sleep. karaoke wrestling. hunter/jumpers. lucid dreaming. jungian psychology and borgesian possibility. memories. the revelation of death vs the illusion of immortality. cooing at my piranha-like baby fish. extroverted introversion. braving vulnerability vs the cowardice of game playing. infatuation vs love. photographing ONLY things I find interesting. endlessly pouring over said photos. eradicating thrush from the hooves of the world (my personal mission). astronomy.. and astrology. pianos, and mud.
Music
Divine Comedy, Ian Brown, Fischerspooner, Supergrass, Super Furry Animals, The The, Blonde Redhead, Goldfrapp, Queens Of The Stone Age, EoDM, Depeche Mode, Jane's Addiction, Ride, Autolux, Hopewell, Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Sloan, The Lilys, Radiohead, Black Angels, Blur, Pulp, The Cure, Jeff Buckley, MSP, U2 (from Boy til Zooropa, past that they are dull as f**k), Primal Scream, Stone Roses, NIN, Smiths, Swervedriver, Kylie, Robbie Williams, Frank Sinatra, JAMC, Dandy Warhols, Spectrum, Suede, Spiritualized, Enon, William Shatner, Aaliyah, Hedwig, Bif Bang Pow, Kate Bush, Verbena, Tarantula AD, assorted Classical, etc and so on. By the way, I dumped Britney -- meth heads are so passe.
And the worst film of the past decade: V For Vendetta.
Television
though I never have time, or energy, to watch it anymore...House, the Law & Order's, Odyssey 5, Battlestar Galactica, Dead Like Me, Six Feet Under, Arrested Development, Doctor Who, Monk, Psych, Peep Show, The Shield, Farscape, Seinfeld, all the Stargate's, all the Star Treks, Perfect Strangers (isn't the opening song the best ever?), South Park, Cosmos, Connections, I'm Alan Partridge, Red Dwarf, Black Adder, Father Ted, Northern Exposure, Charmed (a guilty pleasure.. a very guilty one), Spongebob, Aqua Teen, Homicide, Family Guy, Futurama, MST3K, 3rd Rock, Young Ones, endless assortment of science documentaries...
You might be asking yourself, how could a young woman living in the happenin' metropolis that is LA (and sometimes, though rarely, NY) NOT list Sex & The City? Well, although Sex & The City has been erroneously claimed as a look into the mind of each and every female, I strongly disagree -- unless you're shallow, wrapped up in mind games and the time-wasting neurosis it enduces, and confuse compulsive sexual promiscuity with sexual liberation, then Sex & The City is for you (ie, it is not for me)....
Radio: John & Ken, Dennis Prager, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and the Factor.
Books
Lolita, Frankenstein (poor, poor monster), Flatland, All Men Are Mortal, 2001 series, Brave New World, Fountainhead, Joseph Campbell, Jung, Marion Woodman, Kierkegaard's & Kafka's Diaries, anything and all by Antonin Artaud, H.H. Munro/Saki, HP Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Sowell, Clive Barker, Martian Chronicles, Time & Again, 1984, Animal Farm, The Player, Great Gatsby, Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, Hunter S Thompson, Ann Coulter, Krishnamurti, Colin Wilson, Assassination Vacation, Magazines: New Scientist and Fortean Times
The ongoing reading list of 2007:
Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (pretty damn good, a worthy classic) Rama II by Arthur C. Clarke & Gentry Lee (sell-out shite) The Garden of Rama by Arthur C. Clarke & Gentry Lee (even bigger shite) The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter (same problem as the Rama sequels - cliche characters, Melrose Place-drama and one-dimensional political preaching. Nevertheless, the straight sci-fi bits about wormholes and the earth's history was fairly awesome)
"Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things [Chartres Cathedral], this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millenium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life... we're going to die.
'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing.
...Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."
--Orson Welles, "F For Fake"
"The plot itself is this: A man (the unbelieving, fleeing law student we have met) falls among people of the lowest, vilest sort and accommodates himself to them, in a kind of contest of iniquity. Suddenly -- with the miraculous shock of Crusoe when he sees that human footprint in the sand -- the law student perceives some mitigation of the evil: a moment of tenderness, of exaltation, of silence, in one of the abominable men. It was as though a more complex interlocutor had spoken. He knows that the wretch with whom he is conversing is incapable of that momentary decency; thus the law student hypothesizes that the vile man before him has reflected a friend, or a friend of a friend. Rethinking the problem, he comes to a mysterious conclusion: Somewhere in the world there is a man from whom this clarity, this brightness, emanates; somewhere in the world there is a man who is equal to this brightness. The law student resolves to devote his life to searching out that man.
Thus we begin to see the book's general scheme: The insatiable search for a soul by means of the delicate glimmerings or reflections this soul has left in others -- at first, the faint trace of a smile or a word; toward the last, the varied and growing splendors of intelligence, imagination, and goodness. The more closely the men interrogated by the law student have known Al-Mu'tasim, the greater is their portion of divinity, but the reader knows that they themselves are but mirrors. A technical mathematical formula is applicable here: Bahadur's heavily freighted novel is an ascending progression whose final term is the sensed or foreapprehended "man called Al-Mu'tasim." The person immediately preceding Al-Mu'tasim is a Persian bookseller of great courtesy and felicity; the man preceding the bookseller is a saint... After all those years, the law student comes to a gallery "at the end of which there is a doorway and a tawdry curtain of many beads, and behind that, a glowing light." The law student claps his hands once, twice, and calls out for Al-Mu'tasim. A man's voice -- the incredible voice of Al Mu'tasim -- bids the law student enter. The law student draws back the bead curtain and steps into the room. At that point, the novel ends.
I believe I am correct in saying that if an author is to pull off such a plot, he is under two obligations: First, he must invent a variety of prophetic signs; second, he must not allow the hero prefigured by those signs to become a mere phantasm or convention. Bahadur meets the first obligation; I am not sure to what extent he meets the second. In other words: The unheard and unseen Al-Mu'tasim should impress us as being a real person, not some jumble of vapid superlatives. In the 1932 version of the novel, the supernatural notes are few and far between; "the man called Al-Mu'tasim" has his touch of symbolism, but he possesses idiosyncratic personal traits as well. Unfortunately, that commendable literary practice was not to be followed in the second edition. In the 1934 version -- the edition I have before me even now -- the novel sinks into allegory: Al Mu'tasim is an emblem of God, and the detailed itineraries of the hero are somehow the progress of the soul in its ascent to mystical plenitude. There are distressing details: A black Jew from Cochin, describing Al Mu'tasim, says that his skin is dark, a Christian says that he stands upon a tower with his arms outspread; a red lama recalls him as seated "like that image which I carved from yak ghee and worshipped in the monastery at Tashilhumpo." Those declarations are an attempt to suggest a single, unitary God who molds Himself to the dissimilarities of humankind. In my view, that notion is not particularly exciting. I cannot say the same for another idea, however: the idea that the Almighty is also in search of Someone, and that Someone, in search of a yet superior (or perhaps simply necessary, albeit equal) Someone, and so on, to the End -- or better yet, the Endlessness -- of Time. Or perhaps cyclically. The etymological meaning of "Al-Mu'tasim" (the name of that eighth Abbasid king who won eight battles, engendered eight sons and eight daughters, left eight thousand slaves, and reigned for a period of eight years, eight moons, and eight days) is "He who goes in quest of aid." In the 1932 version of the novel, the fact that the object of the pilgrimage was himself a pilgrim cleverly justified the difficulty of finding Al-Mu'tasim; in the 1934 edition, that fact leads to the extravagant theology I have described. Mir Bahadur Ali, as we have seen, is incapable of resisting that basest of art's temptations: the temptation to be a genius.
I reread what I have just written and I fear I have not made sufficiently explicit the virtues of this book. It has some quite civilized features; for example, that argument in Chapter XIX in which the law student (and the reader) sense that one of the participants in the debate is a friend of Al-Mu'tasim -- the man does not rebut another mans sophisms "in order not to gloat at the other mans defeat." --Jorge Luis Borges, on the nonexistent book The Approach To Al-Mu'tasim
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