Imaginary journal

Deception

“We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.”

Albert Camus

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Everyone carries a room about inside him

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

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Bonfire of the Vanities

Like so many of us until Death itself takes us into his arms and burns us with the fever of living dragging us like Don Juan into the bonfires of hell! The voice of the ghost ringing in our ears! “Repent!”

Aubrey Buffing, Bonfire of the Vanities (“Aubrey Buffing. He’s on the short list for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS. You’ll love him.”)

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Having a Coke with you

Having a Coke with You

by Frank O’Hara

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

   I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

   it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

~

Vice interviews David Simon

Vice interviews David Simon, mainly to discuss The Wire

It’s one thing to recognize capitalism for the powerful economic tool it is and to acknowledge that, for better or for worse, we’re stuck with it and, hey, thank God we have it. There’s not a lot else that can produce mass wealth with the dexterity that capitalism can. But to mistake it for a social framework is an incredible intellectual corruption and it’s one that the West has accepted as a given since 1980—since Reagan. Human beings—in this country in particular—are worth less and less. When capitalism triumphs unequivocally, labor is diminished.

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Christopher Doyle interview

Vice interviews Christopher Doyle

When I left Australia, I was studying literature during a very drug-oriented, politicized cultural environment in 1969. Vietnam was going on, people were being drafted, all this kind of stuff was happening. Also, most Australians—and I am talking about white Australians for the moment—feel isolated. There’s a great deal out there in the world that you haven’t experienced, so you try to get exposed. I wanted to know something that I only knew through literature up until then. I wanted to have it firsthand instead of having D.H. Lawrence or Borges or Bukowski tell me about it. So I became a merchant marine, and then I ended up in Europe, and then I ended up traveling in Israel, and then I traveled cross-country to India, and I lived there for three years, and blah, blah, blah. And I do believe that was my film school. I totally believe that.

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Gardens and libraries

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

In a nice confluence Borges wrote, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library”. Paradise literally being a walled garden.

I still have my library and almost require more shelving but I’m going to lose my garden. That might result in moving. Again. And no matter the deficiencies (one bedroom, no bath just a shower, small kitchen) this is a great apartment. The agony of moving is tempered only by irrational thoughts of moving somewhere more interesting, somewhere away from the city.

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The Glass family and The Royal Tenenbaums

Last week I finished reading Franny and Zooey written by J.D. Salinger and originally published in the The New Yorker as a short story and a novella.

Written in 1955, ‘Franny’ reminded me of The Razor’s Edge with the protagonist looking East for spiritual meaning and something beyond her life and the education offered in college.

‘Zooey’ follows on from the short story and features more members of the Glass family. With the description of the Glass’s New York apartment I suddenly realised that these precocious children who, as they become adults, are disconnected, fail to live up to the promise of their childhood genius, and face a profound existential crisis, are very similar to the Tenenbaum family.

A quick browse of the Wikipedia entry for The Royal Tenenbaums and I realise that I’m not the only one to make the connection. The internet, ruining my fun.

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The Judgment of Paris

The Listener. Telling it like it is.

This is actually from the back cover of Messiah. It features a protagonist who is in the process of writing his memoirs, an old man dealing with memory loss and physical decay.

I’ve read a couple of his books but enjoyed Palimpsest the most. Now that Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare is out I’ll probably grab that too.

Whether or not you believe his stories or share his politics, you have to admire his mental agility and the quality of his scathing wit. Gore Vidal is a fine writer.

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C’mon be the sugar in my tooth

You Am I are one of my favourite bands and this is one of my favourite tracks but until this morning I had no idea that the video clip for “What I Don’t Know ’bout You” was a tribute to Don’s Party.

Don’s Party by David Williamson, centered around the 1969 Australian federal election, but really it was about gender and class, boorish, pissed-up men and their dissatisfied wives, Labor and Liberal sympathies, and the sad plates of cheese cubes and celery at Australian parties of the sixties.

It had a run at the Opera House in 2007 during the lead up to the federal election where Labor won out against the incumbent Liberal party. Different end result but the politics and climate was incredibly similar to that in 1969.

Back to the clip. A few quotes serve as clues and some great Australian actors are involved: Stephen Curry, Ben Mendelsohn, Matt Day, Tania Lacy and Nadine Garner.

I’m guessing Matt Day is playing Cooley. He’s got some of the best lines:

Cooley: Hello, gorgeous! Care for a screw?
Don Henderson: He used to say “fuck.”
Kerry: Any particular reason for the change?
Cooley: Yeah, I get more fucks when I say “screw.”

And, damn what a song:

Don’t be cruel, come on be the sugar in my tooth
And I think I like what I don’t know about you
Don’t be cruel, come on be the champagne in my shoe
But I think I like what I don’t know about you

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