Renting identity, just for tonight…

Tonight was one of those nights. My book became too boring, and my conjuring of dreams turned to smoke. Drinking anything made me end up in the bathroom, pissing it all out again, and then ending up (back on the bowl) with more racing thoughts. So I decided to crawl towards the all familiar nodules of my keyboard, and begin to type out and idea that had been troubling me for a while. You see the thing was…a while ago at college, there was a competition to write a poem on the theme ‘identity’. I’m (by nature) reasonably prolific, and so just handed in one of my older poems that needed little oil and elbow grease to be presentable. This theme of identity still raced around my head and I thought that I had to do it enough justice, and make the topic pinned down and conquered (in my own head).

So I took the word identity. It was eight characters long, and had four syllables. You may ask why this is at all important, and the reason is that for a change I wanted to try building more of a puzzle than a poem. I took the word further and broke it up into i/dent/ity. Still not satisfied, I decided to turn the ‘ity’ into a word and then end up denting whatever the ity-word happened to be.

Sometimes I think writers need to feel more relaxed and loose with words. If you are restricted by too many rules, then your creativity is blocked, because you’re scared of making a mistake. This is part of the reason e.e. cummings is such a massive success, he is today. In his era everything was strict and formal, like having a whole crowd of parents around you telling you how to eat (except they were critics). He threw his hands in the air (metaphorically, of course) and decided to write without using any grammar. He was young and wild at heart and decided to run with the creativity rather than the fear of messing up.

That’s what we’re told in school, isn’t it? We first learn to write, and then to write in cursive and keep it neat and tidy. Even when we color in, we’re taught to stick to the borders and be good little boys and girls. Well by the time the freedom of varsity grabs you and your big ideas, everything that HAS rules seems rather infantile now, and you decide to squash it. So the piece you are about to see it partly about experimenting, but then also about being honest. This is another trap that artist’s fall into, IMO. They’re scared of showing what they really feel and want to say… because if they do, they’ll have society cursing them.

 

That’s another WHOLE topic all on its own, so it’ll just give you the poem instead

 

 

PhilosopherPoet

 

 

identity

 

i dent (p)ity

and the morosembrace

crawling over

our bones

 

i dent (gratu)ity

the feel that

comes once

you’ve given your

beggar his coin

and a bin to lie in

 

i dent (the sh)itty

cigarettes that crawl

out of her mouth like

burnt worms.

i told her

once to stop

this habit of

collecting smoke.

 

i dent (tranquil)ity

with my morning

fart, my wife leaps

out the bed like

burnt toast.

 

i dent (deform)ity

when i shave

the morning after

the stag. i carve

up the face

i use to have

 

i dent (moral)ity

because god is dead

last time i looked,

and remembered

to check my

religious opinion.

 

i dent (char)ity

with a furtive shout

i gave an old man

who should have quit

trying to help

 

i dent (formal)ity

because i’m an ass.

i can’t chat at

supper, or mutter

at weddings,

button my shirt, or

clean out

my psychopath.

 

i dent (proxim)ity

i draw borders

you won’t always

find.

i listen to voices

tucked behind

 

our pseudonyms.

Some Deviant Art Favourites

Here’s some images I really liked from one of my favourite web sites…

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PhilosopherPoet

Young Bloggers Have Ear of Fashion Heavyweights

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/technology/14youth.html?_r=1&nl=technology&emc=techupdateema3

September 14, 2009

By ALICE PFEIFFER
PARIS — At first glance, Dirrty Glam resembles any trendy online magazine. It features famous faces like Lilly Allen and Sienna Miller on its cover, and combines fashion, film and music reviews with celebrity interviews.

There is just one thing: Dirrty Glam’s entire team, from editor in chief to public relations manager, is between 19 and 22 years old. The magazine, based in Paris, was started three years ago by Alie Suvelor, then 18 and now editor in chief.

“We’re young but this isn’t a hobby, this is our full-time job,” said Ms. Suvelor, who also serves as stylist and writes for the magazine, which is in its 24th issue and has an English-language version.

The magazine and other fashion blogs and blog networks are helping to give young entrepreneurs an early entry into journalism and winning some of them a place in the notoriously competitive fashion industry. Other sites include TeenUgly, an American-based blog network; the blogs Susie Bubble, based in London, and Childhood Flames, from the United States; and Cherry Blossom Girl, a blogger and designer from London.

“Traditional fashion publications are all learning to adapt to this new force,” said Géraldine Dormoy, the online fashion editor for the French magazine L’Express.

Ms. Dormoy, who is in her 30s, has been on both ends of the fashion media continuum. She created the blog Café Mode five years ago and was later offered a fashion position at L’Express, a widely read weekly. She continues to produce her blog.

That a younger crowd is making its mark in online journalism should not come as a surprise. Tools available on the Web — in addition to the proclivity of younger people to adapt to them — has made it easier to create a Web site, blog or network.

“Today’s teenagers never had to discover the Internet,” said Tomas Gonsorcik, head of intelligence at the social media consultancy Interaction London. They were “almost predetermined to master the new means of media and communication in a way that is qualitatively much richer than the older generation.”

Mr. Gonsorcik said the online projects presented many advantages. Blogging tools offer simple layouts that resemble Web sites, making the blogs and other projects almost indistinguishable from traditional online media, he said.

At the same time, Mr. Gonsorcik said, they “reach out a demographic beyond their own by the very ability to sit side-by-side their older competitors in the search engine result.”

And they have been received and recognized by the fashion industry in part because of the value it places on self-training.

“Fashion is one of the few fields which accepts people with little formal training,” Ms. Dormoy said. “Through these blogs, these young girls show their ability to work as stylists or photographers.”

Some of the efforts are attracting advertisers. DirrtyGlam has ads from the clothing retailer Miss Sixty. The online luxury boutique Net-à-Porter has partnerships with DirrtyGlam and Red Carpet Fashion Awards, a blog that comments and rates celebrities’ red carpet outfits.

Alison Loehnis, vice president for sales and marketing at Net-à-Porter, said the new generation of fashion blogs was attractive because it had “a wonderful viral capability” and allowed the company “to connect and interact more closely the potential future audience.”

American Apparel, the sportswear brand, advertises on all the major fashion blogs, like Teen Vogue; and Childhood Flame, produced by a 15-year-old from Portland, Ore., Camille Rushanaedy; or Fashion Toast, by Rumi Neely of San Francisco. It also created a personalized ad for the online fashion journalist Alix Bancourt, the Paris-based creator of the Cherry Blossom Girl blog.

For Chictopia, with more than five million unique visitors a month, the reward has come in the recognition. The fashion-blog network introduced TeenUgly in 2008, which is produced by high school fashion enthusiasts and features offers to share and comment on outfit snapshots.

TeenUgly rapidly met such popularity that the editors, ages 14 and 16, were invited to New York Fashion week in February and reviewed several shows for Chictopia.

Sea of Shoes, a blog from Jane Aldridge, 17, of Dallas, gained such a following that she was asked, in June, to design her own line of shoes for Urban Outfitters.

Similarly, the British blogger Susanna Lau, better known as Susie Bubble, and her blog Style Bubble, has just designed her own line of clothes, produced and sold by the online retailer Urban Collection. Last May, Ms. Lau, 24, was also made commissioning editor for the online edition of the British fashion magazine Dazed and Confused.

Some say that making the move from amateur entrepreneur to worldwide recognition highlights the intuitive aspect of fashion.

“Fashion is subjective,” says Keith Pollock, executive online editor of Brant Publications, which publishes art magazines and Interview, the pop culture magazine founded by Andy Warhol. “There are very respected fashion journalists that can evaluate the state of the market. However I don’t see how a fashion editor’s perspective on a Prada shoe is more valid than that of a teen blogger in Evanston, Illinois.”

toothpaste tubes

Toothpaste

Originally uploaded by James Almeida

This morning the toothpaste tubes
were fornicating.
Clamped in a sticky embrace, and
creased
at the
caps.

They sunk into my soft palms:
crinkled, embarrassed, and naked.
It was a first.

The window dew heavy with sex,
my toothbrush a slender finger,
two shower taps turned tempting,
and it would never be the same.

In the bathroom this morning
The toothpaste tubes set it off.
They never let go after the first
kiss

A zip flew down, the first domino
dived, a buckle blew off, the symphony
started

my hand was stained with
toothpaste.

Book Dilemma

This morning was one of those mornings (for me), where you find yourself lying in bed for an extra five minutes meaninglessly listening to the radio. You wait for the guilt of wasting time in bed instead of doing the morning chores, to override your current impulse of listening to more news. Eventually half of me decided it was time to get out of bed, this time it was the heavier half. So I managed without oversleeping. I did my morning ritual of staring dumbly into the depths of my bookshelf, for not particularly reason at all, other than that I seemed to be doing the same thing every other morning.

The First Copy of the book I bought

 

Still half asleep, and feeling lazier than most days, something on my bookshelf jolted me to a sudden and frightening freshness. I have two copies of the same book! I’m a Don DeLillo fan at the moment, and I realized that I’d bought two copies of the book Falling Man. This was on two different occasions, and the two books I had had different covers. The first time it was when I was at a book sale on a leisurely weekend stroll through the mall. The second was when I was in a rush buying groceries. All my brain registered at the time was the Author’s name, and the fact that I hadn’t seen this cover before. Both are still in good condition, so I came up with a cunning plan. The book with the most attractive cover (the second one in this case) will be my personal copy. I’ll read this in due course and then rave about the book to my friends and lend out the other copy, to further promote literacy. This way I can not worry about my favorite books being lost to the terrible clutches on friends.

This is the Second Copy I bought. The image above is of an audio tape, by the background image is the same as what I landed up with.

 

This experience has haunted me previously. It’s ironic that your most favorite books you end up recommending always get lost in the clutches of some long-lost friend you can’t find on facebook anymore. Sigh…anyway I’ve decided now that I’m going to draw up an inventory of all of my media. This would be books, films, music…and so on. I think I need to start keeping up to date with discs that go missing. The handy thing about music, is if I recommend an album, I’ll download it…and then make a copy for a friend or two. Alternatively if I do happen to buy the original, I’ll still make a copy of the disc for a friend. It’s logical and sensible. Unfortunately I don’t have a pocket printing press I can slap on the counter, and run off a few extra copies.

 

PhilosopherPoet

Chapter 20

This morning Gregory folded his clothes neatly in the basket. They were fresh off the line and he then decided to make sure that everything else that he did, that morning, involved some of sort of cleaning. If he were to be totally truthful…he hated cleaning up. It was a personal nightmare. It felt like he brain was slowly eroding away with each menial step he continued to take. Although he’d now learnt that phrase “Someone’s got to do it”. It rang in his head like an equally annoying alarm clock.

While cleaning up his radio blurted out Bon Jovi’s song, Living on a Prayer. Although whenever the chorus came he bellowed out “aaaah-ha living on my owe-hone”. It seemed to comfort him now that he was making his own way in the world. It wouldn’t have been his first choice, but he was starting to like some of the choices he was starting to make.

“Fuck you.”

The following song was a Katie Perry song, and a pet hate. He abruptly turned off the radio, and continued to shuffle through his pairs of socks. Since cleaning up and washing up after himself, he’d started becoming a lot more forgiving with certain knit-picks he’d had in the past. For example, he’d had an issue with socks. Gregory was by no means a perfectionist, although socks had started to wander into that category. Gregory had had the belief that socks had to match…no matter what If he ever saw some forgetful person wearing to different kinds; he’d mentally berate them for being so sloppy and untidy.

Since he’d moved out of the house, a lot of Mr. Tweedle’s opinions had begun to change. Unfortunately the subject of socks was one of them. This is because he simply couldn’t be arsed to fold them up so they would look pretty for a week or two. There wasn’t enjoy time in the day to spend an extra twenty minutes, going through the of sock folding. Instead Gregory he came up with a much better idea. The idea was to have a sock bucket. One little bin where you clean the clean little soldiers ready to be unleashed upon the world. It was far more creative, not to mention that everyday now had an element of surprise in it.

Gregory threw everything in his sock bucket, and left. He had business to do.

 

PhilosopherPoet

Personal triumph and a tragedy

After watching the most drawn-out and brutalized TV series in American History, I feel like more of a survivor than the people I was watching. I’m talking about the series Lost. Call me a bit slow but I only just finished watching Season 4 recently.

And you may now ask, why watch a series that you’re already calling terrible? Well, to be entirely honest, I went along with the crowd and saw through the first two seasons. After that Season 3 came along, which seemed bit-sized in length so I decided to whip through it and watch it. I kind of forced Season 4 upon myself now because I needed a break after writing exams, and since I’d eaten my way through 90% of my movie collection…Season 4 was literally staring me in the face and calling my name.

So I’ve now ploughed through a record of four whole seasons! This feels like my biggest film achievement ever for some reason. Even after watching the entire series of Battle Star Galactica (2004) I didn’t feel so tired, weather-beaten…and damn hungry. I’ve made a mental note in the process, which is to steer clear of commenting on any films that has any kind of survivors and/or island-based theme.

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, I feel better

 

PhilosopherPoet

It’s all about the Popcorn

Well this is what I’m thinking every time I go watch a film. Everything else is pretty much the same…the chairs, the sweets, the seats, even the Coke seems to taste better when I drink it from my little bottle at home. Okay the picture might be a lot bigger, and the sound louder…but at the end of the day you only have one chance to get the jokes without someone laughing before you do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Call me a cynic, but I still enjoy a good old laugh at trends we seem to follow. Think about it even if you have an attractive date with you, you’ll either end up leaning over the chairs and trying very hard to smooch elegantly…or you’ll watch the movie and enjoy two whole hours of ignoring your date. Then the laughter comes …

Should you laugh when she’s not enjoying it? Or wait until the very last moment for her to burst into tears, appropriately try to stroke her leg without looking like a pervert? Movies are tough when you’re not in your own worn-down armchair. They are the most tough when you’re not curling up with your cat, lover, cocoa, or teddy bear. So I’ve got a better idea….wait for the DVD… Mostly when I’m dragged to the cinema I end up sitting behind an NBA player, or right at the back with an erotic couple. In other words I forget most of the ‘memorable’ movie, and come out thinking about basketball or tonsils.

This is my game plan then. Rather support the local video guy who’s been dying for someone to talk to the whole day. The odds are you’ll have time to choose what you want. Plus you’ll been saving the money you’d have spent on the food and the ticket, and using half of that to buy a large pizza to share. And my personal favorite…you can pause it to go take a leek. So if I’m not being anti-social and crude, think about it rather being sociable at home with better food and cleaner chairs.

Then maybe you can even watch the w-h-o-l-e thing again?

 

PhilosopherPoet

Chapter 18-19

18

Gregory had an ugly confession to make. It was the kind of confession you’d rather be mumbling to someone well-proportioned with a gun, or some spindly-legged 18 year-old American teenager who hadn’t taken his pills…or to be more specific to no one at all. Gregory had to have a few swigs of his favorite brandy before even having the interview with the Narrator.

The fact was that Gregory was ‘over-estimating his age and responsibilities’. These were the word that bounced out of his father’s mouth with the ferocity of a paper shredder. His poor mum simply shrugged off two tears teetering on the tips of an emotional outburst. To be even more honest, Gregory wasn’t a professional programmer. He did love computers, and electronics…but the only major success he’d had in his short-lived adult life were the few comments anonymous people threw at his blog.

Gregory was a reasonable lad, and this sort of confession was normally far beyond any twenty-four year old…but the inevitable had landed on him. This was probably more painful to admit than his previous fabrication of his identity.

Mrs. Tweedle had a dear a fragile face. Gregory had once heard that ‘a face is nothing without eyes’. He thought about this, and decided that Mrs. Tweedle had fragile eyes, careful hair, and a tightly worn mouth. Come to think of it, it could only be the eyes that were fragile because everything else in Phillipa Tweedle had had the urge to resist gravity as much as possible. To be more specific Phillipa was one of those people that words like toilet, sex, slippers, bath, and hike were seen as fearsome challenges rather than exciting possibilities.

Despite this she waddled over to the foot of Gregory’s bed one evening. She sat down rather promptly and in her dear voice said, “Munchkin…there’s something we need to discuss…”

His blood went cold. This was not because The Wizard of Oz has given him nightmares fifteen years earlier, or because she had taken control of his legs and voice at the same time. His blood turned violently cold because she spoken that ‘cursed phrase’ that hadn’t come out in a very long time. Every time she spoke it, his dignity rarely lived to tell the tale (or in most cases, the saga). Soon after the morbid introduction Gregory came to learn the following…he was to move out of the house.

His mum had made it sound so simple and silly, that he’d hesitated on uttering ‘yes’ to her rhetorical phrases and suggestions. Basically he’d learnt that they were doing a lot of kicking…and he simply had his hands in the air like a criminal. This wasn’t a misrepresentation either. A few weeks later – still fuelled by the injustice – Gregory had crawled into an internet café and posted his thoughts on his blog.

 

20 ways to leave home, get a job and become a psychopath

 

Recently I was kicked out of house and home. By recent I actually mean that I got this news a good couple of hours ago. It’s so fresh in my head that I still have to remind myself I’m moving out tomorrow and being banished from freedoms, and thrown into the chains of commercialism and the claws of capitalism. Allow me to demonstrate with a list resulting from three magic words, no well-meaning citizen should ever hear.

They kicked me:

1. Out of the house.
2. Out of my warm bed and blankets
3. Onto the grimy streets that await me.
4. Into the company of people (drunk and hung-over). I heard that one of them studied Philosophy soon after he had memorized ten shooters from the eight clubs he’d been to.
5. Into unemployment, and millions more strangers staring at me.
6. Into a house full of people. They politely call this a ‘Communal Dwelling’ which feels more like a concentration camp of chaos.
7. Away from the Internet (which was my intellectual warm bed and blankets).
8. Away from my parents. Despite my swearing at them, this means I’m still going to have no one to drive me to the bus stop every morning.
9. Into the murderous rain. This is due to pt. 7 and other ways that they are telling me where to stick it.
10. Into Laundromats, filled with the lower class somberly staring at the cycle of clothes and suds. All I was thinking was: Where The Fuck Is There Telly Around Here
11. Into dirty newspaper stands. Because after a few evenings in the pub you forget about the news, and because you’ve spent you hard-earned money drinking…you now have to squint at the headlines of The Guardian, through the rain and with a hangover.
12. Into the hands of the Coppers. (see pt. 18)
13. Into a fast food store. The most words you’ll ever say over the phone are “Please stop shouting at me, I’m only a cashier.” And then very occasionally, “I can’t make the cooked-spider disappear from your fries.”
14. Away from people that had a good sense of hygiene, and table manners.
15. Far away from any kind of domestic animal. The only thing I can pet is my drunken roommate when he’s throwing up in the toilet bowl and not my sock drawer.
16. Away from people who have a sense of moral decency to remain sober. (The opposite is equally frightening – see pt. 4)
17. Away from a clean fridge that stops food from going off. (i.e. it never malfunctions)
18. Out of the reach of my favorite breakfast cereal. The last time I saw it was in a supermarket. It was the very last one in the aisle, and so it was between me and the old lady.
19. Onto the street (with millions other people who don’t mind poking you in the eye with their umbrellas when you forgot yours in the door of a train).
20. Into dirty internet cafés (where I’m typing this and trying not to think about the yellow stain on the left-button of the mouse).

 

19

Months later another computer geek got hold of this very post and decided to email it around to every school mailing list he could hack into. This did not go down well for Gregory. Within a period of a few days he was subsequently armed with a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a lawyer, a dietician and two social workers. When a tabloid reporter later asked the reason for all of this he replied, “My Mum’s eyes are the only thing about her that is fragile.”

After a year bulleted by, the newspapers (thankfully) had now found another Tsunami to investigate. It left Gregory to his lonely devices of drinking, insomnia, gaming, smoking, and watching late night TV. When one stray reporter did remember to do a follow-up…Gregory gave him the number of his shrink. Which made the newspaper read:

When I asked about the condition of the infamous Kick List Conman, his psychologist reported that “[Mr. Tweedle] is in an emotional, but stable condition.”

 

PhilosopherPoet

self Portrait titled: New Hairz

new hairz

Originally uploaded by Zlarcae

Another interesting image from my browsing on Flickr today…

PhilosopherPoet