Six word story

Transplant recipient marries widow, kills self

Breath

Love is a claw
shoveling our hearts into
the incinerator.
Our souls rise up
the chimney stacks,
bodies, ash lay
behind on the floor.

The Goddess is a hologram.
There is no authority. Our
emotional machinery was grown
on an assembly line.
We have been programmed
to be hungry.

This pump and valve runs
on beautiful illusion.

Enjoy what you can
while you can
without destroying yourself
or anybody else.

Airy Nothings

I have been recording some music in the attic over the past few weeks. My goal is to have an album featuring between ten and fifteen original songs recorded by the time I graduate (August 24).

I've written the songs over the course of the past few years. Most of them are basically just fragments. I usually get bored with a song and leave it wounded rather than kill it off completely.

I find it really hard to write lyrics. Music is such an ethereal thing, writing lyrics for a melody is like trying to pin a butterfly to the wall while it's alive and fluttering around. Most of the songs are fairly typical love songs, but I think my style is becoming a little more sophisticated. I feel like a lot of music serves to keep us in a kind of permenent adolescence. There's a lot more to write about than holding hands and heartbreak. I guess pop music is particularly effective when dealing with these subjects, but I'm trying to write about something else, not politics, but just anything interesting.

I am using Apple's Garageband and a Blue Snowball microphone for drums, organ, percussion and vocals, as well as an iMic USB input to record the guitars. I think the guitar amplifiers on garageband are basically shit, but I can't seem to get a good sound any other way.



If somehow you manage to find yourself all the way out here on this little internet outpost would you please be so kind as to visit this link to here some of the music.

Here's a tentative track listing:

1. Mushroom Cloud
2. I Like the Way Your Pants Fit
3. Static Electricity
4. Let's Stay Up All Night
5. I Want to Wake Up Next To You
6. Hall of Mirrors
7. Marilu
8. Black Rainbows
9. Tattered, Shattered, Broken and Beat
10.Girl With Her Feet on My Dashboard
11.Supersonic Narcissist

The Stuff That Dreams are Made On

There is something almost holy about a dolly shot, as if the camera were being carried by angels. The viewer floats towards or around a subject as if on a cloud.

A zoom is robotic, mechanical, produced within the technology of the camera. The human eye has no zoom capability. A zoom is almost like a gunshot; The camera is aimed at the subject and the view launched like a bullet towards the target. It creates excitement, and sometimes comedy in films like "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Kill Bill" where the clumsy showmanship of a quick zoom becomes the cinematic and emotional equivalent of a Magician's "TA-DA!"




The Dolly-Zoom may be the most famous camera technique in film, used probably to the best effect in Vertigo and subsequently in films like Goodfellas and Jaws. A reverse dolly zoom gives the viewer the impression that space is folding in, bearing down on the subject. The world is accordion-ing, shrinking rapidly.

A Pan is almost surveillance. The steady rhythm of the pivot approximates a robot turning its head. The camera is searching. When I think of pans, I think of the end of "The Conversation", where Francis Ford Coppola posts the camera high on the wall in Harry Caul's apartment and pans back and forth as Harry tears up his floors, paranoid that he has been bugged, poetic justice, as Harry makes his living spying on others. In a way, all film is voyeuristic; It is invited or artificial surveillance. The audience spies on the most dramatic moments in the lives of the characters, fictional or not.

And yet the mechanics of the camera can be manipulated to create the most divine effects, can turn men into gods. How magnificent it is to see Jean Taris twisting and falling in slow motion in Jean Vigo's film!

A lap dissolve is a dreamy transition. The screen becomes a pond that ripples, a windshield splashed with rain, an eye full of tears. The eye is wiped clean and we are gently whisked into the new scene, the new time and place as if out onto streets washed clean with rain, as if we were emerging from a car wash. A lap dissolve is a baptism, a cleansing of the informational and emotional residue of the previous scene.

A fade is a descent into sleep, or an awakening. A birth or a death. Shakespeare may well have been talking about movies when he said they "are the stuff that dreams are made on and their little lives are rounded with a sleep". The light rising up from the blackness at the beginning, and falling back into it when the story is over is the most natural, beautiful framing a film could take, a perfect imitation of life, of each day of our lives: A morning, a sunrise, an awakening, a birth; the story of life, the day; the drift back into darkness, nightfall, sleep, death, never knowing the precise cleft between consciousness and unconsciousness. Film has brought us closer than any other medium in history to seeing our dreams made real, to creating a worldwide mythology, to bringing the images that we see in our mind's eye into life, into light. Films are almost tangible, but not quite, like water in a raincloud.

Film is a Frankenstein monster resurrected from limbs of celluloid and charged with the flowing currents of words, emotions, ideas.

Lame White People

Stuff White People Like is a frighteningly accurate website about you and I and all the other progressive middle class white people out there.

I like girls with bangs, Wes Anderson movies and have not one, but TWO arts degrees. I am writing this on a Powerbook. I have a shelf full of New Yorker magazines that I haven't read and a couple copies of "McSweeney's" that I bought simply because they look pretty (I think the writing kind of sucks).

To the list of things White People like I would add:

Vespas
Craigslist
Wine
Audrey Hepburn
Graphic Novels
Messenger Bags
Headbands
Ironic facial hair
Ninjas
LOL Cats

The Quarry

Seymour looked out at the cliffs that had been carved away and the smooth blue water and wondered how deep the lake was and what lay at the bottom.

He had heard that it used to be a quarry until twenty or so years before. Italians had come over to cut the limestone out and make it into gargoyles that they put in the sky.

Supposedly when the quarry was flooded they abandoned all their machinery down there; Machinery that was too big or too old to be worth hauling out.

He thought about diving in with some goggles and seeing if he could swim down far enough to see the rusted old skeletons of cranes and fossilized shells of drills and ancient dulled knives. Probably no one would ever see them again. They would never again breath the air or feel the wind and sun.

He wondered if he dove off the cliff and hit his head on a rock and disappeared down into the dark how long it would take for him to float to the bottom.

He had grown up in a condo nearby and no matter where he went or what he did he felt the quarry was the center of his world, the great drain that he would always swirl back to, the well spring of his life.

He felt that, no matter what crime he committed, these waters would always offer him absolution.

He dove in.

Apathy

On the green the students
circle around a woman who brandishes
the Bible like a gun.

“You will roast!” She decries
pointing her bulky finger.

Students take turns stepping into the
circle. “I can see your panty line, sinner!”
they scream and “Whore! Whore!”

A kid hands one of the screamers a soda and
slams his own soda into it. “Cheers.”
The students laugh.

I am only there to see
the girls lying in the grass,
waiting for the sun to cook them
until they’re succulent.

A foam hot dog with arms
and legs comes around
campaigning
with propaganda
of his own.

An ex-girlfriend, tearing the
blankets and pillows out from
underneath, discarding me
to the floor, told me
my apathy
was astounding.

Sweetheart, nobody knows
that better than I do.

I wish I could fasten myself to the circle,
but, for me, destiny lies stillborn,
like a fortune cookie, shattered before
I could crack it open.