i got it right (finally...)

86, shit canned

Top Ten Moments

10. CALLATE PINCHE PERRO. HIJO DE LA MIERDA. BASTARDO, VERGA. PINCHE CABRON.

9. huevos de huevos.

8. "Coneja, you're much more beautiful when you callate tu boca."

7. teaching lokito mi ninito ingles.

6. huesitos mi amorcito siempre. TIED with talking big stuff with Mi Companero.

5. johnsina dinners every wednesday night. MY BROTHER.

4."I can see your veins."

3. shit-canned african chants.

2. SORPRESA BITCHES! i never had to eat cannoli again.

1. su coneja... cada momento con risitas, PERDON.

no me importa

if it is wrong. i don't care if it kills me.

a little SATC lesson

Remember when the affair between Carrie and Big in season 3 ended and for the rest of the series she kind of just drifted from first date to first date, back to Aidan, then to Berger and finally to the intolerable Russian whom she didn't even deign to call her boyfriend, just her lovah? I totally get that now. Where are the fireworks, people?

Sometimes I think, I'm 25 years old and I'm alone in Brooklyn. What the F is wrong with me? But then I calm myself down and realize that if you don't feel that "spark" with someone (what's the spark anyway? I think it's all based on pheromones and chemicals and shit we can't see) then why bother going thru the exhausting and time-devouring motions of dating.

In my favorite episode of Sex and the City, Carrie called Big "The Chrysler Building." I don't want to date anyone unless I can call him The Chrysler Building-- that glorious Art Deco beacon of man's awesomeness that penetrates the New York City sky-- and actually mean it.

brittish 1/25/10 classic flashback craze

At work today I found myself thrilled with the radio tunes that floated from the speakers. First "Baby I'm Yours," the classic Barbara Lewis song that Arctic Monkeys covered in 2006.

Next, "Close to You" by the Carpenters. Imagine the person you die over walking into a room with animated bluebirds flying over his shoulders. Makes you GRIN every time; works like a charm!

How about a little country? "Stand By Your Man" by Tammy Wynette for when you want to wallow in pre-feminist blues that surface in every girl from time to time.

"Baby Love" by The Supremes makes me jump around like a conejita, flippin' my bleached blonde pony tail for joy.

Want to slit your wrists? Then how about "The Endof the World" by Skeeter Davis. I dig her hair so much and wish I could sing with such pathetic/awesomeness.

And best for last, "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes. Let the lyrics speak for themselves.

"The night we met I knew I needed you so/and if I had the chance I'd never let you go/So won't you say you love me?/I'll make you so proud of me/We'll make 'em turn their heads every place we go/So won't you please (be me, be my) Be my little baby/Say you'll be my darlin'/Be my baby now/Ooh whoa whoa oh-ohh/I'll make you happy, just wait and see/for every kiss you give me I'll give you three/Oh since the day I saw you I have been waiting for you/You know I will adore you till eternity."

Elvis Forever

Everybody that I speak to knows I live and die by Roberto Bolano. So of course I bought the spectacular book Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview & Other Conversations and ravenously devoured it in a less-than-48-hr. period. While the interviews contain various "Bolano Bombs" as I like to call them, my favorite moment occurs in "The Last Interview" conducted by Monica Maristain for Playboy Mexico in July, 2003. After asking Bolano a series of questions in which he must pick one of three choices given, Maristain queries, "John Lennon, Lady Di, or Elvis Presley?"

Bolano smartly answers, "The Pogues. Or Suicide. Or Bob Dylan. Well, but let's not be pretentious: Elvis forever. Elvis and his golden voice, with a sheriff's badge, driving a Mustang and stuffing himself full of pills."

This response encapsulates what I love best about Bolano's writing and what it evokes. The Romanticization of Elvis as the ultimate, aging, drug-addicted rock star (poet) iconizes Bolano's own position, or at least the one held by his alter-ego Arturo Belano, in his oeurve. In The Savage Detectives, aka the best novel of all time, Belano and his partner in crime Ulises Lima run the Mexican Visceral Realists and appear and disappear at random and mysteriously throughout the course of the book, mythologizing themselves in the process. It doesn't hurt that the entire middle section of the novel consists of first-hand accounts of what Belano and Lima are like and the affect they have on the other poets rambling through Mexico, and probably the most succinct description states that they were like two Dennis Hoppers running around... In any case Bolano never fears proximity to the lowliest and most disgusting and most fearsome aspects of life, that sueno, that pesadilla.

Bolano devoted his art to marginal groups, to giving voice to whom he calls in Amulet "the kids who lived in a lonely world of love and slang" because he once was one of those kids himself.

And like Elvis "The King" slowly and compulsively killing himself with his glamorous pills in his shiny black car and his slicked-back pompadour, moving ever closer to the abyss, Bolano understands and thrives on these "sadomasochistic" aspects and urges that construct this modern life which he lists as: "That's the way love is, and slang, and the streets, and sonnets. And the sky at five in the morning."

How Do You Know You're in Love (I'm totally ripping off imboycrazy.com)

1. You can't eat normal foods. Somehow vegetables and salad greens (the mere thought of them) make you gag a little bit. But you don't wanna eat anything unhealthy because you need to remain skinny to attract that one person you desire more than all the others. So the day passes by, and at 8:00 PM you realize all you've ingested during the course of the day was a 7:00 AM non-fat latte, Diet Coke (wish it had been Diet Pepsi, dammit), and water. And that's why you've got the shakes!

2. When you do give into your growling stomach, the only thing you can stuff in your face are carbohydrates, and not the good whole-grain kind, but the most unhealthy ones that exist: white bread, plain bagels, grilled cheese, salty chips, and CHOCOLATE. The "Cloud Cookie Coma" (shout out, Brooklyn Standard) exists for you to make yourself sick by eating DEATH chocolate at the speed of Speedy Gonzales on an empty stomach.

3. Every night you come home exhausted and cannot fall asleep because you toss and turn, going over the hypothetical details to the lead-up to the boning that you wanna do with that one person whose black eyes are burned into the projector screen of your skull.

4. When you do finally fall into a dull, un-deep, tooth-grinding sleep at 4 in the morning, you wind up sleeping till 3 PM the next day. The sun's almost down for the count, and you wanna kill yourself because you wasted your daylight hours on depressing and hopeless dreams that you can't even remember. And then you just have to laugh because maybe all this melodrama/vampire bed-keeping hours has something to do with the cultural phenomenon that is TWILIGHT.

5. Caffeination Nation begins the minute you step foot out the front door, no matter the hour. You feel naked without a coffee beverage clutched in your trembling, ungloved hand.

6. When you switch from the caffeine to the alcohol while out with your invincible, tireless friends (thank God for them, for listening to your neurotic/impulsive/crazylocalokacraziest problemas) you drink way too fast and don't feel it till you hit the 7-beverage-wall and then vomit*** out everything, crying because your heart's so stuffed up with love and anxiety.

7. ***Not before the WORD VOMIT, of course. Thanks again, aforementioned, tough-as-balls-to-the-walls confidants.

8. Your iPod playlists consist of sad-sack rubble. Example: "Samson" by Regina Spektor, "I Wanna Die" by Adam Green, "Can't Live (If Living Is Without You)" by Air Supply, "The First Cut is the Deepest" by Rod Stewart, Cat Stevens OR Sheryl Crow, "Unattainable" by Little Joy, "The Way I Feel Inside" by The Zombies, "Me and Bobby McGee" by Janis Joplin, "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" by Bob Dylan, "We've Got Tonight" by Bob Seger, "Headache" by Girls, and the ULTIMATE LOVELORN SONG OF THE PAST CENTURY "Between the Bars" by the saddest sack of them all, Elliott Smith.

9. Weekends: desperation kicks in because you're not with him or her, and the hours go slow, and you delude yourself into thinking you're having a good time, complete with elaborately accessorized dresses, the highest heels you have, bad Pop playlists and false enthusiasm for mundane get-togethers and regular cocktails.

10. Free time: you spend it listing pros and cons, reasons to stay miserable and reasons to move on. And blogging lists like these when you could be doing something much more productive like finishing your Christmas shopping, writing scholarly essays, volunteering for Amnesty International, or running 3 miles in 27 minutes.

11. You used to wake up alone and sad about your ex, but now when you think of him you wistfully smile and remember him fondly. Aw, fuck. Life goes on.

12. Your tendency for over-analyzation runs rampant like an unnamed and unclassified beast a la Where the Wild Things Are. You're the victim in this unrequited love situation, but your mostly a victim of yourself, your own un-back-down-able challenge for one-person domination, and keeping it real, chill and together all at the same time. Good luck. I hope you can defeat yourself with this one.

image by Ryan McGinley, Hanna (Ophelia) 2008/2009

DISCLAIMER: I'm not necessarily in love at the present but I always wish I was.

Reddy Fox---

"admiring my new red silk blouse, stroking his fingertips down the front, and my eyes wide, because I could feel his fingers on my chest, even though I was holding the blouse in front of me on a hanger to be admired. All those moments, and all they meant was that I was fooled into thinking I knew these people because I knew the small things, the personal things."

Once again I turn to "The Burning House" by Ann Beattie for help in these tumultuous times.

I, like the protagonist in this, my favorite short story, believe I actually know the men in my life because I can list their favorite foods, colors, and songs. And like a stupid, naive girl I always think that boundaries don't matter. Age, sex, country of origin. But like Gatsby, I "beat ceaselessly" against a current that always knocks me back to square one. People are different. We don't really ever know anyone. And life is pretty pointless.

I learn my lessons the hard way.

Hiroshima mon amour

"Like you, I longed for a memory beyond consolation, a memory of shadows and stone. For my part I struggled every day with all my might against the horror of no longer understanding the reason to remember... You're destroying me. You're good for me. I have time. Devour me. Deform me to the point of ugliness... I'm very fond of men. I have dubious morals, you know... I somehow understand that it was there and that I almost lost you and ran the risk of never, ever meeting you. I somehow understand that it was there that you began to be who you are today... I was hungry. Hungry for infidelity, for adultery, for lies and for death. I always have been."

best part of the best movie

1:55- 2:25 pretty much explains everything.

Obsessions

by Denise Levertov

Maybe it is true we have to return

to the black air of ashcan city

because it is there the most life was burned,

as ghosts or criminals return?

But no, the city has no monopoly

of intense life. The dust burned,

golden or violet in the wide land

to which we ran away, images

of passion sprang out of the land

as whirlwinds or red flowers, your hands

opened in anguish or clenched in violence

under that sun, and clasped my hands

in that place to which we will not return

where so much happened that no one else noticed,

where the city's ashes that we brought with us

flew into the intense sky still burning.

Adam Green: Master of Sad

Say what you will about crazytrain Adam Green, but the boy can write sad songs better than anyone else. His surreal (and sometimes disgusting/disturbing) lyrics manage to perfectly describe existential pain. Sometimes when I feel like I wanna get all Emo, I play 3 killer tunes from AG's 2nd album Friends of Mine, 2003.

1. I Wanna Die

"I wanna choose to die/and be buried with a Rubik's cube/and sleep inside the big blue buildings/as the sweet disease drives through." Yeah, I think this means he wants to make a choice to die without having to actually do anything about it himself... instead he'd want to just die in his bed in some big blue building without exerting any effort. But to want to be buried with a Rubik's cube? I guess that means he wants to know there is a solution to the problem and hopefully he'll finally fucking get it once he's dead. I feel that!

2. We're Not Supposed to Be Lovers

The opener alone is enough to make you want to cry. "Picture a place that's far from danger./A nicer place to cash your chips/I'm not the one holding you hostage/squeezed in between my lips./We're not supposed to be lovers/or friends like they'd have us believe./We're not supposed to know each other/accept my apology."

But it's the end that gets me every time. "Picture a person you've forgotten/kissing your brother or your friend./Picture a wounded entertainer/cutting his hair again." While we can all get what he's talking about in the first part: you'd want to kill your brother or friend for making out with one of your old lovers, it's the last lines that I find most poignant. Everybody knows that one of the best things to do after a heartbreak is to go crazy, cut and dye your hair, get a whole new "look" and get on with it. Poor Adam.

3. Bungee

The most gut-wrenching of all is Bungee. I don't know why. Adam talks about incest and the Clap and Indian chiefs and priests, but there's something so disorienting and devastating, almost as if it's straight out of a nightmare, about "she went bungee jumping/one fine day/off the cliffs of our friendship/and at the bottom she stayed./when they told me/that her body was found/an astronaut drowned/in the long island sound/i tripped down the stairs/in my basketball shoes/and paddled downstream/in my father's canoe." I think it's the juxtaposition of something so tactile like "basketball shoes" with the metaphorically dead body of the girl and the dreamlike strings of the music.

The video below is pretty bad, but unfortunately Adam doesn't usually perform "Bungee." So instead watch and see how fun he is and how much German people are obsessed with him.

the burning house

"Everything you've done is commendable," he says. "You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding yourself a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you've made one mistake-- you've surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men-- if they're crazy, like Tucker, if they're gay as the Queen of May, like Reddy Fox, even if they're just six years old-- I'm going to tell you something about them. Men think they're Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don't feel? That we're going to be stars."~ Ann Beattie, "The Burning House"

on repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat