november 16, 2002

here -- you go flying

this is one of my favorite polaroids, taken during miss b.'s visit a couple years back. i've always liked the polaroid as an artistic medium -- little rough, little tumble, but incredibly true to form in many ways. it allows for composition/design in a manner rarely imitated.

still life with pool table

november 13, 2002

miscreant science

shook my groove thing, etc., last night to the blissful ministrations of the endlessly talented mark farina. it was at chop suey, home of the implied egg roll, and with the lovely brett. i really dug hanging out with him one-on-one & must make a point of doing so more often.

i must say that i adore the way life consistently surprises me -- often, of course, when i'm feeling like maybe i just have a bit of it figured out. thrilling, really.

thank you, et al.

november 11, 2002

the main event

saturday night was this year's toast to astrological commitment: scorpio vi. it was an excellent time, although i had to recuperate all sunday as a result. this year's theme was 'minimalism' and we requested everyone dress in one solid color -- which resulted in a wonderful aesthetic. all of our vittles were white-hued, and our cocktails were either blue, orange, or clear -- dubbed in progression, blue #2, orange #5, etc. we all crammed into a small apartment and chatted and gyrated and generally had a wonderful, humorous time.

it reminded me a bit of a party in my basement apartment in north seattle -- eventually all of us dancing in the living room to nikoel's pal guinness' cd-spinning, everyone basically hanging on to the ceiling to keep upright. high energy, and feeling a tad underground -- at the time i was reminded of an article i had recently read regarding the club scene in apartheid-era south africa. maybe just the vibrancy, or the dim lighting mixed with body heat.

anyway, an excellent birthday party, that. three of my favorite photos:

the class of scorpio vi
back: max, mark, adrienne, elisa, nikoel
front: adam, me

lisa & elisa show they shit off

brett, accompanied by my glasses

november 4, 2002

thoughtfulness

y un regalito.

november 3, 2002

"this is sounding better all the time"

romantic relationships/commitment.

over the last several years i have remained primarily focused on personal growth outside of any traditionally defined romantic commitment, and for a time i began to feel quite self-assured and as if many of the sensitive sore spots -- which lived so near the surface and came out in almost uncontrollable, rabid mannerisms/reactions in relationships -- had been explored, prodded, poked, cut open, and allowed to heal properly. this then lent me the feeling that perhaps i should open myself up again to a commitment of some sort, the search for which caused me to feel lonely.

it has always humored me that short-lived relationships are construed as meaningless, for it would seem that the most powerful lessons i have learned in regard to human interaction were garnered during what most would consider a "fling." it's probably obvious to most people, but when there is an identifiable end to a relationship, going in, the parties involved seem to embrace it more wholeheartedly -- baggage is left at the train station and extra coal is thrown on the fire.

there is a charm to abiding love/care that does strike my fancy, but i hate all the strings attached. i dislike it when i notice it in my own motivations, and when i feel the crushing expectation of another, it wrenches my heart.

and as i grow older, it's almost as if the urgency of it all lessens, and i've come to appreciate the aloneness i have cultivated over the years. although it must be clearly stated that i do crave companionship of a sort, i suppose that what i actually want to record here is the slow demise of that demanding need which formerly hummed at the heart of all my actions. certainly, i look forward to all future romance and the sharing of love, compassion, perspective, and desire -- but i no longer think on it as a sort of remedy for a particularly evasive spiritual ailment.

november 1, 2002

simulate string guitar

a few nights back, i transcribed the following, a rather basic record of my ideas behind mapping the intellectual evolution of the human mind in relationship to the evolution of philosophical thought in human history.

my thoughts are that, at some point in our early development, there is a turning point wherein we realize the wonder we felt up to that point was actually incredibly one dimensional. somehow, we are exposed to an idea that introduces the plurality of perspective -- and pushes us, for the first time, to reevaluate everything we knew in order to verify it actually has some relative merit. this is when we become existentialists. existentialism itself can last quite a long time, as we fight an internal battle with all of our supposed points of values -- losing each one of them, more often than not, until we are basically stripped of the socialized mores with which we associated that childhood wonder. we realize that we simply believed everyone when they told us what "meaning" was, and that there is no actual concrete definition by which we must all abide.

it's not as if we then hit a "rock bottom", but eventually there comes a time when we realize that we have actually taken everything in our reality apart, looking for the root of it -- the essentials which will (hopefully) provide us with the "truth" -- and now we must learn how to put it all back together, in order to actually function with a point of reference. and, taking things apart and putting them back together again provides us added detail as to the nature of things, so we begin knocking down the building blocks -- and as our reality changes, grows, expands we learn to take everything we come across apart, if only to put it back together for our own knowledgeable satisfaction. this, then, would be deconstructionism.

and then, perhaps, eventually we'll understand that every time we take something apart, it's put back together the same and there's really little difference between the knowledge we've ascertained from deconstructing and the knowledge we had back during our childhood wonder. somehow, there is an acknowledgment, or realization, that an understanding of plurality simply leads us to an acceptance of the singularity & similarity of all things. so we revisit all the ideas we learned to reject during our existential crisis and redefine them with the meaning we've gleaned by taking everything apart over and over again -- eventually becoming postmodernists.

full circle? perhaps. but now the wonder is possibly more astounding because we have a full record of comparison. nothing is black without white, etc.