Hello blogland,

It’s been terribly rainy and unseasonable lately, so I figured that I would check in and write about some things. There have really been more experiences in the past month than I can even remember without prodding (I really spend more time being angry with myself for not recording them than I do actually putting down the memories), but I’ll make a full-assed (why doesn’t anyone ever use that term? Isn’t it as graphic and weird as half-assed?) attempt to let you know what my first half of living in Williamsburg has been like.

The weather of the past few weeks has just been awful, so I’ve been spending a lot of time inside the apartment reading books (the terror that is introductory college English [Literature Humanities, for you core-loving folk] made me forget how much I truly love poring over a book and engrossing myself inside its world). I’ve been getting outside every chance I get, though, and spent a good hour before interning yesterday basking in Central Park and enjoying Suze Rotolo’s A Freewheelin’ Time, her memoir about her years dating Bob Dylan. I can’t say that I was ever particularly into Bob Dylan, but the world that she described in the book (Greenwich Village in the 1960s) made me realize just why so many people in every post-60s generation are engrossed with the period.

I also recently came back from a trip to Canada to see my sister, brother-in-law, nieces, and nephew and revel in the cuteness that is little children. It was a really enjoyable trip (the kids were relatively well-behaved the whole time, which is impressive for three kids in the one to four year-old set) and I got a few really choice soundbites out of the little ones:

(I recently [well, within the last year or so] got quite a few piercings, and could notice when I was sitting on the couch with my oldest niece, J, her clearly looking up at my septum and nostril rings.) Me: What are you looking at? (not angrily, more like I knew something amusing would come of asking) J: Um… (very diplomatically looks away and up at the photographs on the wall behind me) At the photos mom took! See? (looks outside) And it’s raining!

(At the zoo, my two nieces [J, age 4, and E, who’s almost 3], sister, and I crammed into a single handicapped stall to make “potty time” easier. The kids went to the bathroom and my sister sat down to do likewise, at which point J says [quite loudly in a public bathroom, might I add]:) MOM, I CAN SEE YOUR VAGINA! (pause) I love you.

Needless to say, it was an amusing five days.

Before that, back in New York, I spent a lot of time exploring Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan, an area that I am unfortunately quite robbed of spending time in because University is so far Uptown (I know it doesn’t sound like such a schlep, but it’s hard to find time to make the forty or so minute trip down to the Village when you’re drowning in homework). Lovely Rena (meter maaaaaaaaaaaaaid) came in from New Jersey to visit me and we spent some time at our favorite non-carding bar, Heartland Brewery in Union Square (I know it’s expensive, but they have really nice beers that they brew in house. Can’t really beat that with a cheap Japanese restaurant, eh? Okay, so maybe you can. Shush.), after which we stopped to listen to a man playing accordion and a woman accompanying him with her lovely voice. We danced around tipsily and, after listening to their whole set, decided to go sit on the stairs of Union Square near the now disappeared Virgin Store (anyone know what’s going to take its place?). A bit later, quite unexpectedly, they came up behind us and introduced themselves (by inscribing it on my knuckles) as “Projekt Hex,” hailing from Germany. We had a really lovely conversation about their travels and experiences in New York, and were soon joined by a number of other buskers, including an aging breakdancer (“I’m older than you think I am; I was here before all of these young kids got their start!”) and a somewhat socially awkward, albeit kind, magician. Rena began talking to a crackhead who had sat down next to her (smoking a crack pipe in public, no less, although time was moving quickly into the early hours of the morning) about politics, and we gradually all separated.

The internship is going well; I’ve been enjoying doing various odd jobs (graphic design, mostly) for the Neo-Futurists, and am glad that I’ve been able to get into their shows for free. I’ve been unable to find a second job, though, and have been sort of stressing about that. Ah well, c’est la (shitty) economie, no?

July should be a good month; there are a bunch of free concerts in Williamsburg and I’m expecting better weather than that which characterized June (although today doesn’t really set a great precedent for that, although it has sort of lightened up in the time that I’ve been writing this post). There’s also a potential photo project coming up for a Syracuse student-run magazine, which is random but should be fun. What I’m really hoping for is that I’ll be able to start writing fiction again. For some reason that I haven’t quite discovered—self-consciousness, lack of confidence, or otherwise—I have been creatively stifled recently to the point where if I even think about writing I want to run away screaming. It’s extremely disheartening, but I guess that considering how prolific I had been throughout high school it was bound to happen. I know it will pass, I’m just trying to get it to do so more quickly than it would if I just sat on my ass and pouted about it.

Speaking of sitting on my ass and pouting, I’ve been having some oddly major life-shifting dilemmas lately. I don’t want to turn this into a therapy session because I know you don’t necessarily want to read it (and, to be honest, I don’t necessarily want to spill my little nineteen-year-old guts out to a public audience, no matter how small it may be), but I just feel like I’m at a crossroads in my life and don’t necessarily know which way to go. To be honest it almost feels like puberty all over again, which is bizarre but the most appropriate description that I can ascribe to it. I just feel sort of aimless and am having a weird longing to share that aimlessness with someone. I’ll be honest and admit that reading Rotolo’s book didn’t help much (“why can’t I be with someone exciting and intellectually stimulating like Bob Dylan?”), but I don’t entirely know how to deal with this sort of situation. I’m actually going to stop talking about it, because it’s just making me feel awkward and despondent.

Also, I have a mosquito bite on the middle section of my right pinky. What are the chances of that? 

    Let's just skip past the requisite returning-to-my-blog nostalgia and apologies; I left, now I'm back, let's resume from where we left off. I guess I didn't write much about my freshman year of college, which is something I regret in theory but not in practice (considering I never really had much free time, and the free minutes I did have I certainly did not want to spend cooped up in my dorm room on my computer). I actually had a really excellent time in school these past few months, made some great friends and learned some really valuable things. And now that summer is here, I will be working with the New York Neo-Futurists in the East Village as a Managing Director Intern, and hopefully getting some writing done for the first time in at least a semester. I've also moved out of my parent's house in New Jersey and am living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (in what my landlord described as the "proper, ungentrified" part that is supposed to give me "street cred" or something).

View from my Bedroom

Or is this just some insane stereotype?

    When I walked into the Grand Ballroom at the Manhattan Center, I might as well have walked into a circus. The smell of popcorn cooking behind the concession bar was enough to even block out the body odor of the dozens of unwashed hipsters touting moustaches of carnie-proportions.
    “Look!” My friend grabbed my arm and motioned towards the merchandise stand, speaking in hushed tones as if trying to turn my attention to a bearded woman, “The bassist!” I turned to where he was pointing, trying to discern to which of the shaggy-haired men he was referring. “Come on!” Before I knew what was happening, he was dragging me over to the stand under the pretense of looking at overpriced posters and t-shirts.
    “Dude,” an obscenely tall twenty-something behind us muttered to his painfully thin blonde girlfriend, “I hate that all of this shit costs so much now. At least I could actually afford it before they started playing venues like this.” As the couple walked away I began to wonder whether I had accidentally walked in on some perverse exaggeration of our cultural milieu.

    Frank Fairfield, the concert’s opener, didn’t help to stave off that thought. Dressed in slacks and a button-down with parted and oiled hair, Fairfield embarked on a one-man set embodying a period that can only be referred to as the antebellum American South. Fairfield was undeniably skilled—I had never seen a musician with more finesse at finger picking—but something about his histrionic performance begged the question of validity. As he plucked away at his banjo and violin, I couldn’t get past the ludicrous notion of a kid from Los Angeles sweating and grimacing like a specter of someone’s great-grandfather. Even during his banter he spoke in a warbled southern whine, having perfected the art of performance to the smallest degree.
    I began to ask myself about the true importance of validity in music. In a world infused with the oversharing of bloggers, had I come to be able to accept nothing less than the truth? Has the function of stage personas become completely eradicated with that of privacy and subtlety? When I researched Fairfield and listened to his “degenerative records” radio show , I was dismayed to find that his voice was hushed and Californian, showing no hint of the Southern drawl of his stage persona. He spoke with the quiet intelligence of an armchair musicologist, but despite how knowledgeable and interesting his commentary was on the records I couldn’t help but think about the disparity between the Frank Fairfield on stage and the Frank Fairfield on the radio.
    When the Fleet Foxes finally came on stage, however, I knew there would no longer be a question of stage persona involved. Quiet and nervous with the air of shell-shocked veterans, the band’s five members (playing guitar, bass, percussion, keyboard, and occasionally other various strings) stepped on stage and looked out towards the large crowd. Guitarist Robin Pecknold—looking strangely ethereal despite his flannel shirt and unwashed beard that only a Hassidic man could make look natural—remarked that this was the band’s first time playing in such a large venue. Although I had paid money to access the event, I suddenly felt self-conscious and out of place, like I was encroaching upon some sort of musical ritual and violating the intimacy that said environment should hold.
As uncomfortable as the band members and I felt at first, the second they slipped into their opening song I felt immediately comforted by a strange sense of transposition. Unlike Fairfield’s performance, Fleet Foxes’ did not try to force me into a time about which I do not know and with which I do not have any experience. Rather than becoming a novelty cultural snapshot, Fleet Foxes encapsulated the harmonics and instrumentals of folk music without imposing any false pretense upon it.
    It was the same effect that Frank Fairfield had been trying to achieve, but in lieu of the snickers that Fairfield received for his performance there was simply hushed awe.  The members of Fleet Foxes had a way of wistfully harmonizing, invoking a haunting fugue for their polyphonic “White Winter Hymnal” that was even more tonally striking on stage than it is on record. The crowd kept so quiet, in fact, that Pecknold was able to play a solo acoustic two-song set for “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” and a cover of traditional American folk song “Katie Cruel.”
    As Pecknold’s raspy, warped voice rang through the crowd, his face gave way from being that of a heavily bearded twenty-two-year-old to that of a man much older and more weathered. It was easy to see that this transformation was too intricate and subtle to be a stage act, but was rather a direct connection between Pecknold and the music. Whether we were in a large venue or a small one appeared not to matter; his eyes were closed, and even though he was within arm’s reach from where I was standing, we might as well not have been in the same room let alone on the same planet.
    The entire band slid back on stage for the last two songs of the set, the second of which, “Blue Ridge Mountains,” which relies heavily on keyboard and a repetitive guitar part, pulled me back into the reality of the concert and the venue in which I was standing. As Fleet Foxes played their last note, I began to resent having to go back to a world in which I was not constantly surrounded by live music. As my friends and I stepped out onto the crowded streets of midtown and began to separate, I realized that even Frank Fairfield’s unsubtle performance had been a welcome distraction from the small realities in the non-musical world. The concert hall may have been just as crowded than a rush-hour one train uptown, but something about every one of us in that room collectively having reveled in the escape afforded to us by music made the stench of popcorn and sweat bearable, if not welcome.
    Fairfield and Fleet Foxes, although using different performance techniques, proved to be surprisingly complementary acts. Together, they worked to transport what I am sure was almost the entirety of the audience into a different time, or at least a different mindset: Fairfield by acting as a living relic and the members of Fleet Foxes through an indescribable onstage connection to their art. As easy (albeit cynical) as it would be for me to simply thrust this aside as a gimmick of the former performer and a happy mistake for the latter, their success at making me forget the outside world is enough to laud their attempts, accidental or not. To make a room full of teenagers, twenty-, and thirty-somethings forget their generationally inclined brash natures and stay quiet is, after all, no easy task.

    I don't want anyone to be turned off by the sensational title of this post-- by no means am I asserting that the correlation between happiness and the quality of the art one makes is applicable to everyone. Certainly, there have been many happy writers and artists over the past thousands of years (although, come to think of it, I am having a difficult time thinking of any-- Sappho, perhaps? That's probably a cop-out because we don't know enough about her to make any assertions. Is it something about artists, or is no one truly happy in the first place?), but with the recent passing of David Foster Wallace the topic of artists and mood disorders has become hotly contested once again. It's a topic that's particularly pertinent in my life right now, and I was interested to see it come up in a Jezebel post today.
    If the video, from a documentary on Yoko Ono, isn't working, I can sum up the most important part of the whole thing: Camille Paglia (an author and professor at UArts in Philadelphia), makes the assertion that Yoko Ono discouraged John Lennon from practicing and using English humor, and says that "crushed his originality [...] He may have been a happier person with Yoko, but he was a lesser artist." This brings up the question of what is more important-- John's (or any artist's) happiness, or the quality of the work that they produce? Supposing that being happier brings about work that is lesser in quality, or in originality (which I have personally found is true), do artists owe it to themselves to be happy even if this means that their work suffers? I know that, for me, the quality of my work affects my happiness-- if I am producing good work, my mood is improved and I feel like a productive, contributing member of society. But in order to produce good work, I generally need to be in an "abnormal" mood. I say abnormal in terms of what is considered to be a stable mood-- I don't necessarily need to be depressed, but I cannot simply be content. No good work ever came out of being content. In order to write I have to be overemotional, or overly contemplative, or unstable in one way or another that may generally be harmful to my non-artistic being. I'm afraid, however, if I try to correct this in order to make my life outside of my art better, will my art suffer?

     As something of an accidental complement to the last post, I have been thinking a lot about children and motherhood lately. When I told one of my suitemates, Alexandra, she said that she had also been thinking about motherhood, but only in the sense that it would let her become a stay-at-home mother and drop out of college (a joke, I presume). Regardless, that got me thinking about the different motivations that people may have to become mothers and fathers. Undoubtedly it happens quite often by accident, but when it doesn't, what is it that makes two people (or one person, if through a sperm donor or adoption) want to be parents?
    I am reading Plato's Symposium for Literature Humanities and came across an interesting passage in Diotima's speech, in which the topic (as all of the rest of the book) is love (and remember that this is all describing males):
    "Now, some people are pregnant in body, and for this reason turn more to women and pursue love in that way, providing themselves through childbirth with immortality and remembrance and happiness, as they think, for all time to come." She continues to argue that those who are pregnant "in mind" are more "drawn to bodies [and souls] that are beautiful," for they want what they need, and what they need is to beget something beautiful (if they themselves are so), and so look for a partner who would give them that.
    That's more philosophical than the discussion that I was intending on leading, but it brings up a good point. Although I really doubt that many man, if any at all, consider the physical beauty of their children in picking a mate, I do believe that there's some inherent desire that attracts two people to one another. Getting back on the subject of child bearing, I wonder if men (I focus on men because Plato does so) really do make the same connection as Diotima does between "childbirth" and "immortality." Is that the reason that some (or even most) men want to have children? From what I've seen in my experience with pregnant females (which has generally been limited to family members and some high school peers), the reasons, age of the woman aside, generally have to do with desiring unconditional love or wanting to make something with a partner. The younger women, those who were around sixteen when they got pregnant, tended to discuss the desire for a stable family, while the older women (generally in their late twenties) would cite loving their partner and wanting to pass on the family name, genetic qualities, wanting to teach a younger generation, etc.
     I'm putting these questions out to all of the fathers out there (and any mothers, if they want to answer-- heck, even people without kids are welcome to answer the first question): What made you originally want to be a father? What were the particular circumstances surrounding your fatherhood? Do you still agree with the original impetus or desire that made you want to become a father?

    It could just be the product of the over-sexualized college environment, or maybe it's just pathetic wisps of teenager hormones trying to get themselves heard before those years are over, but I am just finding that whereas before I was basically asexual, all I can ever think about now is men. I guess it's normal, but I think it's just pathetic, the fact that I would even waste my time being preoccupied with the matter of sex and sexual encounters. I'm trying to stick to the belief that it's simply my biological clock that wants me to settle down in the peak of my reproductive maturity, but that is just a prime example of ways in which I use science to lie to myself. (Hahah now I just sound like an Evangelist-- I ain't didn't come from no god damn monkey!)
    If my suitemates continue to play rockband twenty four hours a day, every day of the week, I may simply shoot myself. As if it's not bad enough already that I spend every minute of every day here doing homework (total lie-- I actually have given up today and skipped my first class to watch Weeds on my computer), I have to listen to the horribly overrated Ramones barking over and over accompanied by the clicks of plastic guitars. Terrible.
    I'm just being dramatic, though. College has its ups and downs, but generally it's been an enjoyable experience. The work is hard, no doubt, but I'm not planning to go to graduate school straight out of undergrad, so I'm not worried about my GPA and all of that other bullshit. How's that for a change from high school? It's freeing, sort of, but in a way I'm also afraid that I'm just stepping off of a cliff without a rope attached. Here's to hoping there are lots and lots of pillows at the bottom of that cliff.
    I guess that when you're majoring in creative writing, though, GPA shouldn't really be the foremost thing on your mind. Life experience, perhaps, and general accumulation of knowledge are in the front seat right now. (How to go from Evangelist to Self-Help Guru in two paragraphs!)
    Okay, time to get back to the concert report that I have to write for my music class. A number of my instrument-playing ex-hookups would be proud. How's that for a circular blog entry?

Modern success, I have learned, is dependent on the number of people to whom you are significant.

    A few days ago, I had a sex dream about Bill Murray. Not Ghostbusters era Bill Murray, or even pensive Broken Flowers Bill Murray, but fifty-seven-year-old, pockmarked, alcoholic, Bill Murray. Freud tells me that this dream is simply an externalization of some repressed fetish, but I know that this is bullshit because Freud was a cokehead and I certainly do not have any sexual fantasies about Bill Murray, unconscious or otherwise. My subconscious is just lost in itself, like I am lost in this lonely world and this world could lose itself in me.

    Who has had more cultural impact, Homer (as in author of the Iliad) or Homer Simpson? Is it even possible to say? Clearly the former Homer has thousands of years of advantage, but which image comes up when the name is mentioned to anyone born within the past fifty or so years? Does the cultural impact made by Greek Homer hold as much weight as Homer Simpson's? Even though the author and philosopher had thousands of years to make an impression, is his impression as strong as Homer Simpson's is considering that the latter had/has the benefit of technology and mass media to ensure his image is recognized internationally? Does anyone realize how absurd it is that simply because some cartoonist decided that it would be amusing to name a boorish oaf after a Greek philosopher the cartoon has now practically usurped the philosopher's fame and accomplishments? Is it even worth trying to do well in this world if some day we can all be reduced to a few lines and some yellow coloring?