The beginning of the end...nah, it's just Tuesday

Monday I finished my coursework for the M.A. program. That felt good. Tuesday I defended my prospectus. That was pretty nerve racking. I'm not sure why, I've spent time in each professors office, worked with each one quite a bit, but the combination of all three of them together, wow, I was actually shaking for the first five or ten minutes (This may have been caused by standing out in the snow for 45 minutes waiting for the UTA bus that never came).

When it was all said and done, I felt relieved, but more than that I realized just how much I have ahead of me. I also learned how little I know about academic writing. That might be a bad thing to realize just before I begin my thesis. At the same time, a professor once said, the purpose of the M.A. thesis is to teach you how to write. I thought I knew a thing or two already but some of the things said on Tuesday seemed so obvious, yet they had never crossed my mind. I've always been somewhat of a quick learner. The problem is, I'm the kind of kid that had to be thrown in the pool to learn how to swim. That's how I feel now, barely staying afloat. Always a bit overwhelmed, always playing catch up and trying to leave my ignorance behind as I run frantically toward the future. I'm tired already.

"Hey man, I just want some muesli."

Living in Boston I can honestly say I felt inner city pressure. I think it's akin to university finals pressure, except for the part about second hand underpants. This one's for you Chris.

Oda al mate

Let's face it, I'm not talented enough to write an ode to mate, but I'm dedicating this post to mate. When I was a boy we lived in southern California and I had a friend named Jordan Giuliani. At the time I could never figure out why his last name was Italian if his parents were from Argentina. I do remember that every time I would play at Jordan's house we would drink mate and watch futbol or cool sci-fi movies (after we played G.I. Joes of course). That was my first exposure to mate and when I think about mate I think of friends.

Later my friend Mac would patiently teach me how to properly cebar my mate and it became a regular habit. I remember many days in the office when we would share a mate, ruminate on philosophical questions, or simply talk about the simple things that make us happy. I've always known mate as a friendship beverage. Though there are many times when I drink it in solitude, on the farm, late nights while writing, quite afternoons staring out the window at the mountains. But it always tastes best when I can share it.

I like my wooden mate and the way it contours to my hand, I like that the yerba comes to me from Argentina, I love the warmth of the mate going down my throat and the foam that forms at the top sometimes. I enjoy the different blends and how each one is connected to a memory. But most of all, I love that when I sip my bombilla I know that my friends, even perhaps my childhood friend Jordan, would share with me if the distance didn't separate us.

Disappearing

i am at the office on campus listening to phillip glass' "einstein on the beach" in order drown out the giggling aftermath of a chinese culture party while writing the prospectus for my thesis about ghosts in literature and film which will also serve as an outline for my term paper on a book about specters, phillip's minimalist composition acting as a caricature of the word revenant, mulling over the numerous meanings of ghost, haunting, Shakespeare's usage and why it garnered certain meaning in popular usage i can't stop thinking about how much i miss my wife and my little girls and that by the time this is all finished i may not be much more than the dream of a haunting in their beautiful memories.



This court of common pleas is now in session
this court of common pleas is now in session
This court of common pleas is now in session
this court of common pleas is now in session
This court of common pleas is now in session
this court of common pleas is now in session
[...]
Hey Mr. Bojangles

ghosts: 1/ben: 0

The Best Action Figure Ever

Let My People Go

Midvale imposes moratorium on new taco carts

MIDVALE, Utah (AP) -- Don't expect new taco carts in Midvale for a while.

The City Council has approved a six-month moratorium on new carts. Council members say they're worried the carts compete with traditional restaurants. Assistant City Administrator Phillip Hill says some also don't like the appearance of the carts.

Hill estimates there are about seven carts around town.

The moratorium on new carts is meant to give city staffers more time to update regulations.

The moratorium also prevents new business licenses for other vendor stands, such as those selling fireworks or flowers.

West Valley City earlier this year approved an ordinance limiting the number of taco carts. Salt Lake City has regulations on where they can operate.

------

Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

We made a boy!!!!

There was a strange pressure I felt after we had two girls in a row. I love my daughters very much, they are in no way lesser than a boy. Where does this desire to have a boy come from? I don't know, is it fear of oblivion? What's in a name? Regardless, it's very satisfying to know that my family name won't perish with me.

Passing the buck

My friend and colleague Paul directed my attention to a blog that parodies Zizek. Here he is welcoming you to the gym. If you've ever heard an interview with Zizek, or seen a video of him speaking, this will make you laugh.

the ghosts of Bergson and Deleuze

I've been interested in the subject of memory and images for some time now. I tried to read Matter and Memory and had an easier go at it than I did with Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. Still it wasn't easy to wrap my head around. Next semester we will be reading Deleuze's cinema dyad and I'm excited to revisit them with greater understanding and the guidance of my professor. As I continue my ghost work, I want to explore the ghostly aspect of memory and images: reflected, projected, remembered and so on. I'll be getting at some of that in my M.A. thesis, but there is need to go deeper.

There is no question, cinema is ghostly; Plato's allegory of the cave is an uncanny prefiguration of such. An up and coming film thoerist, Gilberto Perez, titled his book on film The Material Ghost, check it out here. There have been a few books published recently that hint at the same, The Virtual Life of Film, and Framed Time. This all may seem obvious, but what are the implications? For now, check out this blog, which is a cool coupling of Deleuze's theories and some good photography. For those of you that have Cien años de soldad, think of José Arcadio Buendía's death in virtual space. He dies in an image, which is then intrinsically tied to memory. I wonder if remembering isn't some sort of projection, as the title of a book on Deleuze suggests, The Brain is the Screen.

nostos

I've been thinking a lot about place lately, then I read Heidegger. For reasons I don't understand, a place that feels closest to home for me is county Kerry Ireland. I would like to be buried there in a pine box..nostos.

screen theory

there's nothing on...

What is the Real?

Plagued as of late by the fear that I may just be a myth, I've been seeing indicators everywhere that pure perception may not be possible, that everything is phantasmagoria. In this fog of thought which often times resembles a Tarkovsky film, I got an e-mail from a friend with a link to an article by Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and cultural critic who's book, The Sublime Object of Ideaology, I happen to be reading at the moment. Below is the conlcusion of the article, I think you may, dear reader, see a connection between my intillectual wanderings and Zizek's take on the current state of affairs, or maybe I'm just shining my own shoes. Incidentally, the title of the article is "Through the Glasses Darkly"

"[W]as the financial meltdown really the awakening from a dream? It depends on how the meltdown will be perceived by the general public. In other words, which interpretation will win? Which “story” about it will predominate?

When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field of “discursive” ideological competition opens up. In Germany in the late ’20s, Adolf Hitler won the competition for the narrative that explained to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. (His plot was the Jewish plot.) In France in 1940, Marshall Petain’s narrative, that France lost because of the Jewish influence and democratic degeneration, won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat.

Consequently, the main task of the ruling ideology is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such, but on, say, lax legal regulations and the corruption of big financial institutions. Against this tendency, we should insist on the key question: which “flaw” of the system as such opens up the possibility for — and continuous outbreaks of — such crises and collapses?

The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one. After the dot-com bubble exploded in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments to keep the economy growing and prevent recession. Today’s meltdown is the price paid for the United States avoiding a prolonged recession five years ago.

The danger is that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one that, instead of waking us from a dream, will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but also about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and U.S. interventionism in order to keep the economy running."

If you want to read the whole article, go here.

a sort of homecoming

"So they lived in great joy and if ever they remembered their life in this world it was only as one remembers a dream" - C.S. Lewis











Where then is home? I feel California calling, and if its voice does reach me, I will return.

Watching Citizen Kane

I got together with a couple of friends during the football game so we could watch Citzen Kane. Matt was very excited to view Welles' masterwork.



















Here we are, three nerds watching one of the greatest films ever made while our no. 8 ranked football team plays a home game...they lost. We had more fun watching and discussing Citizen Kane then we would have if we watched the game. And there were some great insights shared.



Orson Welles 1
BYU Football 0












Other Orson Welles films I recommend.

The Chimes at Midnight (Campanadas a medioanoche)
Mr. Arkadin (A.K.A. Confidential Report)
The Trial (Le Procès)
Touch of Evil
F for Fake

Thesis

How do I describe then, the moment?
To capture in a frame this movement,
flux, ebb and flow.
Is it possible to write the ghost?
Memory, consciousness, le reventant,
becoming, always already haunted...
We are différance, we are ghost.

Silence, in memoriam

I'm coming to believe in the importance of silence in music. The power of silence after a phrase of music for example; the dramatic silence after the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or the space between the notes of a Miles Davis solo. There is something very specific about a rest in music. You take your foot off the pedal and pay attention. I'm wondering whether, as musicians, the most important thing we do is merely to provide a frame for silence. I'm wondering if silence itself is perhaps the mystery at the heart of music? And is silence the most perfect music of all?

Songwriting is the only form of meditation that I know. And it is only in silence that the gifts of melody and metaphor are offered. To people in the modern world, true silence is something we rarely experience. It is almost as if we conspire to avoid it. Three minutes of silence seems like a very long time. It forces us to pay attention to ideas and emotions that we rarely make any time for. There are some people who find this awkward, or even frightening.

Silence is disturbing. It is disturbing because it is the wavelength of the soul. If we leave no space in our music—and I'm as guilty as anyone else in this regard—then we rob the sound we make of a defining context. It is often music born from anxiety to create more anxiety. It's as if we're afraid of leaving space. Great music's as much about the space between the notes as it is about the notes themselves. A bar's rest is as important and significant as the bar of demi-, semi-quavers that precedes it. What I'm trying to say here is that if ever I'm asked if I'm religious I always reply, "Yes, I'm a devout musician." Music puts me in touch with something beyond the intellect, something otherworldly, something sacred.

How is it that some music can move us to tears? Why is some music indescribably beautiful? I never tire of hearing Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" or Faures "Pavane" or Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay." These pieces speak to me in the only religious language I understand. They induce in me a state of deep meditation, of wonder. They make me silent.

Sting, Berklee College of Music Commencement Address May 15, 1994

88 visits or writing to nobody

I logged on to Google analytics to see if anybody is looking at my blog and was surprised to see the map had turned very green. My visits had spiked from one or two a day to 88 on the 9th of October 2008. Turns out the name of the photographer who took the photos featured in my last post has a name similar to a certain Swiss soccer goalie, awesome. 88 visits, average length of visit, 0.00 seconds.

The cool thing is, some poor soul in Catarroja Spain actually stayed and read my blog for a minute and a half. I feel the love from Spain (¿Es posible extrañar un lugar que uno no conoce?). It's good to see that football is alive and well in most of the world. My goal is to get a visit from Russia so I can turn a HUGE part of the map green. And to the person who visited from Saco Maine and didn't stay, I've always dreamt of going to Maine, and perhaps I'd stay a while and watch the sea. (Longing for New England)

Blindness is Ghostly

In honor of Saramago's novel Blindness that is now being popularized in filmic form. All images courtesy Stefano de Luigi (http://www.stefanodeluigi.com/features-cecita.php?szLang=it)

The Lawrence Welk Show

When I was at music school I studied jazz improve with Lin Biviano. One day flipping through the channels I saw him on The Lawrence Welk Show, turns out his mom was a regular pianist on the show. That's all fine and good, but for those of you who, like me, think that The Lawrence Welk Show is a strange cultural phenomenon, enjoy this video.

outofstateplates

You know that guy you get stuck behind,
the one with the out of state plates?

He must be an old lady or someone trying
to save on gas.

When you finally pass with your angry acceleration
and glare to let me know that I've offended you,
don't be surprised that I'm in my late twenty's
wearing a baseball cap with a familiar logo
and smiling like an idiot.

I'm listening to jazz...man.













(Name this famous trumpet player and earn a gold star!)

Forgetfulness

For somewhere between five or seven months I've noticed that my memory is failing me, short term and long term. My wife as well as my friends have mentioned that I probably don't sleep enough. Sometimes I'll be reading and I can't even make sense of the words on the page, as if I couldn't remember the signified of the signifiers. Other times my inability to remember results in a strange kind of euphoria and I am able to feel more than perceive.

This not infrequent experience reminds me of something I read in and interview that Borges gave. He talked about not knowing German well enough to understand the poetry that he read in German. He did however understand enough of the language get the feeling of the poetry, which he thought was more important.

Together with my forgetfulness, I often wake up in places, at first unfamiliar, then context begins slowly to form in my mind and I understand. I read about a man who forgot the previous five years of his life through some freak happening in his brain. If that happened to me, I wouldn't know my beloved wife or my two daughters, or anything related to my field of study. I miss them, maybe I should get some sleep.

Where did you get $240?

When I was in high school my closest friends and I would, without regard for propriety, let loose our strange sense of humor on the plebeians, often when we knew people were watching. We derived a weird pleasure from seeing confused faces and stares of disbelief in response to our brand of comedy. We can't take all the credit though, we often drew our inspiration from a short lived comedy show on MTV called 'The State'. Here is my favorite sketch ever. Peter, this is for you...ahhhhh yeeeah.

Walking Across the Atlantic

"Walking Across the Atlantic":


I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach
before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic
thinking about Spain,
checking for whales, waterspouts.
I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.
Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what
this must look like to the fish below,
the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.


Magical, beautiful, everything good. I'm hooked. I came across a poem titled "The Dead" by Billy Collins (Former poet laureate of the United States) on a friend's blog and now I can't get enough. He came to BYU to do a reading and I had class at the time so I didn't go. I should have learned by now that one will often learn more while playing hooky than they will warming a seat in class. I put the above book on my amazon.com wish list, the title alone is justification enough to buy what appears to be a wonderful collection of poems:

"Walking Across the Atlantic" and many others by Collins, remind me of the wanderlust I felt as a boy and the many afternoons I left off, pursuing vagaries and watching the shifting light as it danced through the trees to warm my youthful cheeks.

If you want to see a visual interpretation of this poem, go here. Enjoy these poems and the many gifts Billy Collins wants to share with you

Automatic Doors

If you think this is funny visit http://xkcd.com/ but proceed with caution.

Working for Google

http://xkcd.com/

Cansados...

Quisiera verlo todo con mis propios ojos

Me canso de la vista enmarcada

Presta un aire liviano y falso a todo que pretendo ver

y no sé distinguir entre verdad y percepción

La primera cara de la mañana, la que creo amar

es borrosa y sin forma

Quisiera verla pura, sin ningún vidrio separándonos

Hace años que no veo las estrellas

y su imagen ha vuelto simulacro incontables veces

Siempre a través de las ventanas virtuales



El otro día me habló y no la podía ver ni escuchar

La vista, el oído y junto con ellos la memoria

se aproximan al olvido y el paso del tiempo

Muy pronto se acaba todo y me quedaré solo en un mundo gris

un mundo ausente del decimoquinto sinfonía de Shostakovich,

ausente de Hal y Falstaff,

ausente de su cara borrosa

Aún así, vale más que estos ojos ya cansados de ver

El Chérrida

Revisiting the Cave of Montesinos

"It is a long time, most valorous knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, that we, who are shut up and enchanted in these solitudes, have hoped to see you, that the world by you may be informed what this deep cave, commonly called the cave of Montesinos, encloses and conceals; an exploit reserved for your invincible heart and stupendous courage. Come along with me, illustrious sir, that I may show you the wonders contained in this transparent castle, of which I am a wanderer and perpetual guard; for I am Montesinos himself, from whom this cave derives its name."
-Cervantes, Don Quixote Part II, Chap. 23

And so I begin again, entrusting my thoughts and wanderings to whoever may read them. By nature this is a narcissistic exercise, also histrionic and postmodern since it in many ways will mix the high and the low, exists only virtually, and will be not only a simulacrum of my self, but a compendium of simulacra, feigning representation. Enjoy.