Scenes from the (home) studio

Kurt Vonnegut on Writing

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The Waters of March

Waikiki is vulgar, plebian and coarse...

Like a bottle of fortified wine in the hands of a derelict old man on the curb, it can be truly said of our hotel that it is reasonably priced.  Of the many places I have spent a night in the past six years, it compares with only one: a non-chain hotel in Aberdeen, Washington, where I spent one night of the summer of 2010.  In terms of location it compares favorably - otherwise, it merely compares.  But we had asked for no-frills and for our sins we got it. 

Our hotel limits expenses through a complex process that can be summarized as "having inferior everything."  It has two full-size beds, which is fortunate considering that we can't sleep together in one.  The mattresses feel salvaged.  In the bathroom expenses are reduced by having only bolted-on toiletries.  The dispenser in the shower emits a bath gel* in an alarming purple hue that suggests it may be also - if not primarily - suitable for deterging dishes.  I won't go into detail vis-a-vis the toilet, which is incongruously high tech and mocking.  The air-conditioner emits a sound best described as "caged bird cries through a damaged intercom."

The only aspect of the hotel that does not suffer from obvious effects of price controls is the attitude of the staff.  The staff is, without exception, friendly and helpful.  The cynic suspects that this probably has less to do with either dumb luck in hiring or especially good working conditions and more to do with a well-maintained and strictly enforced black list for sub-stellar performance among hospitality workers, given the relative importance of the industry to the local economy.

Regardless of where one stays, Waikiki is vulgar, plebian and coarse, without the dissolute and transgressive charm of Las Vegas, to which it is increasingly similar.**  It has been so for my entire life, but it exceeds itself each year.

One gets the sense that many of the people who visit here are not only not well traveled, but really embody the aphorism "they don't get out much."  I have watched a retirement-aged white male American work to frame and capture the perfect picture of a Honolulu Fire Department hose truck.   I have seen a newlywed couple pay $14.99 to pull a "real" pearl from the maw of an oyster living in a bucket.  I walked past a kiosk selling t-shirts with oscillating electronic lights in the shape of a marijuana leaf.  I have seen a line of several dozens form each night in front of a Cheesecake Factory,*** which boasts an outdoor eating area fronting on the same busy street where the line forms, leading to an incredibly recursive and post-modern mise-en-scene for all involved.

The sand is fine-ish without being quite powdery.  The water is a chalky blue-green that offers an uncanny complement to the skin-toned beach.  Diamond Head is pleasantly imposing and an essential counterpoint to the garish hotel stacks that line the beach.  The breeze is gentle and desirable in the afternoon heat.  Everything natural seems designed for maximum balance.

We've identified and sampled great Korean and Japanese street-food restauants.  We've found a good sushi restaurant where we've had dinner two nights.

In the mornings we get coffee and breakfast and then surf for two hours.  The waves are rideable the whole time, but shrink a bit toward the end of our stay.  Surfing offers me a happiness that is unchallenged, which makes it singular among all the things I do. 

In the afternoons we lay on the beach and read.  I am in the midst of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, a biography of David Foster Wallace that was a birthday gift from my youngest sister, and Arguably, a collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens.  Although I've read no more than half of each, I'm convinced that David Foster Wallace was brilliant yet deeply flawed as both a human being and a writer (and profoundly doomed on both fronts) and that Christopher Hitchens' greatest asset was either a truly incredible memory for facts or a commendable method of recording and organizing everything interesting that met his attention (I say "either" because a greater measure of one would stand in for an equal measure of the other).  Both men died before their time, but only Christopher Hitchens did not obviously have his best work behind him.

From the deck of our hotel I can see a good portion of the inland part of the city, including the dorm where I spent a semester in 1999.  At the time I was a student journalist basing major life decisions on proximity to good waves.  Since that time I have made some fundamental changes of direction; in that same time the city has merely amplified what it was.  It's yet to be seen how it will work out for either of us.

Monday consists mostly of traveling homeward.  The rigorous humiliation involved in the commercial air travel experience has been exhausted in pop culture and is now irretrievably cliche and impossible to write about interestingly.  It is pointless to point out that the in-flight meal represents a sort of high-modernist confounding of expectations regarding color and form.  It is no longer interesting to note the incredible intra-fuselage alchemy that makes every person in the plane both a demonstrable annoyance and justifiably annoyed.  It is too clever to mention that it can be said for an airplane restroom what can also be said for mankind: it exhibits a sort of basic functionality, but clearly does not represent a perfection of any purpose whatsoever.  It is not even interesting to share a personal anecdote regarding "walking in," through an unlocked bi-fold door, on a woman seated in the lavatory, who had inexplicably been sitting in the dark, having failed to activate the door latch that in turn activates the overhead light (meaning that the whole experience would not have been possible but for a really odd and (forgive me) stupid set of circumstances).  None of that ought to be written about and it certainly won't be here.

We arrive home to uncharacteristically good weather and a condo that is stuffy from the A/C having been turned off for the week.  October looms.  Seattle is in the national news thanks to football referees.  On the mainland one's life seems to have been plugged back in.

________________________________________________________________________

*Note the noncommittal phrasing: shower being a location/activity and gel being a state of matter.

**One suspects this is no accident.  More people from Hawai'i moved to Nevada from 1995 to 2000 than the combined populations of Lana'i and Moloka'i and the equivalent of half of Hawai'i's population travels every year to and from Las Vegas.  This phenomenon has been explored, but not sufficiently explained.

***Its own website makes it sound achingly, ontologically banal: "US chain of full-service restaurants, specializing in cheesecakes for dessert"(italics in the original).

Lanai

Pacific

Bauhaus Sunday

YACHT: Claire

Hot Chip

Hot Chip

YACHT

Paramount

...the responsibility of a post-war world...

Ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

- Barack Obama, approx. age 20, in a letter from New York

Not all who wander...

Reblogged from This Isn't Happiness

Celebratory Drinks

Gateway - Joe Nix

Gateway 2012 - Teaser from VISUAL ANTHEM on Vimeo.

Regular readers will have a passing familiarity with the work of Joe Nix, my childhood friend (Joe lived with me and my parents for the better part of a year), current friend and fellow Belltowner. Joe has had all kinds of success pursuing art, on canvas and on buildings. In addition to his own art, he runs Vice/Versa Gallery and the monthly Sideshow event in Belltown and in doing so has helped further the careers of other regional artists. Joe sent me this link today. It's a teaser trailer for an upcoming indie documentary about the creation of one of his most compelling projects to date - his mural on a house in Nashville. If it doesn't play smoothly, click the "HD" icon on the lower right and it will play smoothly in low-def.

LCD Soundsystem - Band Rules

"Nobody onstage can hear anything the audience can't hear. No click tracks, no guides, nothing can be heard onstage that isn't going to the front of the house.

"If it's a synthesizer you have to make that sound happen onstage with a synth.

"If it's an organic sound it absolutely cannot be put on a sampler.

"No 'feeling it'

"No sunglasses.

"No rocking out.

"No improvising.

"No noodling.

"No psyching up the crowd.

"No pretending you're cool. I understand that if someone's going to make me his idea of cool I can't control that. But no wearing the rock-and-roll hat. 

"Volume. Volume. Volume. Volume onstage. We like it to sound uniform, even and loud as fuck."

- James Murphy to Sasha Frere Jones in the New Yorker (May 10, 2010 edition)

Lights

M83

Best Coast