Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Aquarius, Prisoner of Sex's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
3:53 pm	Exercise the James Bond Way Am getting old and fat and feeling the need to exercise. May take up the James Bond exercise method: "There was only one way to deal with boredom--kick oneself out of it. Bond went down on his hands and did twenty slow press-ups, lingering over each one so that his muscles had no rest. When his arms could stand the pain no longer, he rolled over on his back and, with his hands at his sides, did the straight leg-lift until his stomach muscles screamed. He got to his feet and, after touching his toes twenty times, went over to arm and chest exercises combined with deep breathing until he was dizzy. Panting with exertion, he went into the big white-tiled bathroom and stood in the glass shower cabinet under very hot and then cold hissing water for five minutes." (Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love, p.95-6) (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
1:30 pm	Gilliam Speaking From a recent and nicely lengthy interview with Terry Gilliam: "Because of Facebook and Twitter and all this crap, people don’t have time to be alone and confront themselves and who they really are. It’s the thing that really worries me the most about the modern world. People just seem to be extensions of a social order now. We have a house in Italy with no telephone or television. My son would be there, and he was used to playing his video games and blah, blah, blah, and he’d go there and get bored. My wife would say, 'Well, we have to do something to keep him entertained,' and I’d say, 'No, let him get bored and you’ll see what happens.' After about two days of boredom and saying 'There’s fuck all to do here,' he started inventing things. He was creating a really interesting world, because he was involved in creating it. He wasn’t just having it created for him. I think so much of what we do is now done for us. It’s digested, it’s handed to you. I like video games but I also think they’re dangerous because of how much time and energy they consume. It’s not the same as reading a book... Another thing is this: My son had the Tony Hawk video game and he was brilliant at it. Then he started skateboarding and he realized that it actually hurts. And this is what bothers me about so many of these video games. They’ve removed that element of pain. You just sit there and you watch your life force go down, but you’re not experiencing pain. You’re sat there flipping through the air, and then you try to go out and do it in the real world and: 'Ouch!'" (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, September 21st, 2009
11:20 pm	That's the Way It Is Kid "In Ottoman political thought, the order of the world was built on inequality. In a moving document, a long didactic poem, the poet and scholar Nabi (1642-1712) advised his seven-year old son how to live a just and peaceful life. He started out describing social order: The groups of man exist in different classes With different ranks order came into being Without ranks whatever exists falls into ruins The ignoramus cannot take the place of the scholar Water cannot fulfill the task of fire Earth cannot do the wind’s job Gold cannot do iron’s work Sugar cannot produce salty food The foot cannot take care of the hand’s issues The pen cannot take the sword’s place… The slave cannot do the lord’s work Kings do not know the state of the flock… Thus is the order of the parts of the world: Observe them as far as your intellect understands them." --from An Ottoman mentality: the World of Evliya Çelebi, by Robert Dankoff. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
4:31 pm	Vin Triste "Darling, what are the saddest words in the English language--If Only, Never Again, Kept Waiting, Too Late, No Answer, or Just Because? I think If Only is the Saddest." -- Maimie Lygon to Evelyn Waugh (Comment on this)
Friday, August 21st, 2009
9:48 am	C'mon Nazis, Die Already... One defense of Tarantino's new movie insists that "this film, contrary to all the high-minded talk, isn’t really about the Holocaust. It is more about America’s cathartic response to violence." Yes, but that response is dealt with in a film that cannot help reminding us of the Holocaust--where violence was anything but cathartic, as we know far too well. Tarantino asks us to remember history and then put aside all but our most basic concepts of it so he can stage a revenge fantasy sanctioned by the idea that someone who is a Nazi should be treated as badly as they treated the Jews. In reality the Soviets pretty much thought the same thing--their invasion of Germany was a cavalcade of rape, assault, and murder. That was the reality of anti-Nazi revenge. Tarantino's film is not about reality, yet it posits that film can redeem history by rewriting it, turning it into a closed-circuit bounded by film. But great movies usually do the opposite, whereas for Tarantino film is a comfort-blanket he uses to smother reality with. His supposedly ambitious project is really a way of closing down the possibilities of movies by insisting they can become a world unto themselves, instead of what the best movies do, which is heightening reality through the language of dreams, leading us back into the real world with enhanced vision. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 14th, 2009
11:05 am	Take that, Dresden Royal Air Force Marshall Arthur "Bomber" Harris was once stopped for speeding by a policeman. The latter told him "Please be careful, Sir. You might kill someone." "Young man," said Harris, "I kill thousands every night." (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 13th, 2009
5:06 pm	Why most biographies of artists fail "To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves" -- Simone Weil (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
12:04 pm	Playlet (Scene: Heaven. Clouds, angels, etc.) Michael Jackson: Hee hee! (Grabs crotch) St. Peter: Welcome to heaven young lady—-oh sorry Michael. Jackson: Not as nice as Neverland, but it’ll do. St. Peter: It’s just as you’ve imagined it Michael—clouds, harps, angels, and cherubim. Jackson: What are cherubim? St. Peter: Little naked boys. Jackson: ...I think I’m gonna like it here. (They are interrupted by God.) God: Omigod omigod! Michael, show me how to moonwalk! (8 Comments |Comment on this)
11:47 am	Wackiest line of Freudian criticism ever? "The wounded knight and the homunculus that acts as his extension form a composite symbol of the father: the homunculus is the father's ambulatory penis, extended from his father's wound and most dangerous and deadly to the son." -- Dell Skeets, from "Guingamor and Guerrehés: Psychological Symbolism in a Medieval Romance." Watch out for that ambulatory penis, he'll get you! (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
11:53 pm	He should have died before that trial instead... "Jackson-ism produced the image of a pop explosion, an event in which pop music crosses political, economic, geographic and racial barriers; in which a new world is suggested. Michael Jackson occupied the center of American cultural life: no other black artist had ever come close. "But a pop explosion not only links those otherwise separated by class, place, color and money; it also divides. Confronted with performers as appealing and disturbing as Elvis Presley, the Beatles or the Sex Pistols -- people who raise the possibility of living in a new way -- some respond and some don't. It became clear that Michael Jackson's explosion was of a new kind. "It was the first pop explosion not to be judged by the subjective quality of the response it provoked, but to be measured by the number of objective commercial exchanges it elicited. Michael Jackson was absolutely correct when he announced, at the height of his year [1984], that his greatest achievement was a Guinness Book of World Records award certifying that Thriller had generated more top-ten singles (seven) than any other LP -- and not, as might have been expected ... 'to have proven that music is a universal language,' or even 'to have demonstrated that with God's help your dreams can come true.' "The pop explosions of Elvis, the Beatles and the Sex Pistols had assaulted or subverted social values; Thriller crossed over them like kudzu. The Jackson-ist pop explosion ... was brought forth as a version of the official social reality, generated from Washington D.C. [Reagan summoned Jackson for a visit] as ideology, and from Madison Avenue as language ... a glamorization of the new American fact that if you weren't on top, you didn't exist." -- Greil Marcus on Michael Jackson, from Lipstick Traces. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
4:41 pm	That's all you need From a review of the Rubaiyat: "The carpe diem theme has never been more succinctly or movingly expressed than in this gem of a stanza: 'A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread –- and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness –- / O Wilderness were Paradise enow!' Note the unusual rhymes; note the list of essentials for paradise –- poetry, nature, food and wine, company (including love and sex no doubt) and music – a more satisfying catalogue than the celebrity, riches and power that are the aspirations of today." (Comment on this)
Monday, April 20th, 2009
5:33 pm	Line of the week "Because of the polyglot nature of the English language, the sound of great English poetry is the sound of monosyllabic Germanic words chiming against multisyllabic Latinate words (Shakespeare’s 'seas incarnadine' or Tennyson’s 'immemorial elms')." --Source here. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
5:26 pm	A Letter from Larkin "Dear Mr Shakespeare, I remember promising to send you in writing an account of what I conceive to be the purpose of my poetry, though I think I was possibly over-confident when I did so. Such explanations usually read very heavily. However, put it this way: I have no ideas on what poetry is, in the abstract, but I have sometimes asked myself in the past what exactly I am doing when I write a poem. Most people say that the purpose of poetry is communication: that sounds as if one could be contented simply by telling somebody whatever it is one has noticed, felt or perceived. I feel it is a kind of permanent communication better called preservation, since one’s deepest impulse in writing (or, I must admit, painting or composing) is to my mind not 'I must tell everybody about that' (i.e. responsibility to other people) but 'I must stop that from being forgotten if I can' (i.e. responsibility towards subject). When writing a poem I am trying to construct a verbal device or machine which will, upon reading, render up the emotion I originally experienced to as many people as possible for as long as possible. You’ll remember I called it a slot machine into which the reader inserts the penny of his attention. Of course, the process of preservation does imply communication, since that is the only way an experience can be preserved, and that explains why obscurity is so often a disadvantage; the distinction between communication and preservation is one of motive, and I think the latter word gives a very proper emphasis to the language-as-preserver rather than language-as-means-of-communication. In other words it makes it sound harder, which it is! I forget if you asked me whether I thought poetry important: I’m afraid my opinion on it would be about as valuable as that of a beaver upon dams. It’s certainly important to me, but I doubt if the world would miss it much. All the same I can’t imagine how people exist without practising some form of art." -- Philip Larkin (from a letter reprinted here.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
8:23 pm	Leaving Home When I got home today my roommate Kevin told me that our other roommate Matt said last night that he'd be moving in with his girlfriend in June or July. I had known that Matt would eventually be moving, but then came further news: Kevin wanted to move out too. He'd been here for three years and was considering moving south of the city, where he might be able to get a house with a yard for his dog and a place to park (a near-impossibility in most of San Francisco). Our lease is up for renewal at the end of March: we will most likely sign on for another two to four months, but after that... I'm still a bit surprised by how quickly events have went, but I can see that there are several options to take. They are that: 01. Matt will move out and be replaced by a roommate, while Kevin and I will stay on. This is what I once thought would happen but now it seems very unlikely, since Kevin definitely wants a change of scenery. 02. Matt and Kevin move out, while I stay on and find two people to replace them. At first this seemed like the way to go, since I could pick my roommates and stay in a place I like, but I'm less confident now. The prospect of interviewing dozens of people and hoping I've chosen the right two isn't that appetizing, and since I was never on the lease I would have to negotiate with the Presidio and jumping through all their hoops. And if my roommates are moving on then I'll have to deal with the security deposit and pet deposit. Our apartment has sustained some minor damage, so handling these matters could quickly become contentious and I might be left screwed. 03. Kevin decides to stay in the city and he and I move into a two bedroom unit, where he'll share a room with his girlfriend. We've briefly discussed this option, and he says he's willing to pay more while I pay a bit less, which is nice. Still, even if we manage to find a flat at Baker Beach it almost certainly won't be as nice as our current apartment and Kevin's girlfriend isn't sure about living full-time with him. 04. Everyone moves out, and I try to find a room in someone else's apartment. Not on my own, because I can't afford that. Frankly, I still have nightmares about my previous efforts at finding a room. I abhor the grind of visiting apartment after apartment, seeing one that looks nice, politely asking the occupants if they'll take me, and then never hearing from them again. I hate having to display myself and self-consciously trying to "make a good impression." I know damn well that I was very lucky that Kevin and Matt liked me from the start. Would I get that lucky again? And I looked for a new room, would it be close to my old one? I love living in the Presidio. I love being able to walk to Baker Beach in five minutes. I love living right next to the bus stop. I love being able to see the Golden Gate Bridge from my window. But I don't love having to walk a mile home after I've stayed out late and missed the last MUNI bus. I don't like being on the other side of the city and far away from the most exciting parts of town. I don't like the near impossibility of shopping for groceries or furniture without a car. So maybe I should try looking for a place in the Mission or SOMA, where are all the hip folks are (it would be great living near Dolores Park). But would I miss what I now enjoy--not having to worry about being safe or parking (back when my car was still running), and living in a forest in the midst of the city, encountering nature every day. It's a tough decision... Fortunately I'll have at least a month and a half to make up my mind about which option to take. But it's going to be an agonizing and stressful experience, no matter what happens. Hell, I fell a little stressed right. But best not to begin fretting when it will do no good. For now my mind is open and I'm accepting advice. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, February 20th, 2009
5:33 pm	Classical Gas From "Class Dismissed" by Sandra Tsing Loh, in this month's Atlantic Monthly: "Paul Fussell believed in an escape pod from this tyranny of classhood: residence in a special American psycho-emotional space called 'category X.' ...Fussell’s Xs were essentially bohemians, the young people who flocked to cities in search of 'art,' 'writing,' and 'creative work,' ideally without a supervisor. Xs disregarded authority; they dressed down on every occasion; they drank no-name liquor...; they carelessly threw out, unread, their college alumni magazines. "...Sadly, though, rebellion is not the outlier stance it once was. Xs are no longer America’s free. By 2009, Xs are neither what Fussell called the 'classless class' nor an 'un­monied aristocracy' with the freedom of the Out-of-Sights, if without the bucks. (Note: tickets to Burning Man start at more than $200.) Today’s Xs do not 'occupy the one social place in the U.S.A. where the ethic of buying and selling is not all-powerful.' Thanks to the economic rise, over the past three decades, of what Richard Florida (betraying a wee bit too much admiration) calls 'the creative class,' Xs now rule the world...Today’s Xs define themselves largely by what they consume... "At network-TV meetings, millionaire 20-something comedy writers see how low they can go with torn jeans, T-shirts, and grimy Red Sox caps, while the only guys in coat and tie on the lot are the Honduran valet parkers. That grimy baseball cap signifies Harvard Lampoon alum, which opens the door to Hollywood comedy riches, in a process that can seem, to the uninitiated, truly bewildering and mysterious. X people offer jobs to those they recognize, by certain nuanced clues, as members of their creative tribe, which makes people fear that they might mistransmit a code—-bringing us back to Fussell’s rubric of class being announced in clothing, lifestyle, and speech...What if you went to UC Davis instead of Harvard—-are you not as funny?" I went to UC Davis and am not a millionaire 20-something comedy writer, alas. Anyway, Ms. Loh continues: "It’s not just that Romantic Selfhood—-Walter Pater’s notion of burning with a 'hard, gemlike flame,' which is the true emotional underpinning of bohemia—-has become commodified...It’s that Selfhood has its own berth now in the psychiatrist Abraham Maslow’s 'hierarchy of needs,' a generational shift presaged by American sociologists who, as early as the 1970s, posited that, while hungry people are concerned about survival, those who grow up in abundance will hunger for self-expression. In the relatively affluent post–Cold War era, the search for self-expression has evolved into a desire to not have that self-expression challenged, which in turn necessitates living among people who think and feel just as you do. It’s why so many bohemians flee gritty Los Angeles for verdant Portland, where left-leaning citizens pride themselves on their uniform, monotonously progressive culture—-the Zipcars, the organic gardens, the funky graphic-novel stores, and the thriving alternative-music scene. (In the meantime, I’ve also noticed that Portland is much whiter than Los Angeles, disconcertingly white.) "Further, as Bill Bishop argues in his disturbing, illuminating The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, the creative class’s quest for lifestyle self-determination has had a giant and, in some ways, deleterious national effect. In the past, U.S. migration patterns were based on economics and available jobs. By contrast, writes Bishop, over the past 30 years, 'there was a surge of people who wanted to live in cities for what could only be social—or even aesthetic—reasons.' In Austin alone, the percentage of people with a college education went from 17 percent in 1970 to 45 percent in 2004. In 60 years, the total population of San Francisco stayed roughly the same, but the average house price rose ninefold, from $60,162 to nearly $550,000 (compared with Cincinnati, where the average house price increased from $65,000 to $145,000). New 'superstar cities' (a term coined by the economist Joseph Gyourko) were 'metro areas where residence had become, in essence, a luxury good. People paid for the privilege of being in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Portland, Los Angeles, New York, Austin, and Raleigh-Durham because they wanted to live there, not because they expected an economic return.' In short: 'The function of cities had changed. Their reason for being—and their residents’ reason for living within them—was no longer to produce salable goods and services. The city’s new product was lifestyle.' These locales became "consumer cit­ies"—metro areas that catered to the well-paid, well-educated people who moved there.'" I should say right now that I happen to live in San Francisco. Still, could be worse: at least I'm not in Portland. (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 5th, 2009
4:10 pm	On Patriotism "What America is all about is that it promises every individual freedom to define and discover, but when you pursue your freedom you also betray your community because you leave it behind. In acting out the fact that you don’t need it and won’t obey or respect it, you are denying the whole that has given you this freedom. That paradox, that tension, is where I think American identity exists, if we want to set up something binary. I think it would be too facile to say it’s at war with itself, but in America, freedom, which is our birthright, is always accompanied by doubt and guilt. Refusing to seize freedom and only living within the suffocation of everyone else’s expectations, that’s a betrayal too, of your birthright to find out who you really are and what you really want. I think that is unique to this country. Every real society has a different sense of values and what’s most important, and I don’t think you find specifically that tension anywhere else. I mean of course you find it, but not as an identifying, fundamental element that ultimately everybody who is an American or wants to become one comes to grips with." -- Greil Marcus. Source. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 1st, 2009
11:51 pm	Knowledge Kills "When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings." -- E.M. Cioran (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 9th, 2009
5:03 pm	The New Fragmentation? From this month's Atlantic Monthly, Hua Hsu on "The End of White America?": "Consider the world of advertising and marketing, industries that set out to mold our desires at a subconscious level. Advertising strategy once assumed a 'general market'—'a code word for white people,' jokes one ad executive—-and smaller, mutually exclusive, satellite 'ethnic markets.' In recent years, though, advertisers have begun revising their assumptions and strategies in anticipation of profound demographic shifts. Instead of herding consumers toward a discrete center, the goal today is to create versatile images and campaigns that can be adapted to highly individualized tastes. (Think of the dancing silhouettes in Apple’s iPod campaign, which emphasizes individuality and diversity without privileging—or even representing—any specific group.) "At the moment, we can call this the triumph of multiculturalism, or post-racialism. But just as whiteness has no inherent meaning—-it is a vessel we fill with our hopes and anxieties—-these terms may prove equally empty in the long run. Does being post-racial mean that we are past race completely, or merely that race is no longer essential to how we identify ourselves? Karl Carter, of Atlanta’s youth-oriented GTM Inc. (Guerrilla Tactics Media), suggests that marketers and advertisers would be better off focusing on matrices like 'lifestyle' or 'culture' rather than race or ethnicity. 'You’ll have crazy in-depth studies of the white consumer or the Latino consumer,' he complains. 'But how do skaters feel? How do hip-hoppers feel?' "The logic of online social networking points in a similar direction. The New York University sociologist Dalton Conley has written of a 'network nation,' in which applications like Facebook and MySpace create 'crosscutting social groups' and new, flexible identities that only vaguely overlap with racial identities. Perhaps this is where the future of identity after whiteness lies—-in a dramatic departure from the racial logic that has defined American culture from the very beginning. What Conley, Carter, and others are describing isn’t merely the displacement of whiteness from our cultural center; they’re describing a social structure that treats race as just one of a seemingly infinite number of possible self-identifications. "The problem of the 20th century, W. E. B. DuBois famously predicted, would be the problem of the color line. Will this continue to be the case in the 21st century, when a black president will govern a country whose social networks increasingly cut across every conceivable line of identification? ...we aspire to be post-racial, but we still live within the structures of privilege, injustice, and racial categorization that we inherited from an older order. We can talk about defining ourselves by lifestyle rather than skin color, but our lifestyle choices are still racially coded. We know, more or less, that race is a fiction that often does more harm than good, and yet it is something we cling to without fully understanding why—-as a social and legal fact, a vague sense of belonging and place that we make solid through culture and speech. "But maybe this is merely how it used to be—-maybe this is already an outdated way of looking at things. 'You have a lot of young adults going into a more diverse world,' Carter remarks. For the young Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image. 'We came along in a generation that didn’t have to follow that path of race,' he goes on. 'We saw something different.' This moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was a bridge, and we crossed it." (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
4:08 pm	Unknown Memories From the TLS: "A celebrated anecdote in Herodotus concerns the staging in Athens in 493 BC of one of the very first works of Greek tragedy, The Fall of Miletus, by Phrynichus, an elder contemporary of Aeschylus, only two years after the historical events it describes – what we have learned to call the ethnic cleansing of the Milesians by the Persians. 'So Miletus was left empty of Milesians', according to Herodotus. The Fall of Miletus had a profound effect on the Athenian audience: they burst into tears. Not only that, they fined Phrynichus a thousand drachmas 'for reminding them of a disaster that was so close to home', and banned the play in perpetuity. "This episode is analysed afresh by [Paul] Kottman in A Politics of the Scene, for whom the crying of the Athenians arises from a shared recollection of suffering that was their own ('that was so close to home'). The Fall of Miletus reminded them of what they already remembered, as he puts it. In other words their response is not attributable to catharsis or mimesis, but to anamnesis. ('Good art is anamnesis', argues Iris Murdoch, following Plato, 'memory of what we did not know we knew.') In the case of the Athenians, the 'memory' is not an individual memory of a personal injury, but a shared memory of a public catastrophe. It is not strictly speaking a collective memory, transmitted and embedded and memorialized, for it is mortal, says Kottman; it is, precisely, a living memory. It comes into being through live action – direct affirmation: shared tears." (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
1:51 pm	"Eliot broke into a chatter about a letter being misunderstood" William Empson recalls T.S. Eliot on the subject of letters: "'Ah, letters,' he said rather as if they were some rare kind of bird, 'I had to look into the question of letters at one time. I found that the mistake...that most people make...about letters, is that after writing their letters carefully, they go out, and look for a pillar box. I found that it is very much better, after giving one’s attention to composing a letter, to...pop it into the fire.'" (1 Comment |Comment on this)