Trunk Show

I watched a designer run through of Elephant Man today in the rehearsal space across the street. I'd previously seen the black-and-white David Lynch version many years ago and harbored certain reservations about a secondary experience (not in terms of story quality, but rather redundancy). The hour passed swiftly and, as often happens during workday experiences that vary from the regular clicks and mumbles, I found myself engrossed and even moved to scratch down a line posed by the titled character himself:

What happens to dreams when they cannot get out?

If ever the chance occurs that I get to determine a writing topic for a class, that question would serve as my first assignment. I may, in the near future, simply assign it to myself.

When the Sidewalk Ends

gravamen (gra-VAY-muhn) noun [plural gravamens or gravamina (-VAM-uh-nuh)]

The essence or the most serious part of an accusation.

It's hard to think that it's all a trick. That the way we live our lives--the kinds of choices we make, the kinds of opportunities that present themselves--was all staged years ago by elite chess players interested in owning the board. It's hard to believe--it's quite amazing--just how true it is. Ownership is our legacy. We claim ourselves and then we claim our objects, all our precious humanly things. And that marks our legacy. We claim each paved step, each tissue, each dried letter of a word, each chemical in our body. We claim and we own and we sell and we profit and we die. We--who invent symbols from our own inventions--who kill not for survival but for luxury, for the opportunity to surround ourselves with our own symbols and inventions--rectify the very systems that snag us each on the labyrinth of valued success. If anything is deemed doomed by our own doing, by our own mazes, it's us. We shall kill ourselves with our created, owned systems.

Ask yourself this: when did you last walk on a surface unfit for wheels?

Mixing for a Good Time

moliminous (mo-LIM-in-uhs) adjective

Massive; laborious.

I finally finished a mix CD I'm giving to my soon-to-be-married friend. Who knows how long I actually spent on it; I tend to get absorbed in mixing. The whole process totally consumes me when I finally sit down to do the tracking. Usually it pieces itself together over the course of about a week, or, when the schedule permits, I might devote an entire afternoon or evening. Regardless, I spend the majority of time scrolling through songs, testing transitions, teasing out the tone, trying to find the right fit for whatever occasion or person inspired me in the first place. Sometimes I'll listen to an entire album by an artist and ultimately decide against its inclusion. My mind's musical conception of the subject matter tends to eek out slowly as I choose a couple hours worth of songs, then delete and rearrange...

I rarely set out to make mixes for myself, but, thanks to modern technology, I get to keep each one on my computer and, yes, I do play them. Probably more than whoever receives them, really. At least, that's how I imagine it now, in the age dominated by mp3 players and iShuffles and thirty-second samples, a clunky CD with a compiled set of songs that don't magically appear when inserted into a computer simply doesn't fit modern specifications.

Not that I truly consider myself a modern man.