so due to my writing/procrastination problem recently and the death of david foster wallace and what not, i've neglected to share a few very important moments in my life, one of which went something like what follows below and occurred sometime around the middle of september, when the weather was still somewhat comforting here (in chicago), even on the lakefront...and when we were still preceding official obamarama by over a month and a half:

one saturday night my favorite republican invited me over for a private, home-cooked meal to be eaten in her courtyard and so i, of course, accepted and bicycled over to her house 'like a hipster would do,' then proceeded to eat a very fine meal of gourmet roasted chicken and various other side dishes and a much-appreciated surplus of fancy wine (in bottles, not boxes!) that flowed through everything like the euphrates, all of which i would tirelessly praise here were it not for my totally-incompetent culinary vocabulary.

but so anyway, after dinner and after watching the horror-movie-of-the-night - inside (2007), by alexandre bustillo & julien maury - i peddled away towards the lakefront a few blocks east of her house with a pocket full of flavored tootsie rolls that she insisted i take with me, along with the most healthy-looking apple i have ever seen - it was, like, the david of red apples.

once there i rode north, even though i lived south, and even though it was 2:30 in the morning...i think because i had this premonition that something fantastic was going to happen. it was foggy. i remember the fog. and it was totally silent. and there was no one else around. no one. and before long i had to pee, which hit me hard and without warning, probably because of all the wine. i immediately dismounted by a tree about 30 feet from the bike path and let flow...only to hear, mid-stream, the disturbing cackle of a man dressed in an all-black suit laying on the ground beneath some bushes nearby. he was staring at me from the darkness and moonlight. he was close enough for me to hear, even above the splattering of warm urine, the sound of his breathing suddenly crescendo.

at this point, the destructively hyper-imaginative part of my brain got the better of me as i clawed my way through a labyrinth of uncountable possibilities of what this crazed hiding nocturnal maniac was about to do to me: break all 10 of my fingers one by one by weaving them mercilessly through the spokes of my tires and then forcing them into a bloody grinding death-rotation...or...lift my bike skyward with superhuman strength only to smash it down against my head with such force that my brain actually exploded, allowing him to collect little samples of it with a plastic spoon that he had tucked away in his front shirt pocket for precisely these kind of situations...or...stab me seven times in the stomach...or...and...or...and so on to infinity.

at some point during this suddenly chaotic feargasm i realized i was peeing all over my handlebars (that he had just utilized, for all i could tell in my mind's eye, to meticulously separate my shoulder blades and then break through my sternum in order to pour a witch's cauldron of scalding battery acid directly into my chest cavity). i didn't really know what to do so i pretended like i didn't notice and just kept peeing right on my bike, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. unfortunately, my mark happened to be right where the highest density of absorbant tape was wrapped, for padding and grip purposes...and sure enough, a few moments later, as i was riding away in a desperate frenzy, finally, and escaping, i noticed it was all totally saturated.

initially, when i still believed myself to be in danger, this was easily tolerable...but eventually, as i headed north on the bike path, again, despite living south, through the fog and away from the black-suited monster and into relative safety, the still-warm reeking dampness started to eat away at my palms and i, having never ever been able to ride a bike with no hands (let alone an old 80's-era racing kind of road-bike that was way too small for me anyway) despite trying to learn pretty regularly every summer since third grade, decided to just fling my arms upward and let go and sit all the way back and see what happened...and sure enough, i stayed upright, then rode over 60 blocks, up and down and up and down the lakefront bike path, all without using my hands, feeling totally liberated.

my excitement intensified throughout the course of this glorious ride as i pondered the reconfiguration of my notions of steady incremental progress vs. epiphanies / crucial thresholds until i could no longer venture onward without reporting this miraculous leap in coordination and muscle-memory and self-conquering (i was steering with my knees now!) to an elite group of my closest friends via text message (while still riding, in fact, since my hands were free!)...and then, eventually, to my favorite republication, in person, when i rode back to her house where this all began and got her out of bed.

"what time is it?"

"3:50."

"well, what is it?"

"i can ride my bike with no hands now!"

"hm. well something smells like piss."

if these don't work, nothing will.

in no particular order:

- a hole in my heart - (lukas moodysson, 2004)

- tetsuo: the iron man - (shinya tsukamoto, 1989)

- the holy mountain - (alejandro jordorosky, 1973)

- the seventh continent - (michael haneke, 1989)

- cannibal holocaust - (ruggero deodato, 1980)

- the heart is deceitful above all things - (asia argento, 2004)

- i stand alone - (gaspar noe, 1998)

- audition - (takashi miike, 1999)

- ma mere - (christophe honore, 2004)

- sleepless in seattle - (nora ephron, 1993)

- dog star man - (stan brakhage, 1961-64)

bonus secret-weapons: fat girl, freaks, gummo, repulsion, eraserhead, un chien andalou, and pretty much any troma movie.

please share with me how your first-dates go. thank you in advance.

"what is the truth? do you think what i'm telling you is true? i've never told any fucking truth in my life. this...[pointing at the movie screen]...you think this is true? you think what you're gonna tell me if we sat down and drank, do you think it's gonna be true?"

- asia argento, during a q-and-a for the heart is deceitful above all things



"death to the music industry (if music means movie)"

i used to scream
profound things
into the night

they would always
echo around
the neighborhood
for a while

miraculously
no one ever complained

in fact
i think they sort of
liked it


but

sadly

in retrospect

they aren't
profound
at all:

"she tastes like
orange absinthe!"

"we are
metonyms
growing
at right angles!!"

"i'm chasing
chocolate-covered peanuts
through the couch
but they are
too fast for me!!!"

everyone in the bar seems sad and lonely except a group of guys across the room playing darts like the fate of the universe depends on them. i watch all of this for a long long time until some strange old man comes around and tries to recruit me for the army.

'hell no,' i say, 'i don't believe in that stuff.'

'but we're not that kind of army.'

'what?'

'we're not that kind of army.'

'no?'

'no,' he says, 'we're the kind of army that condenses your personal history into a museum exhibit displayed beneath a thin pane of very clean glass that is poorly-lit and has no intrinsic meaning beyond its own abstract analysis of itself, which is almost impossible to even access, let alone decipher (unless you have a special microscope that can breathe like a turtle swimming under thick chocolate pudding...and even then it's still really difficult).'

'wow,' i say, getting interested, 'so what will it condense my personal future into?'

'a snowflake falling.'

'hmm,' i say, thinking seriously, 'a snowflake falling during the day or at night?'

'a snowflake at night, falling into the headlights of a semi.'

so i sign up.

it's painful and worthwhile, but it makes me feel very lonely: i'm kept in a small room, alone...the walls and floor and door are made of grey stones and the stones are cold...it's very quiet but sometimes i hear footsteps in the hallway. eventually i get expelled for laziness.

i don't know what to do after that so i go back to the bar and order another drink. nothing's different except for the group of guys across the room playing darts: they're even more excited, and much louder: they already know they're even more indispensable now than last time.

i'm pretty exhausted but i manage to make it over to them.

'hey,' i say, 'are you guys some kind of army?'

one of them (probably the leader) says, 'what?'

'i was expelled. i want to join you. i want to sign up.'

all of them laugh at me for a long long time but i can't understand why for the life of me.

so, finally, the traditional structure again:

"Brechtian activity itself is one of the features of knowledge and art as those flow back into the useful: the 'means' inherent in turning the useful slowly around into an end in its own right - yet not an empty formalist end, not the end-pretext, the 'any-old' purpose that we invoke in order to be able to keep ourselves busy: but, rather, a substantive and Hegelian coming together of means and ends in such a way that activity becomes worth doing in its own right; that immanence and transcendence become indistinguishable (or their opposition transcended, if you prefer); or, in other words, that 'the thing itself' appears." - Fredric Jameson

a friend of mine wasn't doing so well earlier today and called to take her mind off things, so to speak...and we eventually articulated the difference between "prolific" and "slutty," which, in my opinion, is just a matter of content, not form, and of positioning within a certain conceptual-spacial dimension that is synonymous with depth measured in a vacuum, not degree, all of which is so abstract it's meaningless and therefore just another ironic reiteration of what we were talking about in the first place.

so it goes.

ah, the weather.

and then we talked about all those (mostly) post-hardcore or metalcore bands with the first-person band names, and what the hell is with that? and, more importantly, what does it say about the future!?

as i lay dying, between the buried and me, i killed the prom queen, my bloody valentine, every time i die, against me!, i love you but i've chosen darkness, belie my burial, belay my last, so i shot myself, i shot the sheriff, i've been shot, my chemical romance, bring me the horizon.

does it stem from some ever-increasing desire to personify suffering, struggle, conflict, into the narrowest, most internalized way possible? does it indicate some kind of enhanced camaraderie/opposition? or...does the extreme compartmentalization of distribution-power and, consequently, the "privatization" of commercial/aesthetic/creative influence (not to mention the relatively accessible dose of cultural and historical omniscience to top it off, if you will, thanks to wikipedia and what not) inevitably generate a more narcissistic breed of music(ian)?

well, whatever, because if i started a metalcore band i would name me this: my eyes our opening.

a first-person adjective AND a phonetic pun!! does it get much better? i think not.

but i'd rather start a post-metal band named thimble.

to my film- and/or video-oriented blog-readers, please check out my so-far-embarrassingly-stagnant myspace group, as i'm trying to press some air into its lungs: guerilla filmmakers of amerika - chicago.

it'd be nice to expand into something sooner than later that's capable of supporting a monthly open-screening in the back of a bar or something like that, so please tell your cinephile friends.

"the mostly-vertical personality of candles"

eventually the tombstones
will whisper this
very quietly
in all directions:
equilibrium can be
maintained
atop the sharpest tooth
of a plastic comb
knotted tightly
within the wires
of the machine.

stay tuned. be careful.