. And I was on the barricade with my dear friend Will.

Setlist:

Fast as You Can

On the Bound

Shadowboxer

Paper Bag

Anything We Want

Get Gone

Sleep to Dream

Extraordinary Machine

Werewolf

Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song)

Daredevil

I Know

Every Single Night

Criminal

Carrion

Not About Love

Encore:

It’s Only Make Believe (Conway Twitty Cover)

Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and Atlas Sound.

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 08:52:00 -0400

Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and Atlas Sound.

Iranian illustrator Marjane Satrapi and a still from Persepolis.

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 07:02:36 -0400

Iranian illustrator Marjane Satrapi and a still from Persepolis.

Anna Karina & Jean-Luc Goddard in Agnès Varda’s 1962...

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 08:10:00 -0400

Anna Karina & Jean-Luc Goddard in Agnès Varda’s 1962 film, Cléo de 5 à 7.

Sirènes by Georges Malkine, 1925

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 07:32:46 -0400

Sirènes by Georges Malkine, 1925

The Joy of Life by Paul Delvaux, 1937.

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 07:22:00 -0400

The Joy of Life by Paul Delvaux, 1937.

Annie Clark aka St. Vincent performing “Your Lips Are...

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 07:38:00 -0400

Annie Clark aka St. Vincent performing “Your Lips Are Red” off her first album, Marry Me.

Miss Apple covering Paul McCartney’s Let Me Roll It with...

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:40:00 -0400

Miss Apple covering Paul McCartney’s Let Me Roll It with The Roots.

Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder.

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 02:35:23 -0400

Two by two, we gather at the MacArthur Park mural for Dia de los Muertos. I notice some Aztec nosed Mexican girl playing with a white lighter by the lake. Waist high corduroys hug her skinny legs and even though it’s November patches of sweat begin to soak the through the white cloth under her arms. The lighter sparks and she hovers it over her left wrist to singe the dark hairs, leaving her skin pink and bare. She doesn’t look a summer over seventeen.

We’ve all seen her before. Marisol saw her last weekend in a Pasadena motel room, her Aztec nostrils caked in white, in nothing more than cotton panties and a Morrissey t-shirt. Sometimes while I’m counting quarters in the laundry room I hear her arguing with her mother in Spanish. I asked Marisol what they were yelling about, but she tells me it’s something that shouldn’t be repeated.

A still from Jan Kounen’s 99 Francs.

Sun, 20 May 2012 23:12:00 -0400

A still from Jan Kounen’s 99 Francs.

A still of Anna Karina from the 1961 Jean-Luc Goddard film Une...

Sun, 20 May 2012 04:04:00 -0400

A still of Anna Karina from the 1961 Jean-Luc Goddard film Une Femme Est Une Femme.

A still of Mania Akbari from Abbas Kiarostami’s 2002...

Mon, 14 May 2012 03:42:00 -0400

A still of Mania Akbari from Abbas Kiarostami’s 2002 film, Ten.

Meow. In the past four hours I’ve studied different breeds...

Sun, 13 May 2012 05:10:00 -0400

Meow. In the past four hours I’ve studied different breeds of cats across a spectrum of three different variables: Cuteness/Intelligence/and Maintenance. These are the finalists. Help.

Bengal or Siamese?

Note: I just invented a new informal fallacy. In my research of browsing through photographs of the two breeds pictured above I realized my favorite is always the one I am looking at. This, among other reasons, is why I don’t receive funding.

A still from Wong Kar-Wai’s 1995 film Fallen Angels.

Thu, 10 May 2012 06:04:00 -0400

A still from Wong Kar-Wai’s 1995 film Fallen Angels.

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be...

Thu, 10 May 2012 04:40:29 -0400

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.” (Simone de Beauvoir)

Morira Shearer in The Red Shoes.

Sun, 06 May 2012 03:08:00 -0400

Morira Shearer in The Red Shoes.

Transference

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 05:57:14 -0400

A man without white blood cells rents a studio apartment in Echo Park. It has high ceilings and exposed brick walls. A half Siamese kitten sleeps in his kitchen sink. There’s a faux mahogany desk in the corner littered with letters to and from various publishing companies. Next door, a woman is doing research on the newest pharmaceutical drugs. Next door, Meryl Streep is making someone’s mother cry. Next door, a pair of newlyweds are leaning how to synchronize their orgasms.

The man without white blood cells has blue and white pills stuck down his throat; he sets his lips on the bathroom faucet and sucks. The mail has arrived; a Nel Noddings book and coupons for American Spirits. The man without white blood cells has a projector instead of a television. He watches a game show from the seventies with the sound off. A record spins for Ian Curtis.

Ewan Y. Petragère

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 08:08:00 -0400

A recent poll in a local art magazine shows that 37% of subscribers suspect Ewan Y. Petragère to have designed the dress in Le Devinir’s display window, though there is still debate as to whether such a man exists at all. The earliest known reference can be traced to an eighty-five page fashion manifesto being passed around the East Village awhile back. Petragère is cited as its author. It’s a critique on department store apparel, which he calls, “as ordinary as brown eyes.” Only in the last few pages does he propose a final severance from the modern era, though the text doesn’t explicitly say what would remain.

This is the sixth month of Greenwich yuppies filling in the blanks, writing high fashion articles on the sacrilege of polyester or the rise and fall and rise and plateau of pill box hats, Ewan Y. Petragère as a noted authority. Then again, same as last Saturday, a low ranking police official talks with Ginger Zee on Good Morning America about vandalism and consequences. The same phone number as last week flashes at the bottom of the television screen, EYP spray painted gold on Bloomingdale’s entrance doors, and a few fragments of an old brick scattered on the sidewalk, sulking under a nicked glass window.

Aside from the increase in business for independent fashion boutiques, there’s been an even higher demand for Petragère to go public. A face for the name. Everyone seems to know of him, but very few have made his acquaintance, so few that his existence has come into question. Some say he’s a wide nosed Italian with sharp glasses and hair straight to his shoulders. Others claim he’s a balding Frenchman, an ex-tailor sort, dressed in Algerian silk, teething on a plastic tip cigar, rattling a watch as it hangs limp from his wrist. Most seem to argue the culture created the man, or rather a flock of eye rolling intellectuals operating out of SoHo. They wrote the manifesto collectively and are responsible for the graffiti and nicked windows. Now even more conspiracies arise after the publication of an exclusive interview with this unidentified icon. However, there are still looming concerns over its authenticity, primarily because the person giving the interview to Mr. Petragère is none other than Mr. Petragère himself. This is an excerpt:

EYP: So Ewan, what do you have to contribute to the fashion world?

EYP: Well, as you know Ewan I’m simply a solver of identity crises.

EYP: I know what you mean, but why don’t you tell our readers, all of them eager for wisdom and such.

EYP: Very well, imagine yourselves dressing for a night out at the Temple Bar, no no no 1534. If you’re a man you might drag a dull razor down your cheek, choke on a bright paisley tie, and once all is symmetrical you tilt that insufferable pinstripe fedora towards your left eyebrow. Say you’re a woman; you squeeze your breasts into some fancy red brassier and lean forward in the mirror to apply a foundation slightly lighter than your original skin tone, cake your face until all the blemishes are covered and swallow another diet pill as a reward. After you’ve put on a dress and styled your hair you remember a tip in Cosmo about jewelry, so you rush to the mirror to hook in some dangling pearls and a necklace that droops into your cleavage. You purse your lips one last time before you go out to your taxicab. A few hours later you stumble across the white bathroom tiles smelling of dry vermouth. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and notice you’re much more attractive than you remember. It’s just a passing thought really, nothing you obsess over, but you exit more poised. Why?

EYP: Are you asking me or is this rhetorical?

EYP: No, I’m asking.

EYP: Well, it’s because of you.

EYP: Exactly, it begins with me and ends with anyone who wears me. You wouldn’t be as interesting without that flamboyant tie. You wouldn’t be as desirable without pert full breasts. By wearing my clothes you become a vessel for my expression and we both reap the rewards. You go out to the clubs at night and get to drool over each other, like two Mona Lisa’s across the hallway. You have people like me to thank for this. I turn fives into tens.

EYP: You’ve mentioned this before Ewan, how with the right clothing you can transform the most vile bodies into aesthetic royalty.

EYP: Yes, you see Ewan, we’re confined to this aging corpse whose only purpose is to fuck before it decomposes. I make that process easier for us all.

EYP: How do you respond to those who claim inner beauty should take precedence over our exteriors? You know, many may say a dependence upon the physical realm might be detrimental to a man’s essence.

EYP: I say insufficient evidence! Nacissisus didn’t drown because he was too enamored with his own reflection; he drowned because he could not swim. Inner beauty is nothing more than a parable for those born defective or brought up disillusioned. If I took a scalpel to the belly of the elephant man and lady gaga I’d find nothing more than guts. Our culture is a visual one, a man’s essence changes with price of his watch or the length of his hair. The very notion of inner beauty relies on the existence of a way to express it. Imagine yourself judging a piece of artwork, or better yet a woman wearing sweat stained bikini kill t-shirt with a pixie hairdo. Now try, just try to describe her essence without appealing to your senses. Who is she? Well, she might as well not even exist.

EYP: Sometimes you make me sick Ewan. Even if I grant you the changing of one’s essence what happens when we remove her clothes and shave her head only to prop her up in a darkened bedroom nude? A thing’s definition doesn’t rely on –

EYP: No, no, no, no, Ewan. It does. We may claim a woman nude is still a woman, at least as long as she retains her genetics and vital organs and such, but to make observations without sight or accessory is absurd! We look at the nude woman and notice her absence. Only when we see where the hem of her dress falls are we able to give definitions. Beauty and substance don’t exist in nature. Nature relies on Monet’s brush or Kennedy’s pen to give it such abstractions.

EYP: But why Monet? Why Kennedy? If we’re going to degrade beauty and substance into mere relativism why even invoke our ancestors, especially when your own arbitrary opinion is just as valid? This is your flaw Ewan; your own aesthetic eye cannot function without embellishing on that which already exists. You leech off Victorian England or new wave France. You’ve hung yourself with the umbilical cord.

EYP: And who do you think our fathers leeched off of? Long before the Fall, even before language man began making distinctions and he did so by listing the things that were unlike himself. He soon realized that there would never be fewer than two categories. Never mind art, any attempt to portray some divine notion of ‘real’ or ‘natural’ will fail with dead ends. That’s why I’m deliberately idealistic.

Qualia

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 06:39:00 -0400

Something burrowed in though one of my lymph nodes last night, laying eggs and chewing up rust. Stephanie says it’s more swollen and more purple than it was an hour ago. We tried removing it with one of her grandfather’s old cigar cutters that he used during the Korean War. She took some cotton balls out of the bathroom cupboard and soaked them in rubbing alcohol, dabbing the open sore with the wet cotton until it looked sterile. She pressed the dull metal against the abscess and shut her eyes. /////////// Wait.

The symbolism crashes to the floor like a grand piano and the floodwaters rise over an uncharted island in the Philippines. Bloody Mary skips through a Corpus Christi hardware store and stocks up on duck tape and quick dry cement for those days when the humidity has corrupted her. We speak a thousand languages; Icelandic, Tamil, Swahili, Creole and Gibberish among others. Still, every morning I have communication errors with my local mortgage broker. I am not for sale and neither are my organs. I’ve grown bored with jubilation. I’ve grown weary of its opposite, so I’ve catalogued my perversions alphabetically. A is for Antithesis. B is for Biology and Beheadings. C is for Cathartic. I’ve slept better in fox holes. S is for…

Somewhere in the early 1900s there exists an unobstructed view of the historical Anna Pavlova performing The Dying Swan. I hope this reduced people with wristwatches and broaches and prosperity to Salt.