musings.

I find it hard to write about some things. Love, death, happiness. I can talk about sex as a sort of abstract oncept that is unattainable in its purest form. Of course it is easier to write about concerete things: people, places. But feelings, especially those noble, lofty ones we all aspire to are not nearly as tangible or translatable. Baser intincts like lust are identifiable and can be readily diagnosed. But love is almost obscenely difficult to pin to a board to be examined under scrutinous microscope. Love is elusive and often mistaken, misdiagnosed and manipulated. Romantic love is even more endangered, disappearing from its native habitat at an alarming rate. Of course, love can be mistaken for truth, as in "true love" and then spirituality is ascribed to the most human of emotions. True love is always accompanied by celestial imagery and singing cherubim. But I think it is wrong to give love, a human emotion, a quality of heaven. Life on earth is flawed and love itself knows no perfection. The people we love are dark, monsters at time, and love fades and dies. Love is not truth, and yet one can find truth through another person. One can find transcendence through love, and that is a form of spirituality.

But the clarity of religious experience seems to be more akin to sexual ecstasy. The spiritual nature of love seems to be closely tied to physical acts, and as a societ that both embraces and rejects physicality and hedonism, it is difficult to reconcile the two with words or images. Any depiction of love and sex risks being voyeuristic; depictions of love and sex are stick figure paintings of the real thing. Any film, book, etc. that shows love loses any sanctity through distance and corporeal limitations. I hate watching romances, especially those marketed to single women as "chick flicks." Directors seem to mistake chemistry and compatability for genuine emotional attachment, and sometimes even love. Fairy tale endings do not happen, and it is cruel and at times disgusting to pretend otherwise. Romantic movies set up the average couple for failure, by promising a beautiful ending with happy grandchildren, when reality is
in fact a bitter, dark ending in death, divorce, or apathy. Life is what it is, and love is not truth or god, just the ecstasy and pain of being profoundly human. It is not the grandchildren, or the ending that makes love beautiful: it is the pain and the ecstasy of being human.

I feel it is easier to achieve that beauty through writing. Prose allows for at least the attempt to delve into emotion, whilst visual experiences seem to only skim the surface of emotion. I dislike the omniscient perspective in writing because only deity can claim to know everything, but the limited third person seems to most directly translate the human experience into "reality."

Billy's Dad is a Fudge Packer!

This is the best little short film I've seen in a long time. It has one of my favourite actors in it, Robert (Bobby) Gant playing the father. It's just hilarious. The sexual innuendos are awesome. Anyhow, if you have five minutes, it's totally worth it.

we live in a beautiful world...

"we live in a beautiful world, yeah we do, yeah we do…" — Coldplay, "Don't Panic"

Sometimes I forget that the world is a truly unimaginably beautiful, until a day like today. Today felt like my eyes had been opened for the first time since I was very young, and I saw beauty in the small things. The crack in the pavement like lightening. The scrawl of graffiti across a bathroom door. The way that boy who has the Mohawk shrugged his shoulders, as if water were running down his back. Sometimes I get so lost in the every day murmur that I forget about what's really important. The trees, the sky, the people. I get lost in myself, and I forget the landscape outside my own mind. I think that it is not odd for that to happen to people, especially in a suburban or an urban environment. To escape the dreariness of cookie-cutter houses and boxy skyscrapers we retreat inside, and we create a terrain where we can survive. I think the human ability to adapt to monotony is one of the most amazing things in the world: we survive by noticing the details, or drawing within and finding a garden in ourselves. I think that garden is what we use to protect ourselves from pain, from feeling too much. Because living in little cookie-cutter lives is numbing and at the same time excruciating. So we create a coping mechanism.

And I think that for some of us that coping mechanism doesn't work as well, so we end up sort of paralysed on drugs and what not. Sometimes I'm hate my meds so much I want to scream and scream and fucking scream my throat raw, and then I have to remind myself that they're keeping me alive (ironically enough) and there would be nothing worse than losing myself in that strange fluctuating mess between happy and sad all the time. Anyhow, I need to find my garden outside my mind, and today I was able to reach out and touch something I haven't touched in a long time. You know how when you've been holding your breath for what seems like forever, your lungs burn? That's what it felt like, and it was like I suddenly resurfaced and found sanity just above the water.

My college results shall be arriving from Cal on the fifteenth. And I was freaking out about it at dinner, but now that I've had a little time to think and distance myself, I realise that my self-worth and my journey is not dependent on where I go to school. Agreed, my sexual journey would probably be much more fulfilling and meaningful if I was living in the Bay Area and had all the resources I could ever imagine, but I could just stay here. I would feel stifled at first, but then I'd find the beauty in the ordinary things, and then I'd cope just fine.

hot damn.

Sorry for the neurotic posting, but I just figured something out.

I am a bisexual man trapped in a girl's body.

That's it. For the first time in my life I've been able to pinpoint exactly what is up with me. And it kind of sucks, because I really really really would prefer to be a guy

Slava Mogutin

I wanted to blog for a moment about one of my favourite photographers/artists, Slava Mogutin. Mogutin is famed for being exiled from Russia for his queer writing, and specifically for "malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism and extreme insolence." Anyhow, I'm going to post a few of my favourite photos of his, and then I'm going to give you a link to his site, but I do have to warn you that many of the photos are particularly sexually explicit, and I'm sure that to some degree I am a voyeur for enjoying his work, but I like to convince myself that it's the artistic sensibilites that draw me to his work, and that's true definitely, but there is something insanely beautiful about all of it: the grunge, the BDSM.

Slava Mogutin

Proust Questionnaire.

Ah, Proust, you lovely boy, you. I dedicate this to you!
To see his actual answers, in French, follow this link →



Confessions.
An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, &c.

Your favourite virtue. – Kindness and patience.

Your favourite qualities in a man. – Intelligence.

Your favourite qualities in a woman. – Intelligence, wit.

Your favourite occupation. – Thinking, writing, dreaming.

Your chief characteristic. – Liberality.

Your idea of happiness. – A life spent in artistic pursuit.

Your idea of misery. – A life without love or purpose.

Your favourite colour and flower. – I love red and calla lilies.

If not yourself, who would you be? – I would be… Rufus Wainwright.

Where would you like to live? – Canada! Or Ireland.

Your favourite prose authors. – Jon McGregor, Alan Hollingshurst, Michael Cunningham.

Your favourite poets. – Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Yevegeny Yevtushenko, Anna Ahkmatova, Alan Ginsberg

Your favourite painters and composers. – Rachmaninoff, Mahler, John Singer-Sargent, Rufus Wainwright, Snow Patrol, Bob Dylan, the Doors.

Your favourite heroes in real life. – My friend Eli, Rufus Wainwright.

Your favourite heroines in real life. – Sylvia Plath.

Your favourite heroes in fiction. – John Grady from All the Pretty Horses.

Your favourite heroines in fiction. – Antigone.

Your favourite food and drink. – Food: pan friend noodle; drink: Irish breakfast tea.

Your favourite names. – Eli, Rian, Rafe, Inara, Mikael, Ecke.

Your pet aversion. – Chewing with ones's mouth open.

What characters in history do you most dislike. – Hitler, for his avarice, his racism, and his nationalism.

The natural talent you'd like to be gifted with – Beauty and charisma.

How you wish to die – A painless drug overdoes. Euphoria and then silence.

What is your present state of mind. – Rather bored, kind of musing.

For what fault have you most toleration? – Sarcasm.

Your favourite motto. – "It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end." – Ursula LeGuin