turn turn turn

Has the fish ever dreamed of water?
Has never the forest forgotten its roots?
Have the clouds never lived without the sky?
Does love ever stop for time?

In her eyes

A mother misplaces her swollen tears
A child abhors her for the loving years
And the earth will stop spinning centripetally
And we will find happiness
Eventually

Some things in life will never change
But lives are meant to go away

As long as

In the eye of a storm
A way is paved
Clear and warm
Away
From the our lovers we are torn
And born

Anew

Until the next torrential rain
Starts falling down
To meet again
And since we ride the winds of fate
I’ll think of you until that date

And ponder that which never was
That which was always
In your eyes

A culture of thieves

A suburbanite: One who grew up in suburban America, usually white (though not necessarily), enjoys quoting movies, and above all else, feels cheated out of a culture.

I grew up in smoggy suburban Sacramento California, with white bread for my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, 2% white milk to wash down the white chocolate chip cookies I ate after dinner, and white picket fences to keep all good white children from playing in the not so good black cement streets. Yup, that's where I'm from. Middle class white-assed America, where the pay checks were just big enough to feed your fat ass family in front of a forty inch T.V., but never big enough to afford that trip to a different city (as if the family would actually venture off their big comfy couches in order to see that every city's got a suburb, and oh yes, a motel six). No, we were stuck to our jobs, stuck to ourselves, stuck to our obligations as middle class citizens, stuck to the sticky streets of sweltering heat that engulfed the city because everyone seemed to own just one too many SUV's. And we all know, the bigger the car, the smaller the cock; so those in my suburb must have had microscopic genitalia, flaunting fronting forgetting their humiliation to instead bling bling themselves around town, causing the most awful pollution. But I digress. My town was not a very very very fine town. No my town was a cesspool of appropriations, a city of thieves, and a mass of white suburbanites who stole that which they so desperately lacked: culture. The suburbs were the next phase of something grotesque, something with an embedded vicious historicity, something that stands between the authentic and the counterfeit. The apocryphal character of a suburbanite has it’s framework, it’s architecture founded by the will to power (Nietzsche); I will take that which is not my personal creation to increase my own social standing, to make me more powerful, to show my mastery of domination. I will steal your culture, your authenticity, and your ability to claim territory, your notion of truth, to proliferate my own culture of parasites. Hitherto modern times, the classical suburbanite had to physically force oneself into another territory by plundering, raping, and stealing another’s culture. Now, all one has to do is go to the movies and there it is. Every stimulus one desires to become the bandits their families once were, everything one needs in order to feel powerful and dominate, to fulfill one’s own will to power, is projected on a 30 foot scrim at 24 frames per second. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Hollywood was created for the specific purpose of proliferating this type of thievery. And all it costs is ten dollars per visit and three hours of one’s time. It’s cheaper than a whore, and has more of a chance of birthing something brilliant and powerful. And speaking of whores, along with the dissemination of images, sound, and art from distribution conglomerates like MGM, Disney, Universal, Paramount, FOX, etc. came the ability to bleed culture to death, frame by frame, title by title, joke by joke, and drama by drama. And we suburbanites love it. Fuck, we go to three, sometimes four movies per week, just to keep up with the new suburban authority. If we didn’t, we’d be left behind to, god forbid, have to create a culture of our own. But it’s so easy in the theaters. We go into the dark curtain draped domes a blank slate, tabula rasa style, and come out somehow enlightened, informed, powerful. The narratives fit, they say that which we had always thought but could never formulate into words. We now have a better understanding of things that seemed so foreign at one point, we could never have dreamed of comprehending. We go back to our streetlights, our peers, our subordinates, with a feeling of authenticity, of righteousness and loquaciously verbalize our interpretations and critiques of these new and exciting cultural constructs. The re-contextualization of narratives, creating the Meta narratives of suburban culture, allows us suburbanites to materialize into real humans beings. Like Pinocchio once said, "I’m a real boy. I'm a real boy".
-Sid

This is an internet conversastion I had with my mom, long overdue...

sacinmac: are you at your house or your girlfriends?
Mach Siddhartha: we broke up
sacinmac: oh Sorry to hear

sacinmac: well you keep me informed on how you are and keep out of trouble You have to much to live for for any more screw ups Things will work out and eventually you will look back and see how crazy your younger days were when you get older
Mach Siddhartha: they aren't crazy. it is a life worth lived

sacinmac: I will try to help you all I can but please be careful It takes a short time to get into trouble and a long time for it to go away Life is to short to get in and out of trouble
sacinmac: do you have a way to get food like dinner
Mach Siddhartha: life is too short not to live it to the fullest, a thousand times too short to be bored, and when I do get a chance to turn around and critique my life, I will smile and nod and be full of pride
Mach Siddhartha: yes
Mach Siddhartha: i can get dinner
sacinmac: I love you Just remember that when you hurt I hurt too Thats love I love you and worry about you a lot I love it when you are healthy and happy not in trouble

sacinmac: I love the fact that you are a survivor but you have too much to offer the world to mess your life up and you are too smart to make foolish choices
sacinmac: I trust most all of your choices and I know youare a very wise man
sacinmac: but you will alwways be my baby
Mach Siddhartha: My life is not in a mess, nor tangled, nor confused, nor painful. I am ecstatic to be alive, to make the decisions I've made, to be figuring out who I am, my past, my future. You shouldn't hurt, because I do not.

sacinmac: Everyone always said to me when you were little that you would be my challenging child in life and they were right You have a strong will and I love that in you It just scares me every once in a while now that you are older because I love you so much and always want the best for you Sometimes I have to remind myself that this is your life not mine and the decisions you make are yours not mine and that you have to live with them I just hope the good things that were taught to you when you were young sticked with you to help make the right choices so you take the right path in life
sacinmac: Im a jewish mom What do you expect

Mach Siddhartha: right and wrong are subjective constructs, and I understand your concern. I love you too. And I don't just mean that as a superficial "you're my mom, therefore I have to love you". No, what I really mean by that, is that I love everything you've taught me, every principle I hold dear to myself. That which has come from you and my upbringing has always been inside me. So if I want to love myself, which I do, I have to love that which constructed everything I've ever been. I love the pain, the tears, the anger, the happiness, the joy, the giving, the taking, everything that has made me who I am. I am confined by that love, trapped within it, engulfed in it's omnipotence. It is the warmth of your thoughts, the memories of your touch, the brilliance of your motherhood. True, I don't always have the energy to share this side with you because I spend so much of my time thinking how to formulate these thoughts into words, but they are there, always.

Mach Siddhartha: I'm not sure why you decided to have children, more importantly, why you wanted to have me, but beyond that uncertainty, I can only dream to be the parent to a child that will appreciate me as I do you. That is something you've taught me, to let me be me, and to always give that which can not be said, or even given completely, that which only a son or daughter can complete in full cirtcle.

sacinmac: i not only wanted to have you but ever since the day you were born Ive never loved a child so much and enjoyed the years watching you grow and cried so hard when you were off to college so far away Its so hard to let a child grow up even though I know you are Youve always been my baby and you always will be and as much as I love your brothers for some reason there has always been a stronger love for you I feel your pain stronger than I do with them when you are down or hurting and I cant explain why other than its that way I worry about you the most and want to help you the most and I cant explain why that is either but thats how it is

Mach Siddhartha: and that's how it will be. As for now, I am going to go get food.
sacinmac: its kinda like the song pooh corner where the adult goes back to visit pooh corner You will always be my christopher robin

sacinmac: Go eat . I love you Talk to you later Be careful
Mach Siddhartha: k
Mach Siddhartha: bye
sacinmac has gone offline.

the exchange enducing closure-

When two people have been together for long enough, when they have shared their inner most fears and desires, not only do their lives merge as one, but so do their personal possessions. Healthy couples share their most routine articles, from sweatshirts to necklaces to toothbrushes, without ever considering what will happen if their relationship splits apart. Hitherto breaking up, it seems automatic that what's mine is yours, and what's yours is mine. Of course you can have the spare keys to my house, sure you can wear my pajama pants to bed, oh you need a pair of socks? take mine. Without a second thought those little trinkets of the relationship help build the framework for what we call love. However, when a break up does happen, the process of giving those possessions back to their rightful owner becomes an event all in itself full of unwanted emotions like pride, greed, and forgiveness. There's a whole economy built around the instance of returning artifacts of love. It's not like we keep receipts in our journals about who gave what, when and where, in fear of the "just in case" breakup; that would be supercilious. And so, what is this process of giving back, sometimes taking back, called? The process of resetting our love to zero, of exchanging the very building blocks that represent a deeper passion of our love's possessions, symbolizes the foundation of the breakup. Some people even keep these material metaphors as mementos of the lost love. They burry these treasures in their closets, under their beds, in their garage, to later be rediscovered, along with all the buried memories associated with that time of happiness, of a reinforced love. I've done this myself to preserve the memories I fear will disappear by the time I'm too old to be happy.

Talking Animal Festival...saturday night.

In the busy bumper-to-bumper streets of Hollywood, there was only ONE place where one could find theater, music, art, and above all, Alexia Tsotsis. That place was the Stages Theater Company. From the exterior of the building, first impressions lead me to believe that I was about to walk into someone's personal house. However, with a closer inspection, I found that the Stages Theater Company just happened to be in a Residential neighborhood right off of the Sunset strip, and the actual building was hidden behind a bushel of vines. The cover charge was five dollars, which was non profit to reimburse the hard working curators of the show: Joe Napolitano, Alexia Tsotsis, and a few other brilliant individuals. Upon entrance, a bar was set up serving drinks for donations. The play had already started by the time we arrived, so instead of interrupting the show, we walked upstairs into the art gallery. The walls of the second story were jammed packed with art, outstanding art, art that surpassed my every expectation. Hanging a show salon style sometimes can be tricky if the curator doesn't understand that a work of art needs its own breathing room to give the spectator a chance to gaze at and away from the work itself. And, although there were twenty-three artists exhibiting in a space no bigger than 20 square feet, the show had a coherent complimentary vibe. Even the stairway walls became a resting place for the paintings to interact with the viewers. To sum up a night well spent, the show proved once again that with a little money, a lot of love, and some damn fine art, anyone can have a wonderful Saturday night in the city of Lost Angels.

Pocket Rockers rocked my socks

This Thursday night I decided to take a trip into the heart of consumer culture and hype, Old Town Pasadena. Yes, good ol' old town, where the beer flows like a broken fire hydrant recently smashed to bits by a drunk driver and the entertainment roars louder than the fire truck sirens coming to survey the scene. You can have anything and everything in Old Town, for a price that is. (However, when I tried to purchase a beer from the bar, I was denied because all I had was my passport as I.D.) Besides the not so friendly service one usually finds in this elite Meta-culture, Old Town can actually have its moments of, dare I say, fun. Tonight the excitement happened to be taking place at Ye Old Towne Pub, a small joint hidden away right off of the strip of Downtown. When I first arrived at the pub, I saw the members of Pocket Rockers all sitting around, waiting for their turn to go on stage. The band was comprised of six members, three females and three males, however one of the singers couldn't make it to tonight's show, and therefore left the other five musicians to do their thing without her vocals. But this didn't stop anyone from having a dynamite performance. While watching Pocket Rockers do their thing on stage, what ever it is their thing happens to be, I was reminded of what it literally looks like to see a disjointed crowd of people in a total state of pandemonium. It was like a bomb had gone off on stage while all members scrambled to escape harm's way, but couldn't get off stage to find safety. Amongst the crawling, climbing, cussing, crazy jumping and falling over, Marianne, the lead singer, screeched the main vocals into the microphone in a strangely beautiful but punk rock fashion. Her back up, Jeff, tended to do more harm than good as he continued to tumble over the mic chords and dive directly into the keyboard setup; a true show of passion for punk if I say so myself, or maybe he was just too damn drunk to stand up straight. In any case, the show's main strength was that it kept going with a constant commotion of energetic vibrations. The members where well versed in multiple instruments and swapped gear in mid show, which I thought was quite amazing. The wall of sound exploding from stage complimented PR's amazingly disheveled yet coherent performance. The show sounded as great as it looked. And with the beautiful lead, Marianne Williams in front, take it from me, the performance looked like a sexy supper decked out version of the 2004 Olympics. Now, if I only could have bought that beer using my passport, the night would have been a perfect blend of fem rock my sock action and music. Maybe next time Pocket Rockers plays a venue in Old Town, they should make sure the place accepts ALL legal forms of identification to buy the booze that compliments the vocal and visual aesthetics of their kick ass performance.

It has been four days...

Since we officially made the decision not to be together any longer. However, we spoke over the phone and so there was a disconnect between us which disjointed my emotions from my logic. If we were together, discussing which path our relationship should travel, I am sure that the outcome would have been different than the one we chose. That part of my heart feels cold and dark, wilted and all dried up. It happened suddenly, and I don't even know why. The unhappiness brought to our relationship from outside factors became too unbearable, for me. I love her, and I think she loves me, but we just met too early in our earthly lives. Our politics were too different, opposites even. We fueled each other very well, until our flames stopped communicating. This is all I can say for now. I hope she is happy, and does not hold our differences against me too harshly.

I am Chris' mean side

From what I can gather, my mean side comes out to play when I feel frightened from the idea of permanent. Maybe this has to do with my need for not wanting to become comfortable in my life? Maybe it is the result of reading too many books about conflict and struggle? The friends I keep around me are chess pieces I manipulate for the better of myself. Chess has always been the main metaphor I consider when confiding in my most inner warriors. Wow. Chess? Shouldn't I be playing paintball with my partners? Shouldn't I be fighting wars, face to face with the enemy? Shouldn't I have at least picked a more pro-active game to exemplify the agons I create? Hitherto college, my life had been quite comfortable. It's no wonder I enjoy suffering as much as I do these days. My current pain must be retaliatory towards my past, a past in which I sat around playing video games, eating junk food, and reading. Currently, if I'm not sad, I'm not happy. What's with that? However, sadness in not necessarily a product of loosing. In fact, my problem is that I always win. I've not met a worthy opponent in this intellectual game we all call life. That's not to say that I haven't sweated a few beads of worry from time to time, but in all honesty, I can not say that I've met a challenger who can put me in my place, mentally that is. On the other hand, maybe I've been cheating this whole time at my own game! If it is I who makes the rules of my cerebral lands, then maybe it's not that I haven't found a extreme enough challenge, but maybe I've scared all my confused partners away.

in response...

I always find it hard to describe things about myself without feeling like a pretentious and arrogant asshole. This is probably because I am very modest. But since you asked, then I will tell. I am an artist living in Los(t) Angeles. I consider myself a big geek, but no one else I know thinks of me like that. The world around me seems strange yet attractive. I kind of always pictured reality as a reflection of some other dimmension or an object of truth resting on the surface of a muddy pond. Like if I reached out to grab it, the image would ripple and fade away leaving me with my hand in cold murky water. I feel like the truth behind our world is immured somewhere between the image of water's glassy reflection and the surface of the liquid itself, in the infinite microscopic area that no one can grab a hold of without destroying it.

gamine: a girl of the streets, an urchin in society

The air is strange today. It swirls with the stench of rotten flesh and melting mindless minds that are too doped up to care. The hills of Los Angeles are barely visible because of the opaque nature of people's emotions; they wear their thoughts like hats that are too big for their heads, blinding their vision as they slam into said mountains surrounding the valley of the lost. The men and women of the streets walk desultory as they bump into one another, causing sparks to ignite in the hearts of already angered individuals. Today is a day for dodging: bullets, racquet balls, dirty looks, unwanted stares, fallen gamines, reckless cars, smoggy clouds, bills, death, flies, the smell in the kitchen, the smell in the bathroom, library fees, friends, non friends, books about supernal epistemologies, etc. I hope my game is on par with what this city plans to dish out.

Ah yes, it's been a while

I thought I could keep up this blog and write in it every night. But, as one can see, life has blocked my path of articulation and has hindered me from sharing my most deepest darkest dampest secrets...well, maybe those secrets aren’t that damp. I just got back from having the routine post-undergraduate dinner with seven associates from USC. All of us were art majors, some business minors. After a few hello's and how are you's, the number one topic of conversation tended to be "what job did you get?" and "how much money are you making?" What? And I played victim to this concern as well. No questions as to what art's been made, or what books one has been reading, or what future creative plans one has for oneself, were asked, but only monetary social status and vocational rhetoric. Some political views crept their way into the conversations, but mostly we all just sat around the dinner table talking about how much we either loved or hated our jobs. The first round of drinks was toasted towards something I could not associate with. I was ostracized from the joyous clinging of glasses for not being single. The two people at the table who had been in steady relationships while we were in school, which constituted three years of more, were now happily strong and single. A few of my associates wanted to know why I looked so normal that night. I had been wearing a plaid shirt and khaki pants, a unusual style compared to the skirt wearing, dyed hair having, ragged paint splattered shirts I use to sport all throughout my college career. My only answer was a truthful one: this is what I wore to work. Ah yes, work. That word seemed to steal the spotlight of conversation once again. As a precursor to tonight's dinner, I had an hour long conversation with Brandon about how I loathed my job, how lethargic it made me feel, and how my mind mashed around my head like a stew of rotten vegetables from sitting in a chair eight hours a day staring at forty television monitors. How, when I got home from work I am always too tired to produce anything important. I told Brandon that I wanted to quit my job and work on my art full time. There was no way I could get into grad school if I couldn't even remember how to paint, if I didn’t have the time to remember...ugh. Well, this is my rant for tonight. Work sucks. Post Undergraduate school sucks. Being tired sucks. And above all, pretending to enjoy your friends' company whilst bloviating about work, well that sucks most of all.