frenetic license

"So many of the arguments that knowledge goods industries make for extending their reach are really naked self-interest and rhetorical tricks."

Ciro

It's true that my mirth can be cruel at times, but I am usually possessed of good intentions. Nonetheless, I say that Chad owes me a great big, "Fuck you!" He in fact is going to be published, is among the bare handful of my writer friends to achieve that honor for fiction.

I think his friends owe him a congratulations.

Ciro
--

"I turn the ocean over. . ."
- Soulsavers, "Jesus of Nothing"

. . . about the Firewater show —

1) Tod A. spit in my mouth.

2) Tod A. put my glass to his lips.

3) Tod A. gave me his bourbon.

Whoa.

Ciro
--

"So you light a dog-end smoke, and you're laughing as you choke, and you give the wheel of fortune one more spin."
- Firewater, "Bourbon and Division"

Neuromusicologists have long been interested in the psychophysiological structures that separate relative-pitched people (a majority in Western civilization) from those with perfect/absolute pitch. Hard data has not been forthcoming, though experiments asking participants to sing popular songs they know by heart has demonstrated that absolute pitch is stored in memory for most individuals, even if they cannot apply that memory to individual tones. The common scenario for those with perfect pitch is that each tone has an individual significance, rather than one that relies upon the melody. For some, both carry meaning without any kind of training.

My girl has been telling me for a while that I in fact have perfect pitch. The experience of music that most perfect-pitched people describe didn't really match my own, so I was skeptical. Not too long ago, though, I ordered a basic course on music theory, because I was tired of being ignorant, and I went through a few exercises today. It's good to learn. My favorite moment of eureka in a long time came during an exercise with the harmonic series of F. I returned to the exercise a few hours later and discovered that I could sound each note, perfectly in tune and on key, even though I had no melody to associate them with.

So, she was right. I have perfect pitch. That's not so bad.

Ciro
--

"Ooy vol I tub!"
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce), Amadeus

"Efffffffffffffffff."
- Romie Stott

And, today with a china marker I turned someone's ballpoint doodle into an image of Morpheus the Sandman.

Ciro
--

"As I am an honest Puck. . . "
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

When I was bean-slinging in Boston, one of my regular customers was an MIT guy who was working on the detection system to allow using one of these devices for preventing seizures. Now they're trying them on psychiatric disorders.

Humans rewire own brains. I am a strange loop. Whoa.

Ciro
--

"I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."
- Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time" (trans. James E. Irby)

The lady above worked the corner for 3 or 4 hours before anyone noticed the sign. If she's right, I was the first, on my lunch break. She was happy to oblige for a picture.

My neighbor has Decided to ride her bike to work — ten minutes, probably, less if she keeps at it and gets better at riding.

I've been a pedestrian for a long while, a status forced upon me but which I am now reluctant to relinquish, even in this most unwalkable of cities. Highways are king. Land around you is cheaper than the air above, so people build out instead of up. Everyone wants their own private manse, and space between neighbors. Downtown is dead after 6 p.m.

A Dallas pedestrian knows a lot about frustration — you spend hours going short distances, most of your nights in doors, isolated. It reminds of me of being an artist in this city. Once I thought I could turn that into a good film, about being stranded, about dysfunctional creative communities, about relationships that fall apart under the weight of disconnection and the mute anguish of struggling to get nowhere. I still do. I still have something to say.

And I've Decided it's time I say it.

Ciro
--

"They will find you. They are looking now. It will not be too late."
- Romie Stott, "Forecasts"

Ciro
--

"Someone will have to measure the wreckage. Someone will have to walk through the ruins. Someone will have to count the cost."
- Charles P. Pierce, "The Cynic and Senator Obama"

In Dallas we're not that organized.

Ciro
--

"Large, dark, garbage."
- Terence Scopey (Julian Sands), Million Dollar Hotel

http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/T/TECHBIT_EPILEPSY_FOUNDATION_HACKED?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-05-07-19-29-17&reload=true

I'm all for the Computer Underground, but this shit makes me want to napalm the next DefCon.

Ciro

--

"I am a hacker and this is my manifesto."

- The Mentor, "The Conscience of a Hacker" (a.k.a "The Hacker's Manifesto")

I'm supposed to be writing about a museum visit for a class, but I've become Distracted. It's difficult for me to write about art — I get the vocabulary in my head, start examining my responses, and suddenly I'm in the mood to create something, not dance about architecture. In The Mood. It's a peculiar problem, I think. Just now I spent the last hour drawing and trying unconventional combinations of clothes. I have a scarf tied to my arm. I just finished a sketch I started a year ago. I'm plotting notes in Sibelius.

Outside the wind is up. The sky is twilit by the city. If I can find the moon, I'll swallow it whole.

Ciro
--

"Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."
- Robert Irwin

My father is not afraid to cry. His father was, I think. I have a picture of the two of them together, from some time in the late 70s or early 80s. My father has on a rockstar face, one of a series of expressions he learned from Mick Jagger. My grandfather looks made of wood or stone. No expression. I wonder if his face ever moved, except out of anger. His life was so devastatingly hard, what I know of it.

I see that face on the homeless men scattered around downtown. It's a cliché, really — ghosts in the flesh. Corpses that don't know they're dead. Some of them don't even ask me for money, they just look at me, like I'm a silhouette in the distance.

My father will lose his place to stay in 2 weeks; he has no prospects. My brother won't take him, can't — his girlfriend won't allow it. I told him he could stay with me, if he saw a doctor and took prescribed medication. I wasn't hoping for a cure, just some kind of relief. A day or two in the week, or even an hour, when he could get by without hearing voices, without twitching, without trying to convince me that he's growing younger and will soon save the world.

He refused.

It took a day before the finality of it hit me. In 2 weeks, he will be on the streets, and I will have no way to help him. I'm a Starbucks employee with a Pell grant, no heat or hot water, eating the food my customers won't buy. Working and studying full-time. I have no room in my life for sickness.

I almost deleted that last line. I'm so ashamed. I promised the people who care about me and see me in the middle of this that I would be selfish, that I wouldn't try to fix what I can't fix. "I have no room for sickness in my life." I keep telling them I've moved past guilt, because the looks on their faces say they need to hear it, but I haven't. I'm terribly ashamed, and torn open, and lately, seconds away from tears. The right words will do it, as my manager discovered a few days ago. I had to excuse myself to the back, find a small corner and cry. I think about what I have to tell my family in Italy, when the time comes that he's disappeared. I won't know what to say. I'm filthy with guilt. I hate my choices. None of them are bearable, and I'm most ashamed of the one I've made.

It won't be over for a long while. He's not dead, and until he is, I don't have any way of letting go. While he's still breathing, while he can still speak, I'm almost convinced that bond is still attached. But it's not, and for gods sake, it won't stop hurting.

Ciro
--

"And all his disciples, they shave in the gutter, and they gather what's left of his clothes."
- Tom Waits, "Diamonds and Gold"

So the emerging scene is far less than we deserve, and the outcome is far from certain, but I think that misses the point. When it's all over, I'm selling t-shirts that say, "I made it through the Bush Administration."

Ciro
--

"Great political parties, then, are not to be met with in the United States at the present time. Parties, indeed, may be found which threaten the future of the Union; but there is none which seems to contest the present form of government or the present course of society. The parties by which the Union is menaced do not rest upon principles, but upon material interests. These interests constitute, in the different provinces of so vast an empire, rival nations rather than parties."

- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (trans. Henry Reeve)

It's not just that I did a lot of work on one of the installations, or that one of the headliners is my best and oldest friend (and a formidable artist) — it's that it's everything you could ever possibly need to feel completely fulfilled forever.

Ciro

My girl says I remind her of a cat, but not specifically how. Something about the way I move, or the shape of my face, or the way carry myself, or something. Sometimes I see it, in certain pictures, though I would never describe myself as a cat person. And yet, two nights ago I had my second dream of a big she-cat (this time a tiger, instead of the massive black panther from the first one) falling in love with me — love as in eros, as in these cats want to have my children.

In both dreams the cats start out demonstrating their love by protecting me from some violent force — a band of ravenous human monsters in the first, Marxist guerrillas in the second — and quite graphically tearing their prey apart (impressions of rampant gore, but no specific images). The second part of the dreams involves them making physical overtures. Nothing pornographic (except for one seriously-fubar-but-titillating image, whoa!), but highly erotic. And they're not stand-ins for people I know in waking life, they're just sentient big she-cats.

Bestiality means nothing to me, and anyway I've never heard of it in conjuction with exotic animals that would most certainly kill their molesters. Something subtextual is happening here, something about the impression of strength I get from my feline suitors.

Regardless, it's weird and hot, and I spend most of the day aroused and frustrated. The girl has got to come back soon.

Ciro

P.S. I told this to a coworker once, and she said I'd been watching too many movies.
--

"In America sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world, it is a fact."
- Marlene Dietrich

I have such trouble with family. Poverty and illness has made keeping up with my parents a mostly depressing task that I'm bound to continue, despite how it drags me down. As for the extended part, my mother's side is out of touch, and my father's side is across the ocean, closer to my girl at film school than to me.

It's why I'm so fond of the family you choose. And keep in mind, I do make a distinction between that and "friends". Friends come and go. Family, on the other hand, lies under the aegis of blood-is-thicker, even if it is chosen and not born.

We have our own holidays. The best of them is Ashley's birthday, which falls right around Thanksgiving, so it means we get to do what you're supposed to do on turkey day but can never manage — eat, drink, and be merry, without the awkwardness and politics of spending hours with people you are related to, but to whom you cannot relate. Pumpkin carving is another, good enough to hold us until late November, and a bit more hands-on. You get dirty, make ephemeral art pieces, watch horror movies, eat toasted seeds —

Quality time, you know? I missed it last year. It's good to be back.

Ciro
--

"That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die."
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Nameless City"

Chad says with certainty and a trace of cynicism that he cannot possibly be photographed well. Indignant, I respond that had I other than a poor cell phone camera, I would prove him wrong. He is skeptical, followed immediately by irritated as I take shot upon shot of him, each punctuated by the noisome shutter-and-wind sound they put on phone cams these days.

24 in all, most unsuccessful — the angle is extremely wide in that tiny red eye. But I've never tired of looking at him, even before I thought of putting him in pictures. He's unaware of himself in an extremely characteristic way, though this is best seen when he moves.

He doesn't move as easily these days. He's care-worn, heavy with the immediate future, and on many levels still unaware of it. But the two of us have always played off each other like the best of comic duos (really, it's entertaining to watch). I thought perhaps we'd take on the roles of photographer and subject, to see how we do when the comedy goes quiet.

Ciro
--

"It's the good who do not sleep."
- Brad Leithauser, "A Good List"

James' place is empty of him. In the end, none of his people would help him leave, out of spite, I think, because they don't want him to go, so the two of us loaded his history in possesions into a U-Haul for tomorrow's trip that ends in New York City.

The apartment he lived in but never loved is cold and startlingly white and empty like space is empty. He's gone to his mother's for his final night, but so far, this is still the only place I have to sleep. I occupy his shell and do not fill the space.

That may change soon. A friend sent me a wonderful windfall — a potential apartment in downtown Dallas, hardwood floors, owned by a sweet old couple who don't bother with the rental formalities. $500 a month. If it goes through, I'll be ecstatic.

Now I'm being safe. My girl says she hopes I get it, but that I don't stay — an indirect reminder that she's still keeping faith that I'll make it to London. It's not that I think it impossible, but I've lost a year to the effort, and now I've got work to do. Catching up. Fixing what Heathrow made broken. I can still try for London, but I'm being safe now. Despair can be a natural place. Hope can be as dangerous as love.

Of course, for the moment, none of that matters, not while I'm lost in these white walls. James is gone, and I am not.

I'm caught in the construct. I'm waiting for some guns.

Ciro
--

"Then, in the afternoon, he purified himself in the waters of the river, worshipped the planetary gods, uttered the lawful syllables of a powerful name and slept. Almost immediately, he dreamt of a beating heart."
- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Circular Ruins" (trans. James E. Irby)

Last night I discovered that taking photographs helps me sleep. I was tossing and turning after at least 18 hours of waking life, and I asked myself the simple question, "What is it? What would you rather be doing instead of sleeping?"

Dreaming. So I took photographs.

I'm in a period of, mmm, not writer's block, but circumstances not conducive to writing. Coming toward the end of a year spent entirely as a guest. Unsure of my living situation. Perilously short on funds. But working, so short on time as well. Absent my girl.

Neither writing nor sex, then, can serve as the creative release I need to complete the day. As disposable as cell phone shots are, at least they make me feel productive. Therefore, photographs.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Ciro
--

"To take up his task again, he waited until the moon's disk was perfect."
- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Circular Ruins" (trans. James E. Irby)

Before my girl left, I grabbed a bunch of the photos from her digital camera. I did this without permission, but I think I'm in the clear. There's a lot of her in them, you see. People like photographing her, a side effect, I think, of her obsession with staying constantly interesting. They're like my bundle of lovin' when she's gone, or those baskets you make for sick people with, like, chicken soup and OJ and a cute pillow too small to be useful. What's more, she sends additional photos when she takes them, snippets of her days to give me context for her stories.

They're endless fun to play with. Sometimes I get crazy and turn her hair purple. In the end, though, it feels a bit like the aubade games the best lovers play, tangled in the sheets being perfectly silly, or when she tries on underwear for me, just so I can see.

Ciro
--

"The face forgives the mirror. . ."
- Tom Waits, "All the World Is Green"