o hand in hand

so, now that i've learned the bare bones html needed to link off of my page, may i present to you a link to a nice, brief walt whitman poem that, i think, will provide a sufficient explanation as to how i chose my blog title. scroll down, and you'll see links to a hundred billion other whitman poems as well. very nice.

i've just recieved permission to pull a paul bowles quote selected by olivia from her blog at myspace...

i've never read bowles myself, but i liked this a lot (and i plan on looking into his writing soon):

You ask what decadence is. I should think in art and literature nothing is decadent but incompetence and commercialism. If I stress the various facets of unhappiness, it is because I believe unhappiness should be studied very carefully; this is certainly no time for anyone to pretend to be happy, or to put his unhappiness away in the dark. (And anyone who is not unhappy now must be a monster, a saint or an idiot.) You must watch your universe as it cracks above your head.
~Paul Bowles. (New York Times, 1952)

i got a functional walkman about six months ago, and i swear it's changed the quality of my life. tonight i went across town on foot to return movies, deliberately taking an atypical path and listening to my walkman for most of the way. perhaps it's just my cinematic nature, but it's funny how something that simple can transform mundane bullshit. it could just be these great mixes from olivia (and the understated intimacy crucial to a good mix cd), but it made my night an awful lot better.

two summers ago, i spent three months at an artist's residency in rural maine. i used to paint in my studio until it was very late, and occasionally i'd listen to music on my way home. it's amazing how vulnerable you become with headphones on and a flashlight in your hand in the middle of the woods (more or less). i thought of this tonight, and of all the sounds i take for granted, and of the great luxury of blocking certain sounds out to let better ones in.

with michael jackson on the run, i can't help but find strange the amount of pity people continue to feel for him. the bits and pieces i've absorbed (from sources ranging from cnn & yahoo news to chit chat with taxi drivers) make him look increasingly guilty, and frankly, the bizarre, brutal documentary from several months back left me with little doubt to begin with. and yet, the pity still pours out. personally, i find him neither more nor less unfortunate than any other mentally ill celebrity, and i'd chalk the cultural reaction up to "cult of personality" if it wasn't so strangely melancholic.

so i'm wondering what it is about michael that provokes this outpour of compassion. in a sense, it almost reverses the logic of the typical nightly news, which (in my opinion) is too often centered around the pleasure of punishing/condemning urban, african american men (not that i see our reaction to michael as particularly progressive). is it his face? after all, charles manson is weird looking too, but our attraction to him steered more to the cowboy/outlaw stereotype. no pathos. and it certainly isn't his "feed the world" style philanthropy, as our hatred for any number of fallen televangelists will show. maybe we all just love "wanna be startin something"...

to me, the ornate dog-and-pony show of michael-in-the-media has the peculiar resonance of an ill-written fairy tale. this is, honestly, why i think that the current "scandal" is worth mentioning at all. like the unfortunate recipient of a storybook's morality, jackson is doomed to the banality of excess. his taut skin is the perfect "dorian gray" to the thriving id of a millenial consumer. if edward gorey were to interpret the winchester mansion story, he might situate it at the "neverland" ranch. jackson is like pinocchio becoming a donkey.

i grew up with jackson's music. i can remember my first cassette tape had a dub of "thriller" on one side of it. i'd imagine a lot of people my age developed an affection for him at a vulnerable age, and it's taken a heavy dose of tabloid pornography to feel any sort of resentment towards him. and now, for whatever reason, we're again bombarded with his android face, this time linked irrevocably to two of our final cultural taboos (namely molestation and pedophilia). it's funny how all the conversations i hear about this seem a bit sad. especially the jokey ones. in the end, someone always expresses a little bewilderment. the current dialogue seems strange and sincere. it's as if the media has unleashed a new kind of ruin.

well, this is my blog i guess. i'll post something more substantial later, but to start things off, i should say that the title of it is inspired by walt whitman. i pick up and put down "leaves of grass" several times a month, and each time i feel like i should devote more time to it. such is the nature of my brain, i guess. what will appear here will assuredly be a series of questionable observations and opinions, and i look forward to hearing those sharp voices from cyberspace that call me on my shit. i don't have the exact quote from ol' walt in front of me, but i'll try to find it for future posts. so, um... welcome, and glad you stopped by...