The Ism

01:32 am: The internet is mine to control...
That is to say, there is now badass wireless connection in my house and while it took it's fucking time to get here, I couldn't be happier. My computer feels like a real thing again, with the internet window open and the ability to Hulu and watch Criterion films via current... and scroll picture blogs and be near facebook and livejournal and awake all the time. And all the job hunting... can be done in part at home. Exciting, exciting, exciting!

I have more to say about Hawaii, I will say it too! I promise...

Still right now I just want to revel in internet having and life being nice to me overall sort of for a change and feeling like maybe I'm going to be able to make things work, and y'know, just more positives. I really love Portland. And that it feels like home. It feels like I am home, right now. I don't get that feeling in a lot of places, but I definitely have it here. It's wonderful.

06:15 pm: Also help with this!!
http://www.indiegogo.com/Send-Tourettes-Without-Regrets-to-the-National-Poetry-Slam

We are awesome! For realsies!

We are also broke! For double realsies. Help us be less broke while retaining a solid level of awesome!

Thank you!!

01:23 am: It would help if I was from the future...
...because I really want to know what happens to me already.

02:14 pm: Bees wax...
So I guess my neighbors have been keeping bees, and today a queen escaped and landed in our backyard. I just watched the swarm shrink into a protective enclave over the last half-an-hour it was amazing and beautiful and fascinating, and so many bees!

The buzzing in particular is still with as I write this, and not just because I decided to listen to the Raveonettes latest album. But being all hopped up on bee pheromones... whoa.

And I'm dizzy and probably should have worked today but felt kind of terrible. Also, Kansai which is the sushi place that folks seem to go to after the Berkeley slam sucks. I mean, it is always a really crappy experience - for instance they typically charge for tea (but then they said it would be free last night so I ordered tea and of course it never arrived). It's worse because Koryo which is one of my favorite sushi places is RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET!! But no ever goes there, they just go to Kansai, and then complain as everything goes wrong. It sucks. No more I say.

Next time I am relocating the colony to a better place for sushi-ing.

11:29 pm: Nosy, NaPoWriMo 22....
Of all of the features on your face it is the nose
I was always most pleased with. Indeed the nose
is often the feature I gravitate towards on most faces. The nose
being central in such a way as to be obvious: the nose
directing the rest of your face, and yet absent: the nose
directing my eyes to the rest of your face. Here the nose
has become something I think about and wonder upon, be the nose
slight and sharp, or curved and angular, or smooth and round at the bottom of the nose
like yours was, and of course, I miss that. Nuzzling you with the nose
on my own face like a secret wink of understanding. The nose
holds so much identity in the face, it is what we are most drawn to: symmetry. When the nose
is ever so slightly uncalibrated we become aware of the nose
and the face it belongs to as having character that wasn't there before. The nose
then is our window to the person, more interesting than the soul we can never see. The eyes
may contain our essence, but it is after all the nose
which senses it.

11:42 pm: Please don't go...
So what I forget about doing the NaPoWriMo is the same thing I forget anytime I go through a phase of writing poems daily and posting them or trying to post most of them. Tomorrow will be short poems, but that changes nothing. And there may be more than one, which just makes it worse. It, being that one of the comforts of writing here and not in my notebook, is the (illusion of) communication. That other people see the writing I do and converse with it.

I know it isn't real (time), but it is at the same (time). It feels good to think I am not just sitting alone with these thoughts, that I am not the only thing stirring here.

And then at some point during the NaPoWriMo everyone burns out and doesn't read things and stops commenting. And I could probably do a better job of breaking up that monotony, or I mean I could probably do a better job of writing things that actually merit reading, so I'm culpable in this as well. But I start to miss the people saying things.

And it's harder when you're (me) alone and unsettled.

Here's what I watched tonight: Win Win in the theater, which was great and all but I needed to be more uplifted than that movie was offering me and so I felt troubled and stifled my crying on the walk back to my house, and then Home Movie in my home, which is about other people's homes but it's weird and sweet and quirky and (real) because it is a documentary so you think my goodness this must exist out there somewhere. A lot of times I get hung up because I write far more poetry than I do anything else, and yet I pretend far too often that I am going to be involved in film like I spent three years studying it at college or something, and then I think of someone like Terrence Malick, his new film screened as a trailer again tonight the Tree of Life and I think of how Malick is just writing poems in the language of film - that they speak one and the same. And then when art is done well it is always poetic somehow, because that is how we understand life.

A poem that we read daily.
A poem that we write anew with our hearts.

08:27 pm: And so it is that all forms of art have their benefits...
One of the more recent series that Vertigo started publishing is this book House of Mystery it's based off the old DC book in that it's got a short-story/variety aspect to it and a slight horror tone, but it also frames all of that within a larger narrative and various post-Sandman trappings, such as the House of Mystery belonging to Cain.

Anyway, when I first began reading it, I mostly was following it because I liked the writer and the artist and I found the embedded short stories offered an excellent sampling of art talents that might not normally get to showcase themselves across a full book, but now I'm re-reading it and when distilled through my world-dampened post-breakup haze I find it is one of the most poetic and meditative comics I've ever read and each issue impresses me more and more than the last.

Musing on themes like love, purpose, belonging, home, family, the book dwells on the emotional complexities and the mysteries that these essential components of life are suffused with. I read a lot of comics that do not always resonate with me on an emotional and simultaneously cerebral plane and this is perfectly okay because that is not something I require of comics which often deal in such large and vivid fantasies that I could never place myself in those positions in the first place - and yes House of Mystery is replete with fantasy - but the human pieces are lush in a way that is lived in. I don't often wind up using this space to just plug things, but this is the first thing I've done on my own that is really healing...

So, House of Mystery, consider me a new resident.

07:54 pm: Food, drive...
I am featuring tomorrow night in Modesto. Which is not close to the bay. That said, anyone who wants to meet up with me and trek out to Modesto, would be welcome to join. I might even offer food somewhere along the way. So yeah, let me know about that Modesto.

11:17 am: Not entirely a wash. Things that didn't suck in 2010, pt. 1...
Admittedly 2010 is a year best left to rest. The collective reflections all seem to agree that the year was more suck then it wasn't suck. And I can attest to that overall feeling. But instead of discounting it entirely I'm going to go ahead with my annual entertainment summations, while I o think film (the next installment) suffered and was therefore harder to identify standouts, it was an unbelievably good year for music. In fact had it not been for my girlfriend and music, I am honestly not sure I would have made it through. Enough of this, the stand-outs this year came from every direction and genre and level of capital and just damn:

Arcade Fire - the Suburbs
Band of Horses - Infinite Arms
Baths - Cerulean
Beach Fossils - S/T
The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night
Best Coast - Crazy For You & Something In The Way EP
The Black Keys - Brothers
Broken Bells - S/T
Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record
Cotton Jones - Tall Hours In The Glow Stream
Crocodiles - Sleep Forever
Das Racist - Shut Up, Dude & Sit Down, Man
Dr. Dog - Shame, Shame
Drake - Thank Me Later
Fang Island - S/T
Girls - Broken Dreams Club
Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
Here We Go Magic - Pigeons
High On Fire - Snakes For The Devine
Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy & G.O.O.D. Fridays (single track releases)
Kings Of Leon - Come Around Sundown
Land Of Talk - Cloak And Cipher
Love Is All - Two Thousand And Ten Injuries
Magic Kids - Memphis
Midlake - The Courage Of Others
The New Pornographers - Together
Ra Ra Riot - The Orchard
Ray Lamontagne & The Pariah Dogs - God Willin' & The Creek Don't Rise
Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin - Let It Sway + Bonus EP
Suckers - Wild Smile
Sufjan Stevens - The Age Of Adz & All Delighted Peoples EP
Surfer Blood - Astrocoast
The Sword - Warp Riders
Tobacco - Maniac Meat
Tokyo Police Club - Champ
Wavves - King Of The Beach
Woods - At Echo Lake
Yeasayer - Odd Blood
Yelawolf - Trunk Muzik

The Verdict Is Still Out On:
Blitzen Trapper - Destroyer Of The Void
Solid album, but it seemed to lack stand-outs and direction... perhaps following on the heels of the marvelous Furr didn't do it many favors, that said I am going to revisit this one, and I am eagerly awaiting whatever Eric Early does next.
CocoRosie - Grey Oceans
I acquired this amongst a bevy of excellent albums and I think it just got lost in the shuffle, but there's always promise with CocoRosie so I will be revisiting this album
The Drums - S/T
Not a bad album but I don't think it really offered anything strong that wasn't already on the "Summertime" EP, maybe I'm not being fair to this group, after all "Let's Go Surfing" ruled my summer, but that's kind of the point - since it was already available with their first issue.
The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang
Again, picked up with several other things and never really taken off the back burner.
MGMT - Congratulations
I really want to like this, but for some reason I don't yet, this is really another record that suffered unjust blowback by following a massive success, if any other group had released this new I'm sure it would be up there in the first list as it is I feel like I need to give it a few more listens.
Vampire Weekend - Contra
And then there's this band, who I really want to like, and yet I feel like there's nothing special about them, save for some reason all the ladies flocked to this band first and hardest. I don't want to discount the taste of thousands of young girls, because theirs is the fandom that makes megastars: the Jobros, Lady Gaga, Whats-his-face who's on everyone's single doing the hook, but I don't get why this band is special. I've tried. I keep trying. That is why I'm including it here... because I keep trying, because maybe I just don't get Vampires.

Speaking of which, while it wasn't as great as it's predecessor, props are also due to this:
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse - Soundtrack
Many, many tasty nuggets litter this thing. But I miss the non-stop standout of the last one. It doesn't really justify the existence of the movies but I mean, it comes close.

10:08 am: Takin' it the streets...
I have to go to the City now.