Welcome to the End of The World - Been There, Done That

Salaam alaikum and Blessed Be, my dear readers! This year started to me as many others before: celebrating the New Year abroad. Ok, ok, maybe Hungary shouldn't count for me as "abroad", BUT, as I've had had my New Year in Paris, my New Year in Sofia, this year the New Year came at the Caribbean shores of Santo Domingo, the capital city of Dominican Republic. This time around it was my boyfriend flying all the way from Hungary to Costa Rica for the end of the year, and not the other way around, for reasons well known for those who need to know them. 

We talked about going to Dominican Republic in spring, but ended up going to Panama City due to lack of proper organizing. This time around, however, with much more time to do the planning - which is the key to everything - we made it to this lovely island, where we enjoyed the Caribbean culture and history. Yes, there were strange and odd things, like the tourist harrasing people at any step of the way, I wrote about in the last post of 2011, however all in all - particularly after taking a walk down Calle Conde - it was wonderful. I wouldn't say it was "magical", because there was so much earthy, human quality in it, that all supernatural forces were erased. Even the shores and the waves seemed like part of the effort of a nation that does know how to work it, but also know how to take it easy, not rush it, but live it.

Part of a trip - at least for me - includes the mandatory cruising of the tax and duty free stores at the airport, where I usually stock up with magazines and candy. My selection this time around included the december number of Latina - a magazine I haven't seen before, as I noted in the last post -, Vogue, Vanity Fair and The Economist. Normally I would go searching for Marie Claire, which had been my favorite magazine for ages, but as things have come by, this magazine has changed going from a smart, women's issues focused magazine to yet another shopping catalogue, with all traces of brain neatly supressed. It does upset me how the roaring "buy more, think less" wave expands to more and more newspapers and magazines, making it harder each time to actually find an article that can absorb you mentally, show you something you didn't know about, educate you, fill your braincells with useful, interesting information, and challenge you. 

After Marie Claire's plunging in quality, bigger concern with adds and pictures of clothes and accessories you don't really need, and lesser with showing the world of women around the planet, how can we otherwise get to know about them? What other way do we have to get informed from a different point of view? Which other source do we have to get glimpses of the history and the present of women all over the world? Yes, snipets can be found, but magazines are far more concerned with rags that won't last three months than the stories behind human trafficking, or efforts towards breaking new and more areas in women's labor fields. Glossy paper has become all about the superfluous and stupid, taking away any trace of thought, any trace of awareness, if not sponsored by a company or a group of them on a trendy topic, such as "Breast Cancer", or any other thing that doesn't challenge society or economical order. Anything to make you spend.

From the batch I purchased, gladly Vanity Fair kept up to the standard I set, though more leaning on the political matter, rather than foccused on the women's issues, even though this last issue had no other than Lady Gaga on the cover. I keep blinking in disbelieve how such an ugly, outrageous person can be so celebrated. Other than that, holding in my head a piece written by Joseph Stiglitz is delightful. However, before I even got around to Vanity Fair, I checked out the overly popularized and commented Vogue magazine. The magazine is an icon in fashion - as many know so - has been subject of songs, movies, books, documentries, and their Editor in Chief, Anna Wintour, quite known and celebrated. The magazine and Ms. Wintour have been also the underlying subject of the book and movie "The Devil Wears Prada" (a great movie, a terrible book, written by a disgraceful, untalented Lauren Weisberger). The magazine is certainly a stack of paper about fashion, with not much thought about any other issues - as I would have expected it to - so in that sense it came way under my expectations. Sure, "Vogue" isn't "Runway", but from no socially striking articles to no-brain articles there's quite a gap, and one that this famed magazine does not manage well at all. As you page through it, you can't see any of the "elitist" style oozing from it that the critics talk about - unless you call Kardashian-like no-brains-only-money style - but the kind of audience it seems to carter for is one you really, really don't want to belong to, specially if you have a university degree and believe in real hard work (not the maniac straining yourself for intrascendental things the magazine calls "hard work"). How can you monthly spend time reading pages that suggest you to dress like a clown, fast yourself into a toothpick and spend regardless of whether you have money or not, because "the trend" says so?

It was still interesting to see Meryl Streep on the cover, so I had to read the article on her to see if there was any mention at all about the afore mentioned movie, where she played Miranda Priestly, the homologue of Anna Wintour. Well, it made me smirk how evidently the sting of the book and the movie hasn't been overcome, as the praising of the actress was all over the place, and the moving was mentioned only passingly, in the middle of a list of other movies. It seems that "the cool people" can't put themselves past the booklet a mediocre writer wannabe composes, and keep the grudge until the end of days. Then again, who are we calling a mediocre writer, when Ms. Wintour's editorial is flat and the rest of the "articles" are blah, abundant in a language that seeks to detail luxury and a sense of grandeur, but that never get's to the nerve of things. It's all on the brands, and the mixes of humble attitude with knowing what's trendy and luxurious, but with not a word thrusting deeper into the vein, going to what's aside from the brand and the fresh oysters and "working hard".

Work hard, work hard... a phrase used up and down to describe successful people who have lots of money and still don't hit the bed before 4 am, are up in 4 hours and do this "work" thing constantly. Yeah, yeah, yeah... so, now tell me what's that "work" about. Is about organizing foundraisers and trips to bring aid packages to depressed areas, or is it sticking your nose to your computer trying to find a way to get millions of American workers to get rid of their debts, or how to create the missing 4 million jobs and make sure they stay? Is it hard work proselitizing for a candidate or a party, maybe a bill about tax cuts, or is it about waking up at 3 am to work on the fields? Or maybe it's hard work to be up until late trying to decide which picture would look better as the cover of your shallow, no-brain magazine?

So yes, there were no articles, so I paged through the magazine looking at the latest trends, what's to come and realizing once again that fashion lately has nothing that could or would hold my interest. There was then a piece (I can't call it an article) about the tendencies and how - unlike with previous times of economical crisis - the tendency isn't towards minimalism (which I like), but towards overaccesorizing. Necklaces and bracelets measured in pounds, not in units, and chandelier earrings. The lines to introduce the tendency were rather insulting, from the social and economical proint of view, basically saying "you can face the times of crisis with frugality and saving, bracing for the hard time, or you can give it the finger and put on every luxury item you can get". Okay, so we are living hard times, millions of jobs have been suppressed in the States, people have been unemployed for years, and their proposal is "overaccesorize and give the crisis the finger". The excuse to do this? "Because youth is doing it and many of them are unemployed and have no money". Oh really, so here we are, adults, trying to get a job or hang into the one we have, with bills and responsabilities to face, realizing that living on a credit card isn't doable anymore, and we need to cut the unnecesary expenses, save some so the next time the economy fucks it up we don't get it up the ass, and here comes a fancy little magazine telling you to fuck the crisis, let's go bolder and still pretend we can max our credit cards and everything will be dandy. Where are we heading to? (In Vanity Fair, meanwhile, Kurt Andersen writes about how it seems that style has remained stagnating the last 20 years, with much of the same when comparing 1992 and 2012, so that makes you think where all this "we like" and "we think" you see in these magazines actually get anywhere in a society quite depleted of resources, with trend gurus that can't get over themselves, but continue to push their own, little, outdated agenda everywhere.)

The way I see it, we are heading towards the absolute stupidization of the population, but not as part as some conspiracy, but also because of ourselves. If the magazines and newspapers dish us day after day articles and pieces of the lowest quality - and that can be seen in the very grammar and composing of many of the articles, where you would expect at least some average manage of the language - in every sense of the word. Shallow articles that not only don't grasp the surface of the matter, working the topic more as if it where a trailer of a topic rather than an article about it, but also because many of the subjects picked are not really that important. What would be more relevant, Demi Lovato's disorders or the levels of poverty reached by many countries, and what that slide down the socio-economical ladder entail? If you ask the magazines and the newspapers, Demi Lovato's issues, no question about it!

Yes, they are consistently working on making us stupid, but what are we doing about it? We keep buying their issues, we keep reading their shit, we don't demand for anything that isn't directly supplied to us. We don't demand, we take. So, demand. Demand! Don't buy the crap, but be clinical, and if you are bored, find new sources, but don't give them your money, nor be an instrument for them to get money out of you and your data for things you don't really want. We complain a lot about quality, but what are we doing to make them improve it? What are we really doing? Me, I'm doing something: Marie Claire is striked from my list, and so is Vogue now. Now it's up to you.

Blogging starts first with reading my favorite bloggers and secretly yearning for the day I can read them also on my Kindle. Kindle. The word reminds me a story I heard from the Pagan Podcaster Fire Lyte, known by his podcast Inciting a Riot, as well as the podcast he co-hosts with the lovely Velma Nightshade, Inciting a Brewhaha. Fire Lyte said that he read somewhere that in the time of the Holy Inquisition, homosexual people were burned at the pyre with the witches, however that they were used to kindle the fire, not to be burn by themselves, and they tied them in fags, thus the term "fag" to refer to them - in a peyorative manner. Perhaps I'm insensitive - after all I'm heterosexual and Christian - but I keep rolling this idea over and over, trying to figure out the actual content of this information. Can people actually be used to kindle fire? For a pyre? Maybe I need to see to believe, but it does sound a little bit too much of a stretch of reality for me to believe it.

Part of the Holidays are over and only the last one remains, along with just a few days of the year and a few days of my vacations. I yearned for this break - I really did - but as things are, I don't mind getting back to work on Monday. A few days scrapped up for mandatory rest, and now that I'm not spending every single one of them - and others I can add to them - to fly to my beloved, frozen Europe, the days are... not particularly meaningful. Mean thing to say, I know, specially when my boyfriend is here and I don't have to wake up early and every morning we can stretch and roll around between the sheets yawing and enjoying either the iddle laying or the more active kind of pleasure. I have him, here, with me, in my days, so somehow the physical closeness, the physical togetherness isn't something so desperately cherished. Do I get my meaning through?

It's cool, though, to mash together the daily routines, the driving, pulling in more routinely conversations about the color of the kitchen, or how shall we manage with the closet space and what should be the first things that need to be taken care of, and even starting to work a long term plan about saving to get eventually a bigger place in the district I want (I'm so not moving from that subject!), because truth to be told, a small income from the rental could be much appreciated for other plans, and to get an extra margin for little indulgements and luxuries I love so much.

A cycle is slowly coming to an end with the turning fo the wheel of the year. Many things have changed and many cycles have been completed in this time. I've tasted into the waters of religion and phylosophy, and discovered things that tug my mind in directions that arrest my attention easily. I've also realized, after much time, that my writing should be rekindled, that the stories played over and over in my head are not enough, but that my skills should be put to practice, the word exercised and restrenghtened. As I stumbled upon my old writings I stood there paralized, almost scared at the skills I once had - the potential of what I could have achieved - and yet I let it all wilter so easily. It goes also to drawing. Perhaps I should try my hand once again at that, just practice and try to draw the things that have crossed my mind.

Unlike planned, I skipped the celebrating of a Pagan holiday: Yule, but also of a Christian celebration I have never kept so far: Advent. Maybe I'll have more knowledge and pay more attention in th next cycle of my life to keep the markers of these celebrations. I wouldn't make it a New Year's promise, as though I've tried, those bear not much meaning for me, but I'd like to make it a proposal for the new cycle of my life: make this new phase more life-aware, and that's own of the things these celebrations give to it. Of Advent I do not know much - therefore have no idea how to interpret it either  - and of Yule I know it's the day when the Sun is born and the powers of day and night, dark and light are shifted again. The contemplative times are to be slowly set aside, and ease back into the active, working days. From the side of Christianity, with the birth of Jesus, we see the birth of Hope, Faith and Light, and with Yule, we see the preparation towards hard work.

As balance tips again, it becomes time to prepare for the work to come, so kindle the lands back from the iced embroidery of meditation, work it, masage it back to fertility and prepare it, work it, sow it with our effort to see in the months to come, in the stages and seasons of our cycle, our efforts and work to blossom and bloom and ripe to harvest. There is a routine, but not because of that there's no change in it. Not because of that there's stagnation.

Is change needed no matter what, as today's "enterpreneur gurus" want to make us believe? Or is it okay to say "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Nature certainly doesn't go around reengineering itself time and again, deciding that mammals will not hatch from eggs, and plant will give birth to their sprouts. Apple trees are not requested to produce now both tomatoes and jam, nor cows are expected to produce flavored milk and orange juice.

When is change needed? When does the monkey turns man? When it naturally happens so, but meanwhile, there is change. Nature works constantly in cycles, from birth to death, from the dropping of the leaves and the winter slumber to the lustful blossoming and the pregnant harvest. Follow nature, follow Mother Earth, your very humanity and you shall find out that there's no space for iddle stagnation nor discomfort, unless you are trying to escape from the natural flow and yearn for what's not out there to be taken and transformed. Change that comes with destruction or change that comes with construction? In this new cycle, I wish to open my soul, my skills, my spirit to this meditation, and so, as the Sun has been born, and the Lord has been born, the fruits of meditation, the blueprints of future, shall be worked upon to make them happen, rekindling the warmth to make that generous, giving Mother Earth receptive to our seed.

Introduction by a Snob, Ignorant Sycophant

You may think anyway you want, and I'm sure you do, but there has been no worse decision made by an editorial house than to let Mr. Karl Shapiro write the introduction of Henry Miller's «Tropic of Cancer». Through Anais Nin's diaries, I have come acquinted with Henry Miller and his rather interesting, "naturalist" approach to life. I wouldn't say that then I loved him and I thought all his words were made of gold, but I stared at him and watched him from a safe distance, as through Anais' sometimes affected, sometimes shaded, sometimes rebelious and open words reflected this hard eyed, German descendant, who would barely write but devoted a great deal of his time to take tons of notes taht would rest in heaps all around him, would be irresponsible with money, speding in whores as if they were a basic necessity of importance only surpassed by breathing, whines about his relationship to June and then simply stares and let people do his life. From love to hate to disappointment, to soft love and a fading sense of friendship soon replaced by other characters, you get to know a given Henry Miller that raises yous curiosity. So you wonder:

"Okay, who the hell must he be?"

Anais' diary is, after all, a diary plagued with the most subjective observations of the world, and after all, what is a diary or a journal but the very concentration and intensification of the subjective view of an individual? Perhaps the question of the diaries, or journals always tends to divert me towards this story I was writing a while ago, a fanfic, a Snockhart that broke the boundaries of NC-17, truth to be told, and where there's mention of three journals kept by a character, three that were kept with different purposes, but weren't even those subjective? So, from Anais' words to Miller's, I thought it was about time I found out the Miller in Miller, so I checked upon two of his books, which I ended buying. The question was indeed fascinating, as you have been watching him from Anais' eyes and you imagine vividly a true procrastinator, who gives so much to a way of organization, the building of a work environment that applies to his European roots, so fond of orderliness and structure, which he yet can't comply with as he's immersed in his Americanism, prone to temper tantrums, and chaos and lack of discipline by claiming "freedom" and the destruction of structures that "enslave the human" and so on, and with which the final result is the nothing: a lot of blah and no result.

But so he wrote a book, pushed and pulled by two women: Anais and June, though... was it so? Did June's endless lies did feed the story so he would write it, and did Anais' motherly persistence allowed him to finally materialize the book. Was it so? Was Anais' hand in the letters, guiding him to put together a decent book and not only a pile of notes? It was time to turn to Miller and see what does he has to say for himself in the book that was supposed to be the portrait of June, a counterpart of «House of Incest», where June was protrayed through the eyes of her female lover. Orderly, as I try to be, I started on the first page of the book, Miller's book, and read my way through the Introduction. >_< Pfwaaaaaaaaaa!!!! You do better skipping it! Put together by Karl Shapiro, the words of an ignorant sycophant rain over you profuse of lists of authors and books and turns and turns around flourish that say nothing, anchoring in profuse quotations of the author himself, is a clear attempt to imitate Miller. Disgusting.

Why do we need to know the list of books Miller or Shapiro have read or the artists that lived or accounted Miller among his friends, or have snippets of Miller's passion for the phenomenon of Rimbauld and then ADD the list of poets and artists that lived in the time of Rimbauld? I stare in the book into the words of an ignorant, no better than the people who surround me on daily basis, who pretend to know by puking long threads of memorized snippets of great names with big words and self-important attitudes. Through thirty-too-many pages this ass-sucking dickwad vomits gouts after gouts of showy phrases that hardly connect to a point, but try unsuccessfully to encompass Miller, his work and present his love for Rimbauld's work and life as an "amazing parallelism" that do not exist if not in Miller's aspirations and half intended desire to imitate. Yep, I see Miller giving up women to fuck men in the ass and pretend an adolescence way up in his 30's and sit down to write poetry. Admiration is not reincarnation.

Shapiro misses all the signs and in the swirl of it, he misses also Miller and his work, spinning words and attempts to show his own "intellectuality" failing so miserably that ends up giving the book a sour, regurritating taste of bile. Anai's prologue smothers it somehow with delicated words and soft praise of her friend, with a shy apologetic smile on her lips, lowering her head and seeking to fit him in the frame of her dream world, imagining the crowd composed by an endless number of clones of herself that would not understand raw words if there's not a prior love for the writer. She might be looking back at her diary and guiltily thinking: "I wrote it was ugly... I tried to make it right, but the truth in me is that I hate it because it is so unaesthetical."

I'm amused. I snort carelessly, frown and face him:

"C'mon dude. Do your worse."

The Worth of "Sorry".

What is with people that think everything can be fixed with "sorry"? Sorry is just a word that doesn't make things better.

New Jersey: Sorry we kept 12000 black slaves and they weren't emancipated until 1846. Well, let me give you some news: slavery hasn't been emancipated because the world is still full with people living in slavery. Even in the United States. "Emancipated" means only that the slaves you get have to be worked in the dark. So sorry means nothing. Or should Rome issue an apology for all the people enslaved during the ancient times in the Empire? I never unsterstood the point in saying "sorry" in such a late date. For instance, if I were Jew and suddenly Germany issued an apology for the holocaust, what does it mean to me? Nothing! I wasn't there, it affected, perhaps my family, but I wasn't my grandpa or my grandma, I didn't suffer, and those apologizing didn't dealt the suffering, so it's hollow. Being sorry has many shades that the sole word can't cover, and asking forgiveness, saying sorry "just because it's about time" is an insult to whatever damage, hurt have happened.

Okay, it might mean that you admit something you did was wrong... we all do. Do we need someone from Hitler's family to admit that what he did was bad? Fuck no! We all know that! Will it make the world a better place if President Bush were to admit that he planned 9-11 and that he pushed his country into a senseless war, attacking innocent people, threatening other countries' souvereignity for his own profit and a power-boost, and then he said "sorry" for that? Certainly not. After the economy was declared to be "sound", which we all knew it was not, and now slowly Bush admits that it's not "sound", does it make a difference? No. Words can be carried away by the wind. Words are empty. It's the meaning what makes the difference, the well timed meaning, the solving of the issues, not the hollow speeches.

Saying sorry when since years ago people know you did something bad, and half admitting a truth everybody knows, makes you only one thing: a fucking bullshitter.

People should consider better what they say.