1.

He was the young romantic. 

He was the true romantic. He played ballads the way nobody else could play them. 

They weren't sentimentalized, they were beautiful and they were deep. They didn't require a lot of hand-wringing. And they were different from anybody else. You'd have these almost stark...

He wakes up late, too late for his eight o'clock lecture. It is not the first lecture he has missed since Lydia entered his life. He is falling behind in his studies and does not see how he will ever catch up. In his first two years at university he had been one of the stars of the class. He found...

Dear Histo​ry,​

I beat you. I stand​ a gener​ator of gener​ation​s beari​ng witne​ss to a world​ that we are holdi​ng accountabl​e for past actio​ns.​ Me and my frien​ds,​ we're chang​ing our diets​,​ re-inven​ting marriage, check-mating capitalism​,​...

I like my red wine chambré, and it was served exactly that the evening I got a special tour at the Weinstein Gallery adjacent Union Square, down town. Hanging off a cable car to get there, I passed Broadway, nipped at the flask. I was feeling good; lithe and libertine, smacking on some gum. I'm on my...

Man, what a hell of a weekend that was. Intimate contact with close friends who by virtue of geography, unfortunately don't spend enough time together. Glad that it happened. It was bound to, if anything. We sang. We drank. We ambled path to path under Speedway pines. A few of us meandered into darkness,...

So what if you tout yourself green just to make bank? So what if integrity is now a synonym for frivolity? So what if we are a culturally kool, hipster-cum-indifferent ensemble of spokespersons and shop-freaks? And what if nearly every technical gadget is hyphenated with the letter i? 

So What if Miles...

At my bedside table
leafing
at a book
and cradling a Carlsberg.
The saturnine gloom that's my face
reflects the news: 
David Foster Wallace hung himself. 
He was 46.
He was a fucking genius.
I can't not help think of his wife. 
I want to hold her,
call Sean and arrange a vigil for Her, 
fetch for...

How I miss the mountain, what it stood for,
represented, what it meant, what it said,
how it made me feel, what it did for me, that mountain,
that emergence, how it embodied the rage of whatever
it is I used to rage against, how I wanted to conquer
the mountain, scale the mountain, whether to hike it
or...

Of all sounds, water, the original life element, has the most splendid symbolism. Rain, a stream, a fountain, a river, a waterfall, the sea, each makes its unique sound but all share a rich symbolism. They speak of cleansing, of purification, of refreshment and renewal. 

The sea has always been one of...

After absorbing so much about it from the media, actually visiting Los Angeles in person produces a curious feeling of relief at finding a place that actually confirms your stereotyped preconceptions instead of confounding them and making you loathe your own ignorance and susceptibility to media...

Going into the Final Championship series against the Celtics, Kobe Bryant was compared often to Michael Jordan. Kobe, the NBA's regular season MVP, the greatest athlete since the great MJ. Now that the Celtics have whooped the Lakers for those NBA Championship rings, it is abundantly apparent that...

One little rule about shooting is that you're not supposed to cross the line between two characters. You shoot on one side of the line - you can't just pop to the other side of the line, because what a video camera seems to be doing is just mimicking a person in the room. It becomes a person in the room,...

Of all animate creation, science recognizes the cat family as the most perfect workmanship. No other animal, not even man, is so unimprovably adjusted to its environments, so absolutely fitted for the life it has to lead. Even evolution, the supreme, slow Afterthought, has found nothing to better in...

Professor of Art.
I have always been envious of the way this particular creature can argue anything at any time and for any number of reasons, least of which is based on material fact. It seems they are particularly endowed in communicating abstractions, thereby making them fitted bachelors of...

Big Boi, Steve McQueen, or Sean Connery would tell you it's a truth universally acknowledged that the way we Look or Dress reflects an instinctive desire to stand out in a crowd, to attract those whom we find appealing while keeping others at arm's length. The same attitudes, as many studies have...

It was a low, indistinct, continous sound at first.
In the coming light of day, it grew.
Murmuring saffron regalia;
a golden red saree sweeping the polished marble
on the floor of your contemptible imagination.
You woke half a stop behind.
You always do this:
play genie with the focal ratio,
discern...

Some days the sun rises with a conviction I don't have.
A soothing, luminous, crimson, orange haze lights up warm and smiling
until it sets your dinner table with a lipstick sunset.
Today was not going to be one of those days.
The phone rang before that lumination had a chance
and it wasn't love on...

Five Films

Given I've been sans cell phone the past week I've used the opportunity to wholly enslave my evenings to the purpose of watching movies. To list

1. Il Postino
A brilliant film. A soulrenching, simple, unbelievably unsimple film. 

Above the captivating score, above the bergman...

Certain records get inside you: every twist of every note somehow slithers into your nerves and becomes as familiar as your own breathing. It might be the time in your life you discover a particular album, or the mood you were in when you first heard one of the songs, or the way some stranger's voice...

She was a brazilian dime
& I was primed like Kevin Kline
preparing to ’act’ in Grand Canyon,
the 1991 film:
ready to be empathetic... visibly seducted, 
and married.
She was a brazilian dime
& that is not even NEAR
the description of how fine
this brazilian dime really was.
Her walk down...