Totally Train

The District of Meatpacking and Lonely Street

2009-03-13T13:56:00.000-07:00

I'm walking to the subway, slightly intoxicated from a martini and a shot of patron. I feel slightly guilty because I left my friend Lauren's birthday party early - and she was more present at my birthday than I was. But I did make the long journey to the "meatpacking district."

It's uncanny how the name still bears truth to its surroundings. A district that used to pack slaughtered meat now promotes one packing their "meat" into the slaughtered prey. Male or female is not so important. It's still a meat market of sorts - one that used to house ground beef to grade A sirloin now selects its 'subjects' based upon lack of fat. Thus, the filet, the sauciest of beef brands would seemingly dissipate as a result, but the skinny prefer the fat and the fat are not welcome - unless provided in marbled eight inch circumferences at a medium rare temperature, to be pick at for status' sake.

I am finding that my fuscia tights get looks, they receive stares; those coupled with my untamed mane of curls. The anti-christ of the faux haute. And I chuckle at the glares and stares because the seriousness attributed to the disgust of my stockings is so trivial, and in reality it is legitimately comical. Poor, poor filets.

I have found that late evening semi-drunk strolls through the city lend one to truly identify with how lonely they are. Trapped between concrete and glass walls that stretch over one hundred feet high - it's easy to feel small. And in those late hours when the psyche is not interrupted by the bustle of foot-traffic, the cranial circuits find time to silence and buzz and connect, and in those moments I think; I really think. Not about the fuscia glares (that is peripheral) but about shana and morgan and my sister and the stature of the architecture around me. I take the time to "peruse" and look through that list of names that I typically find so empty. I have time to think, which affords me reason to act, and I make that call that I should have made months ago.

Bukowski Bedtime Story

2009-03-09T13:44:00.001-07:00

Bukowski Bedtime Story
Those who are crazy are brilliant
I tell myself this
Bukowski said this
Bukowski knows
I have never read bukowski
Those quotes let me know
That he is someone to admire
I do this all the time
Find a muse
A muse that is dead
Or a muse that has passed
My musings are temporary
They rarely evolve
Into more than a mere preoccupation
To take me away from me
Curiosity
That’s what I call it
I would claim it to be inspiration
Those words have yet to touch my brain
So I cannot draw from anything more than an idea
But that idea is a fantasy
And I like fantasies
They serve me well
whoever I want to be
I can be in my mind
This I fantasize
Synthetic sun
Crimson liquidity
In this
My calm exists
It takes away my fear
It lulls my mind
it helps to put me to sleep without thought
so the realization of an empty bed
and an empty heart
don’t keep me awake at night
i force myself to wait
until my eyeballs are sore
and my head aches for rest
it’s not time yet
I may think a thought
i may feel a feeling
this is dangerous territory
I wish I had love
Real love to touch
I forget how to ask for love
So I just don’t ask
Its been two years
since I felt loved
and that love was a farce
its been twelve years
since love consumed me
like I now wish it would
st. marks street
is supposed to supplement this void
with the noise noise noise
but tonight it is quiet
I don’t like the quiet
When there is quiet
I can hear those thoughts
Those thoughts I want to quell

Sister

2009-03-04T15:44:00.001-08:00

24 hours make the day
polar coasts part our time
three hours makes the wall
your words don’t make it to me
i am not a poor catcher
when a ball does not exist
love cannot be thrown
when you open you hand
and heart to speak
time will no longer exist
in this tangled mess of kin

Shape Shifting

2009-02-10T22:28:00.000-08:00

I don’t have a conscience; or do I? Its peculiar, I often find myself faking feelings or emotions to play nicely into the moment that I want to create. I don’t think I have felt a legitimate emotion since the age of twenty and that’s giving a two-year generosity gap for psychological transition.
When I was eighteen, I had a conflict with my Dad. He had promised to help me with college applications and assist my younger sister with her math homework. Simplistic fatherly duties, one would assume. My Dad had been slowing abandoning those practices ever since his adoption of a new girlfriend and her set of lunatic responsibilities, four years prior. Dori, the Medusa-eqsue, pathetic excuse for a human was a high school dropout, yet she had the brains to wrap my M.I.T. educated father around her vile and crooked finger. So much for higher learning and it’s false pretenses about educating the “whole of you.” Dad could deduce an algebraic proof with the dexterity of a professional tightrope walker, but when it came to common sense, he was the circus clown.
On this particular Sunday, my father had verbally pledged to make good on his promises to Lauren and I, regarding her math assignment and my collegiate enterprise. My series of unsuccessful calls began at 10:30 a.m., with follow-ups made periodically on the hour, all of which went unanswered – finally at 4:30 pm, Delilah, or Satan’s spawn (daughter of Dori) answered the home phone and proceeded to tell me that Dad had just walked in the door. He had taken Dori out shopping that day in an attempt to soothe one of her deranged episodic fits.
I wish that I could accurately describe the enormity of dysfunctional senses bubbling inside of me at that moment, but since I now am an emotional mime, tapping into such real feelings and articulating them is impossible. I can only remember a rush of heat filter through my body and electrify each cell with an unfiltered rage; without conscious decision my hand grabbed Lauren, my mouth voiced, “get in the car” and my foot hit the gas pedal with reckless abandon.
Five minutes later I arrived at the three story peach townhouse and noticed immediately that it’s color now took on a rusty appearance and the open window on the second level was emitting a thick air of negativity into the cul de sac. I pushed through the invisible wall of reality as I opened the front door to enter the other universe: the inside of my fathers’ home, and in the middle of the foyer, I started to scream. “You liar, you liar. You told us that you would be there and once again your promises were empty. You chose that piece of white trash over your own flesh and blood. Everything you ever taught Lauren and I about education, respect, creativity, and individuality, you forfeited. And for what? To take this white trash, redneck, uneducated, gold-digger out for a day of monetary indulgence. Lauren and I were counting on you to come through, and I thought that maybe, just this once, you would remember the importance of your children, and that we still need you as a father.”
Tears were steaming down my face and the heavyhearted words kept coming; I couldn’t stop the waterfall of emotion. Somewhere in the faint distance of my screams, I heard a door slam and before I had time to clear the tears from my eyes, a blurry figure materialized and stood two inches away from me and said, “white trash, I’ll show you white trash, you little fucking bitch.” And then like the gates to the fiery furnaces of hell, her cracked lips parted and hurled a giant glob of saliva at my face. It hit me right between the eyes. As the tainted spit dripped down my nose and seemingly permeated my pores, I screamed, Lauren screamed and we both ran out of the house sobbing violently.
I expected my Dad to follow Lauren and I. I wanted him to run after us, envelop us in his arms and say “wait, I’m so sorry, I love you;” like the man I had known four year earlier. But he didn’t, he went after her. As I sat in the driveway of the rusty townhouse with my Ford Explorer in reverse, I wiped the spit off of my face with a clean tissue, and although I still felt disturbingly dirty, my foot wouldn’t let off the brake. I wasn’t ready to give up on my Dad; I didn’t want to believe this was all real, so I held the brake for five painfully hopeful minutes. Finally, when no one surfaced through the invisible barrier, I let my foot go, backed out of the driveway, and left my emotions somewhere inside of that house. With that single act of reversing, I lost my ability to feel, because feeling hurt too much.
Soon after, I learned the art of tempered lies, where my own portrayal of empathy, sadness, love, anger, hope, despair, etc. would manipulate someone else’s emotional core and in turn facilitate the response that I sought or “felt appropriate.” However, I never truly felt again.
The bizarre part is that I don’t know if I feel guilty about this or if I even care. My actions have become so calculated that it’s the uncertainty or lack of emotion that plagues me. Have I become a sociopath? My therapist would be delighted to slap such a definitive term on me, but I don’t think I’m that characteristically shallow. Maybe I am? The weird part is that I don’t know.
I don’t feel guilt from lying or manipulating certain situations in my life; my embellished actions serve their purpose at the time. But still, this lack of emotional cadence is what I grapple with each day, and a stint in therapy did nothing to alleviate it. It was just another “role” played in the life of Lindsey Elyse. The fact that I cannot recognize when, and if, I feel an emotion, is the void that eats away at my core. When that tainted spit hit my face ten years ago, an emotional parasite entered my body and it still continues to feed on my conscience.
I’m lying. I am actually a robot. I just felt this story was a more intriguing tale behind my cordoned conscience – a way to extract the feeling or response that I am soliciting. Can you guess what it is? I’ll shape shift to make you feel intelligently introspective.

On Nation vs. Culture

2009-02-05T12:55:00.000-08:00

A nation is deemed as a “politically organized body of people under a single government” or “the people who live in a nation or country” thus one would assume that reference to a “national culture” would be laden with political nuances of the said nation. However, it is necessary to look at the way in which politics and culture intersect and furthermore define one another. To what point do the people of “a nation” have influence over the cultural evolution (or lack thereof) that comes about as a result of change.
In order to explore that which is “national culture” we must first define the nation in reference. Fanon primarily speaks of a post-colonial African nation, as his observations and proclamations came at a unique time in the history of Africa, when Africa was establishing its independence from a Colonized existence. At the time when Fanon conceived this dissertation on the idea of a National Culture he explored the result of colonized Africans residing beside “natives” and if this post-colonialism would indeed create a national culture and how Africans of all ethnicities would be affected. Africa is a continent that is now composed of 53 sovereign countries so the idea of a national culture seems virtually impossible, especially when one considers that each individual country considers itself a small nation. Colonialism changed the native traditions of Africa and furthermore, drew new borders within the continent to divide territories amongst the colonizing countries, and those borders still exist to this day. But we must understand that within these borders exist both native natives and colonized natives, and those who have emigrated from Africa to other continents. Fanon questions how one can differentiate between the Negro Culture and the African Culture. They are both perceivably black in their skin tone, so ones initial presumption would be the two cultures are interchangeable. Yet this is clearly not the case, as Fanon describes the reaction of American Negroes and African Negroes integration during the first congress of the African Cultural Society, held in Paris in 1956, and find that their skin tone and culture are actually mutually exclusive. Fanon explains “the American Negroes considered their problems from the same standpoint as those of their African brothers……..but little by little the American Negroes realized that the essential problems confronting them were not the same as those that confronted the African Negroes.”
Fanon follows up by explaining that the racial discrimination that the black culture in American feels is quite different than African blacks; thus the common factor may be the push for civil liberty and racial equality, but the context is polar in platform. The political landscape of a nation heavily affects the residing culture(s) and Fanon finds strong ties between the geographical location and political culture in all regions, and in this mix religion often plays a significant role. Politics and geographical location can divide what once was a seemingly “united culture” and I find a personally relevant example of this to be the difference between Israeli Jews and American Jews. Like African Negroes and American Negroes, Jewish people share a common bond that extends beyond religion, as Judaism is often defined as a culture (especially for those of us who are reform in belief), like Negroism has defined itself as a culture. Nonetheless, we American Jews find staggering cultural differences with our Israeli brothers and sisters and what unifies us is nothing more than a history and a title. When I was in Israel, the Israeli Jews asked why we American Jews do not hang the flag of Israel from our apartments and houses, and it is because we as Jewish Americans have assimilated into the melting pot of American culture and in turn define our Judaism through American ideologies.
This process of native assimilation into foreign culture is defined, by Fanon, as a three-phase process where the native intellectual goes through a succession of reactions that range from attempting assimilation to negation and revolt. It is the third phase of this process that finds itself most relevant in relation to American culture, when the assimilated native attempts to recreate his native culture through literature or artwork. Although, in the process the individual finds that the native recreations are inevitably expressed through the language, culture and custom of the colonized nation. Therefore, true representation of culture can only be created in the exact moment and time in which those events that define culture occur. Fanon explains this in saying “The artist who has decided to illustrate the truths of the nation turns paradoxically towards the past and away from actual events. What he ultimately intends to embrace are the cast-offs of thought, its shells and corpses, a knowledge which has been stabilized one and for all.” This theory of stabilized knowledge corresponds with the fluidity of culture and the inability to recreate a movement that has already occurred. Translated into what we know as American culture, this can be defined as the commoditization of a movement or a cultural renaissance. The intellectual wishing to recreate or redefine the music, art and “culture” of the sixties counterculture will never produce more than a static idea or image of what that culture encumbered, because the political, environmental and social landscapes have all changed. Thus, that artist or intellectual who wishes to draw from this era and recreate it will only populate images that he or she has been taught to represent that cultural movement.
Depestre, the Haitian poet and communist, is who Fanon quotes to articulate the non-rhythmic tongue and didactic purpose of native poetry. He explains, “the native poet who is preoccupied with creating a national work of art and who is determined to describe his people fails in aim, for he is not yet ready to make the fundamental concession that Depestre speaks of.” That concession is ones relinquishing of core or native values to “romanticized” or “classicized” ideals. For colonized Africans, this meant trading in aspects of their native culture to maintain existence under the European culture that overthrew them. This concept of displacement where the “cultural obliteration is made possible by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs” (Fanon p. 45) occurred in the colonization of the United States. Indian or Native Americans, among others, were pushed to the side, and their culture ignored and “replaced” by the idealized culture of the colonialists. Now those of Native American descent must attempt to maintain their culture through an existence on the outskirts of American culture and concede portions of tradition in order to survive as a people.
The only resurgence of culture that is found is through artifacts or symbols that are meant to represent the culture of a nation but do not do justice. By the time an oppressed culture, sub-culture or counterculture finds it’s way into the light of the masses, everything that culture stood for – its core structures, have faded into materialistic representations through “dress or a few broken down institutions. Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing life” (Fanon 46). Yet, these post-cultural symbols and ideologies are what we often use to define a culture, and this is where the mysticism and uncertainty about national culture and culture in general lies.
Fanon explains culture as “the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns.” But, what if the people of a culture do not create the preferences, taboos and expressions? Can a culture still develop? American culture is one example where the cultural choices of its constituents have been largely considered and decided for them, and the concept of American culture is very different than the reality of American culture. As a result, the development of an American national culture seems impossible with such a rift in national identity and individual perception. However, we seem to be teetering on the edge of something new, something unique - a moment when a diversified populace united under the notion of hope and change. Fanon explains that the most creative cultural movements come on “the eve of the divisive conflict for national freedom, the renewing of forms of expression and the rebirth of the imagination” (Fanon 50). It will be interesting to see if this theory can apply to where we stand as a country, right now.

Obama Begins on a Most Excellent Note

2009-01-24T16:51:00.000-08:00

Statement of President Obama on the 36th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we are reminded that this decision not only protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose.

While this is a sensitive and often divisive issue, no matter what our views, we are united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion, and support women and families in the choices they make. To accomplish these goals, we must work to find common ground to expand access to affordable contraception, accurate health information, and preventative services.

On this anniversary, we must also recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights and opportunities as our sons: the chance to attain a world-class education; to have fulfilling careers in any industry; to be treated fairly and paid equally for their work; and to have no limits on their dreams. That is what I want for women everywhere.

Folk is Back - and it's a Girl(s)

2009-01-22T22:39:00.000-08:00

So this is not my typical of my more recent musical persuasions, but I read about this Brooklyn based quintet on The Deli NY. and I am really digging the combination of resurrected folk rock and (what I would deem) pseudo new wave, with a just a sprinkle of indie.
Bern & the Brights is able to capture a unique sound without sounding too contrived.
Hints of Bowie, Dylan, Pat Benetar, PJ Harvey (they cite her as a reference) and Karen O (from Yeah Yeah Yeahs) pepper the diversified tracks and create a likable stratification of sound.

Check them out:
http://www.myspace.com/bgroove

The Runaways - Cherry Bomb

2009-01-08T18:28:00.000-08:00

The other weekend I found myself completely ensconced in an absurdly rare yet awesome show, on (yes, it's a shocker) vh-1 - and here's the best part: it was 100% music (save for the occasional gratuitous Brett Michaels cameo with one too many crotch shots and profoundly cliched, yet apropos statements like: "get ready to rock 'till your head hurts").
vh1's 100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs kept me fully entertained and (yes) rocking out for a solid five hours, with a battalion of legitimately awesome jams. Led Zep, Hendrix, Ozzy (both Solo and with Sabbath both made the list), The Ramones and so much more. Despite all these gorgeously talented men, there was one band and song that really scored high on the L-Train awesomeness scale and I highly suggest you check it out!
Keep an eye out and see if you can recognize Joan Jett
The Runaways - Cherry Bomb

Get Down With Doeo

2009-01-08T10:58:00.001-08:00

I am loving this game right now. It's not ridiculously difficult - it's actually extremely simple (at the easy level).
The graphics are reminiscent of the first Super Mario Bros. game, that I still adore, for old skool Nintendo - this could be why I have such love for Doeo - and the music is just as awesome as the original Mario Bros. theme song. Synth action and all.
I highly recommend you give Doeo a try - if anything it will provide fabulous entertainment when obscenely bored with work - or life in general.

http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/doeo.jsp