Not cool Zac. Not cool.

I've been working on a longish, more in depth post about the Arcade Fire. But thats no excuse. I mean to be writing daily, even if the content borders on inane and dull.

I've been taking lots of pictures about all the funky things to see in Portland. This place is less like a city and more like a playground. Or a sanctuary. You don't want to move here, there are too many people here already. I'm certainly one of the "too many." But honestly, you should move here.*

And by the way, my next post is going to be a puzzle.




*Disclaimer: I've not seen more than a day or two of rain. I don't even really remember them. But I hear the winters are brutal. We shall see. Right now, its downright hot.

Periodically I like to dig into my stats on YouTube and see what I can figure out. It took me 7 months to reach my first 10,000 views and it now takes about 17 days to get each additional 10,000 views. But couldn't that just be a result of me putting up so many videos?

I took a closer look. Mid Semptember 2006 I had a rolling 7 day averaged of 70 views a day and that was spread out over 23 videos. Thats a hair over 3 views per day, per video.

Right now I have 54 videos up and I average 576 views per day. Thats just shy of 11 views per video per day.

Horray for 351% increases!

There are those studies whose details come out periodically discussing how powerful suggestions can be. When teachers tell their perfectly average students how smart they are, the students do better. When mediocre video gamers are told of their superior skill their performance improves. And so on.

When I need to pack a lot into a small space, I think of my mother, the worlds greatest packer.

When I lose something important, I think of my sister, Emma. She WILL find it.

When I need to come up with a name for something I channel my twin sister Chelsea and my good friend Natalie P. Both namers extraordinaries.

When I want to think about art for the creation of it, I think of my brother Sam.

And when I feel like conforming to the system, I think of Patrick and realize it must be burned down and then rebuilt from the ground up.

When I want to remember how to laugh uncontrollably at anything, I think of Molly and her singular laugh.

(And when I can't think of anything, anything at all, I think to breathe with my stomach like meditation gurus the world over.)

And finally I try to remember not to seek inspiration, but to wait for it, because its all around me, like a million dots of oxygen.

From moment to moment the state of being alive is a miracle and a massacre. How could it not be? In the spirit of mindfulness I sometimes ask myself a useful question. I say,

My answer depends on a whole slew of factors. Major influences include how recently I ate, how much sleep I've had, and the scattered mess factor of my room as it relates to the scattered mess factor of my mind. My answer falls somewhere between grandiosity and a blank page.

But then it occurs to me: I'm working with the wrong question. The right question is not what I'm going to do with my life. That question assumes that I will have a full life to live, that I might not die at any moment, that living is simply a matter of sensations and changes over time. The right question is simple, assumes little, yet always remains breathtaking in it's implications. The right question is:

*Sometimes its the magic you once made it.

This music video was lots of fun to edit. The song is "Cannot Get Started" by the Handsome Furs. Their debut album comes out this Tuesday, May 22nd. I'm pretty pumped. I'm gonna go ahead and guess a 7.7 from Pitchfork tomorrow or the next day.



I tried to keep the editing in touch with the beat for the length of it, which is something I generally try and avoid. Watching a video that cuts on every beat is usually pretty tiring. Here though, I thought it worked. The final sequence is the same series of moving images, first seen about halfway through, laid on top of itself 14 times. The initial idea was that it was representative of a conversation, but the swirling colors and shifting focus are fun to watch. I pretty much couldn't resist finding out what 14 video tracks playing at the same time looked like.

Though the video as delivered by YouTube comes through with relative clarity, the sequence at the end is much better in the full quality version. YouTube has a habit of inflicting the sinister forces of compression and bandwidth limitations on my artistic aspirations.

This is a photo of me in the bathroom at this bar called The Tube.

Here is what is important: this place makes no sense.

It's reasonable to assume the name comes from shape of the walls (not shown). They curve up to a low ceiling in a way that, strangely, is not at all claustrophobic. The bathroom, though impossibly cool, looked nothing like the main room. The bar itself is lined with some really cool art, I think the ceiling is this plastic looking bright teal. There were large metallic paintings of rabbits with glowing red eyes on the walls.

On Saturdays the DJ plays the funkiest of the funk from the 70's and the people juke and jive like heaven is in movement. Behind the bar there are a number of LCD screens playing a movie that is, of course, impossible to hear. The night I was there they were playing The Motorcycle Diaries.

Two black men in their 50's dressed in vintage 70's pimp style got down like you can't believe. To the hand clap sizzle of hipsters and preppies, the indie kids and the floozies, like cocoa grounds and strawberries, juke'd and jived, rolled and shuffled. The DJ, himself seasoned, sautéed the dance floor until the heat was too much to bear. Thats when I went to the bathroom and took this photo.

Thats right. I'm urinating.

I distinctly recall a point in our time there in which I was unable to stop grinning. It was too loud to think, too colorful to look away, too real to seem earthly.