"McCarthyism, I like that."

"I have watched Dazed and Confused approximately sixty-five times, and I have been stoned for approximately sixty-four of those experiences. At this point, it almost seems unfathomable to watch this movie without being high; it fact, it's entirely possible that watching this movie actually released THC into my bloodstream. But I do know this: I was not smoking pot the first time I watched Dazed and Confused. And I know this because I was drunk." Chuck Closterman in his essay "Not So Long Ago But Very Far Away," as featured as part of the very much worth it Criterion Collection Dazed & Confused

A weekend in Utah won't fix what's wrong with us

Post removed, against my better judgments. Still though, I meant it all at the time, and if anyone was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of such vibrant immaturity and/or bitterness as was previously displayed, I congratulate you. Shit was genuine, and it sure ain't easy. Fuck this and mostly you, if only because it's too hard to have it any other way.


But fuck. I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. 

Played cards in England, threw dice in Spain

Isn't that Heath Ledger's baby?

Maria Kalman's delightful, animated documentation of her trip to Thomas Jefferson's crib is almost as awesome as American Apparel's new staple crop:



That is all.

Sat on the beach with the rusting machines

It's loud and tasteless and I've heard it before

There seem to be, surprisingly, more Resort collections than ever this season. Thus, I must wade the seas and net out the superior.




1. Proenza Schouler. As usual, a brilliant melting pot of all the right, unexpected elements. And those shoes!



































2. 3.1 Phillip Lim. Simple, chic, voila.






































3. Rag & Bone. Let me just clarify how on board I am with the sweatpants trend. I was on board when the Sartorialist first highlighted the look for men years ago, and then when it started turning up fairly recently on menswear runways, and I'm kind of thrilled that it's catching on for women. King of Trend, A. Wang, sort of pulled it out of the woodwork, and Garance recently posted about the art of the sweatpant, and I think for one to truly pull off the look is such a fashionable feat that really relays where modern fashion has taken its seat. In contrast with Wang, I really enjoy how R&B has paired them with more formal elements. Also, love the Indian-inspired drop-crotch and head scarf.






4. Balenciaga. The same predictably great brave, streamlined, unique silhouettes.



































5. Thackoon. Simple, elegant, edgy. Also, I absolutely love the way this lookbook was shot.





































6. Bottega Veneta. Often I like to think of Bottega Veneta as Gucci's less flashy cousin. They've mastered the art of the minimal, sophisticated statement piece.






























7. Moschino. Usually I find Moschino to be just a smidge too much--too costumey, too campy, lacking the, for my taste, necessary dash of sophistication. But the neutral color palette really creates a lovely, modern contrast juxtaposed with the classic antiquated, feminine Moschino silhouettes.

























8. Burberry Prorsum. As always, I'm in love. The dress recalls the most ethereal of Degas' ballerinas, and the suits the reliable rumpled structure that I adore about Burberry.

Godspeed, all the bakers at dawn

Yellow cake, chocolate cake, carrot cake, spice cake, four batches of each, fourteen to a batch, bread pudding, butter cream frosting, cream cheese frosting, chocolate frosting, 24 quarts. Full-body stickiness. Sink overflows, mop up the floor. Full-bakery stickiness. Frosting makes excellent hair mousse, the ends of my tresses caked in flour and cocoa and powdered sugar. Going through the motions, nine eggs, one cup oil, four cups water, mix mix mix, pour pour pour, again again again, hours and hours and hours. Let it sink, in the hot water. But the worst part of the day, by far, is not the 6 AM start time, but rather, the clean up process. The sopping up of mounds of excess ingredients from the linoleum counters, the clumping, the goo, the liquidation of everything combined, everywhere. Scalding rags coated in sugary filth, piled in the sink, and the steam from the faucet, is so hot.

It's gettin' hot in here

Our last summer as independents

3/17/08
He's asleep with his mouth open. I know if he were awake we'd look at the houses on the water and he would suggest that perhaps we live in one one day, with a row boat. I love him so incredibly much.

Finally unpacking all one's personal items a year after a big move, can be much more emotionally overwhelming than I initially thought. There's just so much that I forgot about, and so much that just reeks of that relationship. Like it was all packed away, and then everything collapsed very suddenly, and then I was kind of glad it was gone. And now I'm sitting here sorting through mix cds and writing samples and love notes and photographs and all kinds of hideous mementos of shitty love that fell apart. Seeing it all, in front of you, kind of fucking sucks.

Workin' for the Yankee Dollar

I was in Time After Time the other day, and this song was playing in the background on what sounded like a very dusty sound system. It's been stuck in my head ever since. Seriously, how sick is this song? It's just begging to be juxtaposed with some really fantastic imagery.



And just because these videos (there are dozens) all turned out to be really fun and kind of silly and I just love this shit,



I wanna go to a Hula-Ba-Luau!

Don't be sympathetic, just pass the anaesthetic

Andrew Bird @ Radio City 2nite!

"more complex than a sequel"

Today I woke up at nine, ate some smelly cheese and coffee, found a job, bought a tuna sandwich at a gas station, went to the Post Office, went to Baltimore, watched Suzanna's cable television, ate a burrito, bought some weed, swam with my dogs in the pool, did my laundry, watched the season finale of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, assembled a terrifying shelf tower for my parents' (alphabetized, great going) entire cd collection for $12 an hour, and tomorrow morning I start work at 7.

Also, sounds like J.D. Salinger's in great shape.

Also, if you're really that miserably bored, here's a pretty interesting essay/review, if you're into that sort of thing. I honestly haven't come across Salinger in a long long time, but I feel pretty good about dedicating so much of this post to him; it's refreshing to read a critique of his writing, which is, as I now recall, fairly refreshing itself, in style and essence. Hm. Anyway.

I dreamed I was in a Hollywood movie

"Down! Down! Down!"

Fuck everyone and everything but this song and these nutcases.



Happy Friday.

the tenuous reflection of luminous insects

"Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood. They could not return because the strip that they were opening as they went along would soon close up with a new vegetation that almost seemed to grow before their eyes." One Hundred Years of Solitude

"Wait a minute, I just got here!"

Lonely girl with too many books

"Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.
At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles--a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other--that kept me going." H. S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

When I think of Thompson's writing, two styles immediately jump to mind. First, there is the quick, tight, almost auto-piloted narrative the keeps the plot moving, that allows no room for lulls. But then there are these melodramatic, consciously heady tangents in which his writing really shines. They're so honest they're almost naive, and when you read over them more than, let's say, twice, they almost seem cheesy, overly romanticized and borderline unoriginal, but there's always that first time, when you read it and the words come so naturally and truthfully that they just sort of wash over you, like a wave, and then they're gone. Just simple, beautiful words that seem to pride uncertain wisdom, and that just sound really, really nice together. However, the combination of the two styles is what I really dig, and what has, surprisingly, made me a bigger fan of Thompson's than, hm, Kerouac, whose writing tends to reek so potently of the latter that I oft feel as if I'm wading impatiently through some hot, gummy swamp of endless human speculation, some tangential netherworld where everything is just so.fucking.meaningful. that it all just sort of deduces to goop, to cud, to the shit that they feed comatose victims through tubes. Don't get me wrong, I think Kerouac is a beautiful writer, he is a poet, and his shit changed my life, but I really appreciate Thompson's nonchalance; the sparcity of his sentiment; his even-handedness. Like his narrators, his writing always manages to reign in the chaotic at just the right time, calling on just the right amount of conscience. Talk about tension between poles.

That being said, I'm not even that crazy about Thompson, so whatever. Shit's just entertaining, and I'm mad bored, reading my way into God's Good Graces. Har har.

A Summer Storm

The smell of wet dog. The pulling into the supermarket parking lot for the hundredth time. I can't stand to be in there, I'm not hungry. The unloading of all the items onto the conveyor belt, the cashier, never friendly, I want to be friendly. Don't feel like bringing the bags in from the trunk of my car, but I have to, or the milk will sour, and the eggs, the eggs will go to shit. The decision to take a dip, in the pool. I bring the dogs. The sky is very dark; it begins to rain, lightly at first, then very heavily, and first I just submerge myself entirely into the murky blue and watch the rain pelt dumbly into the surface above me. I can see the dogs, wet, carousing frantically around the periphery of the pool. One is standing nervously, one is rolling in the grass. Can't hold my breath for too long because I smoke too much. Realizing that I won't be able to buy cigarettes much longer if I can't find a job, might have to give that up. Can't find a job. Emerge. This Sunday is Father's Day. No one is home, we get the house all wet when we run in. The smell of wet dog. I wrap myself in a towel, then each of the dogs. Overnight bag lies askew on the floor, I still haven't unpacked. The flickering of the kitchen lights. The attic lights. Again, the dumb pelting of the rain, this time on the roof, I can hear it, it's loud, we're all very wet. The brown dog, she comes up first, crawls into my lap, and she looks at me, her doe eyes that don't care what the fuck I'm doing with my life. Scratching her behind the ears, she drifts off for a bit. Mom comes home, finding us all in bed, looks sloppy and bitter, she wants to ask me the big question, I can tell, but instead, only: "It smells like wet dog in here."

bleeding like a hog

"He and Ana in SAT class, he and Ana in the parking lot afterward, he and Ana at the McDonald's, he and Ana become friends. Each day Oscar expected her to be adios, each day she was still there. They got into the habit of talking on the phone a couple times a week, about nothing really, spinning words out of their everyday; the first time she called him, offering him a ride to SAT class; a week later he called her, just to try it. His heart beating so hard he thought he would die but all she did when she picked him up was say, Oscar, listen to the bullshit my sister pulled, and off they'd gone, building one another one of their word-scrapers. By the fifth time he called he no longer expected Big Blow-off. She was the only girl outside his family who admitted to having a period, who actually said to him, I'm bleeding like a hog, an astounding confidence he turned over and over in his head, sure it meant something , and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thumped inside his chest, a lonely rada. Ana Obregon, unlike every other girl in his secret cosmology, he actually fell for as they were getting to know each other. Because her appearance in his life was sudden, because she'd come under his radar, he didn't have time to raise his usual wall of nonsense or level some wild-ass expectations her way."

I opened The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao at around 2:30 this afternoon and I'm already about a third of the way through it. The pages just fly by, like it ain't no thang, and so far it's alright. I'm not extensively familiar with Diaz's work, just some stories here and there, but uh, he seems to have his moments and, actually, is the only writer I've seen who manages to emulate the kind of honest, contemporary narrative for which the standard has been set only, for me personally, by a (at his best) nearly flawless Roth.

And I, Antonius Block, am playing chess with Death.