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Farmingdale Long Island, Outside the Crazy Donkey, 10.8.2008: we are the few that won't say nothing right
 we are the footsteps fading into the night
 nobody cares and nobody stares with such conviction and i say: 
 i never wanted this, no one ever wanted this
 but they gave it to you so you might as well b

K-76-1996
I had never ridden this far…
When I got to the Sing station they were changing everything-- the plastic signs on the walls were being torn down and they were giving the mini-mart a new paint job: the logo said “K-76” now instead of “Amco.” I selected what I wanted from the plastic shelves and walked over to the man at the cash register to buy my things:
“What’s K-76 sir?
“That’s what we’re called now. K-76”
“What happened to Amco?”
“K-76 bought Amco.”
‘”Oh. Ok. Are you guys still selling gas?"
“Yeah kid. We’ll always sell gas.”
“And snacks?”
“Yeah. Those too.”
I gathered my purchases and biked across the road to an empty church playground to sit on the swing and eat. I finished and started to rock back and forth—it was Florida summer, the air was sweating with humidity, and I was proud. This was the farthest I had ever come by myself. I was intimate with the neighborhood. “To the town next, and then, maybe, the big city.” For the afternoon, though, I was content to be king of the world of the Florida sun.
Across the street a crew of men was tearing down the twenty foot Amco sign. It crashed and splintered as I had reached the apex of my flight. I heard it go dead. A great blue and orange plastic sign was struggling to take its place.

The Long Island Part Two
“WE ARE STREETLIGHT MANIFESTO AND THAT’S THE SHOW. GOODNIGHT!”

Merging Worlds: Merging Worlds: the good people of the Royal Bank of Scotland, The China-Britain Business Council, and the Lancaster China Management Centre posing for the creation of a global economy that may one day unite the varying definitions of love in the world
My Love is My Political Affiliation

The narrator says that in Chinese the words “home” and “family” mean the same thing, but western culture makes an acute differentiation of the two: the word “home” has a literal definition but as a concept it’s completely opened to subjective interpretation and can be present in multiple contexts; the nature of the word “family” endures in the western cannon much the same way, leaving blood boundaries to explore a broader freer and looser definition of human relationships.
A language is much more than a tool of verbal expression: a language gives you the words to define and explain your world. I can’t be sure but I think that’s how we develop our sense of culture as a children: the elementary school teachers ask you to hold your hands up to your heart and recite the pledge of allegiance, you ask them what the words “freedom,” “republic,” “united” and “under god” mean and they tell you to the best of their ability, indoctrinating you into the united states political culture. But as it’s been said before, words are inefficient tools; many times empty, for the honest expression of human emotions because our mental vocabularies limit our thought process because we feel a human need to put definitions to the world we know.

Roman Holiday: People just happen to fall in Love here, at least in the picture shows.
Roman Holiday

“Actually he was unable to contend with any sort of reality, and this was his means of protecting himself.”
“Whom I knew.”

There’s not much to say that has already been said and quoted. Shirley Hazzard loves Italy, makes it a character of antiquity and seduction, a carnival atmosphere to extend our unreality and take us farther into the charming deceit of our own investigations and muddle our perceptions of definitions and destinations.

There’s something to be said for trying, even if there’s mutual premonition that nothing’s coming and the results will be the status quo. Sickness and death overtakes the most beautiful parts of us and our life eventually, like a faded fresco or the marble ruins of an ancient empire. Maybe that is the appeal of Italy—warm climate, crumbling temples, dangerous carnivals, a chance to step on top of it all. And view all parts of the machine at once. It seems like a place where generations and civilizations have been lost to time, not to mention the fate of some young couple, who resemble some other young couple, who fell to the charm like plague.

It’s a sickness the human heart’s in love with. Disregard individual failings and time. I don’t think anybody’s safe from Italy, or that anybody wants to be. In our minds we are tempering hope and reality on the evening of our roman holidays.

Scene from "Eyes Wide Shut": A man drawn by his need to return, despite the looming consequences, to a similarly scary sadomasochistic experience. This one's more classy though, and it stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Also, directed by Kubrick.
Why Return?
There were warning signs, certainly, that should have been taken into account: furtive glances at the dinner table, the unnecessary hurry and urgency in the voices of the host and hostess, the improper persistence in their invitations, and most telling, an actual portrait of Colin on the dresser. Robert and Caroline obviously had a hidden agenda that they blatantly refused to divulge—the authors himself contests that Mary and Colin, though perhaps not conscious of the danger, had enough good sense and caution to feel fear and uneasiness. Why, then did they return?
There are many explanations, and explanations for those explanations, and the answer overlaps between all those layers of reason and lapses into the realm of human emotion. It could have been to save Caroline. It may be true that step by step they could have found themselves back at the house and unconsciously arrived, but if we are to believe anything in Freudian psychology in terms of how its understood in the pop culture cannon, such a trip cannot be entirely unexpected. Some places scar the memory, put changes into affect whose origins we cannot understand unless we see the context of the bigger picture. People need change, and then people need closure. Why the sudden burst of affection in the marriage? What link does it have to Robert and his belongings? What changed?

Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights: It's all about the manner of the process.

Make-up, lipstick, hair dye, eye shadow--an androgenus body infected with cholera, dead in the sultry streets of a deliciously crumbling western ruin where the intracitly beautiful scenes are marred by the jarringly ugly reality. This is are protaganist, a far cry from the respected Prussian author whose notions of dignity were traded for dreams of promiscuous opulance and pagan fair. What caused such a sudden and drastic transformation?No one can say for sure. In Travel Fictions it often seems that many of our main characters waltz on the edge of an undefined void with invisible boundaries, and a taste of the black emptiness spreads in their souls like wet ink. The protaganst of Death in Venice delves into this ammoral well, and his physical surroundings play an intimate part in shaping and mirroring the journey.

Boy Dancing Around a Fire by Pastor Shelly: Taken by a missionary on his trip to Isreal. Ice from fire, civilizaton from ice, but the sillouete against the fire is a much more permanent fixture.

There must always be a father…

King of the jungle, king with conviction--solution to jaded faith and mental dispairity…he who can save America from the American’s?(.)

To protect what is sacred…

The inventor Allie Fox is smart enough to drop out of Harvard, raise his kids away from all those experiences he considers to be manifestations of society’s corruptions. But independence eludes him on the mainland. Something wrong with everything. The only way in is out. Honduras. Yes. Honduras.

He keeps pushing the family, keeps testing the boy: stand alone on harsh rocks in the cold ocean; climb until your greased hands nearly fault you and betray you to the tossing ocean. “Who is that man who is my father?” A disinterested shade, not even looking and always occupied. His own mind has visions of bronze in rain struggling with his comrades to hoist the colors above the Japanese isles, see’s reflections in stone angels carrying fallen soldiers--he carries crosses across the sea.

Is he measuring up to them, or do they measure up to he?

Brando: Kurtz being anointed in the DarkPowerful words. Reading them is hearing them whispered to your ear in a dying breath that sweats ferociously between gasps, the blood draining away and leaving you cold and alone in the dark.
I was ten when I saw Apocalypse Now Redux on Bravo. I wasn’t supposed to watch it and probably for good reason. I talked with my dad about it and he said it was based, in part, on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” I looked up the book but haven’t read it until this point. I thoroughly enjoyed it—The generally murky atmosphere presented in great detail allows the reader to question the creeping darkness while safe with Marlow, Conrad’s light.
I remember the last talk right before Kurtz’s death, when Brando’s face keeps going in and out of the dark reasoning that’s consumed his head all above the surface, giving greater precedence to the voice and its tale of strength above everything; today I read of Kurtz the trader, the voice sounding off promises to the intended and the hallow echoes raising concerns over ivory and civilization, haunted by the presence of its very existence: “Dad, what does he mean by ‘the horror, the horror?”’

Dark Side of the Moon: "Money..." (so i get like an A, right?)

“It might not be so easy to penetrate the true inner workings of other individuals or societies. What is taken to be real might, in fact, be a show that is based on the structure of reality (McCannell 593).”

Introduction

The Via Appia was constructed in 312 BC to connect the small budding republic to the port of Brundisi. Throughout the ages more roads were constructed until one day, when all of Europe and parts of Africa were connected by empire, a massive highway system with the central city as the epicenter allowed armies and merchants to travel with equal ease.
Roman ideas spread along these roads. The Roman empire of thought—much like the empire in its physical sense—was restricted by the material development of its boundaries, where the cultural pillars of honor, duty, strength, civility, and the grandness of society met with the savage ideals of uncivilized people. The pervading modern empire of thought—capitalism-- is bound in much the same material way, though its reach has penetrated places far beyond the realm of the Roman imagination. As a world we are forced to subscribe to a system of labels inherited from the roman western tradition, with very simple criteria containing no specific moral component: we are either of the rich or civilized (patrician) or the poor savages (plebian).

On the Road: All that noise, all that profanity locked in one quiet mind in a tiny silent room, thoroughly engaged and unbeatable for the moment. "A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."
I haven’t read On The Road to the point where I fell comfortable talking themes and discussing the intricacies of characters’ personalities and what makes them tick and how that means one thing or another. In fact I might repost this if I don’t get to lazy. There’s a lot to say about a book that defined a generation, even if it doesn’t mention much explicitly. I will have to read it again, and travel all the roads to all the random unfathomable places searching for whatever they didn’t find. Hopefully not in this terrible mock-Kerouac prose that I’m writing in because I can’t get The Road out of my head. For that I apologize. No one should try to impersonate this man.

French Postar: French Tourism Poster“The Sheltering Sky”—why did Paul Bowles call his piece this?
A title can have more than one meaning; it can suggest an idea to the reader, or ask its welcomed guest a question whose answer may reveal itself in the pages that follow; sometimes the avenue of query branches off into separate discourses—in the end, the reader determines his own coarse, how far he will travel, and when he is satisfied.
Characters have no such power of will that can contest with the pen of the authors—their journey is his to dictate, their actions fated by his choice and moral code. The Sun Also Rises saw figurative representations of post-war disillusionment retrace their humanity back to its most primitive roots in an attempt to discover the rules and purpose of modern life; the blooming of the American age in the resumption of the modern era finds expatriates, emboldened by the new world order, delving farther into the empty spaces of the map to solve personal problems. Port needs a definition to give his life meaning. Kit needs a reason to believe that there’s something worth sticking around for, something to replace that ominous dread which hangs over her sense and messages her in omens. As a couple they need to sort out if what they have left is love or a passport. Tunner just needs something to do.