getting a little crazy

as stress builds,
i return fondly to the song known to me best
as 'the neurosis song'


Nobody.
Till somebody loves you.
(neuroses here i come!)

zip!

This is the type of academic I envisage myself being:




Zip.

keep getting confessional (and i ain't even catholic*)

So, in true geeky style, I have to admit that I think that Foucault was onto something.

Okay, so maybe I shouldn't be quite so apologetic - the general consensus does in fact tend to be that he was onto more than one thing in fact, including the re-conceptualising of the whole telling of historical narrative. Panopticon. Disciplinary structures. Truth regimes. That sort of thing.

That aside,the particular area I'm referring to is the blurt, rant, or confessional moment.

Foucault had a fair bit to say about confession... "the confession became on of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have since become a singularly confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide." Amongst others.

And I'd tend to agree.

Specifically, I've been musing about my own tendency to confessional moments:

Blurts about the intensely, almost painfully beautiful (and tender, vulnerable, tortured, etc.) moments captured forever in the stillness of art photography - images that make my own life feel like a quotidienne jumble of bumps and bruises, dorky awkwardnesses, mismatched clothes, layers of barriers and uncomfortable silences.

Bodily (mis)recognitions which appear to require the disavowing of my 'white Australian'-ness, and the reiteration of my years coming to being in Singapore; the disavowing of the very varied readings of my sexuality, and the self-reflexive relation I have to the label of 'queer'.

...and desires. Needs. Wants.
For people.
For objects.
For performative moments, and dancing in high heels.
For the feel of a tattoo gun on/in my skin.
For arms around me. And a warm, enveloping smile.

Amongst other things.

(Thanks Foucault!)



*though my mum was once

marinating

The film Kissing Jessica Stein, apart from having essentially no artistic merit, and being ever-so-slightly homophobic in the kinda of way that Secretary is ever so slightly BDSM-phobic (think oversimplification and flattening of the nuances of desires and the motivations for them, for a 'mainstream' audience), has one main merit. The main character - a genuinely tiresome, neurotic and sexually timid woman - works as an editor and mulls over and adores out-of-the-ordinary uses of words. 'Marinate' is a key word in this film - her mulling over its use as a non-cooking-related descriptor for thinking on an idea is a moment when her desire for the other main character (a woman!) starts to change and develop. This is, I maintain, the entire reason that I have managed to somehow find myself watching that film a number of times, despite the clear objections I have to it.

Marinate.

mar⋅i⋅nate

–verb (used with object), -nat⋅ed, -nat⋅ing
to steep (food) in a marinade.

Origin: 1635–45; probably Italian. marinato, ptp. of marinare to pickle, or steep in salt water / brine.


While the definitional interlude has more than the slightest air of triteness to it, it seems to set something a-stewing... which is also definitionally appropriate in its own right.

Marinating happens
when words and thoughts sit,
settle and work themselves through your marrow.
Until they vibrate off the ends of your hair,
and tingle out through the toes,
and they must must must be articulated
or they squat in your throat
and choke choke choke.

Perhaps these words are pre-semiotic, pre-articulation,
and so they sit,
and they shape,
and they become,
an endless becoming until
a coming to fruition when they squeeze themselves out
and turn into bright slashes of colour on a canvas,
on skin,
black and white on a page,
paginated,
editted,
and copied.

Marination sits outside the 'conscious', 'subconscious' binary. It's how the world works through to process. It sits sullenly - or was that lovingly? - and stews and melts. It bonds, tenderises - makes ready for the cooking. It makes flesh more succulent, edible, saturates with flavour.

Crucially different from the process of stewing - no application of heat, no need to stir - marination happens from leaving alone: setting in a composite and moving on to other activities.

The end result is far more than the sum of its parts - constituent ingredients: lemon/ lime... citric acid breaks down proteins in its way, sends traces of bitterness along the spine as it creates its own melded tastes, above and beyond the base flavours and textures themselves; then a rich, warm addition - in ochre, rust, burnt sienna, terracotta, and other shades of mud and dirt - creates the base, the bottom layers of warmth in the flavour; with traces of contemplation and emotional fruition saturating all the way through.

Until, finally, at last... the sun shines through. The world crystalises around you. The tenderness has reached its optimum. And there it sits, ready for the cooking.

...has got me kinda zilly

compulsion

com·pul·sion

Pronunciation:

\kəm-ˈpəl-shən\

Etymology:
Middle English, from Anglo-French or Late Latin; Anglo-French, from Late Latin compulsion-, compulsio, from Latin compellere to compel, 15th century

1
a: an act of compelling : the state of being compelled
b: a force that compels
2:
an irresistible persistent impulse to perform an act (as excessive hand washing); also: the act itself



Sometimes, like a scab, when you know something is bad for you, you pick at it. Sometimes, it's not so much that it's bad for you, as that the picking itself creates the damage. Sometimes, I want to look over to you, when I know I ought to let alone. Sometimes, I see the rise of your body, and its fall and I know how fatal you might be and I breathe tentatively, thinking it might hold this one more second. I wait till a moment I could call you and then stare at the phone. I know I shouldn't. It would be bad for the both of us. I think about it instead, incessantly. Compulsion.

response to feather squeezing

ah, the longing

long distance romance involves a lot of longing, and waiting
like this:



now i just wish it came with the costumes


(charleston, everybody, charleston!)

Dreams do come true (it could happen to you)

Everybody, meet Kylie.
Kylie, meet everybody.

*sigh*

i dream

...of mobility facilitated by the latest in style. Or should I say the most retro of styles?
First a passionate love for:
(think minus dorky drink-holder, and additions of spokey-dokes and handlebar streamers)



and now, due to the richness of its blood, a new love:

Try crossing fingers and toes.
And chanting "I DO believe in fairies"...

All together now!