May 19, 2006

Beyond Good And Evil

At these turning points in history there shows itself, juxtaposed and often entangled with one another, a magnificent, manifold, jungle-like growing and striving, a sort of tropical tempo in rivalry of development, and an enormous destruction and self-destruction, thanks to egoisms violently opposed to one another, exploding, battling each other for sun and light, unable to find any limitation, any check, any considerateness within the morality of their disposal...

~Nietzsche

Posted by Charlie at 12:20 AM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2006

Underground Man

"You gentlemen perhaps think I am mad? Allow me to defend myself. I agree that man is preeminently a creative animal, predestined to consciously strive toward a goal, and to engage in engineering, that is, eternally and incessantly, to build new roads, wherever they may lead... Man loves to create roads, that is beyond dispute. But... may it not be... that he is instinctively afraid of attaining his goal and completing the edifice he is constructing? How do you know, perhaps he only likes the edifice from a distance and not at all at a close range, perhaps he only likes to build it, and does not want to live in it."

~Dostroevsky

Posted by Charlie at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2006

Apartment Therapy

I can't get my reading done anymore at home now; the weather is too nice outside these days. I've never really been one to pick up a novel and travel to the park for several hours of alone time, but for the past few weeks I've adapted quite nicely to this change in lifestyle. Every week I pick a place I've never been to before, whip out the shades and the book (currently Apartment Therapy by Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan), and for the next several hours I'm transported somewhere else. Apartment Therapy has been very inspiring, not just on an interior design standpoint, but about making life choices and lifestyles in general. I've been doing a lot of spring-cleaning, getting rid of emotional anchors and what-nots.

Posted by Charlie at 03:23 PM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2006

Charging My Batteries

But before I could say anything, she suddenly asked me to hold her.

"Why?" I asked, caught off guard.

"To charge my batteries," she said.

"Charge your batteries?"

"My body has run out of electricity. I haven't been able to sleep for days now. The minute I get to sleep I wake up, and then I can't get back to sleep. I can't think. When I get like that, somebody has to charge my batteries. Otherwise, I can't go on living. It's true."

~Takashi Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1997

Posted by Charlie at 01:05 AM | Comments (2)

January 17, 2006

Binging on Murakami

Over the weekend the temperatures here in New York have dropped 20 degrees, and although I suspect that we'll be back in the mid-50s by the end of the week (as what happened last week), until then I have my five recently-acquired Haruki Murakami novels to keep me occupied.

Everytime I open the front cover of one of his books and see the countless praises by literary critics I can't help but wonder whether they're applauding the original Japanese text (very unlikely) or the English translation of that text (very likely). Based on past experience I know that there is always something that is lost in translation, whether it be cultural cues, words with no direct translatable equivalent, etc., and although I am greatly enjoying his works right now, I'm sure they'll be just as enjoyable, if not more so, when read in the original Japanese language.

Posted by Charlie at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2005

Mental Throw-Up

From Augusten Burroughs' Magical Thinking, which I am currently reading:

"When I was a little girl my mother used to give me enemas with Dr Pepper. And then make me drink the liquid when it came out! She was a wicked woman. And let me tell you, to this day I cannot drink Dr Pepper. If I even catch a whiff of it, my sphincter tightens up into a little knot."

Dear God in Heaven.

Posted by Charlie at 03:49 PM | Comments (2)

November 09, 2005

R.I.P. Emigre 1984-2005

Wow, this is big news. Emigre Magazine is closing shop after 21 years of redefining the landscape of American graphic design. Long Live Emigre.

Posted by Charlie at 05:13 PM | Comments (1)

June 30, 2005

Summer Reading

Summer is upon us, and for me that means lazy nights in bed with a good book. For some reason nothing beats being lulled to sleep than a story by Edmund White. His stories, sometimes autobiographical, read like a Norman Rockwell painting, capturing a time in American history when things were lazy and carefree, but only a little gayer.

Posted by Charlie at 11:50 AM | Comments (1)

November 28, 2004

Old Faithful

David Sedaris has written yet another lovely essay, this time in this week's New Yorker. Subliminal arguments for gay marriage rights aside, it's the most eloquently written short on love and devotion that I've read recently.

Posted by Charlie at 11:02 PM

March 27, 2004

Dry

I've always been quick to say that a nice hard martini is my best friend. I unabashedly love alcohol, to the point of caressing the stem and talking dirty to the uneaten olives in the glass. Didn't George Washington Carver say something like he loved watermelons so much so that he would personally offer some to Queen Elizabeth? Something like that? Well if that's the case, gin and tonics are my watermelons... or something like that.

Yesterday I read Augusten Burroughs' 'Dry' from cover to cover. In the literary sea of memoirs and essays, 'Dry' stands out like a beacon. Memoir writing seems to be the trend of the moment. But who would argue? Writers have the ability to deftly combine nonfiction with unreal elements of fiction through the platform that is the memoir. By slightly stretching the truth (Sedaris comes to mind) a writer can transform an otherwise dull trip to the park into a Woody Allen movie. That wasn't a good analogy. But readers are sucking up these materials. Take a gander at Lily Burana, Margaret Cho, Arthur Golden, David Rakoff, and Cynthia Kaplan for some other fine works.

What makes 'Dry' stand out as a wonderful piece of work to me, other than the fact of our shared love for a martini, is how candidly funny Burroughs was able to remain even in the darkest of times. His life was anything but a trip to the park. It was, for a lack of a better word, quite sobering to experience through him his daily struggles with alcohol and drugs. Nor was he perfect. But he was real.

I haven't touched alcohol since finishing that book. Of course, it's only been two days. Although I haven't (yet) gotten to the stage of having 400 empty DeWar's bottles laying around my apartment, I don't intend on getting there. Next I see a vodka martini, instead of whispering lovely nothings into its ear, I'll just lightly jab it on the shoulder and say, "I like you very much."

Posted by Charlie at 09:36 AM