| The COMEBACK : Parisien Aesthetic vs. New York grit |
[12 Oct 2009|06:08am] |
I'm back in la belle France for a deuxieme dose of the vie parisien. Paree, mon amour I have missed you dearly - but New York has been more sweet and tender to me. Donc, my affair will last no longer than Janvier, as I've become disenchanted avec french ways and am eager to return to life as a Billyburg. and Paree will be my point of travel, so that I may run off into the night to distant lands comme Tunisie, Moroc, et Algiers and the east et le sud, bien sur!
I need to be reminded of my love for Paris-once the fabled place of the american lost. It's difficult to negotiate these two opposing, uh, i dont know what quite to call it, impressions, i guess, I have of the city. on one hand, it is still very much that whimsical place of a certain left bank intellectualism that i've romanticized to death, where literary giants sat in cafes i now sit, contributing to a late victorianism that best describes a generation lost who left their timeless stamp upon literature, becoming mythic characters themselves (i know its not quite turn of the century literature, but i like to think of it as such. it turned something, shit) but then, as I sit in this cafe, listening to classic american rock, I find myself, my image of Haussman's Paris spoiled by...well, that requires a completely different entry that I don't have the heart or energy to write.
on a grander note, I met the most lovely french-Portuguese girl with a mighty flair for fashion, that is just out of this world. i'd fancy a peek at her wardrobe - i bet it's just sick. but the nicest thing about her is that she's a real gem of a erson, really the nicest person i've met. i only want to meet good people and endear them into my heart; life is too short to deal with the unkind.
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| hermeneutics abound |
[10 May 2009|07:35pm] |
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mood |
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shitting on occidental thought |
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Though I've meaningless degree under my belt, I'm not entirely done with school - I still have one paper out for a class I took last Spring! I thought I would finish it in France while sipping world class espresse but that idea turned out to be a complete dud. I can never get any work done ever; it's hopeless i tell ya!
I'm not sure if there's anything i can do about the incomplete since the deadline was at the beginning of January. It's going to be a lot of work since I have to brush up on the reading and remind myself of the argument I was attempting to make. I think it was something about invoking Cezanne's apple to introduce a Pomo orientation of seeing where I pretend to know what Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and a whole host of other continental philosophers are saying while trying my best to do a literature review...and, in a failed effort to sound smart, pathetically situate the paper in a Heideggarian tradition, somehow relating it to something hermeneutic-ey as postualted by Gadamer's art thing. This is a classic move to obfuscate the fact that I haven't a clue what all the ruckus around hermeneutics is about.
So my paper is superficial at the very best. I think its perfectly alright to assess all knowledge and scholarship as superficial if man is understood with a certain regard that displaces him from ahhh, but thats getting at something else entirely. to return to my rant, my paper doesn't exactly perform a thorough discussion on "understanding" muchless any sort of inquiry into...err, je-ne-sais-quoi. I'm royally screwed considering that I've no ground from which to work with as I haven't been formally indoctrinated into this sort of thinking and these works and by-golly without a scholar to help me decrypt Heidegger.
Alas, to best invoke Filipe, in rolls the fog machine. thats the problem with a lot of these trouble-makers who subvert and turn the world as we know it on its' head, so that everything from here on out gets foggier -- fog upon fog. or perhaps I'm merely incapable of such thought. But the fact that the department would even allow me to commit such blasphemy shows how absolutely shallow and without method Berkeley's rhetoric program is. Let's face it; it's not even a real discipline; its just some made-up bullshit to poke and probe at the very surface of critical theory. I should have wracked my brains around Philosophy instead and let it imbue some ray of knowledge upon my frail mind. In the words of Crazi-Eyez: MOTHAFUCKA what the FUCK!
go rhetoric!
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| my tonsils are the devil incarnate |
[30 Dec 2008|07:52am] |
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mood |
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infinite amounts of happiness |
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music |
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moi, je joue |
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mother of pearl! i have never had anything hurt so bad (except a run in with creme of mushroom soup gone awry but lets not revisit that, ick). i pop ibuprofen like an addict. im in too much pain to sleep and too nauseated to eat. it feels like i'm swallowing glass shards. yesterday, i gargled so much salt water i think i irritated my tonsils more. they were so swollen last night that i couldnt breath properly.
on a sunnier note...
C'est moi!
i love everything about it. its so magical and sends sparks to my heart.
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[07 Nov 2008|09:01am] |
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Paris - the only thing french about france.
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| Bretagne |
[09 Aug 2008|12:42am] |
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just yesterday i purchased a one way ticket to France. I'll have about a week in Paris before my assistantship begins. First thing I'll do in Brittany is go to the seaside. i like the way sand feels between my toes. Well, a little about the town I'll be living in, it is wonderfully small, Medieval, home to about 10,000 Bretons, and located roughtly 20km from the sea and 48km from Rennes.
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[27 Jun 2008|10:04am] |
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i've never needed a handsome paying job quite as I do now. moving to another country while trying to take care of all the logistics of finishing school and all these extra expenses is really starting to stress me out. it shouldn't cost you an arm and a leg or in my case dignity to live in the bay. (that is to say, i'm considering lending myself to art for five hours at a time. lets hope it pays well.) well, to also save money, i've subletted my room and am moving in with richard next week. the only setback is that his studio receives no amount of sunshine. its quite dismal. also, his birthday is coming up next week. my, what to do. i'll be pondering the weekend away.
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[05 May 2008|10:08pm] |
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i cant believe the semester is wrapping up.
i need another month to soak in the last three years...
well, i feel like this:
always.
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| a decadent polyamorous few weeks... |
[18 Apr 2008|11:14am] |
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mood |
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love-make-poetry |
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music |
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Do not go gentle into that good night.... |
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i've been intimate with baudelaire and to bed with dylan thomas.
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[01 Apr 2008|05:50pm] |
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mood |
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time you thief |
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woke up at 8 this morning with every intention to leave the apartment by half past, but didnt end up leaving till 12. i dont know what happened or what i did during those 4 hours...
its all very mysterious.
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[18 Mar 2008|05:32pm] |
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i should have never responded.
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| by way of a bucket grossed in political-poo |
[12 Mar 2008|01:23am] |
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mood |
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slippery slope |
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instead of writing papers, as i should be doing, i rant inconsequentially about poo. Oh glorious berkeley...
putting aside the political nature of the tree-sitter's protest, my major concern, in fact, my greatest fear is that the man's poo-bucket will at some point plummet in a most obscene fashion onto the ground from a violent gust of wind, which will carry with it his feces upon unsuspecting students whose only wish it is to make their way to class without someone's butt stain on their person! how vulgar!
alas! here is where the poo gets transported from student to student. but as they become infected, they also infect everything they come into contact with, and so it becomes a poo epidemic within campus that then enlarges upon berkeley, then the whole of the bay, and then california, then nationally, and then globally, and before you know it, somewhere in outer space is a tree-sitter's-floating-poo-particle. call it a transcendental transmission of poo.
i'm reluctant (and afraid to say the least) to approach the site for the simple fact that i desperately don't want to eat shit...i say this quite literally.
and with all the support that good hygiene may lend to this cause, i enter sather gate with a growing sense of anxiety.
neurotic as ever,
quynh
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| friday nights with mrs. dalloway |
[15 Feb 2008|11:10pm] |
goodness, i found a recording of Virginia Woolf's voice in a 1937 broadcast in which she discusses 'words.'
unfortunately, the sound's quality isn't too spectacular, so here's the quote from the recording bit:
"....purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a society for pure English they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English. Hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech."
the website is: http://www.chasingthefrog.com/reelfaces/the_hours/vw2.wav
enjoy!
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| Up up Up up Up! |
[10 Feb 2008|06:55am] |
i'm still awake!
i'm so mad right now! lol
ahhhh!!!!
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| i know of love beyond what romance feels. |
[08 Feb 2008|01:04am] |
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mood |
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dizzying magic |
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nostalgia continues to ambush me with thoughts of italy in the Spring time.
...phantom images and beauty that strips the bearer of sight
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[04 Feb 2008|11:31pm] |
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i use to smile a lot. now i just give dirty looks of apathy.
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| an attempt at american coffee and the sour aftermath |
[09 Nov 2007|02:45am] |
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mood |
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dissapointed |
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music |
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change channel :. LO-FI-FNK |
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another sleepless encounter.
but on a pleasanter note, i no longer feel it necessary. theres never any rational process of explication with me, strictly nonsensical thought reasoned by emotion.
no matter because courage suddenly took me over. feeling that it was now appropriate to reopen lines for communication, i put forth a proclamation for peace through shear presentation and a bit of harassment. and it did me well.
i feel so much better now. what a rotten feeling to carry around all this time.
yuck.
ive gathered a lot from this year with my bff gone, my american oatmeal experience, and the inversion of my universe. but none of that replaces this constant feeling of fragmentation.
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| an orientation to stalking : facebook is such a crime |
[08 Nov 2007|10:53pm] |
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mood |
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policing the internet |
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music |
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international pony theme :. international pony |
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lately, I've found myself committing a kind of violence to a certain gentleman's privacy, but i guess it's not really a case of violence if he displays his life onto the public sphere. clearly this is an invitation for stalking, why else would anyone showcase their life on the internet, welcoming all kinds of people comme moi. that is narcissism, boy you are a narc. not really, just extremely fat in the head. (but at least it is not a case of the brain, for then that would be difficult to reconcile)
i've secretly facebook-lurked the chap as a course of violation. and though i seldom use the e-chat service thingy, i created an MSN account just so i can see the fool's screename appear on my friend's list. I like to imagine that we're friends again. but it was always a make belief friendship to begin with. and three days ago, i was finally inducted into the world of e-stalking, where i honed my skills further. I've even resorted to searching for homeboy on myspace. this is where i'll perform a bit of detective work to gain knowledge of the events salient to his life during the months of my absence. i simply dont like to be kept in the dark, especially when ive been shoved there. my actions do well to please the lad. this is an innocent course into lurking.
in all seriousness, the more I try to cut this person out of my life, the more i find myself thinking about the arrogant bloke who we shan't dignify with a name or proceed with further.
i'm simply a sucker. i dont understand how people can go from being friends to having stopped talking to each other completely. it weighs heavily on my heart. perhaps i should email the brat. no, i musn't. i don't care enough, but it does make for peculiar fiction.
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| feels like Led Zeppelin's kashmir |
[04 Nov 2007|10:40am] |
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mood |
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delectable |
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music |
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prototypes :. fujiya & miyagi |
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a clockwork of cloves too compressed to unfold.
something out of a storybook. novelty will never die for me.
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| antiquity meets modernity without slaughter. |
[24 Oct 2007|12:24am] |
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mood |
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Karl Lagerfeld |
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true brilliance.
The Great Cat Walk of China: a Scope of Art
though, i did not particularly enjoy the collection...
how can anyone possibly argue that this is not art or make a case against creative processes. fashion is not a form of art; it is art. in fact, lagerfeld's presentation is a cunning move beyond art, a point of departure where we begin to create anew, one that positions the field of art within an entirely new territory stipulated by such endeavors, that coalesces art and architecture in new and profound ways.
how will fashion be illuminated from this moment on?
and how can you not be inspired?...
i'm working on some informal sketches and templates. im trying to build an extremely amateur art portfolio by next semester. hopefully, some generous soul will take pity on me, humor my effort, and help me perfect the technology. that'd be marvelous.
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