stuff that happened (to me) this decade

~ start of 2000
*waits out thunderstorm on top of whiteface mountain
*quits football team after being choked by football coach
*tries out for varsity lacrosse team, doesn't make team
*family sells summer lake house, goes to Mohegan Sun with family
*works at coffee shop, throws party at parent's house while parents go out for Chinese food

~start of 2001
*sees clockwork orange and Dr. Strangelove
*visits 'ground zero' days before Christmas
*works with Guatemalan immigrants excavating septic field, cuts live electrical wire in an old house with yellow 'snippers'

~start of 2002
*gets rejected from purchase film school, wait-listed at NYU, visits Emerson in Boston, enrolls at suny oneonta
*reads 'on the road', 'the rum diary', 'electric kool aid acid test'
*visits grandparents in Florida
*watches wild strawberries, 8 1/2, the seventh seal, and winter light
*vacations with family in Montauk, NY
*loses virginity
*takes psychedelic mushrooms alone in college dorm room
*'crams' for philosophy final using 'cocaine' to stay awake


~start of 2003
*receives a D in public speaking, fails African history (doesn't take final), receives a C- in world literature
*takes acid and eats food in wilsbach dining hall
*takes psychedelic mushrooms after seeing Hukkle in 'art house'
*gets arrested by campus police for lighting fireworks
*drunk drives in snow covered back-country roads in oneonta
*moves into house on Columbia street in oneonta, gets sued by neighbor, reads Faulkner oeuvre, reads 'tortilla flat', reads 'torch song' by john Cheever
*wins intramural indoor soccer title
*takes a girl to a club, listens to heavy metal in her dorm room after
*talks with grandfather re 'art' at breakfast table
*attends weekly mug night entirety of college semester

~start of 2004
*works at ski mountain, flips grandfather's car driving to ski mountain, snowboards drunk, loses car keys on ski slopes
*sleeps in car at ski mountain, reads 'song of Roland', abridged version of '1001 Arabian nights'
*videotapes interviews with several Buddhist monks at monastery in new york
*reads 'leaves of grass', 'complete poems' of Emily Dickinson
*writes 10 page paper re Faulkner's 'go down moses', reads first part of king Arthur's version of the bible
*swims in lake placid again
*girlfriend at the time studies abroad in Florence, Italy

~start of 2005
*moves into apartment in oneonta that has a bow-flex
*takes literature courses over summer in oneonta
*listens to air america radio regularly
*apartment gets big screen tv, kegorator, playstation 2, deep fryer, crock pot
*cares for 3ft female marijuana plant

~start of 2006
*makes ~6min video starring roommate
*drinks sambuca regularly
*graduates from suny oneonta
*moves in with parents
*starts blogger blog
*washes dishes, makes salad for 2 weeks in violet, Louisiana
*serves food at conference center, sees bear vs shark in poughkeepsie, ny

~start of 2007
*works as freelancer in Manhattan, NY
*guts katrina-ruined bedroom in 9th ward New Orleans, scoops used condoms with shovel
*drinks Guinness regularly
*reads Man A la Mancha, Ulysses, The Odyssey
*hikes Mount Haystack wearing new balance sneakers
*rereads abridged version of Inanna's Descent into the Underworld
*drinks whiskey and ice regularly
*flirts with vegetarianism
*deletes original blog
*poem published on california based website

~start of 2008
*reads tao lin oeuvre
*visits bearparade.com regularly
*attempts and fails to hike mount haystack wearing snowshoes and new EMS boots
*moves to brooklyn, ny
*reads 'like life', 'revolutionary road', 'self-help', 'chilly scenes of winter', 'the end of the story', 'a green light'
*sees 'the grand illusion'
*starts new blogger blog
*starts twitter account
*watches forrest gump in its entirety on cable television
*puts 'britney spears' stickers on door of gawker offices
*suffers embarrassing defeat in goldeye for N64 at the hand zachary german
*continues to flirt with vegetarianism, occasionally eats meat
*eats at angelica's kitchen with girlfriend at the time
*sees ellen kennedy read 'probably going to die alone'

~start of 2009
*cross-country skis to avalanche pass
*hikes dix mountain wearing new hiking boots
*has things published on the Internet
*reads march edition of Harvard business review
*interviews at fortune 500 company
*hikes rocky peak ridge, giant mountain
*reads john Keats on subway train
*flirts with veganism, occasionally eats dairy, occasionally eats meat
*grandfather dies via cancer
*listens to 6x Wordsworth poems on cassette tape

~start of 2010
?????????????

again

i cannot remember the order of particular events

after i have singled out one event

where did it come from?

not sure what the purpose of remembering everything is

i feel like my twitters are bad

feel sick of myself, life seems so bad

i wish that 75% of my blog didn't exist

the snow on all the sidewalks is terrible

why am i not writing more, nothing new happens

seems like i cannot broaden my perspective

i am aware there is a broader perspective

but then it feels like i am hungry

returning to original blogger personality

feel bad a lot and can't accept that i'll feel different

felt good for a little after thinking about the past

feel like xmas and xmas-eve

is going to be worse than a regular weekend

this post is going to make you not like this blog anymore

honestly felt my blog was being visited by a recruiter

today

my back hurts

posture seems really bad

not sure if i should stop here

or keep typing

not sure what to do at all

what am i going to do about keeping a steady income

feel like i look like a farm animal

i want to shower

but i showered today

at 430am

going to shower the next time it is 430am

my face looks unsymmetrical

okay i really want to stop making more lines

just seems so bad

sentences are not making me feel better

going to watch the rest of 'men who stare at goats' tonight

clooney

i can feel what it feels like to feel good

chinese cabbage

thnx jamie and zachary

(greatest people ever)

just got back from a reading in manhattan

hated it. not sure why i went.

don't remember anything i liked
remember it smelled like donuts in the venue
remember thinking 'how did i end up here'

all the sentences were very long. there was a lot of repetition.
people were laughing a lot during the questions part.
hated the people for some reason.

still have my winter hat on, and my jacket
sitting at my laptop

'liars in love' is a good story by richard yates
i felt like i needed to recreate something i read in the middle of one of the paragraphs

coming home from work i couldn't understand the prose in the middle part of it.
i felt angry. i stared a lot. i read a page and felt confused
and then stared and my face felt warm.

not sure what the point of this post is.

frostbite seems like one of the worst things to get.
it seems bad to get if you're not expecting it or something,
like if you're doing something 'normal'
and are not prepared exposure to extreme cold

it is worse, i think, if you get it on a mountain
and you get it so that it blackens like a whole appendage.

this is faint and meaningless and produced by Alex Balk

haha he sucks from miles ross on Vimeo.

been working on writing, working my day job, chilling, getting ready for the holidays
bought some stuff on ebay that i am excited for. two of the things came already.



hate WW2

This post has been edited by Tao and republished here.

This part was edited out of what was published at Muumuu House:

"Damn, why are people running away from him / me / each other when we could have just waited until he walked by and the smell would just be momentary? Damn, why didn’t that guy realize he smelt like fresh poop?"

“Don’t you have gloves,” Harry says.

“Mice chewed our gloves,” Ellie says.

“You don’t even have boots on,” Harry says.

Ellie shrugs her shoulders and waves at the people for them to enter the corral.

&6&

how am i different from people?
how will she view my life?
going to google ‘meaningful life’







again

seems like I am upset with life
should probably ‘keep going’
water falls off of a rock and is white





stunts stunts

heard kevin garnett say anything is possible

was staring at a grim reaper figurine

he has a felt cloak, a skeleton face,

and a crooked plastic staff

i felt hungry and nothing / depressed






^^^

do i feel tired right now?

i dressed in the light of my headlamp

didn’t count the change after i bought a bagel

who is my senator

senators seem insane

can i imagine a good senator

radio hosts are ugly






*&^

i am going to imagine the universe
i keep destroying myself
from the inside
we are all hipsters
there are hipster dentists
and hipster murderers
there are red maples everywhere
in manhattan, circa 1609





bros edit

you might hear my dad spinning

love the word 'hosts' above

didn't want to change it

***review***2009 NYFF (New York Film Festival) SESSION 2 - October 3rd, Walter Reade Theater - VIEWS FROM THE AVANT-GARDE (13th Edition)***review***

I went to this with a friend. Another person, a friend and family member, was there too. We didn't sit all together. This is a review, maybe. In the beginning my friend and I talked quietly, then we saw my family member. The event started with the curator introducing all of the filmmakers (10 total films). The filmmakers said their names and then said something about their films. One of the filmmakers, Ben Russell, didn't participate in that. The filmmakers seemed funny, or stupid. I felt that some of the things they said were abstract and then other things they said were specific, too specific to mention for my purposes.

Uhm, so yeah, the first two were short, sort of banal and ‘empty’ pieces. They seemed to work with the textures of things like walls and paint, horizons, desert grounds, piles of dirt, shadows, HD medium, 16mm (scratchy) medium, ‘jump cuts’, fading cuts, and quick edits to contrasting shots.

The third film, "What Part of the Earth We Inhabit", depicted natural life. There were birds, reptiles, rocks, lichen, plants, the ocean, some seals, I think, a pile of komodo dragons, I think, waves, a waterfall, an island. Approximately two minutes before the finish the framing started including man-made structures, like cement walls, some people in modern clothing. The framing sometimes went from the shots used earlier to wider angle shots, including the people. I think there was a giant snapping turtle that looked 'creepy' and 'cute' which also seemed ‘central’ to the piece.

A film called "Night Side" had a house in it and a street maybe. I felt relieved to be viewing things from inside a house - a small reflection of a ceiling light that wobbled from wind pushing the window or glass door it was in. It seemed like this one had a lot of 'nature' in it too. It seems like there was something that made me feel 'happy' or comforted me, I don't remember, sort of like when I try to think of middle school or a vacation before I turned twenty.

The next movie was "dwarfs the sea". This movie felt like a relief from the other movie because there was dialogue. A computer generated voice described the lives of men depicted in photos that a not-seen hand dropped 'one at a time' on top of each other. Each description didn’t seem to have the same length or topic. The observations seemed detached because of the monotone, robotic sound and also because of the concrete actions described. Sometimes feelings, situations and abstract environments were described. I felt cognizant of the pictures the not-seen person put down and the sometimes neglect of the narrative to say things directly related to the picture. It seemed like the voice at the end talked more about just being at sea, and loneliness, and loneliness in life as a whole, and not the men anymore, but just people. The men all looked Latin American and poor - one or two white men, the captain was white. The computer generated voice said the captain was a 'bad lover to his wife'.

The next movie was "Journals and Remarks". It had this 'horrible' blinking technique, where each shot was like one second of something in the Galapagos (this is the one seemed to be set in the same place as "What Part of the Earth We Inhabit") and then a second of black frame and another second of something different on the nature, a second of black and then a shot of a page of Darwin’s Origin of Species scrolling. Some of this film felt to me like what I desire least from my image of the avant-garde classification. As the film went on there were no more frames of black interspersed into the pulsating edit style. I felt better. I felt less anxious once this film was over.

"A Letter to Uncle Boonmee" seemed good in the beginning. I was happy to hear a voice again. I was happy to see a person's face too. The film seemed to have some sort of commentary on a war atrocity. I felt excited because there was a dog. At one point the voice which is reciting a letter to an uncle, mentioning the place we were seeing on the screen and plans to shoot a film in that place. At one point as the camera moved / panned aimlessly around and within a complex of bungalows built in a Thailand jungle, it went out the window a little and the voice said something like 'was this the view you had, uncle'. The sound of the jungle and the moving branches of the jungle seemed calm / relaxing / stimulating / peaceful. Other memorable moments from this film: the Thai man staring, him lying on the floor with the fan on him, the dark figure lying under the mosquito net, the soldiers pick axing and shoveling the dirt, the pan of the jungle with the small dark figure walking in it, the hard wood flooring of the bungalows, the dog eating the thing the Thai man tosses, a giant orb with two dents (like nostrils) emitting smoke from the blind side in the distance.

"Trypps #6 (Malobi)" was 'kooky' as the person I went with said after it was over. What seemed like native villagers participated in a ritual dance / celebration while wearing what seemed to be ‘conventional’ american halloween masks, and not native type clothing / costumes. Some of it seemed eerie and affecting because of the lack of talking and the expression on the masks. Some of it seemed boring, as the costumed people walked through the village you expected them to enter a large celebration circle with a fire. There was the sounds of drumming, laughter, cheering, and random explosions in the background. In the final seconds you see one of the costumers put on a over sized dildo and another costumer strokes it / pretends to have sex with it.

There was a short 'break' before the last film, "I Know Where I Am Going" by Ben Rivers. The short break happened because the projectionist need to adjust the lens on the projector because Ben Rivers' film was shot on 16mm wide (maybe filmed on something that looks like what is pictured to the right, from retrothing[dot]com).While they were adjusting the lens the screen was white and then a ghost white framing went over the screen and onto the black borders of the screen. My friend next to me said, "This film is so avant-garde". The first few minutes of the film the focus seemed off. There was an anxious feeling in the crowd, I think people felt indecisive about whether it was supposed to be soft focused. After a few minutes it didn't matter, to me anyway. The film showed a lot of nature. I think it was England or Scotland. The nature looked nice. There was audio the whole time and that made me feel good. I don't remember what it was of, but I think it was gathered at the shooting locations. Then the audio was of a person's voice and the voice said things about the world and humans, I think. The things seemed profound and calming and abstract. It said things like people do this and this is happening in the world. The film showed a road, moving, as if 'first-person' on the hood of a car. The film looked 'beautiful', to me, and calming and 'relaxing'. I remember snow covered mountains, a misty, darkly lit road. Then film showed a forest, a person cutting trees from a forest, and the person using a horse or something to tow the trees. The person kept saying 'back' 'back' as if talking to the horse. When the film showed the trees falling a felt a desire for the tree to crash into the earth, but most times the trees just fell and then gradually stopped a few feet above the ground. The film showed a man in a beekeepers suit standing inside a ruined foundation, accessing bee boxes. The man gesticulates in between his activities with the bee boxes. There is audio playing of a voice talking about 'humanity', I think, and 'what humans have done so far', I think. It seems like the beekeeper is saying the things. The beekeeper raises his arms and it 'matches up' with the voice 'perfectly' and it seems really funny and 'profound'. Then the film focuses on a man who lives amongst junk. The audio is 'disjointed' while the film focuses on this man. A voice in the audio says things about the planets and the human 'experience'. The voice says something like 'people should calm down and live more simply and not try so hard' or something and that felt calming. The film had basically three or four parts. Three or four (not sure if the beekeeper and the wood cutter were the same) different people, focused on in a quasi-documentary film style, with natural sound from the location and disjointed audio, in addition, overlaid, which was usually voice and in the last there was music. Between each section there were the ‘driving’ shots moving over a road. The final 'section' showed snow dusted mountains and a road and then a forest covered in 2 or 3 feet of snow. It showed a man walking in the snow. There were big ‘cakes’ of snow on the trees. I liked seeing that much snow. It showed a man living in a shack buried in the snow. He was shown outside using a digital camera, cooking inside, and just moving around inside his place. When he was shown outside audio of him playing a string instrument and singing was overlaid. There were shots of some junked and smashed cars. There were shots of nature. It was a half hour, roughly – the longest of all the movies in that session. I watched an interview with Ben Rivers on youtube. He talked about his films being fiction and non-fiction and there being a blur in the reality of that. It seems both noteworthy and underwhelming.

Outside the theater my friend and the person from my family talked about the films. We talked about a person vomiting during The Antichrist, a film by Lars Von Trier. The person in my family said William Defoe said Von Trier experienced 'a great amount' of grief and depression when he made the film or leading up to making it. My friend said that seemed really artistic. I saw a filmmaker from session 2 crying. My friend saw a fat man spill bourbon on his tie after passing through two glass doorways. I ate some polish food with my friend. I went home and don’t remember what I did the rest of the day in my apartment by myself.