Audio post reblogged from Second Balcony with 6 notes - Played 60 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]‘A Letter Never To Be Sent from the Desk of Veronica Lodge, on the Occasion of Reflection on Her Overeducated Ex-Girlfriend,’ Cecilia Corrigan
Source: secondbalcony
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I get it, the weather
Arrived back in breathy LA last night, late, strung out on decongestants and streaming Virgin America channels consisting exclusively of Sex in the City (I forgot how ___ it is), and then I remembered about weather. When I moved here in August I left the Eastern Seaboard summer behind and LA seemed temperate-er but otherwise only a move from Earth to Mars rather than purgatory to paradise (it’s the palm trees, they’re so alien).
But in Boston, the night before I left, it vomited what, nineteen inches of snow, and I walked to the bar to meet my friend, and I felt myself to be utterly stoic and solemn because oh the booted effort of it all. The snow is nostalgic and grand, it isn’t bad or deserving of hatred; it makes you feel Herzog. But, it’s the kind of physically challenging that’s only sexy in a limited way: at some point you realize you haven’t gotten dressed in the morning with any more strategy than wrap-naked-flesh-in-as-much-fabric-or-soft-matter-as-possible in quite a while.
Whereas! LA is full of fruitless mulberries and magnolias, etc, (I missed the angry mud gods,) and I’m experiencing a kind of opiated ecstasy that comes only when easiness is preceded by the sense of a previously hard-fought struggle. Weather is strange this way: while much has been said about the insidious effects of climate on group behavior, I think it might be most deeply affective at first contact, and in great contrast. It’s why in Philadelphia we all went reliably crazy every April and climbed onto our roofs with bare legs, clutching six packs and proposing doomed trips to Atlantic City.
Intimacy
Compare the experience of seeing a CPF/SigOth cry over something you don’t find upsetting vs. laugh uproariously at something you don’t find funny. The latter situation is a lot more alienating, right?
Proposed Public Health Campaign
Posters in middle school health classrooms of celebrities (including Michael Cera, Natalie Portman and Justin Bieber) with superimposed text, “Adderall is my Anti-Drug”
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Music to Fantasize About Singularity To
Here is a compilation of songs about being in love with your computer. I hope you and your special droid-one enjoy it together.
I was talking about the possibility of staying in love with one person for a long time, because it was Halloween & time to get spooky. It does seem an unlikely enterprise, but fortunately for me I have a strong capacity for seamless self-delusion, and a strong track record for listening to Wuthering Heights over and over again until I’m delirious and making really big steps around my apartment accompanied by extreme hand gestures. In other words, permanent affection is a fantastical notion I enjoy believing in almost as much as the notion of that dog from The Neverending Story being real and mine.
One argument proffered by my conversational partner was the imminent arrival of singularity, which, while a dirty move in debate protocol, was a compelling point. After all, isn’t what we really want an oceanic experience of complete integration with the Other? Isn’t that where most of the brutality associated with love comes out, when we realize that there is a fundamental division between our cognitive realities which will never allow for a fully shared experience?
Think about having an A.I. SigOth: not only would they possess an infinite knowledge of your cognitive reality, but they’d probably understand it better than you could yourself. And we all know how good the sex would be, like in Sleeper, or Holy Mountain. I know I’m not the first one to point out that our relationships with our A.I. devices have become paramount to our emotional states, and I found some songs to prove it.
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Meditations for the 110
I know Los Angeles is supposed to be decadent, (sic Ke$ha) but I’ve found it quite a monastic place. There is so much time spent alone, the mind engaged in that median-level consciousness alloted to braking or changing lanes. This sort of boundless singularity is compounded by the relatively empty sidewalks, long stretches of empty industrial space, and of course, by the people. All the women have long, long hair: the city is tenaciously adolescent. While in New York I’ve found the most commonly held self-reflexive affect is a sort of “harsh honesty,” it seems here that the prevailing stance is one of “maniacal hopefulness.”
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Those Movies
I don’t have a list of films which I think are the “best movies.” I have a list of movies which will cause me to develop irrational affection and attachment to an individual who shares my enthusiasm for any one of said films. The reasons for this are partially rooted in my classification (in the imdb of Cecilia’s imaginary internet) of the films as undervalued not on the level of formal perfection, but on the level of semantic badassness.
The Sweet Movie
Picnic At Hanging Rock
Southland Tales
Les Enfants du Paradis
Saute ma Ville
Badlands
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This Is Real
Someone should do a sociological survey on the probability that someone will be on a reality show voluntarily, in relation to the degree of bullying they experienced at a formative age. I had my first experience being filmed for a reality show recently and noticed how impossible it is for anyone not to act like a caricature of themselves, or rather, of some idea of what they might be. It was pretty terrifying: as someone who experienced the entirety of adolescence as material fodder for the (often quite clever, actually) mockery of a group of girls, I was immediately taken back to the compulsive face-touching and bra-adjustment of my 13 year old self.
On the other hand, it was sort of beautiful to see a room of late 20 somethings (all of whom fall into that social category which presupposes some degree of reflexive irony) enter into this sort of social contract wherein they perform their identities as explicitly self-conscious offerings to some Other on the other side of the lens. Over the course of the “shoot” there was re-enactment of the adolescent learning curve: from painful self-consciousness to a more comfortable social state, predicated on a degree of understanding that one exists within a social structure which necessitates a certain degree of trust in those around you.
While there is a lot more to be written about this particular experience in relation to the role of assumed identity in our culture of social media, I’m pretty interested for now in the kind of personality that is actually attracted to this rarified (for now, at least) lifestyle, which essentially consists of constantly reliving ones adolescence under the gaze of Other peers. I’d imagine there are enough people out there by now who’ve either been on reality tv shows or are trying to be to generate some decent data.
Link reblogged from ORNAMENT OF MY MIGHT with 46 notes
ORNAMENT OF MY MIGHT: STOP DOING THAT WITH YOUR HANDS →
Pinpoints a phenomenon that’s been irritating me on/off for a while now
In my head, I’ve always called them “scrappy girls,” which, unfortunately, sounds an awful lot like dirty girls. But they are of a different breed entirely. I could understand (sorta) why they existed in college, but I’m continually shocked to meet them still. Scrappy girls: they’re usually…
Source: bluefugate
City Bois
…in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship,no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. -Werner
…men will find a satisfaction in the consideration of the wild greatness of nature (that certainly cannot be ascribed to its aspect, which is rather terrifying) -Immanuel
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Shh My Boss Says
“So imagine there’s a dialogue rooted in the fact that one guy has a gun, and the point of the scene is the other guy trying to get the gun from the first guy. Now, replace the gun with subjectively exclusive epistemological understanding, and you’ve got this scene we’re workin on now.”
On festive practice: 1 Ariel Pink is by far the best band here, I’ll say it without shame. 2 Look at how good hipsters are at forming a queue! Perfectly bureaucratic baby bobos.
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