Three teaspoons of How.

From The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis,

'What does this stuff remind you of?' I ask her, standing back. 'Degas? Seurat? Renoir?'
She looks at the canvas and says, 'Scooby Doo.'

From Man Alone With Himself by Friedrich Nietzsche,

The street of one's ancestors. It is reasonable to develop further the talent that one's father or grandfather worked hard at, and not switch to something entirely new; otherwise one is depriving himself of the chance to attain perfection in some one craft. Thus the saying: 'Which street should you take? - That of your ancestors.

From A Blue Hand by Deborah Baker,

For twenty years Ginsberg had relished the ritual of pens and paper, the relief that accompanied the emptying of his thoughts and the satisfaction of notebooks with filled pages. There were the small spiral bound pocket notebooks that he wrote in on subways and buses, and there were sturdy bedside notebooks for nighttime cris de coeur or an early morning dream. Returning to a notebook after a day's neglect. he would begin in the present and circle back, writing his thoughts and observations not as he had them, but as he recalled them. Periodically he cast back through the pages, prospecting for the glowing seam of a poem, like a miner long accustomed to working in the dark.

As the years had passed, the notebooks changed. More and more, Allen Ginsberg used them like a blank tape, inviting the world outside and inside his head to inscribe its noisy jive of unlikely juxtapositions. In India he had several notebooks going, and one, designed for schoolwork, now sat open on his lap, interleaved with unanswered letters. On its pages the tracks of his thinking crossed the borders of day and night, past and present, waking and dreaming, poetry and prose. The rhythm of the train itself was inscribed in his handwriting and jagged line breaks.

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This is from books I read recently.

Howl

"If you walk down the street, in New York, for a few blocks you get this gargantuan feeling of buildings and if you walk all day you'll be on the verge of tears. But you have to walk all day to get that sensation. What I mean is, if you write all day you'll get into it, into your body, into your feelings, into your consciousness....."

-Howl the Movie

Electrifying your bones, seeping into your marrow like cold, chilblains working like shock receptors in your fingers and toes, stiffening your neck into immovability and concentration, narrowing your eyes to a typewriter's precision, deforming the font into one adopted by newsprint, fueling the words into a reporter's truth, tapping into a fluid, pungent reality, tweezing strands to create stick figure representations, coughing up enough phlegm to give breath to stone, purging through finger pricks till madness's howl has coagulated to form a coat either of rust or sheen. And then you must do it over and empty yourself again.

'The people of coming days will know about the casting out of my net.' - Yeats

'If you close the door
The night could last forever
Leave the wine-glass out
And drink a toast to never.'

-The Velvet Underground

It comes with the house wine, and it goes down well with the steak.

It spills over, onto the street.

And its in the night air now.

Its sending you shivers, but the evening's holding on.

Eyes light up, half smiles are a French consistency.

It doesn't stick, it empties out. It empties in.

Its a different blue, time to be gone.

'There's nothing as cold, baby, as a spark that won't be flame.'

'Tell me,
Did you sail across the sun?
Did you make it to the milky way to see the lights all faded
And heaven is overrated?'
-The Train

Turn everything away in a coffee swirl.

The stars tonight are a million years old, and another million of years away.

Too late, they're getting away.

You, me and everybody else.

The world's elastic; too small for patience, too big for love.

And its back and forth, and back and forth trying to bridge the gap.

Some people choose, one end of the world over the other.

The others, they shuttle like stars.

Always leaving impressions behind, not knowing that space will stretch itself out, and there's only really a half way back.

Space over time, one without the other.
One without the other.

'We shroud our lives in mysteries,
In shooting stars and storming seas,
If we have any sense.'
-I am Kloot

Skipping stones tonight, we are.

The sounds of water can give silence a queasy turn.

Takes a while for the water to ease out.

Should know better than to fish at night.

Can't even see where the line hits the water, until there comes a massive tug.

Been there so many times on some many assorted nights, but there's still that surprise.

Don't mind it, makes one remember. Feel a little more alive.

Time to wind back the line, and a feeling creeps in,

What if its a Maud Gonne tonight?

Of Anish Kapoor and bathroom glass.

Its clay mold, all of it really.

And to some of us, it comes down to restructuring, reinventing.

Some of us, we turn reality inside out.

We're fascinated with the inside of things, it touches what is most base, most inherent in us.

Nakedness is fascinating as art. Not overt, crude nakedness. No.

Not aesthetic realism or plaintive impressionism, no.

Not even human nakedness, just an objectified extension.

You're looking into every hole, and you keep peering deeper, cause, surely, there has to be an end, but ...there isn't.

And that stumps you.

And there, there the artist has you.

Cause you can't figure him out, you can't just say, 'What a profound artistic statement,' and walk away.

You're unnerved, and he caught you off guard.

You weren't expecting this. I mean, come on, its modern art after all.

It has a visual genius to it that your mind can't even begin to decode.

You're not saying you loved it, it didn't even overwhelm you.

But you saw something there.
Something that wasn't here to start with.

And that's enough.

For now.

The Linear Connect. The Social Network.

"Your subtleties, They strangle me, I can't explain myself at all.' -The All American Rejects

This is...modern, in the real, true, evocative, universal sense.

Very different from the definitive one, perhaps, but a construct that most people born around the same time or after me will recognize and appreciate.

Its..new, and new has its own, expensive charm. All that glitters is gold.

This reminds me of Samara's video, like a leap forward. Like an old film revamped and gone digital.

Keeping up with the times, art is.


"I need to show you, before it fades,
I think I'll be brave,
Starting with you.
I'd rather be wrong,
Than hope that I'm right.'

-Tawgs Salter

And this may sound less than true, but somewhere deep inside of me, there is something inside of me that is inherently averse to a hand-in-hand life.

That said, I try to be brave in my own way. Half the time, I'm trying to fix things in my head before they happen. And so, I don't let them.

Does this seem like an excuse for my reticence?

I don't care.

Because.

"I believe life's too short for compromises and bad fitting jeans."

-Lykke Li

Sometimes, you got to speak in cliches when you're talking to the crowd.




There is a hill top church on an island in Goa called Our Lady Of Compassion.

A small part of my memories are all there, nothing incredible, but they're something I wouldn't give back.

I suppose I can hang a vault of stars over my head any night, and I'll always go back there for a while.

I want you to see how I grew up, why I'm different from you. And sometimes, I need that. The knowing.

I need to know that I can see past the pace, past the chase. That in a good old goan sense, some part of me is still susegad. And naive. And idealistic. And distant.

Its kind of wonderful, having a different sky to go back to. Doesn't matter which place you are.

I've always been in awe of things that endure.
And its reassuring to sometimes be reminded that for some people, I do too.

"And when all of this is gone, who would you rather be, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?"

-Metric

A day in the life of green hat, Samara, fingernails, geisha and me.

'Sometimes, perfection can be perfect hell.'

- Jack's Mannequin

Green hat lady, you sadden me. I don't know which eye to look at, and they're both just seem to be waiting for you to stumble out of one into another.

But I know that's just me.

I know you don't care, and your mouth twitches like a fish.
Up and down, slide and out.

I guess I'm the cliche you're used to, I guess you're tired and impervious to my stating that I you make me sad cause somewhere in the green fathoms of you I see a little, obscure, dismembered part of me.

And I can't tell which part that might be.

'..this hurts like hell
I had that dream again where
I was lost for good in outer space.'

-Jack's Mannequin

This painting is horrific.

That girl scares me.

And for once, I think I almost know what Picasso's saying.

Its like..he turned her inside out, and put her on display.

It just feels voyeuristic and macabre and disconcerting, like someone catching a glimpse of your mind.

God, I KNOW how ugly I am on the inside, I don't need to be told.

I don't need to be shown.

'With the lightning this close I can see That so much in this world is make believe And this ticking clock isn't for me And still nobody knew I need you..'

-Jack's Mannequin

This is probably the only one that doesn't depress me, and to tell the truth its just this mood I've worked myself into.


It reminds me of,

'I don't recommend it, but it is one way to live.'

-Bright Eyes

So I know, and she knows, and you know that I can get by just sitting there laughing and laughing at you. Till the hell to pay gets bigger and bigger, and I can't see past the vacuum.

'Its like how much more black could it get? The answer is none more black. None more black.'

-This is spinal tap



'Through this hole in my chest I can feel
That so much is this world isn't real
And there's some things that you cannot steal..'

-Jack's Mannequin

I guess you can be her, or you can be me.

You can choose to have pride, 'man up' and be stoic and alone and twisted all your effed up life.

Or you can give up on that like me, and be miserable, and hysterical and grovelling and ecstatic and vulnerable and insane and furious and never all there.

The other options don't even matter.

I guess that means that most of you don't matter.

I suppose I screw up a lot, and I demand a lot out of people.

But I was built like that, and if I'm a little blue, and a little too many things, I'm a little I give a shit about you too.

#failpost

In conversation with..

'I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.' -Henri Matisse

I'd hang it in my house, so would you I s'pose.
Its the sort of thing that you can eat dinner with, and not experience that peculiar unease that the realists invariably bring about when in the same room as you.

Marvelous, no doubt. Their ladies sparkle, their gowns are divine.
But I rather prefer food that smiles.

Bubbling wine, blue and pink and fluorescent.
At least,
That's how it tastes in my mouth.

And as I write this inadequate ode to Matisse, I'm sipping an ice tea that makes me think of a coffee swirl. A lemon half. The musty feel of my mother's books. The vintage music covers of the Weepies.

'I have a penchant for scenarios that juggle with the natural order of things. Sometimes one discerns an incongruous situation which is always camouflaged by common sense. If I spot one, my first move is to put it down on paper before it gets forgotten. Assume you're lying on a beach. You're bored and to entertain yourself you play a game of mental sightseeing. You float your nomad eye high above ground, move it around, look down, look behind things, and look back at yourself. The two eyes perceive, the third eye divines, the mind's eye composes, the nomad eye explores. Not many people know they have one.' -Alan Fletcher

I don't like the colors in this painting, its, to put it crudely, loud.
Anything too extreme has a habit of repulsing one when we first encounter it, and this painting makes me feel like I'm being screamed at.

I may not like it, but there's something in this painting that gets to me every time I see it.

Notice the force with which the purple curtains are flying up, almost out of the painting, towards you.
I'm convinced the pot's going to topple over any second.

'Paul Klee always knew when something was finished because instead of him looking at the subject, the subject began looking at him' -Alan Fletcher




I love everything about this painting. I love the fact that there are no people there.

I wouldn't have minded just one person there, then I could have made believe it was me.
People ruin things, and there are some things not worth sharing.

I'd sit in my blue chair, gladioli on my table, have my own conversations, sit poised inside a Matisse on my wall in a infinite reality world. Coffee table world of quiet conversation, and barefoot intrigue.

'In love, the one who runs away is the winner.'

-Henri Matisse

What cynics we are, Matisse.


Beethoven Piano Sonata No.17 in D Minor.

I picked this one simply because I was listening to the above piece when I came across it.
Now, that I'm actually writing about it, Mozart's Requiem Mass in D Minor is playing, and I suddenly realise that I do not like the color of the piano. The brown is such a disappointment, unnecessary. And I know its more Mozart and less Matisse I'm under right now when I think that for some, definite reason the piano couldn't be anything but brown.

I like the painting, I just do. In a forgettable way, in a smile while accidentally meeting someone's eye way. In a sad, why don't we keep in touch way. I can't explain it, and I can't explain the painting.

'I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.'

-Henri Matisse

Its easy to acquit the people in paintings, they can't wake up and disappoint you again.

I don't know why I wrote this, only that I enjoyed it.

Perhaps, I do.

I think it was because you make me question myself, and I had to acquit myself, so I turned myself into a painting. A Matisse.

But I s'pose you don't like him either.