Confession

Awesome internet video checklist:

• racy subject matter - X
  
• comically frequent blinking - X
• skateboarders hurting themselves - no
  
• opportunity to judge others - X
• Tyra Banks trying not to say "slut" and "blowjob" on daytime television - X
  
• kittens - no

No kittens or skateboarders here, but I think this clip amply compensates with its other charms.



Watch carefully to appreciate the subtle awesomeness.

On this day in history...

Pour one out for the old boy! James Joyce died sixty-eight years ago today.

Heirloom

I.
In the grave days of small wonders,
quarried bones and headstone halves gleaned through ceiling holes,
secrets coupling with house ghosts, retrieving mementos
from closets, from bedrooms
at odd hours throughout the night

and straight into winter
and straight into morning

II.
Remember: Exposure

TV buzz, bellyaching
sans love
all the great drones of a great haunted house

our very own. Remember:
Porcelain
(shaken memories from the shelves
shattering on the grubby floors below),
cow hips in the foundation,
cats under crosses,
dead dogs gathering in sewage pools

without a God’s Eye. Remember

the downstairs piano talking
off-key
in the dread hush of something
ghastly taking shape with eyes open

I, in an upstairs twin
beside the curved wall window
gazing into stairs
in the face of time without time,
time without hands
time as endless indifference

in that unearthly moan,
an eternity of just knowing

III.
you, sleeping around in the corners,
in the corner of a room, you were sleeping
around with her, you, with and without my sister
drawing up lies and quick answers.

Then I was afraid just knowing

of my own forgotten sleepwalks,
the secrets I, too thickly harbored
like you, Brother, under woolen covers

the great dusty heirloom
banging about the crooked floorboards.

I shall pet you now

from Holbein the Younger

Four simultaneous occurrences of The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger.

Ice Storm 2008 (Fitzwilliam, NH)

Corpse Groom

In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort by Richard Avedon






You can see the whole New Yorker series HERE.

Also check out Avedon's own website. The portrait section is pretty excellent. Personal faves are The Family series, the Literature section, and the John Ford portrait in Film.

A Week Before Christmas

i.
I heard you went to church
that morning. And the rope

was it already noosed? knotted?
I didn't go to church that morning.

I stopped praying when I colored the Savior
black and blue in CCD, his heart gold,

a cold purple crown.

But you went to church early that day.
And I missed the morning.

You would miss the evening.
It will pour on Christmas.

ii.
I woke up late,
brunched at the Toast

because Harvey's was closed,
my sister and I, frustrated.

You were muttering. Perhaps
praying? You were silent.

Crying? There was silence.
I had eggs over-hard on toast.

I scraped my plate clean.
And you swung.

iii.
Your three daughters are shaking, Donna.
Last night, your eyes were closed like mine

and I saw them screaming, tearing
at their hair, their young faces crumpled,

torrents of tears.
Their fingers only fists.

It was desperate, Donna.
I turned in my sleep so many times last night.

There was nothing else I could do.
You lay in your silence

your last words held fast in a still heart.
Winter settled thickly about you.

The Up Series

This weekend, my roommates and I started watching the Up Series. It's a series of documentary films following a group of British children as they grow up. They were selected at the age of seven from schools all over England, attempting to get a representative sample from all social classes, and every seven years, the students are interviewed again. The original director believed that the social classes in England were so strict, that they would effectively determine the type of people each of the children would grow up to be.

I've seen "Seven Up!," "Seven Plus Seven," and "Twenty-One Up" so far, and I've found them all fascinating. The last installment of the series was in 2005 when the group turned 49, and a new installment is expected in 2011 or 2012.

The whole series is on Netflix, and many of them are available for instant viewing on your PC.

Her Thumb is a _____!

Courtesy of Digital Spy: A collage portrait of Paris Hilton made from porn magazines has gone on show at a New York gallery. British artist Jonathan Yeo is behind the work, which was purchased by Damien Hirst ahead of last night’s opening.

A similar image of President Bush also forms part of the exhibition, reports The Associated Press.

A gallery spokeswoman said the Hilton portrait is titled “Paris, 2008″ and posters of it will be sold for $20 (£10.80) each.

Yeo is offering the star proceeds from the sale of the posters because she never received any money from the notorious 2004 sex video that starred her and then-boyfriend Rick Salomon, the spokeswoman said.

When trying to capture their subject, an artist is faced with the task of trying to find the medium that will best convey the vision the artist is trying to express. Hell, I couldn’t think of a better way to get at the very essence of what Paris is about: sticky pages from porn mags! The only way it could get any better would be to have a frame made out of unused condoms (because you know she doesn’t bother with those) and the packaging from Valtrex. What do you think Yeo used as glue? You decide.

To see more go to http://yeeeah.com/2008/09/26/paris-hilton-portrait-made-of-porn-collage/

Oscar Season is here / gay zombie movie

From Bruce LaBruce, maker of Give Piece of Ass A Chance and The Raspberry Reich:

A young zombie named Otto appears on a remote highway. He has no idea where he came from or where he is going. After hitching a ride to Berlin and nesting in an abandoned amusement park, he begins to explore the city. Soon he is discovered by underground filmmaker Medea Yarn, who begins to make a documentary about him with the support of her girlfriend, Hella Bent, and her brother Adolf, who operates the camera. Meanwhile, Medea is trying to finish "Up with Dead People," the epic political-porno-zombie movie that she has been working on for years. She convinces its star, Fritz Fritze, to allow the vulnerable Otto to stay in his guest bedroom. When Otto discovers that there is a wallet in his back pocket that contains information about his past, before he was dead, he begins to remember a few details, including memories of his ex-boyfriend, Rudolf. He arranges to meet him at the schoolyard where they met, with devastating results.

Otto; or Up with Dead People:

Damien Hirst has created a pickled unicorn

First off, I kind of wish I could afford to buy something at this auction, specifically the unicorn.
Secondly, I definitely recommend seeing Hirst's preserved tiger shark (titled "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living")the next time you're in the MET.

Cat Fight

Two fat 'n spoiled cats locked in an epic battle for the LazyBoy.

fare thee well, Inez

I only spend about three minutes of my lunch break actually eating (peanut butter sandwich and a baggie of cheeze-its) and the remaining twenty seven I dedicate to day dreaming and staring absentmindedly into the trees beside the parking lot. Every now and then I have a good idea and I jot down notes on little scraps of paper, the idea being that later I'll find the note and remember to do something I thought was important.

The system rarely works, at least not in a timely fashion. Today I found a note from last week on a yellow post-it neatly folded in half: ISABELLA/HELENA(?) disappears into the woods ... Aguirre WATCH.

I followed the note's instructions and tracked down the clip in question:



I don't remember what made me think of this during that particular lunch break. Maybe I imagined myself silently slipping into the woods (taking a permanent half-day) whilst my malnourished, half mad coworkers licked the ground for salt ... but there were no native arrows raining down and no one else eats lunch outside, much less licks the parking lot for essential minerals.

Inez (Helena Rojo) disappears from the film's narrative after this and I can only assume she perishes somewhere in the jungle, perhaps on her own terms, perhaps on the jungle's.

fare thee well, Inez

love joshua

Are you afraid of the dark?

Recently, I watched the History Channel's "The Unexplained: Hauntings," an A&E program that interviews three families who have lived in purportedly haunted houses as well as interviews with ghost experts and ghost skeptics. For me, it was the second family that reported the most fascinating haunted house tale. They claimed they saw a lit cigarrette hover by them in the air one night while they were eating dinner. They also had a psychic channel the angry ghost during a seyonce and the ghost, in a very threatening voice growled, "This is my property. Get out," as well as saying his name and what year he bought the property (all, the family found out via town records, were true). However, the icing on the cake was when the family would find crosses and the words "GO DEAD" scribbled on the interior walls of the house and on random scraps of paper. Absolutely horrifying. I think the one thing that the family didn't experience was having the piano played in an illogical manner in the dead of night. (This idea of a piano playing by ghost hands is one of the top most frightening things I can think of.) If they had a piano, though, I wouldn't have put it past this ghost to have gone wild with it.

My mom is always asking why I watch such shows when they scare me so much. My answer is always, I don't know. I have just always been fascinated by the magical and the surreal. I clearly remember stumbling upon "unicorn" hoofprints in the dust of the path that wound through a blueberry thicket in the back of my childhood log home. (Of course, I now know they were most likely deer hoofprints, but just maybe they were the genuine article?...) This powerful imagination of mine coupled with the fact that I was exposed to horror movies at a very young age (i.e. 3 years old) has instilled a deep, unshakeable, and oftentimes very illogical belief in the supernatural and all of its ghosts, hauntings, Sasquatch, little Nessie, etc. So of course, I'm easy to convince if you say you've seen a ghost.

But I really think I've seen a ghost. Or rather, I've seen strange things that I can't explain.

In 1998, when my family moved into our sprawling yellow farmhouse built in 1787, we all thought it was a creepy place. We loved how large it was, how everyone got their own bedroom (a first for me), the beautiful view of the Ossipees, and the woods and pond in our backyard, and yet there was a strange feeling that seemed trapped in the old place. It didn't help that most of the interior walls were painted barn red, brown, mustard yellow and army green, making the place even darker, heavier and more ominous. Places in the house that seemed especially off-putting were the old front hall (the large door leading to the old front hall shown above), the piano room, the dining room, the basement, and above all, the master bedroom. Friends who have visited tend to agree with this assessment.

We soon came to find out that the place had a substantial history: it was once part of the Underground Railroad, was the home of Governor Bean and fam way back when, and that old man Leighton who lived across the street sat down on the front porch sometime in the middle of the last century and drew his last breath. We found Indian shutters tucked inside the wood frames of the downstairs windows in the piano room (to pull in front of the windows if any Indians decided to attack you with arrows), and two long, musty sectioned-off places in the basement that were used primarily to store coal for the house and secretly for hiding runaway slaves. There was also an "unfinished" room in the basement that had a lone, naked bulb dangling by the doorway (by unfinished, I mean, a room that ran the length of the main house, was filled with sand, and was accessible through a rickety screen door). My family ended up using this sand to sprinkle on our icy driveway in the wintertime, but it was never a pleasant experience to lurk about in the basement alone, scooping shovelfuls of sand into a wheelbarrow that then had to be hauled up the basement stairs to the backyard. Even after living there for a decade, the unfinished room is nowhere near being cleared of sand. Finally, the house contained a secret passageway that wound from the smaller closet in the master bedroom (where you lifted up four attached, very inconspicuously cut boards to begin your descent), wound around the chimney down to the little closet (whose door was, oddly enough flush with the wall -- they were big on this feature in the old days) located in the old front hallway. Yes, a few of the siblings did try to successfully use the passage, but it was too sooty and very narrow for us to fully complete the journey. You would have to really want to hide to go in there.

We found turn-of-the-century binoculars, shoes, old cow bones, glass bottles for things like Lady Pinkham's, ink bottles still containing wet ink, loose goldleaf, schoolbooks circa the 1880s, newspapers dating 1906, an old horse harness, farm tools and broken china in the property's grounds, walls and ceilings. Among the more ominous discoveries, a ball-and-socket joint extracted from the basement walls by my brothers and a heavy, rough, square-shaped granite doorstop that when turned over was found to be half of a gravestone. I discovered this one day when, talking on the phone downstairs, I happened to look up at the ceiling (where we had used the doorstop to cover a temporary, coffee can-sized hole in the bathroom) only to see the inscription of dates and a last name carved elaborately into the stone.
In the decade my family lived there, the place was oftentimes a goldmine of history. Especially in those early days of living there, anywhere you looked, a once forgotten relic was staring you in the face. It was all very thrilling in the good sense of the word, except for the strange things that a few of us saw and all of us felt.

Historically, I have never slept soundly in the old farmhouse, be it nightmares or sleeplessness. The old farmhouse was (and still is, in my mind) a place that didn't seem to sleep. I hated waking up in the middle of the night, not knowing why I was suddenly so awake and too scared to open my eyes or get out of bed to turn on the light. I was scared mostly because I have always felt that you're never alone in the farmhouse, that you're always being watched. Naturally, my ability to overindulge in my imagination (as noted above) did not alleviate me of these feelings. But it was when I wasn't the only one with these convictions, that my fears seemed justifiable.

It started with the doorknobs. In the master bedroom, my parents started reporting that the doorknobs would turn back and forth for a few seconds and then the door would lazily open. I myself saw this one late night when we were all watching TV. I heard the sound of the doorknob turning back and forth, turned my head to see it doing just that and then the door slowly opening. I was dumbstruck. I asked my mom and my stepdad what the hell was that about, and they said it had been happening here and there but not to worry about it. My mom said she had holy water next to her bed, so she wasn't too scared. But I was sincerely shaken. And I didn't have Pope blessed holy water. After the doorknobs, my mom and stepdad said they began seeing strange balls of light moving about very independently in their bedroom, the upstairs bathroom, and the upstairs hallway. They were unexplainable primarily because there would be no lights on in the house save the soft green or red glow of the alarm clock numbers.

Finally, one late November afternoon, about a month after we had moved in I had my own little encounter. I was seated at the computer desk, which was at that time located in the master bedroom, a large window looking out on the backyard to my right and the door to the good-sized walk-in closet to my left. Unlike the other doors in the room (four, to be exact), this door had a latch instead of a doorknob, and while I was playing the Sims, I heard the sound of a latch going up and down very quickly. I turned my head only to see that what I had heard was exactly happening: the latch was indeed going up and down vigorously. This carried on for about 10-15 seconds more before, as with the doorknobs, the closet door slowly opened. It took me all about a second to realize that what I had seen was utterly unexplainable, and without further ado, dashed pell-mell from the room. Unfortunately, this was not a prank played by a devious little brother on his gullible, older sister as I was the only one home that afternoon.

Since that first year, the sightings have all but gone away. Other than that terrible, eery feeling I get in the previously noted rooms, the ghosts (if they're still there, or as some might say, if they were ever there) seem to like us now and so there are no more door knobs moving or unexplained lights drifting about the night.

However, this early spring, my mother did say she spotted a man walk briskly by the kitchen window heading for the ice house (a small outbuilding on the edge of the pond that once stored large blocks of ice that were kept cold with abundant amounts of sawdust). She assumed it was my stepdad, and the next day asked him what he was going to the ice house for at 10PM at night. He said he'd been in the house at that time. My brothers, too, claim it wasn't them. So maybe it was a figment of my mom's imagination? Maybe she only thought she saw a man walking outside? (our ice house pictured at right)

An interesting argument presented by a few of the the non-believers in the History Channel "Hauntings" video: We want ghosts, so we make ghosts or unexplainable things happen. They assert that our brain is powerful enough to create these things. I can understand them to a certain extent; after all, I am quick to believe, regrettably gullible, and genuinely love the idea of the supernatural, be it "Lord of the Rings" mythology or horror movies. However, when more than one or two people see the same thing at the same time, I'm reluctant to call it simple fiction.

So, what's your take on the whole ghost/supernatural thing? because I'd love to hear some stories.

*Note: If you have Netflix, you can instantly watch the above mentioned "Hauntings" movie. I definitely recommend it, if only for that second story which I didn't even tell the half of.

Who's Afraid of Ingmar Bergman?

I'm afraid of Ingmar Bergman.

The last three episodes of the Scenes From a Marriage miniseries have been sitting on my coffee table for almost a week now and I just can't bring myself to watch them. I've seen some unsettling films over the years; gruesome crimes; wanton animal slaughter and rape; pregnant women forcibly Caesarianed; Marlon Brando whispering sick-sweet nothings; Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.


But Marianne and Johan make me shiver.

I finished the first three episodes (over an uneasy five day span) and had to open all the windows and watch half a dozen mid-period Woody Allen movies (same themes and questions but mostly happy endings) just to feel right again.

Over two hours of gorgeously lit close-ups of Liv Ullman (most expressive face in cinema?) and Erland Josephson in their suddenly cruel relationship and I don't have any idea just when it started to go wrong but I do know that I'm not sure if I want to find out how it ends.

Two nights ago I opted to watch a Holocaust film instead. I thought it would be less emotionally jarring.

sweet Virginia; punctuation princess

Depending on your feelings towards the semicolon (and freindirekterede), the first pages of Mrs. Dalloway are either willfully wonderful or indulgently insipid.

"Real men... don't use semicolons."

I've read and re-read Lynne Truss' "Eat, Shoots & Leaves." I list "punctuation" as one of my interests on my Facebook page. And, in all honesty, I find a man infinitely more attractive if he knows how to punctuate properly. Which leads me to this article I read about the gender bias of one of my favorite punctuation marks: the semicolon. Apparently, the semicolon is considered by some men to be "the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented." Why are males so afraid of the little tick and dot?

I've always loved the semicolon; at least, that is, since the day I learned how to use one. Soon after that day, I used it every chance I got; it allowed me to continue a single train of thought without ever having to justify my occasionally spotty transitions and jumps in logic. The semicolon was empowering; it forced my reader to conform to my way of thinking and to see it my way: "Yes, these two thoughts are related; get over it!"

How do YOU feel about the semicolon?

Happiness

If I could go back in time - or anywhere in time - I would want to go to a place where I could feel like one of the children at this puppet show: unselfconsciously wonderful.

From Les Quatre Cents Coups by Francois Truffaut


This clip never fails to make me smile, then feel a little sad.

Spooky-girls, Sea-monsters

Bloodroot by Adela Leibowitz

Some of these paintings are fun, some are so-so. I like the 06-07 series, specifically The Purple Room, which reminds me very much of the set design and costumes in Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers.