to love is to be vulnerable

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

C.S Lewis

except because i love you

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

Pablo Neruda, "I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You"

my other blog

I have created a new blog - Keyser Sozer is the Sled - in order to review and comment on television shows, films, art, pop culture, and other ways I waste my time.

sea of tranquility

But they went to the Moon, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, going round and round, working out the IRA thing. And Neil stepped on the Moon and said, "One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind." Good line but not his line, I don't think… it didn't feel like his line, you know? I bet that was just given to him and he was coming down the steps going, "Small step for man, a giant leap for mankind. Small step for man, a giant leap for mankind. Don't get it wrong, Neil. Don't fuck it up. Here we go. I'm a small man with a giant big - shit!... One man, small giant, two...two mens... What was it?" ‘Cause you gotta say something, you can't go down to the Moon and go, "Oh, it's all sticky! It's covered in jam!" You can't land on the Moon and go, "Fucking ‘ell, I've been in that spacecraft ( stretching noises ) Right, I need a piss." You can't land on the Moon and wind down the window and go, "Is this - Sea of Tranquility? Sea of Tranquility? Is this Sea of Tranquility? Sea of Tranquility? There's no one around!”

But he had a sense of humor so he should have used it, ‘cause there was that lunar module there – a fixed camera, just fixed, not panning left or right, just stationary. So he could've been there saying, "Hi, people on the Moon. As you can see, the Sea of Tranquility here, there's the mountains in the distance, there's the Earth! There, you're looking back up at yourselves there. Over to my right, I can see a fucking monster! There's a monster behind me! ( screaming ) Oh no, help! Get off my leg!" Buzz Aldrin in a monster outfit... Neil doing a close-up with: "He's got me, Houston. The monster's got me! He wants cash! He's got my hand up behind my back. I think he knows jiu-jitsu! He wants cash for the release of my life. Send a million… - two million dollars, leave it in a bag by the Sea of Tranquility. I don't know, the North Shore! What the fucking ‘ell...?"

Oh, it would have worked, wouldn't it?

From Eddie Izzard's Dress to Kill show.
Buttons can be purchased here.

out of many, we are truly one

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.

Barack Obama, the next president of the United States of America.
Speech given on March 18, 2008.

Read the full transcript here.

a brief contemporary history of me

What was the last book you read?
Neil Gaimon's Smoke and Mirrors, a book of short stories. But before that was Blackwell Publishing's Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy.

If a movie was made about your life what would the theme song be?
'Passenger Seat' by Death Cab for Cutie or 'Calendar Girl' by Stars... those songs encapsulate me.

What is playing on your stereo right now?
'The Pretender' by Jackson Browne, my favorite song. It's been on repeat for about three months now.

What things make you uncomfortable?
There is nothing more awkward than obligatory small talk with someone you don't care for.

Do you tend to make relationships complicated?
By oversimplifying them, I tend to alienate other people, which then makes it complicated.

Who are you voting for in '08?
Barack to the Future.

i give myself up

I give up my eyes which are glass eggs.
I give up my tongue.
I give up my mouth which is the contstant dream of my tongue.
I give up my throat which is the sleeve of my voice.
I give up my heart which is a burning apple.
I give up my lungs which are trees that have never seen the moon.
I give up my smell which is that of a stone traveling through rain.
I give up my hands which are ten wishes.
I give up my arms which have wanted to leave me anyway.
I give up my legs which are lovers only at night.
I give up my buttocks which are the moons of childhood.
I give up my penis which whispers encouragement to my thighs.
I give up my clothes which are walls that blow in the wind
and I give up the ghost that lives in them.
I give up. I give up.
And you will have none of it because already I am beginning
again without anything.

"I Give Myself Up" by Mark Strand
Image by felixbaumsteiger.

wefeelfine.org

Quite possibly the most interesting online art experiment.
Its possibilities are endless...

the pillow of the world

Beautiful sky! The Baghdad sky is the pillow of the world. (bullets are seen piercing through the night sky) Looks like they're firing angels. 80km from here, over 3,000 years ago, they built the tower of Babel so they could climb up to this sky. 80km from here all our languages were born. Since they tried to touch this sky, we no longer understand each other. A Muslim legend says that now and then Allah comes back to earth because he misses the look of the starry sky from below. Centuries of wisdom, and what have we learned? Nothing. You know why there are wars? Because the world started without men and without men it'll finish.

Again from Benigni's The Tiger and the Snow, as delivered by the wonderful Jean Reno.

the tiger and the snow

Don't start writing love poems, they're the hardest. Wait 'til you're at least 80. Write about something else: the sea, the wind, a radiator, a tram running late, no one thing's more poetic than another. Poetry isn't without, it's within. Don't ask what's poetic or true, look in the mirror, poetry's you. Dress your poems up, choose your words carefully. Be selective, sometimes you need eight months to find one word. Beauty started when people began to choose, since Adam and Eve. You know how long Eve took to pick the right fig leaf? "How about this one?" She stripped bare all the fig trees in Paradise!

Fall in love. If you don't love, it's all dead! Fall in love and everything will come to life. Squander your joy, dissipate your cheerfulness, be sad and silent with enthusiasm, hurl your happiness into people's faces. And how? Let me look at my notes. I've forgotten. (looks at notes) I can't read 'em. To convey happiness, you must be happy. To convey pain, you must be happy. Be happy, you must suffer. Don't be scared of suffering. The whole world suffers. If you don't have the means, don't worry. Only one thing is necessary to write poetry: everything.

Don't try to be modern. It's the most old-fashioned thing there is. If a line doesn't come to you in this position, chuck yourself on the ground like this! (lays down) It's lying down that you see the sky. What are you looking at? Poets don't look, they see. Make the words obey you. If the word "wall" doesn't take any notice, don't use it again for eight years! That'll teach it. "What's that?" (points to wall) "No idea!"

From Roberto Benigni's film The Tiger and the Snow. He portrays a poetry professor who gives very enthusiastic lectures.