Blessed.

Family is so much like an automatic club that God allows us to be born into...a way to make sure we never feel left out of anything.

And I'm glad I got into the one I did.

So glad.

College

The excerpts of "Howl: I" that remind me of my University days. 

by Allen Ginsberg

___________________________________________

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness: starving, hysterical, naked...

Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who, poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high, sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 
cold-water flats, floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, 

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El 
and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool 
eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war...

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, 
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, 

sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks... 

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists 
jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills...

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes...

who studied Plotinus, Poe, St. John of the Cross, telepathy, and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas...

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of
poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago...

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams...

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts...

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish...

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time...

who sang out of their windows in despair...

who barreled down the highways of the past...

who drove crosscountry seventy-two hours to find out if I had a vision 
or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity...

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation
and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second...

rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love...

the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at 
the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,  
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, 
and even that imaginary; nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, 
and trapped the archangel of the soul between two visual images and   
joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and 
dash of consciousness together...

the madman bum and angel beat in Time,
unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death...

an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio..."

Read full poem here.

"do something worth remembering...with a scar."

DARK SIDE OF THE LENS from Astray Films on Vimeo.

"I never wanna take this for granted, so I try and keep motivation simple, real, and positive. If I am to
scrape a living, at least it's a living worth scraping. If there's no future in it, at least it's a present worth
remembering. For fires of happiness and waves of gratitude, for everything that brought us to that
point, enough at that moment in time, to do something worth remembering with a photograph or a scar
- I feel genuinely lucky to hand on heart say I love doing what I do, and though I may never be a rich
man, if I live long enough, I'll certainly have a tale or two for the nephews...and I dig the thought of that."

for grandma helen.

What she's called me ever since I was a very little girl:



Pronounced "sooker" [rhyme: booker] "tup" [rhyme: cup].

Swedish Wikipedia

Sockertöpp: "A sugar-loaf pressed into a large cone. Sugarloaf Mountain can be cut or trimmed with a sugar-tong to
get the appropriate pieces [for] coffee. Sugar Tops were stored sometimes in sugar chests. Sugarloaf
disappeared from the grocery market [when] the mass produced bitsockret came, but can sometimes be
available in stores with an old-fashioned touch."

Psalm 46:5

I like both versions......

"God is within her, she will not fail; God will help her at break of day."
-NIV

"God has taken his place in her; she will not be moved.  He will come to her help at the dawn of morning."
-Bible in Basic English

"The poetic idea here seems to refer to the day as having turned away 'from' us at night, and then as turning about 'toward' us
in the morning, after having gone, as it were, to the greatest distance from us."
-Barnes' Notes

"God is in the midst of her....the church and people of God; not merely by his essence, power, and providence, as he is in the 
midst of the world; but by his gracious presence, and which always continues, though not always perceived..."
-Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

The Truth?

God is good.

And today is a good day.


;]

Review of a Review

"Wallowing in Misery for Art's Sake"
by A.O. Scott - New York Times

It is both surprising and refreshing to me that this New York Times film columnist actually acknowledges the ubiquitous 
pretense of film festivals, being that people like him are often in close conjunction with the semantics of their production. 
Instead of an air of overall praise, he aligns himself with people like me who find it aggravating that a) the general public is 
rarely (if ever) given the opportunity to attend, b) most of the films screened (especially foreign submissions) are otherwise 
impossible to see, and c) independent films are sadly being taken off festival rosters in favor of manic depressive art films 
deemed worthy by executives (see title). 

I learned from this article that a large contributing factor to these issues is high brow film societies' disdain for "the American
art-movie economy" or "the independent sector" of festival submissions.  Scott explains that independent film companies, 
struggling along with the rest of the country from the wayward economy, have started commercializing their material, be it 
minimally and begrudgingly. Nevertheless, festival execs are aghast at the presence of any commercialization whatsoever and 
have hitherto cast a furrowed critical brow on indie gems, resulting in their gradual replacement with a slew of depressing 
featured films that display absolutely no evocation of viewing pleasure whatsoever. In other words, anything redemptive, 
American, and only-commercial-enough-to-put-food-on-the-table is rejected.  

Now, don't get me wrong, I can appreciate a despondent foreign film as much as the next guy, but those that I'm not as crazy 
about I wouldn't be able to see even if I wanted to. Scott alludes that the reason for this restriction is the executive assumption
that the general public isn't interested in these kinds of films, meaning there's no need for festivals to be made readily 
available. Neither are the films themselves for that matter, because any kind of mass distribution would certainly buck their 
"no commercialism" rule.

Mind's eye of festival execs: "If we eliminate the only films they'd be interested in attending and make every other film 
impossible to find then maybe we can make our high brow critical society even smaller..."

Thus, promotion to keep festival attendance a caste system of what Scott refers to as "a transnational fraternity of directors, 
journalists, and well, festival programmers" is in full swing.

After all that, I guess I'm just complaining because I feel left out, festival films are impossible to find, and I love indies. 

End of story.

short film.

by Arev Manoukian

so beautiful, i love the music.


Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

i am the place where i am: well, i left my heart in barcelona.

"Las Coleccionistas is a photography studio in Barcelona, which produces and disseminates visual projects. Understand 
photography as the interplay between light and emotion as a way of communicating at its most provocative, connecting with 
people and spread, but also as a form of participation, a tool that helps them find new meanings and alternative interpretations are closer to of their environment."

Those nights.

Here’s to those nights.
Those wintery nights on the second floor of the building of bird’s egg blue,
in the city we hardly saw.
Never much mattered,
sitting on that $60 couch we loved so well – bottles of yellow tail, the faux-fur blanket,
watching the mystery of Trinity unfold or the brotherhood of an Irish gang be destroyed and redeemed,
all while Figment jumped up the walls and Harmony laid on the orange chair...
gazing adoringly over at us;
those wintery nights of Angels & Airwaves and Band of Horses
when we made pasta dinner and stayed up late,
had tickle fights and talked deeply about friendships,
shared the last cigarette;
those wintery nights when we were motivated to do anything and everything.
And write.

I loved those nights…

and can’t wait for more, love.






photography by Joe Lieske
"There are stories written on the sidewalks"