And Comb Your Hair

… If I’m to take you anywhere
I’ve got it made, while my woman is away
Off taming goats, with compassion I suppose…

Leonard Cohen sings, “Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in” over and over again in my head. Bittersweet optimism is what’s helping me get through these past couple days, which have been much of a downer for reasons of my own making, and no real fault of anyone’s.

In graduate school, someone once sent me an anonymous note that only read, “be kind to yourself”. I was going through a difficult time then, and reading that note made me burst into tears, in public, which is something I rarely do because it embarrasses and shames me so much to cry, even in front of people who are emotionally close to me. I’ve been reminded about being a bit too tough on myself by a few people of late, including my therapist who thinks I suffer from “emotional theft”, something I still haven’t been able to fully research online because I can’t find the right references. I’m probably not able to grasp the nuances of the term or diagnosis, but in simple terms I’m able to understand that he thinks that I allow other people’s feelings to take precedence over my own, and that results in pent-up frustration and a very intense cycle of emotional self-flagellation.

On my to-do list on my computer desktop, I have a checkbox next to “be kind to yourself” and it’s the first task I look at every day. I never check it off, because it’s a work-in-progress, a reminder of how much more I have to do, and how some things can never be crossed off a list. I try hard to remind myself that it’s okay to own my frustration and my feelings, disappointment and happiness – That’s what the therapy helps with. On days when I feel the universe is vast, beautiful, open and full of tantalizing joy to be bitten into, I can be so happy and really feel one with the universe. But on the darker days, I struggle with reconciling my intellectual understanding of what’s going on in my head with the bubbling frothy tumult in the pit of my stomach.

I have so much to work on, for myself. And so much to let go. I’m so humbled by the emotional rollercoasters I go through because they remind me just as I’m getting complacent about having found a comfortable place in my life, that I haven’t figured it all out. It would be nice if everything fell into place, because then maybe that would stop the not-so-great feelings, but I suppose if everything were the way I wished them to be, I wouldn’t have a foil to joy or yardstick for satisfaction. I know things aren’t meant to be easy. But because I know I have so much to work on, I know I’m not allowing myself to develop real (but then again, what is real?) intimacy with someone because I’d like to be someone’s perfect Pygmalion. I recognize intellectually that nobody’s perfect, and don’t fault people for not being perfect, because we are all a little knocked about and chipped. But somehow the expectations I have of other people don’t apply to me.

I feel like I’m out fighting windmills and someone has strapped mirrors to their blades.

Holy cow
I want you to get out
And tell all your friends
that I’m not myself again.

But How We Move…

From A to B
It can’t be up to me
‘Cause I don’t know…

I know I’m probably way late to jump on the Lykke Li bandwagon (it probably isn’t cool anymore, is it?) but I just found this song, and I love everything about it – The toy piano, the tone of defensiveness, the inching towards the edge of falling completely, the tambourine!

I’m in the middle of reading Anaïs Nin’s “Henry and June” which has been an absorbing read for the past week, compelling reflection on a lot of my own feelings about feminism, love (what does it mean, “to love”?), passion, desire, beauty, ugliness, comfort, and being settled or unsettled. This song makes me think of that tension between being strong, independent, autonomous and that submission to love – a confession that the rational has lost out to the emotional? – which exposes us to invulnerabilities and weakness, and the occasional desperation for reassurance.

Come here
Stay with me
Stroke me, by the head
Cause I would give anything
Anything
To have you as my man

“It’s Your Ride”

I love my bicycle, even though I haven’t ridden in months because it’s not feeling well – It’s got a weird squeaky thing going on somewhere and the front brakes won’t release off the wheel. I have, however, promised multiple people that I will fix my bike in time for a) a party this weekend in Brooklyn, and b) the Five Boro Bike Tour which I think I will suffer at because I’m really out of shape and c) general riding in this New York City weather that is flirting with the idea of spring. I’ll just have to make good on my promise this weekend.

I do love bicycles, their shape, their sounds, their mechanics – it’s all more of an aesthetic experience to me than the need to ride like a speedmaven through New York’s concrete labyrinth. Hopping on for a slow, short ride towards an imaginary oubliette or a roundabout errand in my neighborhood makes me smile, and that’s usually all I ever do, really.

Enjoy this video by Daniel Leeb of Cinecycle Productions. Commissioned by Hutchinson tires, the short traces the bike paths of two different bike-riders in New York City. The music is original, by Alan Wilkis, and the track “The Hustle” can be downloaded for free on MySpace.

For posterity.

A ridiculous IM pissing contest between M. and I.

M: i hear people hollering in my courtyard, something must’ve happened in the superbowl

Me: i hollered in your mom’s courtyard…

M: … i hollered in your mom’s courtyard and it echoed

Me: … i made your mom holler in my courtyard. and it broke the sound barrier.

M: i broke your mom’s sound barrier in my courtyard

Me: your mom broke the sound barrier when i echoed in her courtyard.

M: i courted your mom’s barrier, and broke it, soundly

Me: your mom. is a ho. basically.

M: i’ll take that as a surrender

More Jarvis

My band was on Fearless Music – a NY-based national TV program that showcases different musical acts each week – a couple months ago, and the full version of the song we performed is now available on YouTube.

No Solid Ground…

… It’s fake believe
All you can see
Is really there…

The French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – The more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m sitting here on my bed in the apartment I grew up in for the first time in about three years, finally home again after a graduation, a couple jobs, and a flight across the world. I’ve already fallen into a comfortable routine after a few hours of being home, spending most of my time with my family yet strangely apart and distant in my bedroom while everyone else is either in front of a television set or a computer screen.

And that’s the way it has been since I moved away, coming home only during breaks in the school year. My bedroom, which I used to share with my older sister, is now a repository for my brother’s books, cardboard boxes of unidentified possessions, and other odds and ends that don’t belong elsewhere in the house. My closet, which used to store what I used to think was style from the 80s and 90s (think stretchy light wash jeans, oversized shirts and throw in a Hellblazer t-shirt I stole from my brother), has now made space for my mother’s clothes. My sister’s old books and CDs that she never took with her to the United States when she left in 2001, still sit on their shelves. Many of the musty, dogeared titles seem to belong to a certain time that we’ve now passed.

And still, even though we don’t live here anymore, my mother keeps some of our stuffed animals around the room. Mousie (mouse), Fritzie (bear), Winnie (wombat) – we were really into naming our toys when we were kids – and assorted Winnie The Pooh plushes from a time when McDonald’s in Singapore was giving them out with Value Meals. My Tori Amos poster is still stuck to the wall with what must now be pretty ancient Blu-Tack. This scattered patchwork of my things and things that aren’t mine, grown-ups’ artifacts and stuffed animals as old as I am, just doesn’t make the room smell the way it used to when I was much littler.

In some ways, the nostalgia is nice. It’s fun to poke through old drawers – As a child I was intrigued by boxes and the top drawer of my side (the left side) of my sister and my shared desk holds three different boxes each containing little treasures from my childhood – buttons, pins, barrettes, old plastic earrings, and even a picture of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus – a relic from when I thought I might be Catholic.

Poking around, reading old notes, and flipping through old photographs make me realize how much has changed in the ten years I’ve left home. It seems almost unkind to say I’ve outgrown this place here, because it is, after all, home. But I have, and it isn’t really my room anymore. In some ways I’m also a little melancholic about the way I feel some of my memories are slipping from me, and I don’t fully remember what this bedroom used to be like.

I’ve just arrived in Singapore, but I already miss New York City so much. I feel almost guilty for my attachment to my apartment in Bushwick. But this is the first time I’ve returned to Singapore without the existence of a transitory dorm room, with all its restrictions on being owned with pictures, paint and personality, waiting for me on the other side of the journey. This time, I do have a home and an adopted city that I’ve chosen for reasons more than cheap rent or proximity to campus, and I intend to stay for a while.

So when I came in there
A million lines tried to reach me
And what I’ve seen out there
Too many words misleading

Birth Is Never As Hard As The Guilting

When I was in high school I read a Japanese manga called “Maison Ikkoku“. Most of it is pretty memorable but there is one phrase, a supposed Japanese idiom or some kind of blessing, that I recall pretty often: Birth is never as hard as the waiting.

Birth is never as hard as the waiting. As if birth is the terminus of gestation and that is it, when in reality the first cry that wails from a mother’s uterus marks the beginning of a tumultuous relationship between self and child. Birth is never as hard as the waiting. As if everyone is able to have the luxury of making the “right” choice, or is able to pace up and down a metaphorical waiting room for nine months, and walk through the aftermath. As if birth was and has to be the inevitable outcome.

We are born into rupture and trauma, into shit, blood and amniotic fluid. When we’re born we give our mothers trauma and rupture, we begin to dispense blood, shit and piss. Our parasitism doesn’t end when we’ve popped out of the womb and begin to breathe for ourselves – we only get more demanding, vocal and unwieldy. I don’t deny that pregnancy and giving birth is a beautiful thing – I was in the room holding my sister’s legs apart when my niece was born – but I’ve seen what can happen after, and the reality of what demons can grip you terrifies me.

In another life, I wanted to have children, in every sense of what that conventionality meant. I imagined nursing, dressing boo-boos and baking cookies. Mothering. But I’ve come to believe that I was just naively in love at the time, and trusted what other people told me from observing my behavior, that I would make a good mother. I was a smug 22 year-old, and already ensconced in a false sense of worldliness. When my niece was born, I expected an automatic maternal instinct to kick in, already revved to maximum but I found myself still disturbingly (to myself) not sufficiently moved in the way I had hoped it would feel. To not have those amped up maternal feelings despite being in the room when she was born makes me feel guilty in a way I feel I cannot adequately express to anyone.

My sister recently made the observation that when we were children growing up (and yet in 2009 still not fully grown!) we never played at house, or pretended to be mommies with our dolls. It’s true we were never terribly domestic little girls. We ran a radio show and we wrote our own jingles for ads. We had a TV show about crafting, usually with recycled cardboard and scissors. Our Barbies played in a band called “The Blue Oceans” and we had a female drummer who played overturned yogurt containers while Ken and Luke Skywalker (from my brother’s Star Wars figurine collection) stood looking pretty.

We never played at being mommies. That, I know, doesn’t condemn us to being inadequate parents, or bad mothers for our children, real or potential. But I wonder if that makes us inadequate and hurtful for ourselves because we might be trying too hard to be like the girls for whom this all came much more naturally. Of course we have a choice to not be parents, to not go through it all but sometimes that choice is clouded by a “what if” or an “I don’t know”. I can’t deny that I still wonder if someday I’d be a good parent even if for now I’m fairly certain I don’t want to have children or cannot imagine them fitting in my life.

It is the lingering “I don’t know” and “what if” that make thinking about the eventuality of that choice so much more difficult, especially with their implications on one’s “natural” womanhood – breasts, ovaries, uterus and the supposed innate desire to breed. Even if there is no timeline, and no responsibility to anyone else, the guilt that I’m not completely a woman because I feel little compulsion (and in fact much heightened fear) for breeding and its aftermath, sit patiently inside me.

And so I just wait.

Hello, hello…

… over and out
over and out.

Hello EP

My band’s EP got pushed through to Amazon.com! If you dig us and you dig the planet and being green, why not ditch the conventional CD packaging* and get the digital version of “Hello”, complete with a special bonus track! Our friend Roger O’Donnell (The Cure, The Psychedelic Furs, The Thompson Twins) remixed our song “14th Street Station” and it is available only digitally and online.

If you’re old school and like having a hard copy of the CD in your hands, drop us a note or purchase the limited edition EP here while we still have them in stock!

*although, take note that our CD packaging is made of planet-friendly recycled material!

over and out
over and out
over and out

People Come By And They Look At Your Face…

And they say it’s the fairest of all…

bicycle at dumbo

I’ve just added some pictures to my photography site, under the Minolta X700 section. Highlights include black and white pictures from Jersey City and the Renegade Craft Fair at McCarren Park Pool, as well as color pictures from a bike ride to DUMBO.

And while we’re on the topic of photography, of late I’ve been curious about a couple of Japanese photographers whose work I saw at the Met last weekend.

Polar Bear (1976) - Sugimoto Hiroshi

When Sugimoto Hiroshi first arrived in New York City in 1974, he visited the American Museum of Natural History where he discovered “the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. [He'd] found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”

Containers At A Chinese Port (Honjo Naoki)

Honjo Naoki, Sugimoto’s younger colleague, explores the same theme of reality/illusion in his work by using a tilt-shift technique to achieve a shallow depth of field with selected areas of focus, making his real-life gargantuan subject(s) look like little toys in a miniature world.

Certainly not news (Honjo and other photographers have been doing this for a while) but definitely captivating and appeals to my love for architectural types and miniature things. These pictures also inspire me to bake a huge cupcake and photograph it to make it look like a miniature dollop of deliciousness and frosting.

And next time I see you I’ll be pleased to see you
I hope you’ll be pleased to see me
I’ll visit your picture I won’t have the nerve
To tell them that they’ve got you all wrong

But – What If They Like It?

… and lock us in a cannery with your accordion,
Until we canned our love?

A while ago I had a lot to write about – I had planned to write posts on Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut “Synecdoche, New York“, the 2008 elections, a trip out to Flushing, my Metropolitan Museum day with D., as well as random little bits and blurbs about daily revelations and hmm-moments I’ve been having. But somehow, in the middle of being busy yet not, I haven’t been able to sit down and meander at the computer.

The days and their meanings are beginning to string themselves so closely together, calendrical milestones flitting by with one significant event after the other – Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas and the New Year before we know it – another champagne toast, another countdown, another midnight kiss pregnant with hope of a better string of milestones ahead. The more things change, the more they stay the same? I’m approaching the next month or so with the very slightest of anxiety and caution towards reality and my self – at the back of my mind, I wonder if this season, which I love in my own quiet way, is just repetition this year and I’m just moving along, bobbing up and down like a leaf on the surface of a pond.

Maybe it’s just because the days are getting so dark. I’m finding ways to light them up somehow, and reconnect my little world with the universe.

I tried and tried and tried and tried
and tried and tried to keep the crowds away