Small Town Church III: The Name of the Father
"I feel weird turning in papers, like some kind of fake or liar."
"Some of the essays we read were humorous, many were political, and all of them seemed to have another meaning behind them."
"Now that I have made it to the fifth page, I will stop boring you with my ranting about what I learned this semester."
"Breasts, now that’s what I’m talking about."
Crispin Glover as Andy Warhol, or Andy Warhol as Crispin Glover?
"The class of Writing 1301 comes to an end with the blessings of Jesus and gifts from Santa Claus."
"The church-like silence and awkward tension that penetrated the packed-to-the brim classroom could be attributed to the nervousness of the new students. The unique and pleasantly quirky personality of the instructor immediately grabbed the attention of my fellow stone-faced college students."
"I danced extremely competitively and it would take up all the time in between school, eating, and sleeping."
"Not too psychoanalyze this in too much depth, but perhaps my distate for academic writing is seeded from the problem I have with obeying authority and rules. While I wish writing could feel like an expression of creativity, like painting, I end up feeling restricted by the rules."
This is the first time I have done that in a very long time. It felt really good.
Also: Tom Waits, “Silent Night/Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”
It’s almost Chrimbus!
To Chatfield, MN, I go.
The Weeknd, “Coming Down”
Last night I had a dream in which I was at my parents’ church in San Diego as it appeared in the early 1990s. My father and one of the pastors of the church were scolding me for something as if I was a child — I only saw myself in the POV way one sees oneself in a dream, but I was wearing the pants and shoes of contemporary Andrew. In fact, the pastor commented on them, cunningly: “Don’t you like nice shoes, or something?”
Anyway, I’m having some sort of emotional breakdown in the dream, and suddenly there is a flash-forward to some sort of photo collage with captions — it looked like it was made on PowerPoint, but was clearly composed of cut-up scraps of paper & photographs on a cardboard background. It scrolled down my mind-frame like the end credits of a film — I think there might have been a voiceover of my father to accompany it. I don’t remember the content of this collage-thing, but apparently (in the dream, still) my father had made it for me as some sort of apology, and I found it to be incredibly inspirational and significant.
It was at this point, I think, that I woke up.
Phoenix, “(You Can’t Blame It On) Anybody”
“To Ernest Hemingway
—because finally after all these
years I am deeply curious to know
what you think of this.—but if you do not answer, or if you
answer with the kind of crap you
use to answer unprofessional writers,
sycophants, brown-nosers, etc., then
fuck you, and I will never attempt
to communicate with you again.—and since I suspect that you’re even
”
more vain than I am, I might as well
warn you that there is a reference to
you on page 353 which you may or may
not like.
Thursday was the day for my image to be photographically reproduced, apparently. Nanotechnology sure is awesome!
Professor Patricia Ticineto Clough (Departments of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and Intercultural Studies, Queens College & the CUNY Graduate Center) presents, via Skype, at the University of Minnesota, 12.15.2011.
Part five of “Rhetorical Bodies: A Seminar Series on Contemporary Theory,” presented by the Literary Theory Reading Group, the Undergraduate Theory Reading Group, and Student Activities Grants Initiatives.
“When one reviews the history of the last ten years and takes into account the complete about-face of American public policy toward the Soviet Union in the matter of a year or two…I think it is a matter of small importance whether or not there is a ruling class which pulls the strings. Most responsible socialists would discard this notion for its vulgarity, its Stalinoid connotations, and its complete failure to fit more complete facts. But it is quite another thing to relinquish one’s view of America as a social organism with a capitalist economy whose problems are deep and probably insoluble, and whose response to any historical situation must be a function of its need to survive as that need is reflected, warped, aided and impeded by countless smaller social organisms, traditions, and finally individuals who cancel one another out or double their force (so far as actions are concerned) until the result of these numerous vectors represents a statement of where the power in America rests and where the necessity. That the ‘power’ in any important sense does not belong to nine-tenths of the ‘people’ but rather is embedded in such massive and complementary constellations as management and labor executives, the military and government hierarchy, the Church and mass-communication media, is more or less self-evident to radicals who would I believe agree that it is not the differences of interest in the groups I have named which are noteworthy (has there ever been a society including the Soviet Union in which there were not deep clashes of interest among the ruling elite?) but rather it is the objectives wanted in common by these powerful groups which can provide the best explanation of the virtually complete conformity in America during the Second World War and in the eight years which have followed. What characterizes all pre-socialist history and may (let us hope not) characterize a socialist history if there be one, is that the mass of men must satisfy the needs of the social organism in which they live far more than the social organism must satisfy them.”
Speak Andrew is a very short film I made with Josh Zimmerman of The Silent Comedy in 2004. It makes me feel incredibly old.
This is a really long, weird essay I wrote a few years ago about concept albums & the city of London. Unfortunately, my MOG account has since been deleted, so the discography can’t be as easily sampled.
Also, I should add that there isn’t much of an argument here — this was my first sustained attempt at descriptive music criticism.* Nonetheless, I haven’t seen anything else written on the same topic, so it’s possible someone might find it interesting (I’d challenge you, especially, to find another academic-ish piece which considers the band Madness in an at least semi-serious fashion).
*See especially my heinous overuse of the word “panegyric.”
I watched this film tonight. It reminds me simultaneously of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Antonioni at his best. It is also the most compelling critique of the Western I have seen since Jarmusch’s Dead Man, and — as a feminist statement — a much needed addition to the canon of American historical films.
Kelly Reichardt is a true auteur and, I think, very important to the contemporary cinema. This film is an excellent example of the influence of 1970s art cinema on current movements in the indie world — especially in its hyperreal, philosophical, and patience-trying tendencies.* In Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt is somehow able to retain the existential mood of Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy in a historically conscious film about 1840s frontiersmen. And the reverence for the long take doesn’t strike me as nostalgic or emphatic in the same way as it does within the whole Mumblecore scene and other “slow” cinemas. I, for one, find this to be quite impressive.
It is significant to add, I guess, that Bruce Greenwood is pretty great as the titular longhaired charlatan. I only wish I had seen this in a theatre.
*This, perhaps, is extremely obvious and goes without saying.
In a sudden burst of creative genius, I wrote all four of these plays last Friday.
In a sudden burst of creative genius, Aaron Apps did the illustrations.
All of these are dedicated to Mike Rowe (1982- ).
