Bleeding out our Reflections

A few trials…

lately, some things have struck some chords in me. To start, internet has, once again, been deleted from the international guest house. My computer therefore now becomes a stereo/typewriter, and loses its role as an international hub. Nevertheless, some things have struck chords in me and I feel it right to express them here.

I'm obsessed with comics as a medium, I find the potential in them beyond both film, writing and painting. My mother recently brought back a few books of comics for me, most significantly, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan and a compilation by of “America's Best Comics '07” (I have '06 here already). In addition, I recently downloaded Mike Mignola's Hellboy. I spent Monday thru Thursday inhaling the entirety of the Mike Mignola collection. If you appreciate comics, you will find Hellboy godly, and holy (in more ways than one). I mean, his style of art, is literature.
Of course, as a former poet and a current comic connoisseur, I'm captivated by artists who turn comics into poetry. Where a poet can make 20 words into heart or heat, I think comic book artists can do the same with one page. Their play on time such as, when one phrase begins in the top left and ends in the bottom right of the page, is obvious and hard to ignore. It is this bluntness that one can weave subtlety into. Whereas in poetry, one must develop that sense of time within the language itself, which is no less beautiful, but it has a different potential.
Things here in Vietnam haven't quite reached that level of depth. Or at least, ideas of that playful and intense nature have not reached the mainstream. Taste, essentially, is different here. And to me, superficial. (More on how design is really fascinating in this country because of this in the future)
Superficiality in taste, I think, is pretty common here (in music, in comics, in movies, in architecture, in writing, etc.). This superficiality can also be found in an appreciation or understanding of other culture's. This idea can be brought home with, “So, all you Americans just want to fuck and go and fuck and go, that's all?”…followed by a close-mindedness (or refusal to listen to explanation) I've only found in American Christian fundamentalists. That statement was said by one of my colleagues who studied in Virginia for two years. If everything were as cut and dry as most Vietnamese people think the world is, I'd never have become interested in art.
Of course, I'm probably missing something here, but as a thinker, I'm inclined to think, and at least generate something from my impressions and wait them out for verification or refutation. My friend Emily said something in passing that I've remembered til now: “most Vietnamese people think that us Westerners are all sluts.” Ha. I think that I'd love to teach a class here titled: “American version of Freedom, the '60s and contemplating modern Vietnam” I'd talk about how the meaning of American freedom has changed over the years, and how our generation is taking a new twist on it. I'd talk about racial, sexual (male-female, and intercourse) liberation in the '60s. And then the last two weeks of class would just be me giving them various questions that Americans contemplated, overcame, solved and are still grappling with into a Vietnamese context.

whittle away at your thoughts. take thoughts that begin in 2 by 4 foot wooden blocks and end up with poignant toothpicks.

I will never stop learning from my parents.

At the edge of understanding, with a twist of wit, and permeated with irony. I stand precisely where there is a hint of meaning.

why is solemnity the place where people fall silent and begin to listen?

the mathematics of tomorrow are gauranteed by the poetry of today, and thus the past can be said to be founded on ever-allusive patterns.

i love the way a woman’s body moves around a kiss.

most people think that time is the only factor in maturity.

what is culture designed to do from an evolutionarily objective historical point of view?

If she’s even just mildly interesting a man is bound to eventually fall in love with her because the mystery of women is, at times, irresistable.

This is deliberately a reflection.

I don’t mind karma. (emphasis on the word, mind)

At the moment? Yeah, turning major information sources that are in English, into English teaching tools.

“Some people are so good at something that they make it look easy.” This is what people say about things nowadays, especially about good atheletes.

In Asian philosophy you will find a similar concept, but inverted. That is, that person is so good at that because he has perfect himself. (perfection of self in this case, i think, is open for interpretation, although some would assert it’s a moral statement)

I was on a bus in Saigon somewhere and heard a group of guys laughing quite loudly. And then I found out they weren’t laughing. They just had live chickens in bags.

I guess everything has just been a return to what I was 5 years ago.
Meditation isn’t what you think.

There is a technique of lodging irony directly inside of grammar.

On the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, smugglers smuggle in the rain because they know that the Vietnamese police are too lazy to chase after them in the rain.

A few kind words from someone you believe in can go a long way.

After hearing some mediocre jazz I thought…”Man, that’s not music, that’s just a bunch of “I”"….The saxophonist was really cocky, too cocky to understand music.

Sometimes all that matters is the strengthening of the will.

I wrote my own songs via violin because I”m not so bold as to butcher an old geniuses delights.

It’s not a floodgate in a bad way, but it’s a floodgate nonetheless.

It is when we are losing culture that we cling onto the last shreds of what we think is culture.

Of the gorgeous acquaintance unmet i sing one note of solitude.
Make it so that all the low end jobs become high end. Garbage men who are statisticians.

It used to be that politics was about reliable sustainable policy. Today, politics has to be about the creation of culture.

Beginning a good attitude towards internet develops after a healthy attitude towards education. After a healthy attitude towards education then must come a revolution in privacy and intellectual (which is essentially private) property. The breakdown of privacy then revolutionizes identity. The deterioration of identity obliterates what we once considered as “humanity” (which has a slight feeling of community within it, in other words, the way we think of community will slowly die) and replaces it with an openness that we may fear more than any other thing prior because it is this unknown that the governments have sought to harness or restrict, but they are missing it. They (and we), essentially, aren’t paying enough attention to culture (and what culture actually means and reflects). But ultimately, in the end, it isn’t about cultures, nation-states, etc. All of that will be split asunder and we’ll be dealing with an utterly new field-era. Now we seem to be seeing the beginnings of it, but it’s being held back because people (even the most “progressive”) are unable to realize the true revolution that will occur, which is in the deterioration of culture as we know it. Not politics or environment or energy or spirituality or technology, etc.