June 2012
2 posts
1 tag
May 2012
16 posts
Only Resolutions
What I wanted to do was sulk in bed, but was in fact too tired to do so—too tired to index the shapeliness and heft of my woes. They were more like agitations. The tip of the iceberg account might look like “punctuality” is a humungous emotional trigger for me, and bobs up at the slightest change of plans, thus my seeming-rabidness in the fifteen minutes before a movie begins. I hate being late...
And Now I, an Unlikely Candidate, Shall Defend the...
towlehouse:
Well, you guys, it’s finally here. The trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s new version of The Great Gatsby. I have been waiting for this thing to drop since rumors of the film first circulated way back in 2010. You see, The Great Gatsby is my favorite novel and has been for a decade. I absolutely loathe the 1974 Robert Redford film version, and I dislike the 2000 made-for-TV version...
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Did anyone else...
subscribe to The New Inquiry as a good-faith gesture towards tending the internet’s ecology of intellectual writers/intellectual manqué, and now can’t be bothered to scroll through the PDFs they send? They are beautiful PDFs. But I haven’t read through any of them.
If I printed them out I wouldn’t be so bound to read them only at my workstation (dining room table). I could...
3 tags
Licking the Knife
An undergrad affair that, until I arrived, and because of the read on a Facebook events algorithm, I had believed was primarily stocked with my pleasant young gay friends. Think of the way some ponds in zoological gardens are stocked with brilliant spotted koi. I want to spread bread crumbs over brocaded carp, is what I thought. I drank a beer early in the evening, and ate Jarlsberg cheese on...
“Once he was gone I felt like a lunatic. I was engaging in something deluded and...”
– Rush, Norman (2011-10-12). Mating: A Novel (p. 45). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
—
You guys, now that I can pleasure-read again w/o feeling too guilty, I picked up the old saw and am reading it basically in the way it asks of its readers not to be read, as a variant of the I Ching.
But...
Watch
They’re tearing up all the roads back in Union County. When I went away to school they tore up Mt Pleasant (my address) as part of the Lake Access Project. For a whole summer the kitchen table had a layer of red dust on its top and the grass outside smoked in the slightest breeze. When the road was finished Mt Pleasant was the best stretch of two-lane blacktop in the county, perfect for...
Poor Logic
In my undergrad days, I remember trying to curry favor with the elder statesmen of the lit journal on campus. I showed up to the activities fair, found the beardos, and put my name on a list of prospective readers for the selection committee. I even showed up at an interest meeting later in the semester. I was the only person to show up at the meeting, and as I sat across from the editor—a...
WatchI made a commercial for men’s jeans wear! You can hear the tail-end of Caleb Crain reading from a Melville essay at the beginning. Gratuitous. This is an excerpted and expanded part of the video art project Takers. I take a beating in a lot of my work, which, at the time, always seems funny, but then during class presentation the whole piece congeals into a dirge of sorts with...
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Begin with Something Unrelated!
Speaking before an audience at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, Liam Gillick was affable and warm. He had a seemingly endless supply of slides illustrating his output over the last twenty years, and any technical difficulties with projection equipment, chair placement, and lighting were lightly brushed aside. He was witty describing his peers’ endeavors and polite in answering...
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Even More Peculiar
Patient readers may remember a coy aside posted eons ago about my Russian photo professor! After four months of negotiating my unpleasantly deft sexual fantasias—wherein he featured in alternating encounters as a cringe-worthy, Solzhenitsyn-intensive, BDSM labor-driver, in a gulag-situated pleasure palace; and, more roaringly, as a foul-smelling Tolstoyan on the lam in tsarist Kiev (the link...
April 2012
24 posts
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WatchHere is an excerpt of our really pungent style.
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Acting in a Student Film
I need to remember that I’m not a good actor, and start from there.
But merely telling student producers this is not enough.
When you are cast for your face, eventually they will want it to move.
Telling them, “But I’m a terrible actor.” It’s just this one thing.
Start from the bad.
2 tags
failblog
last night i
dropped the birthday cake. i was in a circle of older gay me, some of affluence, with a homemade cake on a platter, and with the candles lit and all eyes on me. it slid to the floor. a medievalist, whom i had met earlier in the evening, i used his hands to shade my eyes from the horror-stricken faces of my hosts, the birthday dude, and the guests. we ate the cake anyway. but when...
CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN IS ON MY SIDE
“Unless the author photo has been doctored, one thing’s certain: D’Agata has very impressive biceps.” —From his essay “Short Cuts” in the London Review of Books.
See previous.
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Exactly
!!!
I am so delighted by this! Also, haven’t we all used the time while everyone’s singing hymns to camouflage our incredulity-farts?
Failure!
There are so many lessons to be learned from tonight! The major one: turn around to see if your projection is actually playing, because your audience, meek, guarded, profoundly uneasy fellow MFArs, they will kindly look on, through you, past you, while you read aloud in the dark on a darkened stage, with the single image of your father digging a hole behind you for 15 minutes. (Some people said...
March 2012
11 posts
WatchFROGS!
WatchLonger tester this time with characters and finer sound! Music is “Pod Światło” off Jacaszek’s album Glitter. And also Nico Muhly, duh, a texture from “Varied Carols” off his album I Drink the Air Before Me. The tail-end gets a little slack because I don’t have my fine acting chops up to snuff. But the dog is quite good, as is Katie, sure.