Monthly Archives: November 2009
Sell anything
| November 1, 2009 | Filled under Shorts |
I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that. — Lloyd Dobler, Say Anything
Feeling very sick lately of people who seem to base their whole existence on promoting something, or someone, or themselves. Not everything in this world can be bought and sold.
The wall comes tumbling down
| November 9, 2009 | Filled under Blog, Photo Album |
A year ago I met CLH in Germany and proceeded to spend five days and four nights in Berlin, a city I knew nothing about and was only minutely interested in. It ended up being one of my favorite places in the world.
I wish I could say I remember watching The Wall fall on television but the truth is that I’ve seen those images so many times I have a hard time distinguishing from what is remembered and what is filling in the gaps. But I was nine years old, and the fall would be an event that would go on to shape the rest of my childhood, it shaped everyone who grew up in the ’80s childhood, and that still affects me today.
Berlin is an amazing city that has had the chance, over the last 20 years, to create it’s own identity from scratch. I would love to live there. I wish I was there now.
More tales from the Wall
| November 10, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
Der Spiegel has an excellent account of the events of the Berlin Wall’s destruction.
On my way to where the air is sweet
| November 10, 2009 | Filled under Blog |
Today is Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary. I wrote post for the Houston Press highlighting my 10 favorite musical performances over the show’s long history:
Sesame Street was one of the first programs to combine research with television production and as a result, was the first children’s program with a set educational curriculum. The creators discovered that children learn better when their lessons are paired with music.
Read the full post at Rocks Off.
Classy lady
| November 14, 2009 | Filled under Photo Album |
At the Y’all Can Go To Hell, I’m Going to Texas rally in Austin.
Eff Yeah Boston Terriers!
| November 20, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
Via Apartment Therapy, an amazing postcard series of Boston terriers on MCM-design chairs. That link lead me to the adorable blog Fuck Yeah Boston Terriers.
Inspiration
| November 23, 2009 | Filled under Blog, Video |
Obsessed with Spalding Gray lately. I bought a used copy of Impossible Vacation to read… well, to read while on vacation — I leave for Los Angeles tomorrow. I’ve been thinking of ways to take my writing to another level, my creative writing, not my writing for work, and there is something inside of me that has been telling me for a while that I need to start performing my work. Which is weird because I am not, nor have I ever been, a performer.
Thursday I went to this event called Pecha Kucha, the first of what I hope will be several in Houston. And there was the feeling again, the voice in the back of my head saying You can do this. I went up front after the presentations to talk to the organizer for the story I was writing and when I introduced myself he said “You know, we don’t have any writers, but I’d like to have some for the next event.” The universe is telling me something.
My boyfriend
| November 23, 2009 | Filled under Photo Album |
Jezebel’s list of the sexiest men *not* included in Life’s Sexiest Men of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s includes Jean-Paul Belmondo. Vindicated!
Person from Porlock
| November 24, 2009 | Filled under Blog, Internerd |
I have read so much British poetry this semester. I have never been a fan of poetry but I kind of love Coleridge for his apologetic ways. “Kubla Khan” is an amazing journey into bizarre-ville.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man.
Down to a sunless sea.
Coleridge claimed that the poem was inspired by an opium-induced dream (implicit in the poem’s subtitle A Vision in a Dream) but that the composition was interrupted by a person from Porlock. A note on a manuscript by Coleridge explicitly states that he had taken opium at the time to combat dysentery.
The person from Porlock thing has me fascinated.
It has been suggested that… the Person from Porlock was in fact fictional and intended as a credible explanation of the poem’s seemingly fragmentary state as published. The poet Roger McGough also suggested this view in one of his own poems, saying “I think he got stuck.”
“Few people,” Pinsky said, “can write without procrastination, time-wasting, whining, and avoiding.” But writers hate admitting that, and may create spectacular fibs to cover it. “The most famous example is Coleridge,” with the person from Porlock, which Stevie Smith saw through. Pinsky says writers of today have “the perfect Porlockian escape: the telephone,” provided there’s no answering machine.
The Georgian Hotel
| November 25, 2009 | Filled under Photo Album |
This is where I’m staying in L.A. (well, Santa Monica) right now. Built in 1933. Walking distance from everything. Right across from the beach. In short, AWESOME.
