blogging : daily noodling : things that make you go hee-hee : puffery more clever than the programming

"I’m making a special cookie…for Gertrude."

vainglory : the refrigerator door : fotografie : fire 6-alarm

vainglory : all my little words : grousing : identity at $1 a page

"A writer, who was a celebrity in Paris, had entered her shop one day. He was not looking for a hat. He asked if she sold luminous flowers that he had heard about, flowers which shone in the dark. He wanted them, he said, for a woman who shone in the dark..."

"Mathilde did not have them. But as soon as the man left she went to look at herself in the mirror. This was the kind of feeling she wanted to inspire. Could she? Her glow was not of that nature. She was much more like fire than light..."

"The man had come back. But this time he was not asking for anything to buy. He stood looking at her, his long finely carved face smiling, his elegant gestures making a ritual out of lighting a cigarette, and said, 'This time I came back just to see you.'

Mathilde's heart beat so swiftly that she felt as if this were the moment she had expected for years. She almost stood up on her toes to hear the rest of his words. She felt as if she were the luminous woman sitting back in the dark box receiving the unusual flower. But what the polished, gray-haired writer said in his aristocratic voice was, 'As soon as I saw you, I was stiff in my pants.'

The crudity of the words was like an insult. She reddened and struck at him.

This scene was repeated on several occasions. Mathilde found that when she appeared, men were usually speechless, deprived of all inclinations for romantic courtship. Such words as these fell from them each time at the mere sight of her. Her effect was so direct that all they could express was their physical disturbance. Instead of accepting this as a tribute, she resented it."

~ Anais Nin, "Mathilde," Delta of Venus, 1940

acculturation : aural : indie pop/rock : death cab for cutie's plans

[Edited, 01/03/06 09:55 a.m.]

Let me disclaim right at the start that I had never seriously listened to Death Cab for Cutie until, hmm, two weeks ago-ish. I've been digging The Postal Service since late Spring, but it wasn't until I heard "Soul Meets Body" on the radio that I thought, "Huh... methinks I might also enjoy Ben Gibbard's day job..."

DCfC's latest, Plans, procured, I set to listening. And listening and listening. And listening. Etc. In one instance -- three times over, consecutively.

This record is perilous. Baneful. It enfolds one into a hazardly alluring sadness. To my mind, that is the authentication of melancholy as device and as experience both: you percept a beauty. It breaks your heart. You do not particularly enjoy the sensation, but you return to it again and again, sometimes relieved at its termination, albeit racked -and pleasurably so- by a spiritual analog of the full-body hiccup-sobs befitting a post-hysterical child.

Ellipses: the craving remains.

In other words, this album makes me want to shoot myself in the head. But in a good way.

Sure, there are tracks that invite dismissal; sophomoric, seemingly penned for those, both expectedly and figuratively, suffering from Teenage Bedroom Syndrome. "You Will Be Loved" is perhaps the most transparent scapegoat for such a reductive nit-pick.

The opening track, "Marching Bands of Manhattan," "Soul Meets Body," and "Your Heart Is an Empty Room" are stand-outs, but I find it difficult to list any one track as any less than Really Fucking Gorgeous.

Save for "What Sarah Said," i.e. the undeniably most affective and infective song on Plans.

This song causes me to burst into tears in much the same way that Joan Baez dueting with Dar Williams on the latter's "You're Aging Well" once did.

And it came to me then that every plan
Is a tiny prayer to father time
As I stared at my shoes in the ICU
That reeked of piss and 409
And I rationed my breaths as I said to myself
That I’ve already taken too much today
As each descending peak on the LCD
Took you a little farther away from me

Circulating piano, a sustained hold... Love is watching someone die... after which the percussive shimmer, organ bass, and cascading piano each stagger their return and then, zenith-ridden... So who's going to watch you die?, dismantle and fade, fade, withdrawing in reverse order. The track never seems to end so much as to retreat, reinfuse itself into one's personal amygdalic ether.

Death is not an entirely difficult concept to grasp. Earthly ephemera and the surviving may complicate and be complicated by it but, as They are fond of saying, it's right up there with taxes: inevitable, we all sorta 'get' the prospect of that eventuality. Yet, there's also the high rate at which the things that ought to be simplest to comprehend being the very same most taken for granted. Or, more likely, most temporally denied -- especially when it comes to the ones we love.

It's the moments in which we fully realize the immutable... with luck, this occurs in rehearsal, emotionally speaking, but even still we may be shaken to the core; the histrionics, large-scale, intense, but in the end it is, it has to be, c'est la mother-fucking vie.

On the other hand, "What Sarah Said" intrigues and then more deeply troubles me because an alternate reading detects a spitefulness (to be fair, possibly a factor ushered in by the would-be patient threatening his/her own life; a suicide attempt, or perhaps by means of drugs or reckless conduct) in Gibbard's conclusion... that is, if we are to assume that the 'you' is the same for whom he waits: for if his place in the waiting room defines 'love', and yet there is the question as to who will further endure the hospice vigil, then... ouch.

Should that interpretation fly, this song makes a strong showing against Sufjan Stevens' "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." for Most Heartbreaking Metaphor of 2005.

Summarily, with Plans, you are opportuned to resign yourself to the most cardiac-quivering loveliness. Sigh and sour but, hopefully, love in spite of what awaits.

Addendum: I had been focusing my ear so single-mindedly (or, rather, single-ear...edly) on the elemental melancholia of Plans that I neglected to give credit to the insidiously earwormy, non-morose tracks. "Different Names for the Same Thing," along with a few others mentioned above, are full of the kind of balmy, sparkly production that reminds me of the smell of earth after a rain shower. 'Oh,' you might very well be thinking. 'How very...pedestrian of you to say.' Then allow me to particularize -- I speak of the sort of wet dirt essence which occurs only in that narrow frame of time after the April thaw, spring not quite vestigial, the cusp of summer still at a distance. Oddly steamy, yet with a chill sharp to the nostrils. Bright. Pavement-darkening.

IRL : the jay-oh-bee : holidaze : envy among pranksters

I really do wish that I could say that I thought of this little gambol. But, alas, it was all Co-worker SevenFeet.

Several weeks ago, I received the latest Harriet Carter catalog. If you are not already familiar with this 8" square of oh-my-god-they-can't-be-serious consumerism, then you are really, truly missing out. It's the Weekly World News of catalogs, sans the fine-printed page 3 disclaimer assuring you that it is indeed a work of fiction and parody.

Featured on the front cover of the catalog is this... item. At first glance, I assumed it was your typical personalized pewter ornament. About which I was not wrong, really. It is in reality abundantly typical of the kind of wares offered by Harriet Carter. But outside the pages of this mail-order delight? Nothing short of stupefying.

Then again, I don't have television so maybe most folks are fairly inured to this level of ridiculosity.

In any event, that be not my raison d'etre this frigid afternoon.

This action item is, again courtesy of Co-worker SevenFeet:

1. Order several of these ornaments engraved with your own name and the current year.
2. Wrap, package, and mail them to close friends and family.
3. Don't answer the phone on Christmas.

Fin.

acculturation : perspicacity : talkies : hollywood, please back away, slowly, from favorite works of my pre-pubescent youth

According to the IMDb, a second film adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia is currently in pre-production and slated for a 2007 release. I was unaware that there was even a first, released in 1985 and, judging from the user reviews, a rather corny and ultimately forgettable one.

The prospect of this new one, however, has me primly pursing my critical little lips. Maybe it's the bias of reverent posterity, my positing of the text in the same emotional lexicon as that of To Kill A Mockingbird. Maybe it's the fact that the director's resume, while nothing to sneeze at, primarily consists of the executive production, writing, and animation of such fare as The Rugrats, The Wild Thornberrys, and Duckman. Or that his likeness was the model for Dr. Nick Riviera on The Simpsons (no, really).

To be honest, in another context, Mr. Csupo's participation would be Wholly Neat. But, let's stay focused. Remember: prim, reverent.

So, prayhaps, really, I want to say right now that I shalt not approve of this film due to the casting of Ms. AnnaSophia Robb as Leslie. You might have seen her as Violet Beauregarde in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and thought, "Hey... what is Dakota Fanning doing in this piece of claptrap?" Or maybe you caught her (playing a character previously brought to life by a doll) in the TV movie event, Samantha: An American Girl Holiday. In any event, she is far too precious and, well, girly to be Leslie. Maybe she'll hit The Awkward Phase just in time for filming but, from the looks of her, she's one of those girls that somehow will bypass altogether that particular circle of Hell.

Furthermore, you just know, you don't have to think about it, you don't even have to read her bio to know (although you really should, especially if you have a taste for the darkly comedic naivete of ironic foreshadowing), so I am merely a mouthpiece when I say this: this child is f@#%ed. And it's all her mother's fault. I mean... just consider, just look, will you, at her given name. AnnaSophia. One word. And she insists, apparently, that one address her as such, all five syllables in their entirety.

Everybody wants to rule the world, but I don't think I'd take to that whip crackin' the moment of my exit from the birth canal. And then preordained with a stage name like AnnaSophia. That, sir, would be a mind-fuck. It might be years before it all unravels in a miasma of coke addiction, botched breast implants, and recidivistic shoplifting, but mark my words: f@#%ed.

IRL : insomniage : morbidity alert : teen bedroom syndrome

I don't know how I am even surprised anymore, let alone rattled, when things of promise turn quietly and inexplicably to shit.

'kay, Universe? I get it. Really. It. Is. Gotten. And, you're right: I mean, HA HA HA what was I thinking?

AH HA HA HA HA HA *giggle* *snort* *lights matches*

Don't worry, though. I'm not taking it personally or anything.

But probably significantly more than it deserves to be.