P.T.S.D.-R

I guess when Lindsay Lohan was about seventeen, she said on television that we carry all the baggage of our past relationships into all of our new ones. Not bad, Lindsay; makes me forgive you a tiny bit for your incident in the Denali last week.

the jars of quality preserves are disproportionately small to the peanut butter

the worse the jam, the bigger the jar.

I just had a dream about Michel, and leapt from bed to write it before I forgot

Michel and I were moving together to some giant city, only we were in some sort of alternate present or creepy future; a post-industrial, post-digital, industrial city on a raging ocean shore. Everything- the buildings, the roads, the streets, and all the machines were colossal reformations of our machines of today. Only the machines were stacked and connected to become fifty times larger than the scale of today, almost like Transformers. At the same time, the wild animals were far greater in number, which I found to be an unexpected detail of such a gnarly, dirty and mechanic landscape, and everyone was careful not to disturb the giant elephant seals lounging on the coast among the mechanical detritus, or the serene plains animals criss-crossing the busy boulevards.
Michel found a job in a grocery shipping factory, which stretched 600 delapitated stories into the clouds, and only had exterior walls on three sides of the building. They made new people work on the uncovered side and sometimes during our shift we would see a silent body slip into the clouds and disappear.
She worked the giant machines like a pro, especially one in which she climbed into and operated with a small joystick that extended her arms to become enormous yellow iron ones that scooped up handfuls of melons and corn and dumped them into pallets. I remember towards the end of the dream watching her work swiftly, seeing her fragile skin brush past rusty rotating gears so dangerously, and feeling sick, looking up at her smiling down at me.
At the end of the dream, Michel and I made a trip to the ocean side. You had to climb these long rickety ladders to reach the sand, and the waves themselves were crazy and crashed in every direction instead of just toward the land. Some of the waves rose stories high and then just collapsed on themselves in an explosion of mist. Perhaps the huge sea wall we climbed down was built to protect the strange city from the schizophrenic ocean, but the fall of the waves never hit further than the wet sand at their edge.
The elephant seals lifted their heads and watched us half-interested as we approached the water. Giant albatross the size of airplanes glided above, blocking the sun, and in whose shadow ice boulders would grow in just a second. Just before I woke, Michel turned to me and smiled, squeezing my hand, and the giant albatross dipped low to pick us up, and carried us into the grey clouds.

goodness gracious

I haven't written here in almost exactly two years. Welcome back, terribleshy; older and wiser, albeit a fraction of a second less optimistic, with a touch of broken heart.

the best kind of surprises

I have a mail thing. I have all this romanticism and nostalgia associated with mail; maybe because I moved so much when I was little. When my parents got divorced I was in junior high. I had this best friend named Jennifer who was this beautiful petite redhead. Anyway, Jen and I had zero friends because we went to an inner city school and we liked Green Day and the Smashing Pumpkins and wore all this flannel. When I moved away, for over a year, she and I wrote these epic letters to each other- ten, twenty pages. I made a box special for them and saved them all in a green ribbon.
When email came around, I thought I would keep better contact with friends left behind when I moved since it was easier to keep in touch. Actually, I was even less likely to be remembered (or remember them) because as easy as it is to email someone, it's even easier to forget to email someone.

So I love mail. I love sending mail. I only send beautiful mail. I send beautiful postcards or pretty stationary in hand-crafted envelopes with all kinds of artifacts and ephemera enclosed. I love getting mail. Any mail. And the only thing better than mail from friends is unexpected mail from friends. And the only thing better than that is unexpected mail from friends in other countries, and the only thing better than that is a lovingly compiled care-package from a friend abroad.

Thanks friend. You nailed it.

Calendar of Upcoming Events

Here are some very keen sounding events coming up, many having to do with film and art:

Wednesday March 30
This film is presented in conjuction with Fair Use: Appropriation in Recent Film and Video, an exhibition on view through May 29. Spin (1995) collects satellite feeds of TV personalities and politicians in front of a live camera with open microphones before they go on air and again during commercial breaks. Springers film unmasks the broadcasts, showing politicians being made up, covering up, and discussing their preferred prescription drugs.

Friday April 1
Los Angeles Abstract Film and Video Workshop
As usual, it will be at 7:30pm at the Museum of Jurassic Technology 9341
Venice Boulevard Culver City, California 90232
http://www.johnadamczyk.com/workshop.html

Saturday April 2
Kronos Quartet Performs
Time: Between 6:00 and 6:30 for dinner or cocktails at Cicada/8:00 performance
Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall
Cost: $65 Orchestra West section. Guests buy own food and drinks at Cicada.

LACMA Late Night
Time: 8:00 to 11:00pm
Where: LACMA (on the Plaza)
Parking: Free lot parking after 7pm at Wilshire Blvd. and Spaulding Ave. and at Wilshire and Ogden Dr.
What to wear: Dancing shoes and a rain coat. Most outdoor areas are covered in case of rain.

Monday, April 11
Time: 6-9 pm
Multimedia Arts by Youth & Homeless in Cities including Boston’s Chinatown, South Central and East L.A., and San Francisco
Speaker: Mike Blockstein
Location: Harris Hall Room 102, School of Fine Arts University of Southern California
Food: pastries and coffee

Thursday April 14
8:30 p.m. Redcat Theatre
Opening night features avant-garde films from the 1920s, and will include rare screenings of three short films by Germaine Dulac, the first woman avant-gardist (accompaniment by CalArts pianists), René Clair's delightful dadaist provocation, Entr'acte (with Erik Satie's original score), and a spectacular archival print from the George Eastman House of Teinosuke Kinugasa's riveting and hallucinogenic experimental narrative A Page of Madness (accompanied by International Metal Supply).