Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Me: [general what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life angst]
My Dad: Well, if you look deep enough inside yourself, there must be some hint. What is it you feel you're qualified for? What could you really devote your life to?
Me: Proofreading?
My Dad: No, not challenging enough. You need something rich, fulfilling, inspiring. [beat]
Too bad they don't have those mining town whorehouses anymore...
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(9)
09:56:35 PM,Tuesday 16 March 2004
{hums happily}
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09:30:06 PM,Tuesday 16 March 2004
The Bach Double arranged for alto recorders! It still sounds a little funny, as it's bound to, but I think this guy's transpositions are a lot more natural and efficient than the arbitrary-ass ones I've been using. I just wish I had someone to play it with. {sigh}
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(3)
09:18:13 PM,Monday 15 March 2004
Keep thinking and thinking and thinking 'bout this. What's the solution? Dunno dunno.
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02:02:33 PM,Monday 15 March 2004
Heaven! (Not Safe For Work -- via Vintage_Sex)
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(7)
12:27:46 PM,Monday 15 March 2004
Dude. I know my countertenors.
Edit: Ok, enough bragging, dorkweed. It was Robin Blaze, go you, ain't you smart. Are you gonna to give these nice people a link to the AWESOME FREE PERGOLESI you're watching, or are you gonna be a little finchface and keep it all for yourself?
Fine, fine. Stabat Mater. Broadband and Realplayer (yeah, boo hiss, I know) required. It's pretty freaking glorious, though.
(By the way, I totally hold my bow Baroque style, I realized, watching it. I could have been spared so many endless hours of anguish and torment from my violin teacher if I had just had a Baroque bow instead of that modern rubbish. Hm. I should see if I could get me one.)
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(1)
06:08:50 PM,Sunday 14 March 2004
Errata:
Of you and me
Each other's
Mein liebchen
Coccyx, not coxxyx. Holy hell. I've developed an X fetish.
Also: "Slattering Ram" is sheer genius, and must not go unacknowledged.
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(10)
10:18:10 AM,Sunday 14 March 2004
Things I want to eat before I die (to be added to, as they occur to me):
Beef Tartar
Ramen From Scratch
Scorpion Brittle
Honey Ants
Beluga Caviar
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(31)
02:38:12 PM,Saturday 13 March 2004
I live on hypotheses.
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(1)
09:35:20 AM,Saturday 13 March 2004
Snip, snap, snute
Så var eventyret ute.
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03:40:00 PM,Friday 12 March 2004
There's a dent in my head. It's been there for some time. Long enough that I can't remember where I got it. Maybe at birth. It's just to the right of the center of my forehead. It could accomodate the curve of a brazil nut (shelled). Sometimes it troubles me (is there a similar dent in my brain?). Sometimes it pleases me (could I use it for subcutaneous smuggling?). But, either way, it's there.
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(4)
12:37:35 PM,Friday 12 March 2004
I don't think that this is in any way related to the previous, but Punch Drunk Love wins my prize for best use of music in a motion picture since... well, possibly ever.
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(4)
12:06:08 PM,Thursday 11 March 2004
"Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm." -- Simone Weil
That quote has meant a great deal to me for years now, but it still surprises me when I realize I have to take it to heart. I'm so used to anticipating the events of my life as if they were a story, and weighing the possibility of certain things in terms of other stories I've read. But this is one of the most important places where it breaks down. For instance, just to take one case: romantic love. It can't be sustained in stories. Either it's just beginning, or it's unrequited, or it's imperiled, or it cuts away to "happily ever after" -- all of those work wonderfully in stories, because they're circumscribed in time. They have a trajectory and a resting place. But happy love, love over time, love without a prescribed ending, is very difficult to turn into a story. It's too subtle. It's not like friendship, which has reams of wonderful stuff devoted to it. Friendship only manifests itself a little bit at a time, in deeds or conversations or, but you know if you could see the whole thing, tips to root, it'd look more or less the same straight through. It can support the plot, because it doesn't dazzle you by its presence. Love is too various, tenuous, unspoken, specific. Books can't reveal it, unless it's frozen in time. And then it's distorted.
But books are all I've got. When I was in sixth grade, I announced that I'd never be married. I wanted a harem instead. And ever since, I've been unable to consider myself in a real, unbounded, sustaining love. Affairs, sure. Why do you think I love Der Rosenkavalier so much? I'm just as callous as Octavian, but I wouldn't have deluded myself into thinking it was Sophie that changed my mind. He was with the Marschallin not only because she was beautiful and wise, but because he knew it would end (even if he didn't admit it), and she knew it too. That's why he felt so deliriously free. And they say another person can't make you happy. All right; I'll take that on myself. But then what? If you figure out how to be happy when you're alone, it's a scary thing to scrap it all just to see if you can do it duo, y'know? Especially if there aren't any BOOKS about it! So it's down to that. But I have a feeling there's a solution somewhere. My skeptical mind won't allow me to positively believe in the possibility of sustained romantic love, but it won't necessarily deny it either. And all the rest of me is willing enough to make a go at it. Because, according to all the books, even when it falls to pieces, it's worth it. And if it doesn't...? Hm.
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(5)
11:10:39 AM,Thursday 11 March 2004
I LOVE SINGING OBNOXIOUSLY LOUD IN PUBLIC!
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(1)
02:37:01 PM,Wednesday 10 March 2004
Nothing gets
more epithets
than the sea.
I wish it was me.
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(4)
09:41:02 AM,Wednesday 10 March 2004
If I was a boy, and he wasn't dead, I would so totally totally do Herman Melville.
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08:43:41 PM,Tuesday 9 March 2004
"Mirabai, you can take the stuff out of the taco thing."
"I can what the what?"
"The... you know..." {vague scooping gestures}
{blank look}
"The avocado! You can slice up the avocado!"
"Ahhhhhh."
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(1)
07:41:41 PM,Tuesday 9 March 2004
New laptop! New laptop! Yeeee! HP Pavilion, 2.8 ghz, 60 gig HD, widescreen display, integrated wireless, firewire, media reader... yee yee yeeee! Hurray for Extended Warranties!
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(5)
05:41:51 PM,Tuesday 9 March 2004
Ok, can any of you guys make any sense out of this, like, at all?
"Although he was not very tall, dance gave Louis XIV the full measure of his grandeur. Absolute grandeur and power brings megalomania. Louis XIV is the alter-ego of Jean-Baptiste Lully and his Platonic object of love. They mirror each other, although the Sun King's light blinds. After numerous revolutions around the sun, after having reflected its awesome light, each planet dies off after an ultimate scintillation: Moliere (1673 -- from consumption while playing the Imaginary Invalid), Lully (from a wound at the foot, like a sort of protracted Oedipus -- swollen foot in Greek); they all die from their symptoms, from the absolute narcissism they so magnificently magnified, illustrated, and cultivated. Corbiau seems to be fascinated by the relation between opera, trans-or poly-sexuality and sublimation (his film Farinelli is about a castrato, i.e., falsetto and countertenor-like, juvenile male voices.) He maps a smart triangulation that makes of music (and voice) the mediation between the idealized and sublimated positions of Angel, Woman and God (the impossible way of ritualizing, pacifying through harmony, the Lacanian Real through a savvy interplay between time, the unconscious and rhythm). As illustrated by Le roi danse, the 17th century development of opera seems to exemplify the semiologic (pre-oedipal) status of "the autonomy of the high voice, as an object of jouissance detached from its usual funtion of signification, communication and the marking of gender difference" (The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Michel Poizat), of a space-time where the fantasy of the lost Mother's voice, the impossible incestuous jouissance (what, in cinema, the Cahiers-du-Cinema, film critic Michel Chion calls the acousmatic voice) is made possible by the operatic (absolute character, God..., or, Mother as a pre/trans-sexual being, what Lacan calls the Imaginary Primary Phallic Power -- think about Louis XIV's Queen Mother, Anne of Austria, in those terms!) The operatic voice represents this male desire to capture this evanescent, ever-receding immateriality whose location alternates (according to ideology, society and time) between the eternal and mysterious femininity (The Woman) and the impossible material jouissance (The Mother), or its substitute, the God-Head (as semiotic stand-in for the Imaginary, all powerful, frightening Phallic Mother.) The modern diva incarnates both (as in J.J. Beneix's film Diva -- 1980.)"
And these are not just random notes off the top of the guy's head. It's the last part of an actual published film review (typos mine, though). The fuh...?
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(10)
12:47:38 PM,Tuesday 9 March 2004
Locutus interruptus.
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(1)
11:46:45 AM,Tuesday 9 March 2004
