because brandon turned him down.

appparently, john mccain has chosen andrea zuckerman as his running mate.

art & craft. or, quote sir charles.

to avoid disappointment in art, one mustn't treat it as a career. despite whatever great artistic sense and talent a man might possess, he ought to seek money and power elsewhere to avoid forsaking his art when he fails to receive proper compensation for his gifts and efforts.

-orhan pamuk, my name is red

i love this quote. but is it true? i am very ambivalent about it. (not that im an artist, mind you - a little playacting now and then notwithstanding.)

on the one hand, im reminded of a writing teacher i once had, who implored us never to quit our day jobs, even if we started supporting ourselves through our creative writing. she had quit hers after selling a novel, and regretted it b.c she felt, among other things, that having a 'real' job had provided a ballast for her creative side, and a more natural way of doing her research - which was, simply, living her life. having become a professional writer, she felt she had immersed herself in her art to a fault.

so she would agree with the bottom line of the quote, if not its reasoning.

but on the other hand - i guess it would be the left one - i am reminded of something i read in elizabeth wurtzel's polemic on gender and culture, bitch. (i hope i used the word polemic correctly.)

wurtzel was talking about how bruce springsteen had been married to an actress, but left her for one of his backup singers. im tot paraphrasing, but wurtzel reasoned that it made sense that a musician as devoted to his art as springsteen would inevitably end up with someone in his band, b.c he has to be immersed in his art all the time, with precious few moments left over for anyone outside that work.

regardless of the accuracy of wurtzel's theory on the boss, shed disagree with the quote.

maybe those two anecdotes dont even directly relate to the quote. i dont know.

my instinct is to say that the quote treats art too coolly. it seems to me that disappointment, while of course always being a bummer, would only serve to inform an artist's work. so why try to avoid it in the first place? i feel like the speaker, by calling for the separation of art and career, is saying 'the travails of an artist's life should never impinge on his mind when he does his art.' under this prescription, wouldnt the artist be treating his art more as a craft, or a trade, than he who made it his career?

whats my pt? again, im not quite sure. i keep going back and forth with this thing.

these colors dont run.

got new sneakers. it's just too bad lina is on her honeymoon and cant tell me what she thinks.

selfish.

i am to sushi what george wallace was to segregation.

two weekends ago, on a whim, i agreed to ordering from haru with nora. got my old standard: inside-out tuna/avocado with tobiko on the outside and an inside-out salmon/cucumber roll. i liked them both a lot.

incidentally, i also had a lovely little cold steamed spinach with sesame sauce salad, in case youre ever there.

the pt is, im taking sushi off my list of hoaxes.

notes on a grad school orientation.

-i had thought that sitting in a classroom again would give me visceral flashbacks to college and even high school. it's only been a handful of days, but so far this hasnt happened in any significant way. the seven years away from the ol' chalkboard seem to have affected a real turnover within the fiber of my being. this is a good thing. im not looking to relive high school and college. not in an academic sense, at least.

-the other students seem around my age, with me being on the slightly older side. id say there are 50 of us(?). it's actually a near 50/50 male/female split. there are not a small number of foreign students, from europe and asia.

-i met a guy yesterday who came here from korea only four weeks ago, and it's his first time in the states! he was placed in a dorm in brooklyn, which i found amusing, partly b.c it's like, coming here from korea wasnt enough? they have to give him the long commute on top of that? i mean, it seems like nyu has a dorm every three feet in this city. he seemed to speak english very well initially, but after talking to him for a while, i wondered if he wasnt making shrewd use of a cache of only 50 or so english words. whatevs: his english is better than my korean. plus, he thought i was hilarious, so hes my new best friend. i cant remember his name for the life of me.

-the people seem classy. there is an inherent comfort in being around people who share such a specific career interest. one guy got up during the predictable introductions they made us do and said, 'i want to make tennis in this country as popular as nascar.' that was sweet.

-while the seven years out of school seem to have changed my constitution, they have not changed my doodling. still doing the crazy name tag. still with the boxes. still chaining the boxes together, snaking the chains around the paper. still filling up every available grain of white space. still rocking the pen twirl. and i still got love for the streets.

-the profs who have spoken so far seem like they know their stuff. they have inspired confidence.

-im pretty psyched.

why being a writer makes you crazy.

i spent way too much of the afternoon debating myself about whether or not i should have said 'usb chord' instead of firewire in the last post.

this reminds me of writing letters home from summer camp. my bunkmates would witness me reading a letter i had written, before putting it in the envelope, and say 'why are you reading something you just wrote?'

lets just say 'im proofreading' wasnt the most 'respected' response.

school update soon. really.

the only pt of this post is to blatantly exploit the free net access at the apple store. (im at the midtown one.)

if i saw someone doing this, id want to strangle them with a firewire. god am i a hypocrite.

i will update about school in the next post. have a good weekend.

holy effing god.

i start school tonite. it's been about seven years since ive sat in a classroom for school-related purposes. i am determined to take better notes this time.

why cant i be one of those bloggers who just posts cute photos?

this is my friend's daughter. the pic is actually from a few years ago, but i came across it just now for work-related purposes. her name is georgia.

i think naming people after locations is one of the more appropriate ways to name em. but thats a whole other don.

dont worry darlin. now baby dont you fret. we're livin in the future and, none of this has happened yet.

john lennon once sang 'woman is the nigger of the world.' thats b.c he was a genius.

i was reminded of that line watching meet the press just now. david 'the-vertical-indentation-between-my-lip-and-nose-is-the-deepest-in-
the-world' gregory pressed condi 'sticky' rice on her reaction to saudi arabia's ban of women on its olympic team.

additionally, it seems that under the old school flavor of sunni islam which passes for law in saudi arabia, 'women are not allowed to drive, travel without the written permission of a male relative, or appear in public not dressed in a full-body covering.' (from the cnsnews.com link above)

im amazed theyre allowed to have babies.

ordinarily im on board with the you-cant-judge-other-cultures-you-
dont-know-what-its-like angle, but in this case, eff that. not only is it unconscionable that women not be allowed on the saudi team, but it's unconscionable that, this being the case, the powers that be at the olympics let the saudis have a team at all.

and yes, i know the olympics is, after all, supposed to be the embodiment of the different culture acceptance 'angle' of which i spoke above. but thats lame. like everything, it should be a proponent of progress above all else.

i know this is infeasible for millions of reasons, but some other country should allow saudi women to try out for her team. (btw, i say 'her' team, b.c like boats, in english, countries are referred to in the feminine gender. [slightly ironic in light of this post. very slightly.] the question is, how are countries referred to in arabic? the answer is, more time on google than im willing to spend right now.)

cupid, im rescinding your bow.

i guess this couldntve possibly been the first time ive witnessed this, but i just saw a couple walking down the street holding hands, each with ciggy in his/her outside hand.

really? this is how we do?

we are ready for the floor?

uriouser and curiouser.

hrc's name will be put into nomination in denver. from the times:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s name will be placed into nomination at the Democratic National Convention, a symbolic move approved by the Obama campaign in an effort to soothe a lingering rift with Clinton supporters...

For Democrats inside the convention center in Denver, as well as the television audience at home, it could create some interesting moments. After the state-by-state roll is tallied, Mrs. Clinton is expected to turn over her cache of delegates to Senator Barack Obama.

So how will Mrs. Clinton, who is a superdelegate herself, vote? Associates say she will throw her lot behind Mr. Obama and ask her supporters to follow suit. To see if it unfolds as the Obama campaign hopes – free of acrimony – tune in on Wednesday, Aug. 27.

here's the proverbial $64,000 dollar question; does this agreement make it seem more or less likely that shell be on the ticket?

you could argue that it signals this is less likely, b.c if hill was gonna be nominated for veep - a historic feat* - why would she need another historic tribute? is that overkill?

on the other hand, you could reason that the roll call for hill, itself a tribute to her supporters as much as it will be to her, would only accentuate a union of her and obama.

bottom line: i like the angels in five.

*(with apologies to geraldine ferraro - who once yelled at me for using a payphone in a room in which she was being interviewed, btw)

a thought while watching olympic volleyball.

(ive had this thought many times before; i was just reminded of it. im actually surprised i never wrote about it on the old blog.)

im always looking for allegories for life,* and with my predilection for sports, im often looking for them in the arena of athletics. of all sports, i think volleyball might be the best metaphor for living.

in most sports, the object is to either score a goal, or to get from pt a to pt b. and in life, we certainly do these things a lot.

but most of life, even if it's in the service of doing the two things above, is spent in the middle ground. essentially, it's all about staying in motion, and not 'dropping the ball' along the way. yes, in volleyball, your team's purpose is to score, but before you can do that, and for most of the action, you have to keep the ball in the air.

sometimes i think that's what we spend most of our time doing.

im not positive i articulated this perfectly, but hopefully well enough.

*mr met, that was not nec a conscious shout-out to ya, but obv it was some kind of hallo-hallo.

id like to say this means ive 'made it' - into a cultural institution - but i have a feeling it more means said institution is, um, 'promiscuous.'

i dont even know when this happened.

look at the highlighted portion.

(ALTHOUGH, i will give wikipedia this. it tot stonewalled our - what i felt were diplomatic - attempts at establishing a 'tickle tips' entry.)

takin his circus to the sky.

note: this post is about the currently-released documentary man on wire. since said film recounts an event that happened over 30 years ago, nothing i have written here could be realistically called a 'spoiler.' however, if you genuinely plan on seeing the movie, this post might compromise your ability to see it with fresh eyes. fair warning.

You never understood, why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special... you really don't know?... it was... it was the look on their faces.
-robert angier, in the prestige

in typical fashion, ive been chewing a lot of ears off about the prestige, a movie i think is woefully underappreciated. (btw, how come i never heard any jokes about kid dynamite chewing real deal's ear off? like, not one? seriously? and yes, im over a decade late with that.)

anyway, the prestige is about two rival magicians in fin de siècle london. at one pt the pair debate the value of their craft, and angier gives alfred borden the quote above. but forget about the prestige for a moment; that quote is a perfect way to sum up the life of philippe petit, subject of man on wire.

this is the frenchman who, in 1974, at the age of 24, walked a wire strung between the roofs of the two world trade center towers - for around 45 minutes(!); going back and forth roughly eight times(!); and even, at times, lying down(!); hangin out just like a street sign - albeit at an altitude where the streets have no name. (couldnt resist.)

of course, that's the climax of the movie. the hour or more leading up to 'the coup' is spent documenting petit's training and planning, and the travails of the multi-person team that surreptitiously (illegally) snuck up to the tops of the towers to set up the wire (it took a lot of work and espionage).

the whole time, as bro-ham is doing all this preparation, i kept thinking, 'why the hell does he feel the need to do this? is he just a mindless adrenaline junkie (even though in interviews, he came off as charming and thoughtful)? and why are his friends and gf letting him do this?'

so even though i was sitting there fixedly watching and taking in all the work that went into one of the most death-defying stunts of all time, a thought wouldnt leave the back of my dome: wrap it up however you want, this guy's just a careless, suicidal daredevil. we all know people like that; they compromise life under a patina of cheating death. petit seemed to be their archetype, is all.

man on wire, was i wrong.

b.c the instant he stepped onto that wire, the second he was no longer anchored to either tower, but rather, to a seemingly invisible wire strung btwn them, my eyes started watering. i got it.

from wikipedia:
Port Authority Police Department Sgt. Charles Daniels, who was dispatched to the roof to bring Petit down, later reported his experience:
I observed the tightrope 'dancer'—because you couldn't call him a 'walker' - approximately halfway between the two towers. And upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire....And when he got to the building we asked him to get off the high wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle....He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again....Unbelievable really....[E]verybody was spellbound in the watching of it.

that was the thing. i realized that intentionally or not, petit did this for us just as much as he did it for himself. as angier said, petit '[made] us wonder,' we 'got to see something really special.'

many people like to say that in life, 'it's the little things.' well, i agree. but i think we live on the little things - a nice conversation, a tasty meal, a good laugh, a good saturday - but we live for the big things.

it is inherent in us to wonder. we alone have the capacity to do that - to look at the universe into which weve been born, and know theres so much of it we cant understand at all, let alone grasp. but it's more than just a capacity. it's an intuitive yearning to reconnect with the ether from which we were sprung.

if only for a fleeting moment, petit pierced that ether. droplets of magic bubbled up from it, and fell down, and the people watching imbibed them, and were never the same. i think watching the movie, i only got facsimiles of those droplets, but i got that taste on my tongue nonetheless.

other things that have fed my spirit like that: seeing the great pyramid of giza; god putting on a jimi hendrix costume and playing a set at woodstock; reggie miller's 8 pts in 8.9 seconds against the knicks; great sex; laird hamilton domesticating a wave the size of a mountain; being in the middle of the atlantic on a cruise with my moms, seeing the stars on a 180 degree plane, from horizon to horizon; the image of that kid standing in front of the tank in tiananmen square; the last paragraph of one hundred years of solitude; the bodies exhibit at the seaport; the footage of neil armstrong stepping onto the moon.

in manhattan, woody allen gives a soliloquy on 'what makes life worth living,' and it's a very elegant list. but theyre things you can potentially get everyday. again, things we live on; in my opinion, not the things we live for. those things only come around once in a while, but they do come. petit gave the world one of those things.

this is important.

even though this wasnt its primary subject, my second to last post inherently poked fun at people who suffer from mental illness.

i meant to tell a story from the viewpoint of most new yorkers. sadly, i think i did somewhat capture the stigma with which people with mental illness in ny are burdened. simply put, they are dehumanized by many of us; i was guilty of this in the post.

not all posts are meant to be taken seriously, but i am a loyal member of the 'theres a little truth in every joke' association, so i have to take myself to task.

i guess the bottom line here is that i regret the lack of humanity/ility i showed. mental illness is perhaps the most devastating category of disease out there, and people afflicted with it deserve compassion. i certainly could have been more compassionate in my portrait.

perhaps this blog doesnt have enough seriousness equity for this post to carry weight, but i hope it does nonetheless. no one should be dehumanized or stigmatized.

i apologize.

gotta post this.

when you spend as much time trying to find obscure pop culture allusions to current events as i do, and someone sends you this, you feel obliged to share it. even if it doesnt take your hero very seriously.

i, creep on the subway.

when i was a kid, one of the joys of my parents taking me on the subway was that each car seemed to have a resident lunatic.*

he usually sat on one of the corner benches, tacitly sequestered away from the 'normal' straphangers. he was of indeterminate old age, with indeterminate stains on his short-sleeved button down and indeterminate plastic bags at his sides. if you got close enough, you discovered that he exuded a delightful melange of cigar stink and rum. shaped like humpty-dumpty, he balanced precariously on the concave bench. there might not have been a pile of peanut shells scattered around his big black orthopedic shoes, but there might as well have been. he muttered to himself, or to god.

or maybe it was his female analog, drawn up much the same, save for her all-too-lithe frame, tattered shawl, rum-only smell, and an indeterminate exercising of her lips, which seeemed to have an equal chance of being a silent soliloquy or some kind of palsy.

people pretended that they werent there, like africa or new orleans.

but i snuck more than enough peaks at them. they fascinated me, prolly not a little bit b.c they frightened me. even as a yute, i understood that these were irreplaceable fixtures of new york.

little did i know i would one day be one.

sure the cut of my jib is determinately respectable enough. but lately, i think i look like im having tete-a-tetes with my own spirits.

see, instead of listening to music on my pod while im on the train, ive taken to listening to stand-up comedy. (david cross and patton oswalt so far, and the latter's 'dukes of hazard' track nearly makes me piss myself every time.)

so im standing or sitting in a subway car, alone, headphones on, just doubling over with laughter, even reaching a fine cackle now and again. this can string on for multiple stops in a row, with nary a breath on my part. im just a lone dude on the subway, cracking up with reckless abandon. i mean, i kinda feel like a freak, but it's worth it.

i dont know that people have been looking at me askew, but id like to think so. i want to pull my own weight in this city. you know, give a little back, to that young bean who's getting initiated to the trains.

*the other primary joy was riding in the first car, standing at the very front, where i could look out the front window at the endless track being gobbled beneath the train, and pretend i was the conductor. give a kid that front-of-train, faux-conductor view, and you have him for life. i think i might actually get me some a that fun tonite.

quote larry bird (33).

you look so beautiful, i can hardly keep my eyes on the meter.

-woody to diane, in a cab, in manhattan

the way you sing off key.

it's the strangest thing. somewhere in the last few days, i found a random key and kept it. i know this, b.c it's on my key chain. but i have no specific memory of attaining it, nor do i have any idea what it could possibly be for. and it's one of these fancy 'do not duplicate' mul-t-lock futuristic-looking jobs. i mean, it's prolly for something good.

i am determined to keep this key as long as i can. i am convinced that one day im gonna happen upon a lock. the lock.

ill be ready.

only in dreams.

a mí, one of the most interesting, wonderful, frightening, perplexing and certainly important features of the human brain is the unconscious. it's so intriguing b.c it catalyzes so many of our actions, but always surreptitiously. it doesnt seek recognition; it allows our conscious mind the illusion of feeling that it's pulling the strings. it's kind of like we all have a little dick cheney homunculus in our domes.

or, a more elegant metaphor from an old david brooks column, itself a paraphrase from a book:

Imagine...a boy riding an elephant. The boy is the conscious mind, the prefrontal cortex and such. The boy can plan ahead. The elephant is the unconscious part of the brain, the amygdala and other regions. It produces emotions and visceral reactions. It processes information and forms intuitions.

obv, the boy can steer the elephant a bit, but ultimately, dumbo is gonna go where he wants to go. yet many of us are rarely at all cognizant of this.

i was reminded of all this by a dream i had last night. in it, i was walking the streets of barcelona, where i lived sep 99 - june 00, at night. i was walking on the gran via de les corts, towards placa catalunya. this is a busy part of town, but it was late at night, and i was the only one in the streets; it was reminiscent of the tom cruise-times sq scene in vanilla sky. i made many such walks when i lived there. my friends and i all lived with separate families, peppered about the city; at the end of a night, we all had different routes home. (to be fair, i also have a proclivity for fantasizing about being the only person in a huge metropolis.)

anyway, the dream made quite an impression on me b.c although i havent been to barcelona for over eight years (dios mio, man), i tot knew my way around.
and dont get me wrong; my mind's eye was not fabricating buildings and signs and sites. the landmarks i saw during my night walk are certainly there, even though i couldnt have described them for you while awake.

it's like seeing a scene in a movie or reading a passage in a book that you could not have recalled on command, but that instantly resonated when it was presented to you. like forgetting someone's name, asking them for the first letter, then discovering you had in fact not forgotten the name. only the conscious part of you had.

(this is all part and parcel of athletes and performers being called unconscious as they reach the heights of their crafts.)

to me, the dream is a good, straightforward piece of tangible proof of the capacity of the unconscious mind for those who doubt its power.

yet names and places and performances are only so many small potatoes. the area where the unconscious really gets you is the emotional realm. if it can tuck away city maps and movie lines behind your back, imagine the love, fear, angst, hope and frustration it keeps in storage. only to let these apparitions seep into your conscious mind, where they have a field day monkeying with the machinery therein.

bridging this divide btwn conscious and unconscious minds, tapping that potential boon, literally and metaphorically, is the tacit all-time quest of man.

yes, ive been into joseph campbell lately.

yes, this post is a bit high schoolish.

manhattan.

went to shake shack with father last night. that's a great burger (id be remiss not to mention that jeannius said that many lifetimes ago.)

the line at the shack is invariably epic; i think dad and i have seen the likes of it only outside the hermitage in st petersberg. thing is, reaching the front of the que and making your order is no denouement. at some pt, preferably before your order is filled, you have to find a table - with chairs. the ratio of customers to chairs at that place is roughly on the order of 400 to 1. patrons become vultures, creepily circling potential vacancies. gaggles of hipsters huddle around chairless tables, sending hunters out for seats. tableless dudes in suits walk around clutching errant chairs, like theyre bearing crosses. i usually try to pounce on a table first, then worry about the chairs.

last night i did it right though. i left my dad in line and, early in my rounds, spotted two women who were drinking shakes with empty burger boxes in front of them: clearly finishing up. i apologized for bothering them, then asked if one of them wouldnt mind coming to get us in line when they were going to leave the table, so either pops or i could seamlessly lay claim to it. worked like a charm; one of them came to get us just as we reached the front of the line.

im kind of ashamed this method had never occurred to me before. was it the darwinian atmosphere of the shack? was it the darwinian atmosphere of ny? was it our increased ability to execute necessary communications with people without actually talking to them? (something tells me all the vultures would have gladly sent mass texts to the table-holders, years before they would have stopped to talk to one of them.)

it's like mariel hemingay said in manhattan: you have to have a little faith in people.

this is here.

forgive me blogger, for i have sinned. it has been one season, innumerable dreams, myriad catharses, incalculable tumblers of whiskey, half a lifetime, dozens of underlined passages in books, immeasurable amounts of tuna salad, several friendship audits, some good and bad movies, some things im not proud of, some things i am, too many bitten nails, countless ant farm mornings spread over two continents, much tossing and turning in the dead of night, a steady regimen of a-rod homers, one lost love, one new hero, limitless miles of pavement underfoot, a few laughs, a few tears, untold gallons of water, constant obama debates, sporadic apologies, one episode of flossing, millions of puns, a number of haircuts and job interviews, multitudinous walks through the union sq and canal st subway stations, much resume rewriting, many reviews of family members to determine how much im like them, dozens of iced teas and peanut m & m's, a slew of tofu, a couple of dried out contacts, a lot of scrabble, daily doses of finasteride, not a little bit of sitting in union sq reading, an assiduous amount of deciphering the moscow metro (and cyrillic), a wedding, copious chocolate ices, a dip in the ocean, a weird tasting stick of gum, scores of epic battles btwn my air conditioner and heat-retaining tar roof, a crazy number of subway rides, one peeling sneaker, and a career turn since my last post.

now im here.