Marriage, Moving, and Interior Design

Soooo, moving into a new place in Pasadena, shaping and forming it. Difficult configuring a new life, the uncertainty of it, the desire to shape it as a shared experience when your significant other is having a great amount of anxiety surrounding, or perhaps triggered by, this very process. As a foray into interior design (not my forte), I've been scouring the internet for something offbeat. Something 50's, black and white or sepia toned, a cafe picture, someone smoking a cigarette maybe. New York? Paris? San Francisco? I don't really care. I have a vague picture in my mind of the thing, but cannot conjure it, no matter how many artprint.com websites I google. I checked in town, but my knowledge of LA art print shops is limited. Any ideas? I checked out Wacko, Book Soup for some reason, 3rd street promenade. The thing is, by now, you come across the same thing over and over and everything looks generic. Any ideas? I'm off to Amoeba Music tomorrow. Maybe I'll find something I'm looking for, except with Sinatra or Dylan or James Dean on it instead. I would have preferred an anonymous subject, but beggers can't be choosers. Maybe Vroman's has something cool. Or maybe not.
Summer is here and a wedding looming next week. We did go out to Malibu yesterday to get sunburnt and sit in traffic for two hours on the way home. Fiancee in panic mode and I at least partially to blame, inasmuch as I had nothing to do with her family structure and past pain. On the other hand, I am not the most proactive person when it comes to practical things. Me taking the reigns in certain areas would no doubt alleviate some of the strain, buuuut I'm me, so how do you work this, what's it called? Screwdriver? I just want to listen to some music, maybe have some wine, unwind, plan some things for the wedding, play some basketball, go to a movie, read a book, go to sleep, start over. I think it's customary to spend time with friends during such a time, which is actually difficult in LA, even though I have some friends who live quite close, it's difficult to find common time. Speaking of which, I received a call from a very old friend, who I haven't seen in 9 years. He's getting married in a month and a half. Somehow I think his transition to marriage is running a little more smoothly than my own. But then, each relationship has its own identity I suppose. I'm actually just pleasantly excited to see old friends and family, some of whom have never met. I just hope my fiancee makes it down the aisle without passing out. Seriously, we're at that point. She assures me it's not me, it's marriage itself. Whew. That's a relief. Cos for a second there, I thought you were going to bail because it was me, but if you just bail cos it's marriage, I'm fine. Seriously folks, I'll be here all week. By myself, maybe, but I'll definitely be here. I signed a six month lease, after all. Aaaanyhoo, tomorrow happy days are here again, cos it's guys night at my place, or at least, technically guys night, seeing as we'll spend the night trying not to spill wine on the new carpet. How the mighty have fallen. Maybe I should keep the Oxi Clean handy. Then Mom flies down from Portland for damage control and pre-wedding help. Thanks Mom! (that's her on the left) Lessee, Monday, Michi flies over from DC. The plan was to hit either Chateau Marmont or Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge for afternoon drinks. We'll see about that. Then we'll do the Sideways thing. Going up to Buellton, staying at the Windmill Inn eating at the Hitching Post, which I liked, but Karla didn't and Michi definitely will. We'll take in some of the wine in the Central Coast, Santa Barbara County stuff, hopefully stay sober so we can drive back in time for dinner with Mom and Karla.
Then people will start trickling in at both LAX and Ontario airports and we'll make our way to the Mission Inn to get ready for the wedding. C u there. Cheers!

Seeing our shadows... or dehumanizing others

Ooo. Highfalutin' title. I like it. Thinking lately about the two opposed kings which encamp them still, in man as well as herbs, grace and rude will. Here, Shakespeare is talking about that duality which exists in nature, brought about by, well, what? The erotic? The daimonic? The force that through the green fuse drives the flower? It's that force that drives human passion. When we integrate it into ourselves, into our society, it becomes a constructive force, love, creativity, etc. When we fail to integrate it, it becomes a destructive force, violence, self-mutilation, suicide. Both are connected with passion. It strikes me, just as it has other, smarter people, whose ideas I am ripping off, that when we are presented with the destructive manifestation of this energy, we in our Western, Judeo-Christian-cum-Hellenistic dualism, call it sin and castigate those, identifying them as evil, etc. "How could someone do that?" "Why do they hate us?" "Axis of evil," etc. It's this dualism that is the problem. We project our own inner demons onto whoever the baddie du jour is. Nazis, Commies, Al Qaeda, Iraqis, whoever. These would be the enemies of the conservative. Or, if you like, liberals project their inner demons onto fundamentalists, conservatives, Bible-thumpers. In both cases, labels are dehumanizing. You and I do it. Whoever you say "God, I hate those type of people," about. This constitutes a kind of spiritual violence, a psychological violence. Yes, this even applies to the socially awkward gaming nerds who occupied by room, until recently, at every break and lunch.
It is also this force that drives us toward learning, a thirst for knowledge, understanding. Isn't this, at its heart, a desire for communion of some kind? Of connection? To truth? To something beyond ourselves? Although, I suppose it can also be done for purposes of status, to measure up to some standard, internal or external, real or imagined. Rollo May brings up Oedipus in connection with this. He solved the riddle of the Sphinx (he had knowledge of man), he ruled the city in relative happiness and harmony, until the outbreak, (he had power). But he lacks self-knowledge. He does not know who he is. One reading of the story is that his relentless pursuit of the truth, even though it causes his downfall, is heroic. He strives toward self-knowledge, even though it has a high cost. The cost of knowledge today? The cost of tapping into that creative energy? It is true that the learned of each era have to wrestle with the demons of their era more profoundly than the simple. Is this a worthwhile struggle? Increased knowledge brings an increased sense of responsibility, but not always increased power to affect change (debatable). Increased knowledge brings increased fear and anxiety. Still chewing on how this connects to the driving force of Eros. I had this experience last night, tired from the day, changing channels, nothing but American trash on the television, none of it engaging interest, passion. None of it would make me anything but dumber for having watched it. Soooo, I pop in a DVD about the Romantic poets, something educational after a mind-numbing day, something stimulating. Then Karla comes home, who, I know would be bored to tears by it, so I turn it off. In her defence, the footage they've chosen to roll when some of the poetry is read is absolutely ludicrous. Romantic poetry doesn't translate well to the screen apparently. So there I am, leafing through Kubla Kahn , trying to remember old scribbled notes from college, and then I flip channels again, Karla comes home, and it's either House MD, which used to seem like a good show, but the formula is wearing thin, or America Has Talent, which is what Karla prefers, featuring the talents of David Hasselhof as cheesy at it gets, and Jerry Springer as the color commentary. How many more signals can there be for "dumbed down, consumable trash." I'm tempted to go off on a rant about how trashy insta-entertainment is incompatible with a life of the mind, yadda yadda, but then maybe it was my state of mind at the time. I was in high culture mode, and could brook no indignities, and she had just come from a youth meeting of some kind or other and wanted something brainless. Although I don't anticipate ever being in the mood for Hasselhof and Springer and the spectacle of the caricatures of actual people that perform on the show, and I do see this being something of a recurring problem, maybe I shouldn't make thaaat big a deal about it. over and out good buddy.

Art Exhibits

Three cool art projects. One, the insanely beautiful and traveling exhibit (was in Santa Monica last year, somewhere in Japan at the moment), exploring the relationship of man and the animal kingdom, deeply beautiful and haunting Ashes and Snow. Another one, I don't mind admitting, I filched off of Barry Taylor's blog (Never Mind the Bricolage), explores art in nature, the underwater scultpure exhibit. Yet a third exhibit is at LA's sort of hipster M+B Gallery. The exhibit is called Another Night Upon Us. It's shot through with some Beat type themes, isolation, community, consciousness, drugs, San Francisco, rebellion, counterculture. That stuff. Originally, this was a set of poems sent by Marcos Johnson to actor Joaquin Phoenix, who decided to ask a photographer friend to translate the poems into visual art. The exhibit pulls no punches and this definitely explores the shadow side, but never, I think, in an exploitative way. Not exactly conservative, but hey, neither am I. Check out the exhibit here. Check out the LA Times write up here.

Vocation

Sooooo, at least 8 people over the past 6 months have uttered the following phrase to me: "I can totally see you teaching college." Perhaps this comes from my frustrations teaching at the High School level, but this is an intriguing prospect. Now, it's true that I love ideas and conversation, but it's also true that I'm a crappy, sloppy, ill prepared, unorganized High School teacher. I mean, I'm improving, prospective future employers, I'm definitely improving. Another problem is my memory. I just picked up a book I began reading last month, but was interrupted through moving, wedding plans, lesson plans, and forgetfulness. I remembered enjoying the book and respecting the author's synthesis of disparate information, from Hegel to Picasso to Freud etc. aaaand it's actually practically worthwhile (the book is Love and Will by Rollo May), buuut I had forgotten any of the book's contents, and had to reread half of it. I had forgotten the book's CENTRAL THESIS. Disconcerting. Then last night I'm watching a program on the Augustan Poets (that's late 1600's I think)...Dryden, Pope, those guys. And one of the profs interviewed for the piece reminded me why I loved English classes in college, that confluence of history, philosophy and the beauty of language. But he also reminded me I don't know much, or at least I lack the framework, and that deep attentiveness that good profs have (on the heroic couplet, he says, "it appears to resolve something, you gather experience and concentrate a comment on it in this seemingly resolved couplet. there's a real sense of structure and order to it, a strength and resolve" If asked about the heroic couplet two days ago, I might have said "I think it, like, rhymes.") Of course, he's much older than I am and finished his PhD, but he spoke no differently than my old English profs, and if I get into that line of work, I have a ways to go. I actually had to pause the DVD and ponder, before moving on, the following point. Let me paraphrase: "It would be a mistake to characterize the Augustan Age as an age of reason. In 1690, John Locke publishes his 'Treatise on Human Reason' [or something]. And in that, he posits that all mental processes, however complex they might be, derive from sense impression, from experience. So it's up to individual to order them, to marshal them. So there's a real sense in which ("there's a sense in which" is every English prof's favorite phrase), out there, things are not so ordered, and there's a real need for the creation of order, which influences greatly the way the 18th century sees itself." Now, I may have read some John Locke, I really don't remember, and I certainly don't remember any of his main ideas, let alone their hhistorical context and socio-literary impact. I do remember something of the Romantic Poets' reaction to Empiricism, and their clash against stratified, logical-linear, scientific method, positivistic, reductionistic worldview, which is not my favorite either, although in my later and less vulnerable years, I am able to see the value of structure and order, even if it is not my natural ally. And reading May today reminds me I am lacking an overall framework. I may have bits and pieces of information rattling around upstairs, on poetry, on theology, on psychology, a teensy bit on philosophy (the most difficult for me to remember, because I can't form a mental image of how, exactly, Heidegger differs from, say Schopenhauer, and how he, in turn, differs from Hegel. Somehow, these bits of information haven't congealed. All that to say, should someone with a mind like a steel sieve be pursuing a Professorship in English? Hmmm.

Only Trouble is Interesting

Sitting in Zeli in Pasadena, sipping a mocha reading a book on Zen. Ah, just like the good old days. The TV overhead has the news on, only with captions and the sound off. It's Paris again, in or out of jail or sick or born again or talking to Paula Zahn or whoever about her week long ordeal. Real things are happening in the world, real things that need to be addressed, but we've moved from wondering who Anna Nicole's baby-daddy is to tracking a do-nothing blonde's (with naught but a good PR firm to her name) legal woes. We invest meaning into these things. I'm wondering about troubled people in therapy (myself on occasion), I'm worried about the difficulty of relationships nowadays, the myriad mini-dramas that unfold, the longing for a different life, the fear of being boxed in, the fear of committing to something that might be limiting. The soap opera of it all, and then I remember a maxim from writing seminars: Only Trouble is Interesting. Hmmm. If this is the guiding principle in story, and we pump our heads full of story through television and film all our lives, how would this affect our basic worldview? Trouble = Drama = A Fulfilled Life? Can we take delight in mere contentment? I have heard it said recently by friends of mine that "they don't feel interesting anymore" or they've "lost touch with who they are." Caught in constant study or a daily routine of work that is somehow compartmentalized from their essential identity, they feel disconnected. Maybe this is also connected with our mobile society. Disconnected from people and places, the network of relationships that comprise our identity beyond our minds and bodies, we suffer recurring identity crises. One way of avoiding this is actually losing oneself in the workaday routine or study. But the respite is temporary. The problem is self-knowledge, self-discovery, an essentially spiritual problem, it seems. Not that study and work or anything for that mattter is divorced from the spiritual, but maybe we divorce them from the spriritual through lack of attentiveness. I wanted to say something pithy like "you can't solve a spiritual problem through intellectual pursuit alone," but maybe that's a little too Wayne Dyer. The experiences and definitions are a lot more fluid than that. The overwhelming questions remain: how do we cultivate a sense of spiritual depth and a sense of meaning? One difficulty I'm finding is that the traditional answers become stale very quickly. On an intellectual level, I would say community is of utmost importance. On the ground level, however, I find myself quickly cynical about any community I've been a part of. Not that they have nothing to offer, and not that I have nothing to offer them, but the conversations begin to repeat themselves, people return each week with the same problems. We sound like one note instruments. Not only the topics, but who will say what when soon becomes predictable, seemingly trite and obvious. Soon, things plateau out, the relationships seem shallow, the community itself strained and self-perpetuating, the same language, the same rhetoric which never lives up to reality. On the other hand, I'm also tired of being cynical and being thus divorced from community. A vicious cycle. A rambling blog. A tummy craving coffee...I'd wish you a good day, but then, only trouble is interesting...

Link of the month...

...because I'm too lazy to put a link of the day, or even of the week, for that matter.
So, da homey BT has a great little rant about the confluence of soft pop culture and Christianity. A nice quote from Graham Ward thrown in for good measure. Enjoy.