I've had trouble writing since New Year. I'm not a journalist. And cold weather is very difficult (to navigate, recover from...). I've been in a dumb cycle of write-publish-unpublish, write-publish-unpublish--anxious and also sluggish, paralyzed. I won't bother to project (too much) here; I'm talking about myself.

I'm prone to elegiac leaps, chronic nostalgia, conflating personal experience and cultural history--sometimes fine for the screen/page, but pretty antithetical to healthy living. I sort of promised myself (and yous) that January 1, 2010 meant FUTURE. But I'm not really sure what I meant by it. It's absurd to do away with memory or history, with measuring out and retelling it, as it's absurd to make too many predictions (unless you are Pillow and psychic). I think I meant: [to self:] be present and let the past and future stand to inform one's presentness without causing some terrible lift-off/missing of the ground. I am going to approach my posts here more directly, state the purpose in the title and then expound, taking all tenses into account, but principally describing the current state of prescribed 'thing,' as I understand it. Like:
Miley Cyrus and Brett Michaels
Longhand
Hamburgers
Barns
Cocktail Rings
Frank Stella
Union Square
Sparkling Water
(Space)Facebook
Highlighters
Michael Kors
Plastic Bags
BMWs

...we'll see. Maybe it will read too Barthes-y...but of course it won't because I'm not that (dry and French and) lofty, not by any fraction.

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Verses

Daria, episode 1.13 "The Misery Chick" excerpt

(in Jane's room; Jane is sitting on the bed, wearing headphones and making some sketches, when Daria knocks on the door)

Jane - (takes off headphones) Yo! Come on in! (sees Daria walk in) Oh. Hi.

Daria - Are you avoiding me?

Jane - Um... not anymore?

Daria - What's going on?

Jane - Nothing. I just haven't felt like talking to anybody.

Daria - I'm not anybody, and I'd like to talk to someone.

Jane - But you've been talking to everyone.

Daria - No, everyone's been talking to me. There's a difference.

Jane - Well, what do you want to talk about, anyway? You don't care about what happened.

Daria - How can you say that?

Jane - You've been treating it like, "Oh well, another stupid day." The guy died.

Daria - I know he died! I'm sorry he died! But I'm not going to pretend that he was some great person when he wasn't. People aren't upset because Tommy Sherman died, they're upset because they're going to die.

Jane - That's understandable.

Daria - Okay, but you know what I've been hearing? "You know how I feel, Daria. You're gloomy. I knew I can talk to you, Daria. You're always miserable." Tragedy hits the school and everyone thinks of me. A popular guy died, and now I'm popular because I'm the misery chick. But I'm not miserable. I'm just not like them.

Jane - It really makes you think.

Daria - Funny. Thanks a lot. (starts to leave)

Jane - No! That's why they want to talk to you. When they say, "You're always unhappy, Daria," what they mean is, "You think Daria. I can tell because you don't smile. Now this guy died and it makes me think and that hurts my little head and makes me stop smiling. So, tell me how you cope with thinking all the time, Daria, until I can get back to my normal vegetable state."

Daria - Okay. So why have you been avoiding me?

Jane - Because I've been trying not to think. About the way we were making jokes about him dying and then, boom, it happened.

Daria - We didn't have anything to do with the guy dying. It was a freak accident.

Jane - Yeah, well, I don't like it when I say people should die and then they do. I don't want that kind of responsibility. At least not until I've got a job in middle management.

(pause)

Daria - You didn't make him die.

Jane - You're not the misery chick.

Daria - All right, then.

Jane - All right, then.

(pause)

Daria - He shouldn't have died.

Jane - No.

Daria - But he wasn't a nice guy.

Jane - (frowns) No.

Radio Soleil D'Haiti

Italian sunglasses, early 60s—

Fellowship

I'm ashamed to say it took me such a long minute (Pillow and Petrova were v. helpful) to grasp The Montag-Pratts' vision of love, their 'Book of Revelations,' their brilliant, interactive primer in what goes on in Hollywood (divorced from film), la verdad, the process of it all, a great, fluffy sham. Here, Heidi, girded, as ever, by Christ, describes—giddy, breathless—her mean pursuit of cosmetic surgery. People need to know (how Megan Fox happened).

Verses

"Directive"----fragment
Robert Frost
1942

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.

Love In This Club

There's just this thing about Damian, lead singer of OK GO. Some people get it; most don't seem to. In any event, their new album came out this week. And this link will probably die soon, so enjoy while you can...

Two Songs For Tuesday

---I might have posted "Love Comes Quickly" before, this time 2009? It sounds like January. And I was reading an irritating back page of Allure magazine, tabloid style talking heads, pictures and captions: What trends are you so over? That insidious prig Zac Posen was published, "I am not interested in the 1980s." I dislike the notion of trends full stop; there are, of course, cycles-- re-sight, oversight, some renewal. But I hate the implied death, the waste and admonition of the "trend." It's tacky (monetary). If one must regard these alleged "trends" for conversation's (and convention's) sake, for answering a dumb question, a whole decade's contents or impressions will not do. He might have said, "I don't like the way the Aughts did the 80s, like the 50s in the 70s or the 70s in the 90s" (though that would have been pretty crazy and forbidding too). Androgyny and ironical excess, such earnest references to Modernism. And then music, where I sort of started without starting---"Love Comes Quickly" or a trillion others. Really.

---Disconnected from the last (outside of my commute this morning), Iyaz's recent superhit debut "Replay," which like Soulja Boy's "Kiss Me Thru the Phone" last summer, makes me wish I were a teen again in the halls of the Central High School hearing boys rif on the chorus flirtatiously. It's a compact, clever little gift of a song, calling forth pop addiction addictively, top-full of milkshake (or Captain Morgan) romance, parking lots, knapsacks, radios, breathmints, braids. Also, a dose of The Islands in winter--via jet or radio--is damn necessary; in Flatbush, one can think of little else...