This is a review I published in Tiny Mix tapes:

Donkey Punch
Dir. Olly Blackburn
[Magnet Releasing, 2009]
99 Min
Rating: .5

{{Genre:}} Drama, Thriller, Horror,
{{Others:}} {Jaws the Revenge}, {Very Bad Things}, {Dead Calm}
{{Links:}} Donkey Punch - Magnet Releasing

This is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with post-Richie British cinema.  With its childishly lewd title and painfully overwrought and more-often-than-not unnecessary action/gore sequences, {Donkey Punch} could quite possibly be the worst major motion picture released in America this year.  Well, I guess we shouldn’t hold our breath ‘cuz there’s still a lot of year left.  The film begins as a mildly titillating story of a girls’ weekend in Majorca, Spain.  Tammi (Nicola Burley) has just broken up with her presumably abusive boyfriend, and her friends Lisa and Kim (Sian Breckin and Jaimie Winstone) take her along on holiday from their dreary existence in Leeds to enjoy some Mediterranean sun and casual sex.  This is all fine and good as far as premises go, but director Olly Blackburn (heretofore known for making bullshit short films) sees it as an opportunity for a laughingly slipshod attempt at character development.  Two of the girls are given horribly rote dialogue while the blonde with ample mammalian protuberances is left with often monosyllabic and always slutty utterances.  Guess which one dies first.

The three girls from Leeds meet three fetching British lads, and everything in the film’s tone suggests that a light-hearted sex-romp is about to ensue.  When the girls find out that the three young men, Marcus (Jay Taylor), Sean (Robert Boulter), and Bluey (Tom Burke) have access to a yacht, the painfully stereotypical party begins.  Champagne and swimming lead to smoking crystal meth and what one of the characters refers to as “proper hardcore” sex.  The film takes a predictable and downright squirm-worthy turn for the worse when we realize why {Donkey Punch} is titled {Donkey Punch}.  Suffice it to say that someone dies in one of the most horrible-yet-unintentionally-funny sex accidents in cinematic history.  Adding injury to insult, Blackburn effectively ruins the Superpitcher remix of M83’s “Don’t Save Us From The Flames” by featuring the track during the uncomfortable, exploitive, and overly-long sex/death sequence.

Olly Blackburn’s first feature film is an interesting case study of what happens when style becomes completely detached from substance.  The dialogue in {Donkey Punch} is almost without exception expository, and his characters are cardboard cutouts, serving as tropes of what I can only assume he thinks typifies young, modern, and hip people.  When Terrance Malick cast a farmhouse as the lead in {Days of Heaven}, people thought he’d lost his shit.  He proved them wrong with his beautiful homage to a bygone era of hardship and beauty.  Blackburn casts a yacht in the central role of his film.  Regardless of the yacht, it’s safe to say that he’s lost his shit.

Of course, {Donkey Punch} might very well become a cult classic in the way that {Battlefield Earth} has.  Other than that, I cannot find any reason that would allow me in good conscience to recommend that anyone see this polyp on the colon of film.

"A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants. "
--Lawrence Durrell

I suppose this is an an excuse to ejaculate praise for a city which I have adopted as my hometown. Coming from further south, Ypsilanti was always an interesting town to me. When I first came to this smallish city for college my fellow students warned me that the particular burg I would spend the next four Falls and Winters in was something of a sore spot, a blemish on the paragon of civic enlightenment that was Ann Arbor. I disagreed. Wholeheartedly. The first time I visited Ann Arbor I was kindly asked to leave a lesbian tea house because they were about to parse some "feminist literature." When I asked why this was a problem I was given a nice-enough blank stare. A city which has always branded itself internationally as a beacon of tolerance and inclusiveness in the midst of the oppressive midwest, Ann Arbor struck me as a more self-important version of Hyde Park, an area of Cincinnati that boasted a spattering of decent restaurants that you might be able to gain access to if you mentioned the name of the mot centrist democratic candidate of that election year. That is, of course, if you weren't impaled by one of the innumerable upturned noses on the walk there.

Throughout college I got to become better acquainted with Ypsilanti through various cafés, house parties, and stupid mistakes, and I got to liking it. It was a pleasant enough place to live in. Close enough to Detroit to be able to sate my appetite for international cultural events, and close enough to relatively untrammeled tracts of nature that I could escape the urban malaise that was almost a prerequisite to keep up appearances with my neighbors. I loved it. Mike Jones has already eloquently brought to light the contradictions of Ypsilanti. So I don't have to. Suffice to say that I became overwhelmingly smitten with Ypsi during the Falls and Winters of my college years. So much so that I stayed in town after graduation. Much to the chagrin of my more practical-minded friends and relations.

So why the Durrell quote? I guess I truly fell in love with Ypsi when I fell in love with one of its inhabitants. There was an invitation to a jazz club. Then there was an indiscretion. Then there was an invitation to a movie. And then there was a shared cell-phone contract. And now there's a wedding date. Or something like that. The English literary counterculture of the early 20th century often penned essays about the importance of place, of a small space that one could be comfortable living in. Presumably this was a reaction to government housing projects that had sprung up in Britain about the same time. But I think they were on to something. If you can't find a place to actually become home in--to really "become home" in--to inhabit in all the senses of that word, then where are you?

There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.
--Lou Reed

Finally, I thought, finally she's arrived. I looked her in the eyes and let go her wrist, murmuring something about modes of alienation and the future. I don't know why I was holding her wrist in the first place, and the way I let it go... I felt uncomfortable so I kept talking; talking about whatever came into my head, because to stop talking, to exist with her in a vacuum without words would definitely illuminate something more powerful than I was willing to comprehend at that hour of the morning. And I knew somewhere in the back of my head that she wanted desperately for me to stop talking, but I wouldn't. I called her bluff, knowing she would never say something as forward as "shut up and makeout with me," as some who'd come before her had. I suppose that's really the most violent I've ever been. The most passively and non-physically violent, anyway. Didn't think I was capable of it, but there it was. And the truth is I have no idea why I didn't stop talking. I get this prickly feeling, in the middle of the day, usually, that I'm sublating myself, denying myself whatever chance I have of understanding who I am, because understanding something like that is always painful. I don't think it has to be, but when it gets that essential, when you're dealing with the innermost core of your personhood, or whatever, it can hurt like a bitch to realize you're living in bad faith. So it seems that understanding is painfully necessary, but not necessarily painful, or something. And so I consistently choose not to think about it, because while understanding yourself might be painfully necessary, and not necessarily painful, you can get along without doing so for at least a little while. Something I've happened upon recently is the epiphany that the unexamined life, while being somewhat less noble than spending your days in some cottage next to a pond, is relatively less conducive to gastritis than confronting your own impotence in the face of the oppressive 'other' that Sartre always liked to talk about. I think the dress she was wearing was navy, but it might've been black. I'm always horrible at that distinction. When I finally ran out of steam, she led me back to my room. The French call an orgasm le petit morte, the little death. I think I've unconsciously tied sex to death my entire life. Leaving that morning without a word was a hard thing to do, but I get the impression now, looking back, that it was easier than staying would have been. But I can't know that. At least not for certain.

And then I start to wonder if anyone could ever understand those midnight reveries of mine that I hold so dear. But maybe the fact that they never understand makes said reveries that much more precious?
--


I laid there and watched as she put on her make-up. There was something vaguely Calvinist in the way she put her face on in the morning. The deliberate strokes and touch-ups, scrunching her face, scrutinizing the flaws, the flaws which were the only thing about her she ever paid any attention to. We had a nice credenza in our apartment then. Her uncle Sal gave it to her when she moved to the Midwest for college. Looking at her as she was sitting on a ratty chair, wearing boy shorts and nothing else, it occurred to me again that I had no idea how I'd ended up with Clair, or how I had ended up staying with Clair as long as I had. With one final stroke of an eyeliner pen she was finished. She smiled at herself in the mirror, looked at me with one eye half-closed, and put that pair of designer jeans on.



"I'm going."



"I know." I roll over.


"You'll be back around 11 tonight, right?"


"Should be."


She always left in a hurry, even when she took an hour to get ready for the shit job she worked. We all worked shit jobs. She had small hands and liked French pop music from the late 70s. I worked later in the day, and spent the mornings after she went back to the saltmines feeling mixed-up about a lot of different things, but mainly about her. Thinking about her when she wasn't in the room tapped in to this gargantuan well of ambivalence that made my brow furrow and my stomach feel bad. I couldn't stand her, and I loved her. And it made no sense to me. But, of course, this isn't really about me.


She grew up affluent, and I always held that against her. I never actually confronted her on this upbringing of hers, of course. That would take too much time. Everything took too much time with her. The dog got into her pills that morning. She preferred prescription bottles with pop-off caps. Said that childproof caps pissed her off when she tried to open them drunk. I told her she shouldn't open them drunk. She said 'thanks, dad.' She said that a lot, come to think of it. The dog was a beagle. Her aunt passed it on to Clair when she moved here. I'd realized Sherman the Beagle had gotten into mommy's 500mg of happiness when I got out of the shower and saw the open bottle, covered in saliva and God knows what else. I tried to reason with him, told him that it was very bad what he did. And then I realized I was talking to a dog, and it wasn't likely that my life was going to turn into a Disney film any time soon.


I arrived at the vet's in record time, running down the street looking completely ridiculous with that pet taxi swinging back and forth, my lungs telling me it was time to quit poisoning them at the rate of two packs a day. The girl at the front desk smirked when she saw the worried look on my face. She wore a turquoise headscarf and these campy earrings that reminded me of some bad horror movie from the 60s I'd seen a couple weeks before. She cleared her throat.


"What's the trouble?"


"Sherman here swallowed a whole mess of Valium, and I don't think that's good."


"No, that's not good at all."


Smart-ass. They pumped his stomach for the better part of the late morning. I had to be at work in a couple hours. I made this problem of mine clear to the vet, and he told me it was very irresponsible for me to let poor Sherman to get into the medicine. Rather than tell him to fuck off I asked him how much longer Sherman had to stay. It was going to be a couple days.


When I got home from work Clair wasn't in. This was odd, as she had become a home-body after the heady days of higher education. She preferred staying in and doing not much of anything to the nightlife that surrounded our apartment on all sides. I walked to the kitchen and looked at the refrigerator. There was a note. It was a bad note. Sherman was mentioned by name. I suppose I'm going to have a find a new place to live.

Hysteria set in pretty quickly. We all watched as it happened, dreadful and encapsulating as it was. They said he was too young to go. I said everyone was too young to go. But I suppose jumping off a cliff in front of nearly a hundred of your friends is quite a way to do it, if you have the mind. I think grandiose might be a passable descriptive. I became aware of the gravity of the situation ten minutes ago, when he walked up to his fiancee with that rose. He never cared for flowers, and neither did she. The pallor of his princely face belied an incomprehensible sorrow. How does sadness work? What is that awful mechanism? Falling prey to my more cynical nature, I figured he had done something bad and wanted to make up for it with the flower. Vassily gave her the rose. She was stunned. He said in the most plaintive voice I've ever heard, "I love you, Emily." And took three steps backward. It was the first time I'd seen him *really* smile in over a year. His face descended. I cried, I think. Later, I finally realized for the first time that Brahms' second symphony was falling in love with me. We spent the night together. It had been a while. She said we shouldn't get all crazy so we didn't get all crazy and I fell asleep softly breathing on her neck. I left early the next morning. The funeral's next week.

He was new. She liked that about him. She wished he could stay new for a while, before she would eventually tire of him. She tired of everyone. She had few female friends. This caused her parents to worry. But they were not really worried. Not really. He liked to have sex with his clothes on. That was one thing she remembered about him. The other was the smell, not necessarily horrible, that he always carried with him. Faint hints of cigarette smoke coming off his jacket and whatever article he was wearing that had not been washed recently. He smoked a lot of cigarettes. She could not remember any mental picture of him without a cigarette. She liked that about him because it kept her from getting too serious. She could never permanently ally herself with someone who smoked that much, because he would probably die soon. Hopefully, she would often think, hopefully he will die soon. There were other stimulants, too, and too many of them. His heart would give out soon, she'd muse. The excitement of being with someone who was as self-destructive as him proved to be completely intoxicating to her. Intoxicating because there was nothing about it that would truly matter in five years. She throws all judgment aside, because goddammit it's her life, and no one is going to tell her how to live it. All the good boys who wanted her so badly would often puzzle over why someone with so much going for her would choose to fuck someone like Vincent on a regular basis, but then again, a lot of good boys end up falling for whores. So we guess it works out in the long run. We all die alone. We all die alone. We all die alone. We all die alone. She remembered something stupid involving a half-full gas can and a few black magic markers.

Standing there, at the foot of the steps of my house, smoking cigarettes and nursing a headache by rubbing my eyes in such a way as to ensure future complications with my vision, I suddenly became hyper-aware of my own mortality. So I took a little walk down to the corner store on Ballard and Cross (Ferris What!?) and bought a bottle of Revive Vitamin Water. I can't drink gatorade anymore. I've tried. Recently. I've tried. It just doesn't cut the mustard these days. And walking back down the street, looking at the midday sky--something a bit out of the ordinary for me, usually looking at the ground or something at mid-level--I saw the most beautiful black bird I ever have seen swoop almost miraculously out of the sky. I of course attached some significance to the bird's descent. It was probably really nothing, but I can't be sure, and that flicker of hope of the bird's flight being some sort of cosmic sign was enough to keep the rest of the afternoon interesting.

In the Spring of 2002 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.

It was a rough Easter. Having just finished up mid-term exams for my second semester of study at Ave Maria in Ypsilanti, I traveled a couple hundred miles South to Cincinnati, hoping against hope for warmer weather. Arriving at my parents' home late at night I became increasingly mercurial and distant. They love me, and I love them, but it just doesn't feel right. Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again, and I'd always intellectually assented to the truth of this statement, but coming back to Cincy that Spring really drove the point home, so to speak. I didn't talk much while I was there, which is an aberration if you know me at all. I pet the dogs and gave my sisters hugs and smiled as best I could, but I felt like a character in a Dostoevsky novel--completely out of place and conflicted. Looking back I didn't really have anything to be conflicted about, but I felt it nonetheless.

The several days I was home I didn't sleep much, maybe an hour here and there. I'd lay in bed, trying to sleep, reading books that I found boring merely to lull me into dreamland, but it didn't work. One night I went to a little public park with a playground in it. Grant and the Johns and I drank Coronas and they smoked cigarettes. You know that feeling you get when you're somewhat having fun but there's an emptiness to it, somehow the good times ring hollow and you're left with this overarching sense of something missing, something important that you might never understand but you know should be there. Yeah. It was kinda like that.

I made the rounds, saying hello and dropping in for tea and such with old family friends. Yep, we actually drank tea and talked about what I was studying, how my Latin vocab was coming along, whether I was going to write my term paper on Plato's forms or Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Then the questions about what I was going to do with my life came up and my head started to hurt. I was intensely allergic to discussions about my future responsibility.

The trip back was just as bad if not worse, driving past an endless flat expanse of farmlands and strips malls that constitutes I-75 North through Ohio. We pulled into the parking lot at the college and I took my bags to my room. My friends who'd stayed at school over the break were well into their 10th or 11th drinks by the time I walked into my room. And that's when everything turned deadly serious.

There was a full half-gallon bottle of bottom shelf vodka--heaven hill or five-star, I can't remember which--on the kitchenette table. My friends Edgars from Latvia and James from Cuba (we called him Gomez, not because of his Hispanic descent, but because it's a slang term for homosexual in Latvian) were there. Perhaps, owing to the fact that I was a bit out of my mind, I wasn't in the best state to do some heavy boozing. Latvians can be very persuasive when they're actually give a shit, and Edgars bet me I couldn't drink the whole bottle on the table. Grabbing the bottle, at first I thought it would be a funny idea to lift it up and pretend I was drinking it. However, once that bottle hit my lips something went off in my head and I started gulping it down like it was water and I'd just been in the Sahara for a couple days. At first my guests couldn't believe I'd drank half the bottle in one pull. I couldn't believe it either. My mouth tasted like an Ypsilanti hooker, or at least what I'd imagined an Ypsilanti hooker would taste like.

My next memory was sitting in the common room on our floor, playing Fifa Soccer on an N64 and babbling about how in love with Grant's sister I was. I kept saying "whoa, those little guys on the T.V. have four legs. Check it out!" Grant couldn't stop himself from laughing. Suddenly I felt very sick and booked it for my bathroom. The fact that I hadn't eaten anything that day didn't help matters much, and the bile burned my throat like nothing else. As soon as I walked out Gomez confronted me with what was probably a quarter-full half-gallon bottle of cheap, cheap vodka. As I was almost blacking out at that point, I obeyed and drank the rest of it. I can't remember anything else, but the things I've heard that I did are pretty entertaining after the fact.

Apparently, I stopped breathing for a while. Grant and Edgars stripped off my clothes and threw me into the bathtub and turned on the cold water. That did nothing. An indeterminate amount of time later they called the hospital. The ambulance showed up a bit later, along with some firemen and cops. The cops were dicks, apparently. All they did was go through my things and ask my friends if I had any pot in the room. The firemen manhandled me down the stairs and at the bottom of the stairwell, when I couldn't remain conscious, one of them jammed his finger into the base of my jawline, right were it connects just below the ear. The pain was incendiary. I gave him the finger and told him to fuck off. Grant has since told me that the fireman smiled a bit at that remark.

I woke up in the morning. I opened my eyes and all I could see was this blistering white light. My first thought was, "Oh, shit, am I in heaven?" Then, "Wait, wait, this can't be heaven. You can't feel this kind of pain in heaven." My eyes focused slightly and I could make out the source of the light. It was an array of halogen bulbs. I was on an operating table in St. John's Hospital, about a five-minute drive from my school. My friend Gerard was with me, wearing my shirt, which I thought at the time was a little weird. I noticed something that made me grimace. I had a catheter. Someone had shoved a tube into my dick. That must've been pleasant. Gerard showed me a vial of my blood. The red blood cells had separated from the plasma, and Gerard tried to convince me that the plasma was actually alcohol. There was a lot of plasma. I remember the sensation when the kindly nurse removed my catheter, but sometimes I wish I couldn't remember it so well. I stumbled my way to the bathroom, still being slightly intoxicated. When I got back to the operating room, I read a note from my doctor, telling me that I was an alcoholic and to seek treatment.

Walking back into my room that morning I saw the aftermath of what I'd done, and felt some of the most intense regret of my life. It was so completely stupid and childish. C'est la vie. I called my mother and broke down, my father got on the line and said, "Well, well, I guess you are human, after all."

I don't think I'll ever know exactly why I almost killed myself with alcohol. It'll always be puzzling to me, but remembering that catheter is a good way to keep myself from drinking too much. A few months ago my uncle Richard, one of the most brilliant men I ever didn't get the chance to know, died from complications of the liver owing to his lifelong struggle with alcohol. It seems such a pity to me now.

In the Spring of 2002 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.

The color's gone all wrong. I'm a kid again, and I'm in the midst of my turn-of-the-90s neon phase, except this time it's considered ironic to like New Kids on the Block. Everything's so garish it makes me want to turn completely inwards, but I have no real desire to do that. Clasically depressive. If I'm in the proper mood, everything oppresses me. I'll feel fenced in by a song I'm listening to, for chrissakes. About three-quarters of the music equipment my band uses was stolen Saturday morning between 4 and 10 am. We played a show at the Elbow Room here in Ypsi on Sunday night. People liked it, so I'm happy. A large part of why I got involved with the people I'm making music with now was to share something with a semblance of hope in it, to offer an experience to those willing and patient enough to take it, and ultimately to make those people thinksmile a little. That's really mainly it.

My most rewarding experiences are the ones that entail my helping other people, or at best, making other people happy. Does that make me altruistic, or belie an inner lack of my own identity? Am I generous, or do I merely wish to appease others out of a fear of rejection on the most basic societal level? I'd like to think that it's the former in both cases, but I might be wrong. Maybe the very fact that I'm *asking* this question at such an hour is an answer in and of itself. Ah well, c'est la vie.

It's traditional for literature written after the Italian Renaissance to begin In Medias Res, in the middle of things. But after thinking about it for quite a while, I've decided that *everything* begins in medias res. But seriously, hear me out. We're born into a world that could probably do without us, and, other than a couple hundred--if we're lucky--billions of people won't notice our coming or going in this world. Unless you're way cool, than lots of people with televisions will notice, not necessarily care, but notice. But, really, you could say that everything (everything human anyway) *ends* in medias res, as well. Experts say the aforementioned literary term comes from Horace, who advised any young Roman writing an epic to follow Homeric form and begin in the middle of a great deal of action. And I suppose its good advice, because no one wants to read a shitty story that begins with some kid being born into the beginning of something, because, honestly, even stories that do begin with birth usually begin with birth into a tenuous, dynamic and dramatic situation--like a war or something, if you're Russian or French. And I suppose everyone's beginning is just an extension of their parents' middle, if that makes any sense whatsoever. And it probably doesn't, but thats all right. But what I'm swerving at is the idea that life can seem meaningless when taking into account how little time each of us spends on Earth, and how there have been so many other people before we show up, and, God willing, will be after we're gone. What contribution, what significant contribution can we make to the deposit of human value and when faced with such a daunting statistic? So I guess that might explain the drinking.

I found this while perusing PointlessWasteOfTime. It's a just-shy-of twenty minutes long documentary on an obscure b-side of the Winston's 1969 single, "Color Him Father" titled "Amen Brother." A six-second break beat from "Amen Brother" has become known as the "amen break," and has been used countless times on both sides of the Atlantic since the dawn of the sampler in the mid 80s. The documentary is fascinating, a meditation on the collective aural consciousness of pop-culture:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

Cheers.

I've been sick. Not metaphysically. I mean I've been ill, I've had a cough that could wake Broderick Crawford for the last few days, and to top it all off, Thursday morning I came down with the first case of Conjunctivitis I can ever recall having. That's right, me, a semi-grown-ass man, got the pink-eye on Thursday. I had to go the doctor and everything. My eye wouldn't open when I woke up after taking a nap later that day. I was freaking out. The fear I have of going to the doctor--not a fear of doctors themselves, but a fear of actually going to the doctor, manifested itself pretty clearly Thursday afternoon. I was thinking I would have to spend tons of money on this fifteen minute visit to the Packard Community Clinic. It seems like my insurance will cover the trip, as my "co-pay" is $0, but I still have my doubts. Visions of having every single paycheck docked for the next 6 months are still plaguing my beleaguered, paranoid brain.

I can't remember going to the doctor since I drank myself into a coma at age 18, after a couple days of not sleeping and a Latvian friend putting me up to drinking a half-gallon of bottom shelf vodka. Of course, being slightly less stupid now, I consider doing it *very* stupid. But I'm getting terribly off track.

While I was worried over whether pink-eye would rob me of my vision (of course, it can't, as I found out from kind Dr. Rion), I started to think of what a gift sight is. We all take it so much for granted. I realized I have no idea what I would do if I went blind. So many of my favorite works of art are visual. How the hell could I watch the next Terry Mallick film if I went blind?

While my eyes are almost 100% recovered, I still have a wicked cough, and my voice sounds particularly horrible these days. I'm hoping the overdose of vitamins I'm going to take working at Whole Foods tomorrow helps to alleviate my current situation, but on the other hand, I'm not holding my breath. I should probably cut back on the smoking, but it helps a little with the stress of it all.

Above all, over the last couple days, I've realized how comparatively easy I have it, and that's consoling. I used to get angry when people would inform me of how easy I had things. I mean, who are they to know? We all know that no one can really know who you are, if interiority is not merely a phenomenological reduction, (which it isn't). But I really have a lot less to complain about than I do. Hopefully I'll stop complaining about it.

God, I love My Bloody Valentine...

Life exists as a series of simultaneously contradictory similarities. Walker Percy, echoing perennial philosophy of years past, spoke frequently of man's existence as being a classic dichotomy. We are constantly meandering between angelism and bestialism. Our high-minded ideals, the abstract entities that some are willing to die defending, such as justice, love, peace, integrity, compassion, are always co-opting or being co-opted by our more classically "base" desires for food, sex, pride, physical fulfillment. Of course, when one extreme supplants the other for an extended period of time, chaos ensues. Man cannot live in his head alone, and yet if he refuses to live at least a little in his head he will eventually lower himself to the status of an animal. There's an old aphorism, coined by an author I can't remember, that man is the only creature capable of being less than an animal and more than human. The existentialists, mainly the French ones, have more or less solidified the reality than man has the inate ability to supercede his basic nature, that, while instinct plays a tremendously important role in coloring his decisions, they still do that and only that, color them, influence them. A human person has within himself an unparalleled capacity to go against what his instincts might tell him to do. This is actually why Pico di Mirandolla, a medieval Italian philosopher, cited as the main reason that man had more esteem than the angels, he had the power to choose to do good or evil. When Ghandi decided not to eat for a period of many days, it wasn't because some physical dynamism within him determined him to do it, quite the contrary, he suppresed his own natural desire for gastronomical satiety in favor of a more abstract goal, a goal which transcended his own desires, his own self. A problem arises when a person decides that the flesh, the desires of the body, are not important, that in fact they are "evil"...

Percy said that the central problem facing mankind, and more specifically modern man, was his insistence on the idea that his angelic nature and his bestial nature were incompatible, that one of them was an abberation, something that crept up in the history of mankind and screwed us up. Of course, at this point it ceases to become an issue of which is more or less valuable, but rather that both are required for a human person to live a full life. We are constantly faced with this simultaneous contradiction in society, those claiming that in order to live honestly, one must follow every capricious desire that might arise in his head, and the inevitable reaction on the other side that by following those animal desires *in the slightest* man has corrupted himself. The idea of a balance between nobility, social responsibility, and personal desire is virtually lost on modern society. It seems that we could all benefit from the Byrds' positive exhortation that "to everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season."

I find something of a solace in this contradictory nature of human life, of this pendulum on which we all swing endlessly, as frought with suffering and intellectual problems as it might be. Keeps one on one's toes.

I can't help but feel overjoyed to the point of tears sometimes. Those times seem to be increasing in their frequency. I don't know, maybe it's an existentially romantic naiveté on my part, but there exist times in my life that I have felt close to being opressed by the amount of beauty I see around me. And perhaps I'm not taking into account a sinister element present in many situations that I romanticize, human sadness and what have you, and that's completely selfish, but it feels good at the time. For several blissful moments nothing, absolutely nothing matters to me, and it's a relief, you know? And in that dispassionate relinquishing of concern lies not hopelessness or despair, but an almost all-consuming tenor of thanksgiving that grabs a hold of me and doesn't want to let go.

It's cloudy today; reminds me of Austria in October. Fog would rise from the small river across the street from my apartment and completely engulf the entire valley of Gaming-Scheibs. Waking up in the morning I could see lights across the way, veiled by a shroud of water vapor reaching for the sky. I've always been in love with clouds, gray days, fog, twilight, the magic hours. The sun tends to bear down on me, leaving me feeling trapped. And this is probably because I've always had eyes terribly sensitive to light, but there's something about the sun, shining on a cloudless day that reminds me of Eliot's musings on man's incapability of bearing too much of the stock of available reality. Sometimes it feels like a couple of clouds are a nice filter to that harsh light of the sun, or reality, as the case may be. At least that's how I feel... sometimes.

Suddenly I realized that I wanted to teach people things. This was very presumptuous of me to think that I could teach anyone *anything*, but, being not just a little precocious, I wanted to teach people to breathe, I wanted to teach people to look. I wanted to teach people to look at the stars as if they were looking at them for the very first time. To gaze at the stars like we did back when they were magic, back before we were old enough to understand that many of them were suns that had probably already set for good.

I also realized that what all of us want is to be able to look at our reflection in the eyes of another and be okay with what we see in those eyes. And mirrors don't count. They say they never lie, mirrors, they also never tell the truth, at least not all of it, and what's the good of truth if it isn't whole? When you're looking at a friend's eyes, catching a glimpse of your face in them, and that image doesn't scare you just a little, you've probably got it more made than any of us can get away with asking for. But that's what I think, anyway.

And I've walked this city's streets as this city sleeps, searching for the answer to a question no one's asked.

Oh, yeah, and Deerhoof is sweet as hell.