Sympathy for the Devil, and 39 other saliva-laden ballads

Self-loathing and jejuneness are such bourgeoisie symptoms. Spare me your complaints and trepidations. No, I am not interested in your middle-class routine. Go buy yourself a pretty dress and wear it to the ball, show it off to the faceless and the anamorphic, but watch out! Those disarming smiles are loaded with razorblades and they will devour you! I've got some bad news for you sunshine the groovy mellow notes you shamefully paint yourself with will not save you from the violating jolts of the big bad motherfuckin' electric gofuckyourself. Be not so fearful, the nice doctor will save you. He'll give you that hystarectimonious shot in the leg and will set you on your gilded-paved way. As for me...well, I've got to go meet the man with the moving camera by the crossroads at midnight. He said something about helping me out with these blurry blood vessels that run from inside my eye and into my nose .It'll cost you, he said. So now I'm down that smoke stuck inside my solar plexus from those cigarettes burned during that cold life-affirming morning.

Silver

An interesting quote from Godard's Masculin Feminin:

"We'd often go to the movies. We'd shiver as the screen lit up. But more often, Madeline and I would be disappointed. More often we'd be disappointed. The images flickered. Marilyn Monroe looked terribly old. It saddened us. It wasn't the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make... and secretly wanted to live."

I could not help but to re-transcribe Godard's words. There is something so...tragically beautiful about it. I don't particularly share Paul's sentiment concerning his disappointment with the movies. I don't think the magic of watching something larger than life play before my eyes will wear off. I cannot think of anything better than to be bombarded with flashing images and thunderous sound. It's epic. There's nothing else that causes me to entirely surrender myself--not one single thing that consumes my soul and holds it captive.

There's a part in Catcher in the Rye where Holden disdainfully comments on people who are always in a rush to get to a movie, stating how they looked like it would be the end of the world if they missed their movie. I must confess, I always feel a strong sense of urgency , giddiness and anxiety as I'm heading to the movie theater. I cannot even begin to fathom what I would do if I missed the opening credits.

I'm also very particular about where I sit. I love sitting somewhere in the middle, not too far behind lest I begin to feel detached from the experience, and not too close so as to avoid being subjected to straining my neck. I love to feel the warm glow of light bounce off the screen from the projector and just covering me, embracing me.

The thing about sitting in a movie theater is that it's such an engaging experience. The screen demands your full attention on account of its grand stature. You are left powerless, and it consumes your soul.And yet..And yet it is not a passive experience; it is not like television. On the contrary, it's very active and demands total immersion from its viewers. I am not a religious person, and quite frankly I doubt I ever will be. In spite of this, however, I remember going to a church service two Easters ago that just enthralled me not because of its religious content but because of its rituals. It was cinematic. It might sound hyperbolic, but I feel the most spiritually at ease in a movie theater.

And with that said, it is difficult to ignore the escapist nature of film. While I am a strong believer that cinema elevates the soul and the being, it simultaneously provides an escape from one's own reality. I find very dissappointing whenever a movie ends and the credits begin to roll. It almost feel like any metaphysical and existential cleansing I had just experienced dissipates.

It is no real secret that I have cinematic aspirations. I would very much like to actively craft and recreate this experience for others, as well as for myself. Part of it stems from the obvious self-absorbed reasons--self-validation, fame, adoration, etc. But another part of me wants to contribute to the betterment of the human condition; to provide a means and to facilitate the improvement of our society. Of course, to even think such thoughts is absurd and somewhat even delusional. Do I honestly think I am capable of doing so? Quite frankly, I'd rather not answer this question because I am afraid of what it would reveal to me. I would very much like to think that someday I will try. I think what scares me the most is that if I did try, I would fail miserably, and would come off as nothing more than pedestrian and uninspired. It's somewhat paralyzing, particularly because my biggest fear is to be that: mediocre. On the other side of the coin, however, I have this strong inkling that maybe I am destined for something like this, almost to the point where it borders on being someone who possesses delusions of grandeur. I could only hope that this part of my personality will eventually win out and take over. Yeah, it's scary to think of yourself as someone who will fail, but then again, I think it'll be more depressing to think that I didn't even give myself an opportunity to fail.

4:22am

At this moment, more than anything, change and transformation are so elusive and paradoxical. In order to bring about change, one has to constantly and endlessly repeat said desired action until it is incorporated into routine. The quickest way to change is to pick up tried and true habits.

Random Musings

I remember this conversation I once had with Rachel in which she stated that she was "scared for [her] soul." Her concern was not theological in nature, but rather, she was worried that she was losing her sense of self; what was at risk was her personal identity and how she viewed hers place in the world. At the time, I found it difficult to understand why someone who was in her early twenties would occupy herself with an existential crisis. I think I understand now though. In a couple of weeks i'll be seven months out of college, and there's definitely something to be said about trying to figure out who you are. It became easy (at least for me) to develop a sense of self and personal identity while in college. After all, the institution is structured in a manner where your choices--what classes you take, who you become friends with, the extracurriculars that you participate in, etc.-- end up defining you a a person, both to others and to yourself. I knew who I was.
While I can't fully claim that I don't know who I am anymore, alot of the things that helped flesh out my character are no longer with me. I must confess there have been moments where I've been terrified that who I was in college was nothing but a farce-- a caricature of a preposterous pseudo-intellectual who talked about the politics of who-knows-what--and to a certain extent, yeah I was that guy. But I was only a product of my environment. Did I talk of such heavy philosophical things because I was forced to? Did I regurtitate Barthe's argument on myth-making because I truly believed it or because it was something to do? With that environment gone, I find myself somewhat worried that all the semi-coherent and smart things I said were someone else's words. So a new task is at hand; for my own sake, I am going to use this space to figure out what it is I believe in, what my real convictions are. In a sense, I will have to carve a new identity out of the woodwork. I can't say that I'm not overwhelmed, but I find such an endeavor exciting.

I can't Remember if I actually wrote this...

I can’t remember if i actually wrote this...

I found this on one of my old journals. I can't remember if I actually wrote this or not, but its language is so eloquent and the clarity of its intent is so clean that I cannot help but to question whether I was the one who actually penned it...
thought 1:
the passions that drive us should be the ones we respect and admire. to feel contempt for one's own motivations is a vulgar thing. too often, it seems, i've succumbed to less than admirable compulsions driven by this furiously reprehensible machine of mine. so many things inside that i can do without- desires and urges and whatnot. so extraneous.
thought 2:
there's nothing terribly wrong with feeling lost, so long as that feeling precedes some plan on your part to actually do something about it. too often a person grows complacent with their disillusionment, perpetually wearing their "discomfort" like a favorite shirt. i can't say i'm very pleased with where my life is just now... but i can't help but look forward to where it's going.