Presentations vs. Speeches

A presentation is not a speech. To make a good presentation the presenter should fade comfortably into the background. His voice should be difficult to remember the source of, like a voiceover in a documentary. And like most documentaries, the presentation should be easy to digest, should demand nothing of the audience. Of course, making it easily digestible is always a little risky. The presenter must assume a person to whom he is speaking. He panders to an ideal audience of which at best only a semblance is present. What makes this slightly easier to carry off is that some of the audience will genuinely and agreeably imagine themselves to be this person to whom the presenter presents. But there are also varying levels of resistance to the notion. Some may be offended or bored, or on the other hand confused.

I have set about to do something impossible: to write about about the immediate experience of writing. One has to get some distance somewhere. I have chosen to use music to put myself somewhat elsewhere to write about being here. This way I can only hear some of what’s going on around me. This is similar to Virginia Woolf’s goal of “life-writing” but differs in its conceptualization of the writing process. Language alienates its subject, and the signification process may only take place in the gap between the subject and the object of representation, or, as the case may be, the gap between the subject and itself. Case in point I’m writing theoretically about how to write experience as it unfolds rather than doing so.

Again there is someone diligently writing in a small notebook with whom I am fascinated.

Words Are Useless, Especially Sentences

I began this blog as an analytic outlet for myself, which as a bonus might be read by others. Increasingly I don't have much in an analytic vein to say, or at least nothing terribly coherent.

So for now: highlights from the Madonna "Bedtime Story" music video. So much of this video makes me giggle, beginning with the line "today is the last day that I am using words."  Apparently it was written by Bjork. That figures; it sounds like her. Although it also fits very well into Madonna's 90s philosophical didacticism. (A tendency which in 2003 yielded this lyrical, uh,  gem: "there are too many questions; there is not one solution; there is no resurrection; there is so much confusion.")

This man looks very familiar, like he was filched from a famous artwork, I just can't think of which.

A spinning object that's both phallic and vaginal!

Lovers with mirrors for faces. LOL.

Focus

I suppose the problem is focus.  For the sake of discussion, let's not throw this out immediately on the valid grounds that focus is not an adequate account of the productivity I'm aiming for.  I've been feeling like I've been running on proverbial fumes.  I have multiple blogging projects, and an intermittent desire to continue writing poetry and short fiction, as well as a looming need to plan various aspects of my life.  Lately I feel stuck in whatever avenue I attempt to direct my energies.  I have no ideas.  In this state of frantic idleness I have been sitting in a coffee shop watching someone else write.  She seems very focused.  She has been writing in her journal (a Moleskine of course) for the past hour.  Occasionally she pauses in that pensive way of considering what she's writing.  I'm envious of her involvement.

Whoops.  What was I writing?

The Only Thing To Take Away From Your Father's World Is Electro

Perhaps you could also get his motorcycle and Pocahontas, I mean "Quorra."  Really, though, what is the point of "Tron: Legacy" if not as a vehicle for Daft Punk?  The movie itself was a singularly uninvolving, not even out-dulled by Star Wars Episodes I-III.  And it contains a match cut so predictable I found myself announcing it out loud with a kind of glee.

It's an interesting idea for a movie, anyhow: what does the future of the 1980s look like today?  The movie's answer to this question is, apparently, that it glows a lot.

Making the Best of the Worst

Sight is the worst. Through the eyes wishes come glaring through. It hurts to look. Yes, I think Anne Carson put it best: "sometimes I just want to stop seeing."

When the gaze is reverse the eyes are weapons.  and shouldn't be carelessly pointed where you don't want to destroy.  But they're weapons whose violence derives from the vulnerability of the wielder.  The gap helpless gap beween wishes and vision shoots out and wounds you.  It leaves you grimacing, longing, apologetic, or scared.

Keep your weapons checked.  Look down at the street as you walk.  Don't let them linger too long and keep out of the way of those that do.  There are no safeties.  Bullets could fly at any moment.  Savor truces when possible.  If you can't evade fire, shoot back.  Riddling each other with wounds is the best.

The New Year's Battle

The Battle: Los Angeles teaser draws some interesting connections.  They're well trodden elsewhere (in The X-Files, for instance), but crystalized here.  The sad, synthesized voice singing what sounds like bad poetry ("the stars go dim and the skies turn black") sets an atmosphere of doom as the title cards delve into the premonitory. "There are patterns that cannot be explained."  "There are warnings that cannot be ignored."  At this point the teaser hovers among signifiers that have not yet added up to what the film is ostensibly about, which is rather dull: aliens invade earth!  Let's not go there yet.  Let's play with how the signifiers allude to a history of the present.

At the limits of our understanding, in the ignored periphery of our lives, there are patterns.  We ignore them because life must go on, but they are actually warnings.  The costs of the reproduction of humanity have been building up neglected for too long, we have been too careless, too sinful some might say, for too long.  Witness global climate change, and every other impending environmental catastrophe.  Witness the economic recession.  We know that things are falling apart, we feel it.  But what can we do?  So many things are outside our grasp.  We know so little and can do so little.

With these anxieties in mind the need for an alien invasion becomes apparent.  Standing in for everything outside human limitation, the aliens are a tangible threat. We can fight aliens.  As they drop on smoking trails to earth, there is something pleasurable about the destruction.  Kept on edge for so long about what we don't know, finally what we've been afraid is here to relieve us.

The last three title cards play on the film as an event that depicts what will be the present.  "In 2011 nothing can prepare you for what comes next."  "You" refers to both the future audience of the film and the people it will depict struggling to survive.  But the statement wouldn't really work without an angst about the coming year.

Watching the trailer is like being allowed to give up.  It's beautiful.  I mean, I guess.  The movie, on the other hand, doesn't look like it will be nearly so compelling.

Scene

I wanted to write an entry about how Reasoning With Vampires' vocabulary of grammatical nitpicks points to but fails to adequately describe what is wrong with Twilight.  I'm not sure this is a failing of the blog, however--I think I actually love reading it so much in part because the humour is just slightly exterior to what she rants about.  Instead of writing an entry about that I'll try to write a scene in Lauren Berlant's sense even though I think she does something quite different.

There are a lot of things keeping me from feeling like I can write that entry.  The distractions multiply faster, of course, than I can lasso them into a representative strategy.  I'll resort to a flat list.  When I came into a coffee shop to write this, there was a baby crying loudly.  Everyone was doing their best to ignore it, to maintain the coffeeshopness that underpins transactions.  The reproductive was disrupting the ordinary flow of coffee, money and atmosphere, and people, including myself, were reacting by quietly retreating to the outdoor seating despite the cold.  I wondered if at some point the employees would ask the mother to leave so that the business might run more smoothly.  Why do I find myself falling into describing the kinds of things that Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects allots in its purview, attempting to tap into fields of ordinariness largely ignored by academic gazes?

The coffeeshop's music tries to drown out the sound of the baby and I try to drown out the sound of both with more music on headphones.  On top of this everyone is talking around me.  The auditory confusion becomes a metaphor for the other forms of confusion I'm experiencing.  In another light--perhaps the light of caffeine--it's not confusion at all, but stimulating multiplicity.  There are layers of form that I can float among, never having to sink into the tense, buoyant, cold void of myself.

I have a friend who hasn't really been my friend for years.  A couple of nights ago I saw him play in a band at a bar, and I talked to him afterwards.  It was an awkward conversation.  Awkward is the word I use when I can't really understand what exactly is tripping us up.  One word I used later was "wall"--our walls.  I came because his facebook status reminded me that his band was playing that night.  His facebook status half-joked that there's no reason for him to worry about how they sound because it was a New Year's show, and nobody would really be listening.  I referred to his status, laughing about it and saying that everyone seemed to enjoy it.  He said they were missing their guitarist, and that he wondered if anyone noticed.  I laughed and assured him nobody did.

He also has a blog, the latest entry of which relates their rehearsal sessions leading up to this show.  There was too much chaos, and there were too many people missing.  The circumstances were "not optimal," as he puts it.  The blog entry supplements my encounter with him, explaining the misunderstanding that "awkward" had deferred.  He felt like things were going wrong, and that he was the only one aware of and trying to correct these impending or ongoing disasters.  The guitarist being missing was one of many problems he felt that he was managing.  I was one more person ignorant of what to him was overwhelming.  This realization gives me a pang of sympathy which soon gives way to pity for his cognitive distortion.  He wants everything to be perfect, and thinks that everyone can see the same failings that he sees.  But they don't.  That night they were busy dancing their hearts out to the music that to him was falling apart.  In their drunkenness they were straining to celebrate, to feel like the "new year" is a beginning rather than an end.  At the same time I had been straining to find all the private nightmares I was convinced are always occurring in loud bars.  Of course when I strained all I saw was people having a good time.  It's somehow poetic that one of the nightmares was taking place for the person whose musical performance was setting all this in motion.  It's a speculative, retrospective perspective thrown together from times that I've felt this way and from the psychological navel-gazing of his blog.

His blog is a way for him to climb briefly out of the rubble of his life and have a look at himself.  Through his blog he strives to be someone more than who the blog describes.  He is constantly searching for the root of his problem and attacking it when he thinks he's found it.  He's always catching up to himself.