紅葉月

---


" I really hope that it resolves soon..    yeah.   I know that   when I'm feeling.. super stressed and anxious and overwhelmed... for some reason it feels like I'm never ever gonna feel good ever again...     do you- do you get that too?     It's so weird... brains are so weird like that. But then it- it always comes back - it always ebbs and flows and -    no low lasts forever... no matter how much it feels while you're in it like that's your life now - that's how it'll always be - it always comes back around again."

clay pigeons

Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

---

Animated, huge eyes deep with sensitivity staring straight at you. into you. Empathy, warmth, sadness also. Expressive eyes. The feeling she could break into a genuine smile and also burst into tears at any moment.

The thing about her going quiet and pensive and choosing to tell us about her childhood and how she still feels guilty over the incident - she didn't have to keep that in. She could have edited it out. Edited it to make it look like she didn't care. Edit out the way her voice trembled - the long silences, looking down at nothing, avoiding the camera, choosing her words carefully as she spoke. But she kept that in. And people responded to it positively - speaking for myself, that moment of honesty alone - that occurred across oceans, miles away and temporally remote as well, recorded and edited and uploaded probably a good 14 months before I stumbled across it - this rendering of a stranger from somewhere in the globe who doesn't know I exist - What I'm trying to say is that it felt real. felt like being spoken to, being seen, understood, accepted, trusted. That moment supplied more human warmth and genuine connection than I had received in a week.¹

Is it like in the movies? When the actor portrays an emotion so real and authentic that the audience feels it too? Maybe portray is the wrong word. Feels. Embodies. Exhibits. Makes you feel it so visceral and immediate as if it's actually happening to you.

Requires being open and vulnerable. Recognizing that both the good and the bad have value. And understanding that displaying virtue can be construed as boastful, and public sorrow can be considered performative, insincere, obnoxious, false, fetishised, and yet daring, being willing to navigate that middle ground, to walk that tightrope of broadcasting your feelings in a raw and visceral and unpolished way. Attempting to be really truly vulnerable instead of trying to seem it. Attempting to offer something real, to try and connect. To risk the sneer and ridicule and parody and condescension. Requires an odd mixture of honesty and exhibition, of interiority and presentation. Like writing publicly about your struggles or difficult moments I suppose. Like any kind of writing - any kind of art. For it to work on any level and connect and affect a stranger you have to be incredibly authentic and also preternaturally self aware. Skillful in managing how the other perceives you. Skillful in perceiving yourself accurately and acutely. Skillful in interrogating yourself for falseness and truth. Requires you to possess all of the innocence and none of the naivete

---

1 sad, but true ^↩

proserpine / elysium

on my chest
naked and crouching
panties on
the dresser, laced
a stranger
a catholic imagining
yeah
show me some skin, girl
show me under &
beneath
show me what's within

if only my body
knew what my
heart believed
was true

so warm, you are
delicate, bouquet
undressed
your hand on my chest
then you are blood,
a scream thick
and terrible
the release, the desire
the pain

and natures askew
all hell broke loose
so return to
your natural state
you were daughter
of the soil, now
you are also
aflame

Pagliacci

"... that really good art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable"

---

people keep asking about how the joker movie was but 
really it's not a movie you can talk about meaningfully
to someone who hasn't seen it yet
it's that involved and tightly wound and self-contained that
to discuss it you need to go into detail and dissect
which 1. would involve spoilers and 2. some experiences just
aren't really translatable in words, especially if you're
trying to avoid spoilers. 
it's like if your dog has been shot,
or you've had a leg amputated you 
could talk to someone else whose dog
was similarly shot or wounded, or had
lost their leg as well, you could
talk to them about the experience
and compare notes but to someone who has never had their dog shot
or never had a dog or lost 
a limb it would be pretty difficult to describe the experience
qualitatively without disclosing that your dog has died or that you are one limb less now
it's one of those things
you have to go through to understand
and here's the thing, everyone will have 
something different to say about it
and that's part of its genius and intrinsic value
is that it will be polarising 
and stir up dissent, it will start conversations about
topics we usually avoid. it will make us ask questions
questioning others, questioning ourselves, evaluate our paradigms
it leaves us with questions
and the value of it stirring up unique and wildly differing reactions from different 
people is that you can learn based on your reaction to the film
something about yourself. it can
tell you something about yourself
you didn't know before.
that's a gift. something rare. not every film can do that, you know

fall record 2019

1. bon iver
2. soccer mommy
3. ben howard
4. paper kites
5. fleet foxes
6. little wings
7. (broken social scene / feist) - either, or

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"i mean it's pretty but it doesn't mean anything, you know? you switch it off, it ends and you immediately forget about it. but if you turn it into a song -- then it stays with people, you know? it maybe changes the way they feel about the world, the way they think about the world. Right now it doesn't mean anything - but if we work on it -- maybe we can make it mean something to someone."


"um... ok. sure."