Looks Just Like The Sun

Festival.

2011-10-26T20:46:00.006-05:00

"'Special Days'

fête / festivity

The amorous subject experiences every meeting

with the loved being as a festival.

1. The Festivity is what is waited for, what is expected. What I expect of the promised presence is an unheard-of-totality of pleasures, a banquet; I rejoice like the child laughing at the sight of the mother whose mere presence heralds and signifies a plentitude of satisfactions: I am about to have before me, and for myself, the 'source of all good things.'

'I am living through days as happy as those God keeps for his chosen people; and whatever becomes of me, I can never say that I have not tasted the purest joys of life."

-The Marriage Plot. Jeffrey Eugenides.

Magical Powers.

2011-06-27T12:47:00.003-05:00

"I don't want to have to do this living. I just walk around. I want to be swept off my feet, ya know? I want my children to have magical powers. I am prepared for amazing things to happen. I can handle it."

-Me You & Everyone We Know. Directed Miranda July.

Watching this movie again for the first time in a long while. I f*cking love this movie.

06.09.2011

2011-06-09T07:07:00.001-05:00

"Some things don't need to last forever to be perfect."

They Just Do.

2011-05-10T00:39:00.007-05:00

A 2400 year-old story from Plato told by way of Aristophanes.

"Once upon a time, people were not born seperately from each other. They were born entwined, kind of coupled with each other. There were boys attached to boys, girls attached to girls and, of course, boys and girls together in a wonderfully intimate ball. We had eight limbs. There were four on top, four on the bottom, and you didn't have to walk if you didn't want to. You could roll, and roll we did. We rolled backwards and we rolled forwards, achieving fantastic speeds that gave us a kind of courage.

The courage swelled to pride. The pride became arrogance. Then we decided that we were greater than the gods and we tried to roll up to heaven and take over heaven. The gods alarm struck back. Zeus in his fury hurled down lightning bolts and strucked everyone in two, into perfect halves. All of a sudden, couples who had been warm and tight and wedged together were now detached and alone and lost and desperate and losing the will to live.

The gods seeing what they had done, worried that humans might not survive or even multiply again. Of course, they needed humans to make sacrifices and pay attention to them, so the gods decided on a few repairs. Instead of heads facing backwards or out, they would rotate our heads back forward. They pulled our skin taut and knotted it at the belly button. Genetalia was moved to the front, so if we wanted to we could.

Most important, they left us with a memory. It was a longing for that original other half of ourselves --the boy or the girl who used to make us whole. That longing is still so deep in all of us, men for men, women for women, men for women, for each other, that it has been in humans to travel the world, looking for our other half. When one of us meets another, we recognize each other right away. We just know this. We're lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy. We won't get out of each other's sight even for a moment. These are people who pass their whole lives together. If you ask them, they could not explain what they desire of each other. They just do."

-Plato as heard on Desperately Seeking Symmetry by Radiolab. You can listen to the show here: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/apr/18/

Feathers On Our Heads.

2011-04-20T00:50:00.004-05:00

"I play tennis and basketball. Basketball teams are made up of both staff and (I hate the word, but there's no way around it) patients. When I'm absorbed in a game, though, I lose track of who are the patients and who are the staff. This is kind of strange. I know this will sound strange, but when I look at the people around me during a game, they all look equally deformed.

I said this one day to the doctor in charge of my case, and he told me that, in a sense, what I was feeling was right, that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities. Just as each person has certain idiodyncracies in the way he or she walks, people have idiosyncrasies in the way they think and feel and see things, and though you might want to correct them, it doesn't happen overnight, and if you try to force the issue in one case, something else might go funny. He gave me a very simplified explanation, of course, and it's just one small part of the problems we have, but I think I understand what he was trying to say. It may well be that we can never fully adapt to our own deformities cause we come here to get away from such things. As long as we are here, we can get by without hurting others or being hurt by them because we know that we "deformed." That's what distinguishes us from the outside world: most people go about their lives they're unconcious of their deformities, while in this little world of ours the deformities themselves are a precondition. Just as Indians wear feathers on their heads to show which tribes they belong to, we wear our deformities out in the open. And we live quietly so as not to hurt one another."

-Norwegian Wood. Haruki Murakami.

This Little Space In Between.

2011-04-05T05:52:00.001-05:00

"I believe that if there's any kind of god, it wouldn't be in any of us -not you or me, but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really. The answer must be in the attempt."

-Before Sunrise. Directed by Richard Linklater.

03.23.11

2011-03-23T18:30:00.003-05:00

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, ' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.' ...

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."

-The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Remember.

2011-02-28T02:43:00.002-06:00

"L’amour n’est pas consolation, il est lumière."*

*"Love is not consolation, it is light."

-Simone Weil

-House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski.

God.

2011-02-25T06:42:00.004-06:00

"The one big surprise is that as it turns out, God is the sun. It makes sense, if you think about it. Why we didn’t see it sooner I cannot say. Everyday the sun was right there burning, our and other planets hovering around it, always apologizing, and we didn’t think it was God. Why would there be a God and also a sun? Of course God is the sun.

Everyone in the life before was cranky. I think because they just wanted to know."

-After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned. How We Are Hungry. Dave Eggers.

Where We Are All From.

2010-11-26T09:12:00.003-06:00

"From small speck of stardust to wondrously sentient
Revolving and spinning in space
Waking and sleeping and yielding to gravity
It starts to show on your face

Millions of forces of physics and providence
Teamed up and brought us all here
Waking and sleeping and yielding to gravity
Pointless to measure in years

Out in the desert your thoughts are as clear as the stars
You feel golden
You're billion year old carbon"

-From Stardust to Sentience. 03.07-09.07. High Places.

The Queer Ones.

2010-09-11T09:14:00.006-05:00

Sounds a little too close for comfort.

"Luckily queer ones like her don't happen too often. We know how to nip most of them in the bud, early. You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry about it. Peace give the people contests they win by remembering capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damn full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV apart and puts it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and your heroin, more of everything to do with the automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment."

-Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury.

And Nothing To Be Done About It.

2010-09-04T04:55:00.008-05:00

"A notion of character, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives. They woke up, were they lucky enough to have consciousness, in the act of doing something they already knew how to do: feeding themselves with currants. Walking the dog. Knotting up a broken bootlace. Singing antiphonically in the choir. Suddenly: This is I, I am the girl singing this alto line off-key, I am the boy loping after the dog, and I can see myself doing it as, presumably, the dog cannot see itself. How peculiar! I lift on my toes at the end of the dock, to dive into the lake because I am hot and while isolated like a specimen in the glassy slide of summer, the notions of hot and lake and I converge into a consciousness of consciousness -in an instant, in between launch and landing, even before I cannonball into the lake, shattering both my reflection and my old notion of myself.

That was what was once believed. Now it seems hardly to matter when and how we become ourselves -or even what we become. Theory chases theory about how we are composed. The only constant: the abjuration of personal responsibility.

We are droll and ornamental and no more capable than a sprig of lavender or a sprig of lightning, and nothing to be done about it.

We are an experiment in situation ethics set by the Unnamed God, which in keeping its identity secret also cloaks the scope of the experiment and our chances of success or failure at it -and nothing to be done about it.

We are loping sequences of chemical conversions, acting ourselves converted. We are twists of genes acting ourselves twisted; we are wicks of burning neuroses acting ourselves wicked. And nothing to be done about it. And nothing to be done about it."

-Son Of A Witch. Gregory Macguire.

The Khmer Rouge: Inhumanity & Death. A True Story.

2010-08-03T13:41:00.016-05:00

I feel like as I'm becoming an adult, I'm starting to contemplate my origins and past events which have coalesced together into making me the person who I am today. Ever since I was a little child, I was told that I was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and that my parents had escaped something called a genocide. I eventually learned the definition of the word. Looking back on it now, I don't think I fully understood what it meant. Genocide: the systemic mass killing of people. For a young child who lacks substantial experience with such events, it was hard for me to grasp the true meaning of the word. As I'm becoming older and gaining more knowledge, I feel as though the word genocide has taken on a whole new meaning: fear, terror, murder, loss, sadness, inhumanity, hopelessness, the unthinkable ... Now, 30 years later, as the sentencing of the first Khmer Rouge leader takes place, I find myself reading up about the genocide so I can try to get some idea of what my parents, my grandparents, my relatives and what the rest of the Khmer people went through during this horrific time in history.

The book I am reading currently, describes the life of Haing Ngor. Haing Ngor became famous in Hollywood after starring in the film The Killing Fields. He plays a Khmer journalist who lives during the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia and then eventually escapes. He even won an Oscar for his performance. In real life, he was a doctor who narrowly escaped the Khmer Rouge himself.

Sadly, Haing Ngor was killed in 1996 when he was trying to stop a drug-dealing street gang in Los Angeles from stealing a locket with a picture of his wife who died during the genocide.

Here is one of the most profound parts of the book which I think best describes the horrible atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. It's hard to remind myself that it really happened.

"Around us, the other inhabitants emerged from the huts they had built of thatch and reeds and pieces of plastic and started down the paths. It was a cold morning, The ‘new’ people wrapped their kramas around their shoulders to stay warm. Those who didn’t have kramas or extra shirts shivered and rubbed themselves with their hands. We walked down the paths toward the railroad tracks, but not everybody in Phum Chhleav was lucky enough to leave. Through the open door of a hut, we saw an old lady unconscious against a wall. Her legs were grossly swollen with oedema. She stank with wastes and was covered with flies. Unable to walk and too heavy to carry, she had been left behind.

As we climbed onto the railroad track, which was elevated a few feet above the nearby ground and was the only dry place in the landscape, we looked around a the pitiful spectacle. And then I understood why the rice fields had been so empty of workers. It was if all the patients I has visited in their huts had been multiplied many times over and put in a parade before our eyes. People with shrunken faces and haunted vacant eyes, with legs and arms as thin as sticks or else puffy and bloated with oedema. Leaning on canes or on relatives’ shoulders, or alone, they walked with that terrible economy of movement that signals the approach of starvation. As Huoy and I watched, a thin, scrawny, middle-aged woman put down the end of the hammock she had been carrying slung under a bamboo pole. The man inside the hammock called out weakly, “Honey, Honey, bring me with you! Don’t leave me behind!” But the woman shook her head and trudged off down the railroad track. After a moment of indecision the man carrying the other end of the hammock abandoned it too and hobbled off after her. No one went to the hammock to help the man. I didn’t. Even if I could have helped him, there was no way that Huoy and I could have carried him. If we tried to carry him we probably wouldn’t have made it ourselves. So we walked on.

The sun cast our shadows in front of us, onto the railroad track. I put the shoulderboard down, shifted it to the other shoulder and went on. To me, every hundred yards seemed like a mile. To other people, every ten yards was a mile. Around us the malnourished, the sick and the near-dead shuffled on in groups of two or three, dressed in whatever rags they owned. Everyone was muddy. Some had wet their crotches and soiled the seat of their pants. They stopped to rest, covered with flies, and some who rested just stayed there, giving in to gravity. A teenage boy ahead of us tried to get up from a sitting position. He put his palms on the ground and pushed but wasn’t strong enough. He tried again, pushing as hard as he could with his matchstick arms. With great effort he got his buttocks off the ground and brought his legs underneath and shakily rose to his feet. He took one step, almost fell and then took another faltering step as we passed him.

What made it worse, and made it more appalling was that somehow it was ordinary. You put one foot in front of the other and you kept on walking. You heard the cries of the weak but you didn’t pay much attention, because you concentrating on yourself and your own survival. We had all seen death before. In exodus from Phum Chhleav, the atrocious had become normal.

No one took count, but my guess was that of the seventy-eight hundred who walked to Phum Chhleav, a little over half walked out and some were dying on the way. Those who lay down and didn’t get up had plenty of company, for scatter along the railroad track were corpses from the previous days and weeks. What happened to the corpses is what always happens in a tropical climate. Their skin had swollen, turned purple-black and bursted through their clothes. Most of them had one leg or arm rose stiffly in the air. They stank badly. Their eyes were half open. Flies clustered around their mouths, anuses and eyes. For them I felt more sorrow than revulsion. It was not the dead’s fault they were lying there. It was the Khmer Rouge’s fault for causing the deaths, and the relatives' fault for not burying the dead. And that made me angry.

How fast man changes! How fast he sheds his outer humanity and becomes the animal inside! In the old days – only six months before – nobody abandoned the dead. It was part of our religious tradition that if we didn’t cremate or bury the bodies, and if we didn’t pray, the souls would wonder lost. They would be unable to go to heaven, or to be reborn. Now everything had changed – not just our burial customs but also our beliefs and our behavior. We had no more monks and no religious services. We had no more family obligations, Children left their parents to die, wives abandoned their husbands and the strongest kept on moving. The Khmer Rouge has taken everything that held our culture together, and this was the result: a parade of the selfish and the dying. Society was falling apart.

That night we camped on a hillock in the rice fields - my parents, my brother and Huoy and I. A Chinese family shared the hillock with us. The night was noisy with frogs and crickets and the treetops sitting in the wind. I couldn’t sleep. I got up several times to sit in front of the fire, feelings its warmth, rubbing my hands, watching the flames. Huoy, who was worried about my health, kept asking me to come back next to her and sleep. Finally I did. In the morning we had discovered that the Chinese man on the other side of me had died. In the dark nobody had noticed.

With this something inside of me snapped. It was too much to accept – the death march, the hunger, the uncertainty of going to another unknown destination. I brought Huoy and the rest of my family to a shady spot on the other side of the road and asked them to stay there, Then I went off, exploring, without any clear idea of what I was going to do."

-Survival In The Killing Fields. The autobiography of Haing Ngor. Haing Ngor and Roger Warner.

Now This Granite Bench.

2010-07-14T01:01:00.006-05:00

I saw this piece at the Walker Art Center for the first time years ago; probably when I was 15 years old. In this art piece there are neat granite benches arranged in a huge square. Each bench has engraved on top a saying of sorts; some with advice, others with vague expressions. I always stop at this bench. It's one of my favorites. I feel like I need to remind myself of this more often. Like whenever I feel like I've done something that I don't think is truly virtuous and in end will come back to haunt me. A way of keeping me out of the gray. Because in the end, I think we all know it's true.

"There is a period when it is clear that you have gone wrong but you continue. Sometimes there is a luxurious amount of time before anything bad happens."

-The Living Series. Walker Art Center Sculpture Gardens. Jenny Holzer.

Shoes.

2010-07-13T23:34:00.006-05:00

This is an adorable movie. Full of kooky wisdom.

Christine: "I mean, they kind of rub my ankles, but all shoes do that. I have low ankles."
Richard: "You think you deserve that pain, but you don't."
Christine: "I don't think I deserve it."
Richard: "Well, not consciously maybe."
Christine: "My ankles are just low..."
Richard: "People think that foot pain is a fact of life, but life is actually better than that."
Michael: "I'll say. You should get some [better shoes] . Your whole life could be better. Just starting right now."

-Me, You and Everyone We Know. Directed by Miranda July.

The History Museum.

2010-07-02T01:42:00.011-05:00

I went to the Minnesota History Center on Wednesday for the first time. I checked out the Benjamin Franklin exhibit which details Franklin's life and accomplishments. Through out the exhibit there were these quotes which were part his "13 virtues" for living his life. He developed these in 1726 at the age of 20 on an 80 day ocean voyage from London to Philadelphia.

These virtues were inspired by Philippians 4:8 which states: "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things."

They are as stated:

"1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation.

2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.

3. Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.

4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.

5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.

6. Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.

7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. Justice: Wrong none, by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9. Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forebear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.

11. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; Never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.

12. Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates."

-13 Virtues. Benjamin Franklin.

These quotes were one of the most interesting parts of the museum for me. Mostly because it seems like they have a lot of truth to them.

An Artist.

2010-05-11T01:34:00.005-05:00

"It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction-- extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn't at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can't help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were to (to put it in much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-eared runt of the litter. It's a thought, anyway, finally said, that I've lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again."

-Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction. JD Salinger.

Strength.

2010-05-02T22:11:00.005-05:00

One of my favorite lines from Morrissey:

"It's so easy to laugh. It's so easy to hate. It takes strength to be gentle and kind."

-I Know It's Over. The Queen is Dead. The Smiths.

Chocolate.

2010-04-28T03:45:00.007-05:00

I go to the local co-op in Saint Cloud about every week to get my fruits, vegetables & all my other essentials. At least the ones that don't make me feel like I'm going broke by trying to be environmentally sustainable. Anyways, Last week I decided to indulge in some dark chocolate and was happily surprised to find a love poem written on the inside of the wrapper.

"Love is too young to know what conscience is;
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,
Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove.
For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body's treason;
My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love; flesh stays no farther reason,
But, rising at thy name, doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize. Proud of his pride,
He is contented thy poor drudge to be,
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side,
No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her 'love' for those whose dear love I rise and fall."

-Pure Dark. Chocolove XOXOX 55% Dark Chocolate. William Shakespeare.

Advice.

2010-03-18T15:09:00.006-05:00

I laughed outloud when it read this. The main character of this story is trying to submit advice to an HIV magazine called Positive and she keeps on wondering why it always get rejected.

"If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him or her the answer to the question. If you don't know anyone, call the operator and tell him or her. Most people don't know that the operator has to listen, it is a law. Also, the postman is not allowed to go inside your house, but you can talk to him on public property for up to four minutes or until he wants to go, whichever comes first."

-The Shared Piano. No One Belongs Here More Than You. Miranda July.

What Comes From Love?

2010-02-21T21:43:00.006-06:00

"It took my breath away and filled me with something absolute- love; but also joy and peace. And with that understanding that love and joy and peace are all the same thing. Joy comes from love. Peace comes love. Now you know, my mother said."

-Essay for This I Believe. NPR. Amy Tan.

Heart & Reason.

2009-11-23T17:20:00.006-06:00

"Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point."*

*"The heart has reasons, that reason knows nothing of."

-Pensées. Blaise Pascal.

11.17.09

2009-11-17T01:04:00.006-06:00

Haruki Marakami is one of the favorite authors, if not my favorite. He writes with such wisdom and creates such bizarre, eerie worlds in his writing. It's genius.

"Time, of course topples everyone in its path equally -the way that driver beat his old horse until it died on the road. But the thrashing we recieve is one of frightful gentleness. Few of us even realize that we are being beaten."

-The "Poor Aunt" Story. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Haruki Murakami.