scents, sense, sensuality, the sensational.

Can you feel sensations passing through your body? - Separate from you, but within you, no less – The channeling of a carnal curiosity – A bloodiness you bleed for. How about when you touch the face in front of you—appearing like an outline finely drawn into the wallpaper’s background—do you smell him around you? If it is, you do, does he then become apart of the closeness that surrounds your existing space? Letting the palm of your hand fall off the surface texture of his face, having it sink through the air and then swirl up underneath the passage of your nose – do you smell him on you? Looking inside the cup of your hand, can you see the text of his essence written and wedged between the wrinkled scars of your handprint? It looks like you had been cut by a blade and sewn back together, some time ago—a jagged line, how it came about, you will always remember. Stitched by a needlepoint, he has been woven through you, at the end there is a tie and a bow that can barely be shown. Inside the world, the night hangs the sky, appearing like a parachute dyed indigo above your headiness. The city speaks through its slumber, but you cannot understand what it hopes to mean because it sounds like a broken piano playing notes that hang off tune. You come closer to him. Why?—because at night one only should. Lashes linger over his neck and he thinks “this feels like a spider’s legs dancing through a child’s hair.” But he does not tell you what he thinks. He does not show you he focuses on what he feels. Instead his chosen words, hitting the air and breaking the glassy silence of sensuality, are “I remember this.” Leaving his impression as a passing moment, you interject instantaneously, How can it be that I remember your taste? He is exactly the same, you think. This is why I prefer signature scents—a smell your heartbeat can remember. “My scent is different today than it was then,” he tells you nostalgically. It is more than a sense of scent, I say speaking to myself. Last night bled into the early hours just before six in the morning, and even then as I was falling behind the curtain of sleep, my tongue traced him and I could taste him on my teeth.

*

i like silk colored creme, slips for their simplicity, sparkling mineral water, when soap suds can stand out because skin is tanned gold, scholarly supplies, signature scents, sensual spaces of solitude, the significance of subtleties, a beat that makes you go, candles burned by the night's intensity, a surface's gleam, a kiss whose quality is a surprise and the power in a glance.

good fun music

Gameboy / Gamegirl - Sweaty Wet / Dirty Damp from Moop Jaw on Vimeo.

golden silvers - arrows of eros

mystery jets - two doors down

cherry ghost - 4 am (my favorite is thirst for romance)

YELLE!

I got into Yelle last spring. Her videos were enough of a good thing to make me not mind/feel ridiculous that I could not understand the language. Well, her videos are only getting better. The woman is insane and I say it will only be time before the world-around catches on to her. She is coming to the US in the fall, below are her tour dates and below that is another video of her performance at Coachella 2008. You'll see the reason to go - because she gets you to moveeee and then move some more. Musicians quite possibly could be the best group to be out with.

TOUR DATES:
10/07 House Of Blues Dallas, TX
10/09 The Venue Austin, TX
10/10 Polish American Club Miami, FL
10/11 The Social Orlando, FL
10/13 9:30 Club Washington, DC
10/14 Webster Hall New York, NY
10/15 The Roxy Boston, MA
10/20 Magic Stick Detroit, MI
10/21 Congress Theatre Chicago, IL
10/22 Turner Hall Milwaukee, WI
10/24 Ogden Theatre Denver, CO
10/25 Urban Lounge Salt Lake City, UT
10/27 Neumos Seattle, WA
10/29 Berbati’s Portland, OR
10/31 Mezzanine San Francisco, CA
11/01 Henry Fonda Theatre Los Angeles, CA
11/02 Beauty Bar San Diego, CA


Yelle - Je Veux Te Voir from kidplastik on Vimeo.

shadow play

i don't have imagination, i have memories in the form of images. i can confidently say, if it were not for photographs my being would be based most on instaneous recollection. i have said it before: i am insecure about my memory and focus on/in the present moment. recently i have been going through piles, portfolios and boxes of photographs, that and watching my father's old slides. the projector screen is in my room and let's just say it looks badass. today i went to have the equipment repaired so it can advance properly. in time, i am going to work to scan the slides. i feel i need the images - there are mystifying moments stopped in time that i want to carry further in writing - advancing ethereal realities. my dream is to produce a picture book - that is - a picture book for the real idealist. the intention: a poetic perception to alchemize a poetic perspective (or is it vice versa?) for the lives that can seem so very contained and constrained.

kenya (the villages were some of the best spent hours of my life)

it appeared that his eyes had less color than his mouth

tasteful triumphs

and with that said, a noted letter:

july 24 2:47pm -

things have been better than prior. miami is more and more a nice getaway for me. i wish i were writing more - and by that i mean, the june story i was writing seems to be at a standstill. i am sure once i am tucked back in my hole in manhattan, i will be able to resume it. but part of me does feel indifferent to the story or maybe, rather the stories' characters. i guess that is when fictitious autobiography makes the transformation into fiction (a less controlled attachment). tonight i am going for drinks with someone i met on my birthday. he seems profound... and older. who knows. i shall see. hopefully the spark is still in me. my room has been nothing but less things and candles aflame, always. very soothing. very romantic. all my kisses have been soft. every time i go out i live in the moment and fewer things exist. these are all achievements... for me at least. cannot wait to hear more of your stories. be assertive. intimidation is beauty. i have been wearing your ring always. i love you.

there were a few subtle shifts i wished would take place while away from manhattan. most all of me - though probably not entirely rational - did not want to return until i let myself go, felt a bit lighter and could breathe out more consistently. all of these hopes seem like vague ideas, i suppose, but they were important to me - are important to me - and perhaps, they are the small tribulations i struggle with. i know things are not easy, but maybe all interiors and exteriors are easy, and it is nothing but the willpower of our mind that builds them into extremities that seem out of our control and at times, can chip away out our heart - making us feel fragile and weaker. or maybe it is just the opposite. maybe "things" are easier than we imagine, and we do not believe it to be so because we do not think it can/to be. how much of our life is dictated by our self-decided reasons? i believe most of it is all mental - sickness, energy, capacity. but still, i do not deny thinking that this too does not make it any easier. who cares to be troubled by these thoughts though? the best choice is to get on with it and just go, spend your time with moments that will be most memorable for you. i know that much of my day time is spent finding a place of perspective and writing from a point. as a result, i spend more time with faces during the night and all in all, although i feel like my mind is available for a relationship - i see that i cannot and at this point (for the last year) have not wanted to be physically present to the extent most relationships require. in mind i can be, but in body i do not want to be stolen from the work i am at the time consumed by and more concentrated on (quite selfishly or quite personally). this may be an excuse? a fear? or just the simple situation that in a few months i will be applying to graduate school for writing - and it has not been until this summer that i have actually taken a workshop and craft course - and have much, much much i need to work on, write out and strengthen. the rest will follow and the low points will be remembered for being slip ups, but their pain will not be able to felt in the future. (life does melt together, making you into one being composed of multitudes). everything will move on, and i will be nostalgic that the time did not take longer or be sensed more slowly.

the above letter of fragments does contain a dose of my recent triumphs though - successes that i strove to experience more frequently since my being here. a friend sent me a message an hour before my turning twenty-one saying, "you're going to feel different at midnight...i promise you." at first, i may have felt like the idea was overstated and promised to be the case when anyone turned twenty one but it did not take much time before i felt like she had been right - in some hidden corner, there was much depth within the idea of experiencing a difference. (and presently, more than i can remember, i feel something new - that is all i can say - as if my will went out of me, as if i had a stubbornness and it was melting -eudora welty). ever since middle school i have promised every holiday (birthdays included) that i would begin taking baths. in my first piece of writing, i wrote this (and for this i know, the idleness of a bath always meant something larger to me).

I spent hours in the bathtub fictionalizing my current existence for a novel I was writing at the time. Everyone thought it was autobiographical; I just thought I existed somewhere in all I created, you just had to find me. Did you know that if you submerge your whole body beneath a steady bath, as if you were drowning, you can hear your heartbeat inside of you? I have never felt so close to myself.

but i never took them. i never even really tried to let myself just be still in the hope of guaranteeing calmness. but since my twenty first birthday, i have now taken almost a handful of baths. add a few drops of oil and i promise, your skin will never feel smoother. yesterday was the warmest bath i have ever taken in my life. my skin initially being bitten by pain and then having grown adjusted, descending down until i could see the reflection of all that laid on the top surface of the bath. (i believe, a woman feels most womanly if a bath is shorter than her body, allowing a foot to dangle off the left shoulder of the tub). mint shampoo massaged into my hair and washed out by the strongest cool of running water. the busy crackling of bubbles, like rice krispies cereal in a bowl of milk. these are all easy sensations you can rely on. laying there languid, i thought about the prior day (in the hospital parking lot - it was to my surprise, i was visiting a family friend's just born baby boy. the entire drive over, i had some idea that we were visiting my dad's sick client). i remembered myself outside the delivery room window, as an unexpected guest, and becoming overwhelmed by this baby i had not known had been born. his skin, flushed, almost like a bruise and with the fullest set of hair compared to any newborn in sight. i just kept staring with trembling eyes, trying so very hard not to cry over a life that was brand new. "what is his name?" the nurse mouthed - once, twice, three times - no one was answering, so i said with my hand against the glass, "dylan. his name is dylan." and she held him up, just as seen in films and in imagination, but with more casualty as if for her, the raising of a baby to the glass was something she had seen and done hundreds of times before. last night at dinner, a woman reached over asking me, "is your sister this engaging?" i laughed, trying to make light of a compliment i had by no means expected, saying oh, do you mean by my rings? raising my wedding finger in the air. "no, i mean it. you are so easy to speak to. a real lady." all at once, it came to me, how similar these three moments were and how entirely special. the bath because i had always expected myself to take them and now i finally was following through with a small gesture. the baby at the hospital because i had in no way expected myself to be there and to feel so taken with sudden emotion, as if my heart was being unglued and lifted. and the woman's comment because for what feels like multiple impossible months, i hoped for my social confidence and self to come back to life but have feared the solitude would prevent it from being the case. life has to be lived for the small slices that you can taste.

known a few of these?

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Midomi Test: Featuring John Roderick of The Long Winters from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

a journal at 17.

i found an old online journal on blogger of mine. i didn't remember having it - and if i had i never would have remembered the blog's name - but somehow, in a backwards fashion, i came across it. i was 17 when the few entries were written. these things remind me that maybe as much as we may want to change, we don't. we just become more of what and who we are.

march 08 2005, in rhyme we have reason

most of the time i feel as though the only way anyone can understand or know me is through my written words. it is my only honest voice. i cringe when i speak; astonished by my chosen words or the lack thereof. i find myself to be terrible with verbal communication, yet in type i can reason, i can come to conclusions, i can have opinions, i can persuade, i can just be me. i suppose this is the result of some underlying barrier i have forced upon myself; ultimately due to some bitter experience. last night i said that conversation was fake. that it is piled down with barriers &that i hardly believe in it. &for the time being i will keep to that, i will continue to write as if my only audience is my own eyes rereading each line, &i will continue to put myself in situations/experiences that force me to feel, understand, &create a perspective. because for the time being turning experience into written words is my only way of communicating, correctly. this journal will be everything. another way in which i expose myself, for myself &whomever. another attempt at tearing down some barrier &at understanding myself better, so i can be..that much more.

l. bourgeois - an artistic return to storytelling

i encourage any and everyone to follow this link. it is the louise bourgeois: the spider, the mistress and the tangerine trailer. truly a piece that will provide an afterglow. "the intensity of the emotions are much to much for me to handle. that is why i transfer them. i transfer the energy into sculpture. this applies to everything i do...the materials are not the subject of the artist. the subject of the artist are emotions and ideas, both."  she is on exhibit at the guggenheim through sept 28.

"we need a louise bourgeois show right now, where the artist who makes work for herself - rather than for an institution or a marketplace - is seen as important" - rachel harrison, a new york sculptor inspired by bourgeois' abstraction.

"time - time lived, time forgotten, time shared. what does time inflict - dust and disintegration? my reminiscences help me live in the present, and i want them to survive. i am a prisoner of my emotions. you have to tell your story, and you have to forget your story. you forget and forgive. it liberates you" - louise bourgeois: blue days and pink days.

i think in a large part, this is my difficulty with editing and with trying not to write with a form of immediacy. i feel like if i return to my writing, dissemble it and replace text with newer/refined content - what i risk doing is misplacing myself, and having the heart of the thoughts become a work for others and from another me. i would rather let my imperfections remain, even in broad daylight, but perhaps that is me being stubborn.

the summer hair here.

in the sun i have lemon hair, whilst the sea has perfume breath.

the only way, i have decided, to deal with a morning hung over is to lay beneath a slice of paradise. i ate blueberries next to giant grassy figures all afternoon, until my hands looked like they were dyed by ink. i am really rather happy, though jose agualusa says "happiness is never grand", so maybe i am just better than before. the mood i brought with me when i arrived in miami is beginning to slip away and be replaced by something fresher. i like myself better this way.

a kissing, softly.

we talked, comfortably, as if we had known each other or at least, wanted to. and at my surprise i spoke most - on and on - over and over - backwards and forwards. his eyes wandering to whatever was passing behind my back. that reality i did not know, i could not see it and therefore it existed without me. (beings exist only when we think of them). "so you think you are the relationship type." i never would have thought that way or believed it would become so, but it is a preference i now prefer. i want intimacy over physicality and most individuals only expose their body - their being - in that fashion if they are secure that it is a relationship they are in. but i am not so sure i insist there be so much pressure. it is just in all relations of mine i want to create a space that is heavy with substance, that is designed by the senses. "you give off that impression. you like softness. you want to capture sensuality." i try and make it that way because it is how i want to remember the moment and i take responsibility for my involvement in it. "but i want to ask you something - oh gosh, and it sounds terrible but - do you ever want to be just fucked?" no.
it was not until later, under a different setting, with my legs pressed inside his shape that his hands touched my skin - tinted ruby by the burdening light. and then, before leaving each other - with no commitment to hesitation - we kissed. and even with my lips being there, i thought, and yes! this is yet another soft, soft kiss.

without avoid, an impression.

whether existing in a new space or without avoid, coming again to an old place, there are always small fascinations tucked away on shelves, memorable treasures buried beneath a mess and something to re-see, to re-experience, something to become familiar with. that is what i enjoy most about homes, the intimate space of a life spread open. that is what i enjoy about evolving, the truth that a character takes on new appeals. and with aging how one may acquire more passiveness but in turn, have deeper and more thought consuming interests.

i am taken by marvels - the rush i get when situated in my bedroom with nothing more necessary than the low hiss of candles and no sightings but blackness until my eyes become adjusted to an inner light and strength. admittedly, i recognize that on the membrane of my being is a soul pushing outwards and injecting tangibilities with ideations - so objects are less about the thingness and more about the attributed impression. perhaps it is me objectifying subjects so they are more romantic in nature than initially or immediately conceived. but maybe it is just my way of encouraging my heart to feel most, to know more.

eying the bookshelves, i spotted "wherever you go, there you are" by jon kabat-zinn. the book is separated into parts - explicating the thematic of meta, which means to go beneath and in a sense (to me) beyond. each part is more like a clue to being wakeful and in doing so, acquiring mindfulness.

the author recommends being in a space and listening to naturalness, that is, to have nothing that can be turned on or off around. i read this while i was outside on the patio connected to my bedroom. i tried to hear and there it is was: the keynotes of the pond's falling water, the repetitious hum of a car stretching down the street, leaving and being replaced by another, and the steady whine of yardmen's machinery. beneath all this was a silence that did not exist. and inside of me was a heart's beat that was not to be heard, but to be felt. and now is the noise of rain, falling in a surge of tears, outside the window.

Chapter #? - Entitled - SHE WOULD RATHER SLEEP IN HER MIND'S BOUDOIR.

From a larger work in process and hopefully, progress - entitled A Sense of Scent.

Q. She would rather sleep in her mind’s boudoir.

Claudelean tore through the air, trying to gain distance from the words that were making her eyes wet. She did not believe she could hold herself up anymore. She did not believe she had the energy to be as strong as she seemed. Instead, she imagined how she appeared dashing through the darkness. She imagined black ink stamped across her front or even soot on her skin from the night’s texture. She believed it would never wash off. Then she imagined how she appeared like a child trying to exit a nightmare. She believed she was an actress; nothing more trying than a youthful starlet and nothing better either. She thought she could play along, so she took advantage of the scene and feigned the role of her myth. But there was no audience watching, no one to tell her she had been believable. 

Descending the stairs to her cabin, she wondered whether being strong had made love more difficult. Emotions strained the soul and it always had made her insecure that if they were revealed, others would acknowledge them as the scars of experience. Alone in her room, she felt like she was in a cave sheltered from nature’s temperamental climate. But it was not a cave because there was a mirror and inside of it was a reflection of her standing self. She stood in the track of silence watching how wounds transform imagery. Having stopped, her tears came spiraling loose and raced downwards at a pace and path of their own. She saw the way a mood decorates the landscape of skin—reconditioning an appearance—changing the spectator’s impression, expression and at times, unfavorably, his reaction to it. She extended her arms, hoping to press upon something tangible. And it appeared like she was reaching out with a desperate longing to be realized. But feeling nothing there, she sensed she might not exist either. Coming closer to the mirror, she sat before the vanity and looking out Claudelan saw into a face she believed she had never seen. It was at that moment, she felt she was becoming less of herself and more of some other. 

At that moment, too, a knock could be heard seeping beneath the door. It was Llurence. He knocked again hoping for entrance through her barrier. She opened the door. He came to her. But before her, she realized his mood had changed and because of it, his voice carried the effects of a different tone. She thought him less sincere. 

The thing about lovers though is they see through eyes of intoxication. And quite similarly, the thing about intoxication is one’s perception softens and one’s judgment begins to flow smoothly soothing the drinker’s sensations like wine. Lovers and drinkers alike sense their selves differently and take shape like waves—appearing externally calm, yet in a constant flux of internal emotion. Rising to the surface is the fleshy foam of salvia, spilling out at climax and dissolving like pearls on the body of the sea. Lubricated lovers involved in romantics crouch over their partner’s heart and press their bodies upon their cage, until with a discharge that saturates sight and makes the night’s body feel warmer, does the lovers collapse and break the heart’s brittle boned cage. 

Aside from the burden mixed within her blood and swimming through the sewer of her veins, Claudelean’s eyes had been heavy with tears when Llurence knocked. Eyes so heavy, she would choose to remember, that she had not been able to see at all. However, they both would remember they were intoxicated that night. But only she would remember that it was not love that had mastery over her room, but lovers. Their judgment had been sensitive, but it was Claudelean’s that also was subject to change. 

She did not remember the kiss or why it came. But she remembered his lips were like shells cutting her and possibly with the intention of making her bleed. She kissed him like she had forgotten how their lips had worked together. But persisted, feeling she needed to know that it could be the same. It never would be though. Her lips moved passively, her body becoming more objectified than it had ever been. She worked at feeling, but becoming only successfully discouraged, expressed a carnal resentment. With her body curved over his bareness, she could not pull herself away—not knowing whether she was holding on a moment more with the desire to have the last kiss take the longest or whether it was because she did not want to not kiss him again. 

He entered her, but it did not feel like love was being made. Instead, it was like the ripping apart of souls. She became dry and for the first time ever, he spit on his hands and moistened the crease of her labia until it satisfied the sensation he needed to finish. After, he fell over her and she responded with her nails tearing down his back’s flesh. But his blood was harder to draw than her tears, trickling into a mosaic around her cheeks, taking on the saddest shade of rose. 

Lying next to him, Claudelean breathed with all the strength that was left in her heart. It sounded like it was the air she needed most. 

"You have always been the most romantic," Llurence said. His words cut the silence with his tongue that was like a knife. "But tonight you succeeded even yourself. Our whole relationship, I never figured if I irritated you even a touch, the passion would intensify extraordinarily."

His words coiled into a sentence and strangled her like a noose. She wanted to escape him. She knew he was trying to kill their love, so it never could live again. But she could not move away because she could not breathe either. 

"Claudelean are you awake?"

Always. 

"If you could have one wish what would it be?"

For an instant to forget my body. 

An incomprehensible distance lay between them. Llurence made no notice of the change. But Claudelean could not avoid feeling it. She wished she could believe otherwise, but knew that she was not the dreamer that Llurence was. And watching him fall beneath sleep, she did not think it was good to be either. 

At that moment Claudelean surrendered to her fantasies. She acknowledged what she been driven to do and what it was she thought she wanted. But memories were bubbles and she experienced how coming too close, thinking they were tangible, would make them burst into invisibility. They were not balloons either. She could not hold on and carry them into the future. Becoming aware that Llurence would not be a quick and accessible answer for future happiness was substantially sobering. She knew how easy and even enjoyable it had been to fall back inside the memory of him often. He remained to be seen as long as her memory stayed to be looked upon. But it was time she let it go. It was time she let the memories leave her. 

She needed dreams—the dying of controlled consciousness and the descent into the most encompassing darkness—to erase the nuance of the night. In her sleep, she could talk to herself as if she were alone and no greater than a child speaking a language of her own invention. Her eyes closed with a final thought, The distance has changed us both.

Mando Diao - God Knows & Sons + Daughters - Guilt Complex & Last Shadow Puppets

also, New Young Pony Club - Ice Cream. The good/overwhelming fact is that music, photography and words are endless and forever in production.

Tuesday Times

CLICK: Berliners Get a Crash Course in Glittery Celebrity Culture

Follow the above link for The New York Times article on a recent Berlin exhibit and their understanding of celebrity culture. I am telling you... the best thing I ever did in Berlin was go to the Helmut Newton exhibit.


CLICK: Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes.

The above link takes you to a phenomenal article on mirrors - self versus other, self-enhancement and recognition, self-delusional, physical self versus projected self. "recapitulate the scene they face, mirrors are like pieces of dreams, their images hyper-real and profoundly fake"

scents are responsible for memory coming to life.

tonight i pulled down a box from the top of my closet. but before i could empty old frames to store inside the box, i had to pull out the other boxes that were inside the larger one. nestled inside - never used and forgotten - was a wooden box he had given me. i had probably only touched it three times and opened it once, i am not sure why, but if i had to guess it was because i never have enough luggage space to bring back all i would like to from miami to manhattan. without even unlocking it, the signature scent of him permeated the space i was surrounded by. i sighed within, remembering how prior to giving it to me he had promised it had been soaked in his cologne. it had been. and almost a year and half later, it still breathes his presence. inhaling i am immediately reminded of our intimacy. i had forgotten and i become flush even admitting that. his scent, living within this box that is no larger than one index card and a half, evokes me backwards into a time that was beaded by our being together. a scent that smells of all the nights we got made up together, of hotel rooms from coast to coast, of suitcases brought up multiple staircases, of letting myself fall to sleep on his oxford shirts, of waking early - showering alone - and surprising his still sleeping body with my own in wake reflecting the morning glow. a scent that exists to me not solely because of him but because of us. a scent that signifies and signals the many moments and magnitude of minutes of us living on and in each other.

but i wouldn't live forward with the same scent living on. i wouldn't erase memory, nor would i ask that it had not changed and let me, him, us, the surroundings moment by moment become something new.

i remember

what can be said for any of our selves? we have our stories, but is it more our memory that we need? don't we need one to have the other? supposedly it is our experiences that shape our relations. and then, well then, it is our reaction(s) to the experiences that define us. i remember how necessary i use to believe experiences were. i use to think without their evolution, i was not advancing, that i was not growing. i feared that if i did not change, that if i did not transform, i would become less of a person. then three years ago - now almost four - things did change. i began having memories independently of others. my experiences were internalized. how could i possibly prove their significance if it was an affect that took place within the interior? i began learning how little it mattered to prove or share or ultimately, to perform. i went on trips, alone. i felt the trips. i rode buses and sometimes was silent for hours. at times, i found myself speaking intimately with a neighbor passenger - sometimes at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere between boston and manhattan, we would speak as he smoked his cigarette and as i stood, freezing, and having not eaten for hours. once there was a train - there were delays and set backs and there was a conversation with an older and terribly attractive man who spoke profoundly and with clarity. he turned out to be a famous actress' father but i was much more interested in him than her. he gave me his card, telling me to call, assuring me it was what he wanted. but it stayed on my desk and then it went missing and i never called, though i still know i should have. there were boyfriend visits to manhattan, surprise rose petals across the bed and glasses i broke in a drunken fall inspired by nervousness due to our distance. when i pulled away in a taxi, he said "adios" and i knew it would be over, sooner than later. there was a trip to berlin and dragging my suitcase through the middle of poverty. there was a taxi cab honking that he was here to take me to the airport, but it was three in the morning, the hotel was silent - still and sleeping, i dropped the key in a slot at the front desk and then discovered the doors were all locked and no one was there to help me out. i remember deliriously racing through the hotel, trying to pick locks until i was finally free in a courtyard and trying to climb my way out. tired, alone, scared, unable to communicate. i remember having the same taxi cab driver in three different sections of the city, recognizing each other, talking the entire drive and feeling like i was saying hello and goodbye to my best and only friend. i remember taking the t to a bookstore and walking down three stairs, finding my way into a dimly lit shop where three book lovers stood talking and flushed faced and puzzled about where the bret easton ellis reading was, turning and watching a dark haired man walk in with the same question. we were in the wrong place, the newspaper had made a mistake, it was a ways away, we would have to drive. i remember him driving - this man i did not know - a doctor with a bmw. i remember walking up the stairs of the bar and hearing bret read like a madman - the place packed - me just an adorning fan and the doctor handing me a glass of wine. i remember the event ending and staying downstairs drinking and talking off all the days i had not socialized in what was so unnatural for me. i remember him driving me back into boston, his car circling the commons. i remember going to his apartment first - nice, immaculate, dark, a couch, trying to kiss me, trying to finger the fold of my legs. i remember that being the closet i ever came to ever cheating - having no desire to, only the desire to not be so far from the closeness i desire. i remember manhattan in the early morning, waiting in a long line for casting. i remember hours and hours and the answers to their questions - and how ironic it would all be now. i remember the moment coming to the first cut. i had ten seconds to speak, to make something, introduce myself and make it memorable. "hello camera number one, my name is chelsea leigh trescott. i am five foot nine, from miami florida baby, and i can't wait to see you again." i remember being chosen #321. i remember exiting the street, deflecting cameras and interviewers, getting into a cab, turning around and looking out back and thinking that maybe today was the day it began. i remember coming for another round of casting, the finales. enclosed inside of a room, nothing personal was secretive. dramatic stories, beatings, raps, pregnancies, insecurities, stripping, drugs. i remember the casting agents trying to make me into something. but i did not have a cruel story. i was a thinker, provocative in the past. inspiration, intrigue, intensity. i remember being the largest girl at the americas next top model audition. i remember feeling exposed and scarred. i remember having to walk in our bathing suits. can i wear a one piece?, i asked hopefully. "not if you want tyra to think you have something to hide. the answer is no." i remember the girl with the eating disorder - and then several months later, i would be that girl, too thin to deny her health and never able to entirely forget its happening. i remember los angeles in the hills - being alone on my laptop in a big house, feeling like a guest, an intruder, a girl with a day off, jetsetting like a snob. i remember a cab picking me up and how he looked like he was doing anything to become an actor with his white pressed shirt, black tie and ray bans. i remember laughing out the window at how strange this city of supposed dreams was. i remember being in rags on a balcony with my feet dipped in mud and paint. i remember open windows and people trying to catch a view of the man with his 19th century camera and me, the model. i remember lying on the ground and trying to look half alive. and then there were the breaks and smoking his mentale cigarettes and truly feeling half alive. i remember him saying, "what is great about you is that you're not exposing your skeleton. i meet and shoot so many girls with fur arms and spinal backs, but you - your naturalness is beautiful." i remember everyone commenting on my hips. i remember the shoot being over and flipping through his stacks of books and thinking, this is how i want to be, encompassed by art and curiousity. i remember meeting a blue eyed boy and loving our conversation. i remember ending up on a couch with him and him kissing me and gluing his body on top of mine. i remember losing attraction immediately. i remember knowing that it was because it was a white couch - a friend's couch - the couch i had had sex on the night before with the boy i truly wished i was with. i remember claiming i was tired, too tired to go on. i remember not even believing myself. i remember knowing it was the second time i had used the excuse and how unlike me it was. i remember believing that if you are interested in the flesh that sits before you, you never are too tired not to proceed. i remember being so tired for so long and maybe i was only dreaming. i know one day i will wake and i will think "i remember". i remember being there and feeling alone.

beck - gamma ray

in general

sitting at dinner, i could see them - without turning my face to look - watching me as i spoke elsewhere. i had noticed them doing it the day earlier, as i sat around the circle table trying to play host. it wasn't some paranoia of others possibly observing or simply listening to me, but it was a wonder if they were observing something new, perhaps someone different. and then she leaned over to me on the right - i was sitting at the head of the table. "i feel we are seeing a different you." my face froze, i lost all ability to act smoothly or at all. it was her certain way of framing the comment - as if not to say, we feel you have changed but we feel you have personas, and this is one we had not known. yes i fear i am a bit more shy, i responded. she continued, "it was always just so wonderful to see you with him. you were so comfortable, natural. it was such an understanding relationship." i knew this had been what she was thinking. i knew and silently feared whether i had (in an obvious way) grown different now separated from the relationship. in terms of days, it is so distant from this present moment and yet, i get reminded and questioned about it at random. i only have one response and it is the same one i told her, there is a playfulness i have when i am within a relationship. i don't miss him. i miss that part of myself. the playfulness that keeps me young.

i'm turning 21 tomorrow. i hate birthdays. it is like valentines day or new years eve - this pressurized expectation to be happier than you have been. and with birthdays comes the supposed dedication to yourself an involvement around you, which i am also uncomfortable about. however, if there is one wish i can make and one way i can hope to see myself within the year, it is to focus my mind within the moment, let the outside drop away and to be looser, to feel myself come free.

an awakening i had when i was in my writing program last month was when writing/speaking to not assume that others desire things so different from myself. in other words, generalizations. assumptions that make myself sound arrogant. it is difficult. it is difficult "saying it as it is" and at the same time being sensitive. the line in my in-the-making-novel was: claudelean and llurence were possessed by a desire to communicate ideas and experiences. they did not disguise their thoughts and were not insecure with the exposure of their feelings. they did not talk about people, unless they were discussing themselves.

he circled the passage with a note, "wait. doesn't everyone want this." it was true. these two characters were not superior to anyone else. their desire was basic and yet, i was using it to make them important. i have so much to learn. he also said in discussion that he believed these two characters would have the most successful relationship only with each other. they were sensitive, mysterious, passionate, intellectual, relatable yet their love worked best when it was used on each other.

i wanted to laugh, but it may have been fake or just forced. it is often agreed that an author's first novel is the most autobiographical.

listen to: neil halstead - paint a face.

is it that at times there are such things you want to say, but can not mindfully agree on the way to say them, and so you don't? the moment passes right beneath the inactivity of your tongue and yet, the thought remains (changing its perspective ever so slightly and with that there is also the chipping away of its intensity). you loose the time (or perhaps the time looses you?), the situation and perhaps the will to ever reveal what was kept enclosed. in terms of the immediacy of the physical presence, would it have made a difference had you shared and spoken? i think most people are fearful of exposing an active change - and so, if you had spoken, they still could have appear unaffected - but internally, who knows. behind the veil they could be experiencing an alteration of the nerves. why do we all make it so difficult to be awake to the moment? why are thoughts dream glasses altering the images that compose life? i wish the delicacy of impressions could be made known. i wish other's feelings were not protected and made forbidden. i wish we could easily say it as it is and not worry about the self being unveiled. i choose vulnerability (in other words, risking the chance of being affected) over ego. i am sure i may appear unconcerned, but if one would only ask - if only i wore my thoughts across my face - the scenario would be so different. perhaps dramatically? there has been a handful of times when i have walked unknowingly/unprepared into a room enclosed by mirrors -- it has usually been a bathroom, or even a rearview mirror and i have not known who it is i see. yet i am alone and that image is me. and she often appears tough. but appearance and reality is so far from the same being.

this vs. that

thought keeping.

yesterday, he mailed me a letter i wrote him. he said he saved it and had just reread it. it truly touched me and this was because when i had originally sent it to him, i had not gotten much of a response and had worried he had taken offense to it. it goes to show you, you never know when, where or why you may effect someone and you never know at what corner of their heart they may be keeping you or your words.

april 16, 2008, the letter was this:

thank you for always making it special. there is a quote, "i feel i could never possibly love anyone wasn't distinguished." and although it can be at first recognized as sounding pretentious, i do believe it - you are very special and i love you and your personality. regardless of any feelings that "could have been burt" at that italian restaurant we went for lunch, i enjoyed listening to you - and believed every word you said. i really see that your best interest is in making everyone happy, and that having to make the decisions, too, is bound to make someone -anyone- feel short changed. there was an article in the new york times last week about two very successful but criticized fashion designers. the reporter explained, "but, in a business of illusions and self-denials, it is interesting and even brave that they are willing to put themselves out there and invite the judgmental people to make judgments." such is life - even the very few closest to us will make judgments, but if you continue to have good intentions, it will never be at the expense of your success. you have the best intentions and it will always bring about success.

cheena.


i remember the day the letter was reflecting on. it was lunch at an italian restaurant in the italian section by soho, manhattan. italian is my least favorite food, the restaurant seemed depressing before we even sat down and we laughed in prediction that this wasn't going to go over well. it hadn't. i remember the tension and having to avoid the self-consciousness of any other families or couples looking at our table and how broken we seemed. i remember sealing back the tears and removing myself to the restroom. i remember coming back and listening to him speak as he buttered his bread, repetitively in nervousness. i remember knowing that i was listening -entirely and with complete interest- for the first time. i remember the sincerity of emotions his words induced. i remember hearing his strength become him. i remember watching his strength. i spoke up really for the first time and sided with him. we left and walked through the maze of manhattan, hoping to get lost, hoping to find ourselves. but we avoided everything and it made me uncomfortable and so i left - not wanting to cry, not wanting to face the secrets that were being revealed. he left and a few days later i sat in class reading the newspaper, secluded, isolated in my mind but entirely aware of specific surroundings (this is something i can't avoid, though i wish i could). the article moved me, despite it being about the fashion business and designers i thought were -in terms of celebritism- selling their pride. the next night i sat on my bed with a pile of clippings substituting a bedspread. i wrote him that message, needing him to know that i was listening to him and that my "thoughtfulness" was not only for personal things within my interior but were the displays of my exterior environment, as well. i wished so badly that i could explain to anyone and everyone, but him mainly, that i have grown quiet, shyer and perhaps more self-aware than i have ever been. i wanted the explanation to be an apology for no longer being as willing to speak and reflect on just anything. but i knew that this change had been my decision - and even though i was not entirely comfortable with it, i was consistently becoming more specifically that way. i never provided an explanation. instead i provided a quote and the truth is i have a book of quotes i have been keeping - and may have a quote for each fitting mood - and it is when i share and send a quote to another that i wish them to know they are often within my thoughts when i am reading the words of a mind and most moved (but i so rarely send quotes because there are just a few i think so constantly of).

the moment i understand her in my mind, i embrace her fully married life, a film.

dream by the day

What does it matter if sleep takes advantage of us? The falsity matters, perhaps because, we will learn to believe it, expect it, favour it—favour the dream world, favour when our eyes are closed. 

~

I try to remember us. Anything of us. Is it difficult or am I not trying? I will try. I will try to get us back. I remember an aloofness on both parts. Distant, removed, discrete, ultimately shy and masked because of an unbefitting nervous inspired by expectation. We both carried titles. Titles that tried to divulge our persona but provided no help in explaining our interior character.

framed.

I get a phone call from Chase, an old friend that moved to Manhattan on a whim last winter. It was nothing he dreamed about. He said he came by accident. He invites me to a social gathering. I tell him I will arrive fresh and pressed by eight. Thirty minutes after my intended arrival, I walk through the doors. Appetizers were placed like a centerpiece that everyone hungered for but did not touch. The room danced with life, color and laughter brought upon by lubrication. Women sat in chairs and their dresses made them look like they were poking through a flower in bloom around their waist. Men could be heard purring to their partners.

I showed up at with a frame around my neck. I figured Manhattan was the city of character, so it was the least I could do to fit in properly. But when baffled guests asked me what called for such peculiar behavior, I could only smile with my eyes, and them alone, pause as if waiting for silence to speak for me, and finally say if one were to take part in a spectacle, he better look spectacularly. And then—as if ready to finally clarify myself and give excuse for my appearance—I only expounded upon the former. Oh, stop speculating and let us experience the extravagance!

I never teased, although everyone felt they were silently being mocked. I got the sense women opposed me for no reason that laid claim to who I was, but rather how I made them feel. And if one knows even the slightest about a female’s interior, it can be guaranteed that this was the worst way to affect another woman. Essentially, to be capable of making a woman feel was proof that one mattered. And this was a power that, in turn, made them feel powerless, which was a vulnerability they would never admit governed them.

A nameless female with her back to my face, turned and displayed the constellation of freckles sparkling across the landscape of her skin. Her wish was to speak with me. She spoke, “I heard the words you used to talk and I think you are arrogant.” I thank her for the shallowness of her thoughts. Women disliked me for my courage. It was an awareness that ironically gave the impression that I was removed from critiquing my sense of self and they disliked me because it was a quality they knew, not admittedly, they would love to have.

Men observed, trying to compare me to other women and finding it impossible agreed I was motivated by confidence. Framed in sight, I could tell they found my poise fascinating and my assurance refreshing. But it is my intensity, which always intimidates them—a consciousness of my mind in sync with the physical, that makes them insecure that they know nothing of their own—my elusiveness which creates a challenge. And it was because of this—and this alone—that their admiration always stayed at an elementary level and never matured to become real.

03.05.08

03.05.08
Oh, I, I love you still. Your brown hair that dangles with an air of being unkempt but is secretively stylized. Your lips that look swollen. Your deep-set eyes that pull one in, instead of cast one toward the outside world. Your room of mirrors, where you spend more time observing yourself than even I, the female. Your towering canvas of art, where I can find my name mingled between the heavy prose. Did you really write me inside the art of your life? Are we, together, a purpose of and in art? I still love your bedroom and the stairs that led us up into seclusion. There were no windows, no light to tells us when. Lovers don’t consider time. We were left all alone, avoiding everything but the bodies of ourselves. Your bookshelves heavy with praise and you translating to me in English. The meaning felt different. Your single bed, fallen flat on the floor. You said you were embarrassed. I wondered how you could be. And then you thanked me for being in your space, inside your world, for spending the night, for falling for a while. Our bodies tangled and posing, I could still see the spine of the poetry volume you read from. I will never forget hearing, seeing and knowing to remember his name, Saul Williams. There are lines that I still tie back to you. They are nothing tangible without you. They mean nothing without our memories. You slept and I was kept up to the sound of your snores and the unbelievable reality that I am here—there—sharing space and invited to sleep beside you, watching with one woken eye, taking mental notes to remember this by.

~

I remember writing the above. It was a spring afternoon in Chelsea, Manhattan. My sister and I had been running around for art direction finds. I was in a warehouse with two stories devoted to props new—mainly old—for films. We wandered off separately, her with her list and me with my camera. Letting our eye’s curiosity take us in different directions. Then, I sat on the pink stairwell and wrote the above, knowing at the time how silly it is and thinking how trite it was. But now reading it, I still know how silly it is, yet that is the reason to love it, for it’s innocence, imperfections, candidness. But it was not trite—those moments all proved to be important and engraining, they were unique for me—personal in their own right—and the memory still feels fresh, ever changing but continually surprising. I wish I could remember more of everything. But I am always left with gaps, dips in time, questions and it is then that my imagination—my hopes and fears of character—fill the moment’s factuality.

07.08.08

I feel contained—self enforced. I feel I won’t release the tension that consumes me, that closes me in. I have digressed. I feel I have. I speak less. Sometimes—most times—I just do not know what it is we are talking about, or rather why it is we are taking about such a thing. I know it is because our time together is more limited, so there is a mixture of expectation, intensity, plea for depth, bond and relief. But I feel inside my self when I am supposed to be outside. We talk and then we end on a disagreement and all I have to say afterwards is that we were talking just to talk, discussing just to discuss and it was a disagreement because we never cared to actually involve ourselves in the discussion.

I am just anxious to finally get to Miami. I have a strange idea that once I am there I will be able to gain control over myself. Have clarity, feel less pressure, breathe better. But who knows. I need to be proactive if I want the change to occur. A month and a half ago, I had a breakdown and thought Miami was an immediate answer. I talked about even signing up for a program while I was there to talk about weight and my never ending fight against it and myself. I want to be better so I can live freely and so I am better to be around. I have been feeling so not engaging. My sister and I have been fighting for the last ten days. That is another story, but it doesn’t help. The separation will be good and that is another large reason I am coming to Miami. I need time to regain my esteem, my self-belief and a healthier mind so I can continue my dreams, my production, my activity and find a balanced lifestyle in Manhattan. I don’t want to just live there, I want to be living there.

darkness in the middle of the world.

“Let’s go out and sit in the middle of the world. Come, why don’t you be with me for tonight, just until the plug is pulled on the stars and the night’s skin turns black? It shouldn’t be long, but if you want, it can feel otherwise. Come, it will be up to you.”

Facing forward, we sit in the field. Behind us is the cabin casting sheen into the open air where the windows are drawn to the night’s moans. My hands stay buried beneath the earth, grass flowering where my separate fingers create cracks, while I turn the side of my face so my eye catches our behind. It looks like a lemon is floating in mid-darkness or perhaps it is more like a sunset saturating a corner of the night. Either way, each color is contained perfectly, making sure not to fuse or bleed into the blackness. Blackness: this color our bodies have been drenched in.

The night’s texture feels thick—heavy air that pushes on your chest and makes your eyes blink back tears. But I, I feel weightless. We are saying nothing, but it sounds like voices are being stretched between, before and beyond us. Possibly people of the past trying to be heard a final time, trying to sigh the sounds of an orgasm that they’ll never forget, trying to tell us to just live.

“It’s all happening,” he says. “There is no use resisting it any longer. What will be will be. What is is something special, regardless of the specifics. I am here to make moments memorable, as memorable as they can possibly be. And what did I make sure to do tonight?”

To come sit beneath a sky you cannot reach and look at stars you cannot touch.

“No, no no. If I close my eyes, things can happen differently. I can reach the sky and I can hold the star I choose. Distanced from the world, I could feel closest to my self and the reality that is real. Close your eyes now, too. Are they closed? You promise? Okay, I made sure you came out and sat beneath this all-encompassing sky with me. I wanted you to see why it feels safe here with the sky stretched out before you—with the wish that as you fall for sleep, the sky will embrace you and hold you in. Claudelean, if you could have one wish would it be?”

My response is spontaneous, unplanned and therefore closest to my mind’s immediate truth. I would wish to live in the present moment.

I fall back on the ground, the bed of the night. He does after me. Both of us lie looking into the sky, like a mirror we stare through it, intrigued. The air sounds soothing, nothing is here, nothing is around us, just trees bending in the distance and animals kept awake. I wonder who is more artificial, nature or us, but I keep this resonating in my interior and do not question it aloud. “Everything is unreal when you see through eyes of love,” he says.

He seems to be purposefully vague and allusive, as if he has been laying out clues that I am oblivious to. I finally ask, What are you thinking about?

“Not thinking, just seeing.”

Well then, what are you seeing?

“The night’s hair is full of dandruff. Which means the day has probably not been washed away. Maybe waking dreams are unforgettable. What are you thinking?”

I feel my feelings as I think them.

“What are you feeling?”

Well, I am just not sure whether I have come along way or still have more to go. Looking around, I see there is no walls and I think how everything is escapable and how I should just run, shaking myself sober from dreams. But at the same time, I think I am sitting in the middle of the world and seeing there are no walls. I feel like the night must not be tangible or attainable and I wonder whether I am just the same. See, it is night out, my hand drops down in front of my face, and although I can feel it, I only see blackness. I feel I should fear I don’t exist.

Just as I am finishing speaking, he kisses me. His lips push into the budding of my mouth. His hands finger my body’s stem. The sky’s color palate trickles into a plush pattern, streaming tears like ribbons across the sky. And for a moment or more everything seems made certain.

I guess I exist, I say with assurance.

“Yes, but you will always seem unreal. The reality is it is within your very being to escape me. That is why I asked to have you for tonight in the middle of the world with no one else. The night whispering its falling, your hand appearing like it is holding an arrow, your ever present taste, but it is your eyes that give me all the light I shall ever need to have to know we both exist now in the middle of here. And if I always have this moment held within my memory, we can both exist in the middle of here forever."

is it more so, a writing of the mind or the soul?

the road whistles, coils and fabricates the journey home. daddy drives and mamma counts down the descending degrees in temperature. i sit staring out the window, looking beyond myself and back at you. time moves and the car is carried with it, as i shed layers of ourselves in memory. with eyes closed to consciousness, i feel your fingers woven inside the pocket of my palm. tightly holding each other, we make our own stamp of being. our skins sweat as the night's skin turns dark. dreams preserve the history of our affairs - we feel each other now and then. if you saw me now, you may say i look most natural, but really i just feel common. i am rather ordinary when i am out of love.

-i have tried to write you out of myself. still trying.

a fragment of: Solitude in the Heart of Manhattan

I walk all day and forget that my depression, too, is what has exhausted me. The night arrives again to occupy the city, so the streets leave and become busy elsewhere. I come back to my bed and Chase is gone. The sheets are straightened and it looks as if we were never there, but I can feel us. A note sits where my head had been lying and it reads, “I don’t understand. You disappeared and I waited.” I do not care that he has gone. He was not the dream I came to the city for. He was not the skin, I dreamed of dreaming upon. I do not care that he has gone. I do not care. Liquid washes over my eyes and I cannot see where I am. I find my phone, place my ear to it and wait for a reassuring voice.

Llurenence answers, “Claudelean, my Chelsea girl.”

I am not living in Chelsea. I live in the East Village just behind the park.

“That sounds nice. Well, good night my Manhattan girl.”

No, the night has not been good. My dream is not what I imagined it would be.

“I want to go to sleep, Claudelean.”

Please, stay, speaking. I plead.

“It is hard to talk to you. I want to but do not believe I am able. Your leaving me has left me with exposed wounds. I am inoperable.”

I didn’t decide to leave you though. I didn’t plan to go away with the idea that if I returned I would not see you.

“I was not prepared for Manhattan to steal my love from me. I never thought I would have to compete with a city; a city that I haven’t ever even been to, but which took you from me.”

It is not how it seems, Llurence, believe me. You do not know how much I miss it all.

“What specifically?” he asks.

Well, for one, the sight that sets in Miami. Living in Manhattan, you forget what else exists—you forget what else is real. But being here now, I see what I have grown to miss: the Miami horizon where the sea and sky come to kiss. But that is just a metaphor for a time when the two touched and fell beneath each other once the night curtained the city.

“Come back to us then.”

I can’t. I dreamed I would stay.

“I don’t believe you,” he cried.

I want to go to sleep inside Manhattan. I want to wake and see frozen framed windows and watch snow fall from the sky.

“Wake up, Claudelean. This is all unreal.”

Manhattan is a dream, but not the dream I dreamed of having.

pulpy flesh, feather lashes.

Q.
What is the history of one’s love? He composes a letter, licks the folds, seals his voice shut and inside the pressed envelope he has recapitulated a dream, a dream of her. Is that love, or perhaps, the origin of romanticism? The way the woman mends the sweater that warms her. How does it feel to be touched? The woven fabrics stretched like skin across flesh. Does love start at the birth of every person mending figures into their skin?

Q.
Stars splinter the violet skies pitched low. The world flips upside down, as you stare up, watching clouds carried across your melon eyes. The soft bedding falls and hangs upon your lashes. In the wind, stillness lingers, and you cry out against it with the hope you will help it be moved. But your very words get pushed back into your throat and are kept there to unravel like a ball of thread, a knot of knowledge.

Q. On Account of Myself/On Behalf of Us Both
I must! For it is time, I say, I introduce another character to speak with me.

Q. Consolation of Writing
The comfort comes from observing ourselves, acting upon our thinking mind, preserving a passing self, seeing that we exist—knowingly.

A. The writer must observer continually.
Q. And what is it the writer observes?
A. The writer observes himself when he is not writing and when he is writing.

Writing moves us into a perspective of ourselves, that forces us further than just simply thinking.

Q. The discourse between the mind and her eye
I am captured, captivated, by this never attaining demand to know it all. The child in me is back on the scene of my more adult life. Demanding growth through knowledge. I am astounded by how much my work has aged, matured, strengthened in one year from merely using my eyes to read, my mind to store.

Q. For we create our own misfortunes and they bear our own fingerprints.

The body of the written subject takes form of its own life—wanting to control its own conscious and decide it own actions. Struggling to disengage itself from the wrappings of the sentences, the bindings of the text.