On making it, says Ira Glass

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” - 


Ira Glass

The Cult of Dying Adonis

beauty like Adonis, bearing
nothing but a simple frown
born from foam, he left to roam
and in her arms he drowned

searching for his Venus,
knocking down pitted castles of sand
left him nothing but the nectar's blood
from Nahr Ibrahim, to his drummer hand

Medea dips down to drag him
tosses him towards the ocean's waves
Persephone's Eleusinian mystery teaches
him naughty ways to behave

never if he followed a fresher trail of flowers
could he be more fire-and-ice
from Cythera to the Cypriot, as she danced her way about
Venus calmed his solemn cries

forgetting where he came from
the fruitful belly of the ocean's crest
he fell to Sirens calling on his lonely
crashed and burned his boat just like the rest

The Only People For Me

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

-Jack Kerouac

Wolves With Guns

I have waited for you day and night

You find a way to creep around my sight

You fill the outer edges of my retina

Is it a dark ring or is it full of light?

I can't tell between what's wrong or right

Leave me in trouble now, I will be alright

I am waiting for the wolves to yell

to take the prisoner's will with my own might,

I am waiting for the wolves to yell

To kill the queen and have a story to tell

Broken windows, just to get to you

I am running, I am hiding from the truth

You won't touch me, you won't kiss me anymore

Who is gonna love me when I'm lying dead on the floor?

I am only one of many queens

Behind every throne is a treachery

I am only one of many kinds

Of foolish lovers that will steal and taint your mind

When in the dark, there is no shame

Another hope lost with every story gained

When losing sparks, no one's to blame

Another love lost with every story gained

The others think I'm crazy, they think I'm having fun

They don't see past the fire, that I'm not the only one

I sold myself to freedom, and now I'm done

No one is gonna love me with my head stuck to my gun

i don't want to be in love, i wan't to be in sadness

i don't want to be in love
i want to be in sadness
an only space that has no place
surrounded by my madness

how will you feel when i touch?
my weary eyes that stole your badness
let me discover you, sullen boy
so that i may hide in you my crassness

not the brilliance of a thousand slivers

not the brilliance of a thousand slivers
of silver and gold
of bright things and bold,
not the last rose
in it's loneliest pose,
with its bittersweet poise,
making its covetous noise
could take my eyes off of you.  

The Discourse of Power & The Fabricated Self

(A short clip of a longer essay by Christina Issa)


Based on the ideas presented by Foucault in his book "Disciplinary Power," it can be argued that our identities are highly fabricated products of an invisible grid of power-relations, which constitutes the mechanism through which disciplinary power operates. In the greater sense, this is the basis for our inescapable arrest to which Kafka so subtly alludes in "The Trial." As our lives and identities are threaded through this lattice of power-relations, we perpetually reinforce ourselves as effects of power. We are systematically bound to a machine, which we ourselves fabricate and inadvertently attach ourselves to. We do this through, among many other things, awareness and ‘self-consciousness." Ergo, ‘The Self’ is a function of disciplinary power and we are just effects of this power. 


How do we break this? We cannot. It is impossible. For as long as the techniques of disciplinary power continue operating through our conscious and even unconscious awareness - through our struggle to assert and re-assert our identities, through our struggle to give meaning and definition to the world, through institutional operations and their assertion of power over the people pressed into the service and ‘improvement’ of the many - no one can avoid the grasp of power, and no one will ever be freed from the grasp of power. In this way ‘The Self’ will never cease being an endless subject of power perpetually being organized, examined, and observed. Moreover, as the individual reacts to these techniques of disciplinary power ‘The Self’ will never own itself and be its own justification; (To Nietzsche's disappointment...) it will only be owned, as a function of another operation. 


Among other things, this reality is why revolution is hopeless. This is why rebellion is just as absurd as the dictatorship in which it seeks to overthrow. As one attempts to reverse the dominant discourse they merely re-establishes another discourse under which he will be bound and existentially contingent. As one redefines, they merely re-subject. The most he can do is hope to have more power than others, so that he may enjoy the power of domination more and experience the effect of subjection less. 


Despite the transference of more power into the individual’s hands, we will always remain caught in the webbing of power-relations. Accordingly, our identity will always remain a figment of our imagination, evading us more and more, escaping us quicker as we tighten our grasp on it. Identity is hugely fabricated in this way, and exists as just an afterthought; in the present we remain to be effects of power.

when neurons are fleeting, Neruda never fails me.

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973)

coin-slot eyes

Coin-slot eyes steal glances in the still of dawn,
sometimes tender, sometimes bare.
We sleep with windows wide open.
Light falling on freckles and you trace my arms, my neck, my back.
Waking takes eternity, if ever we are not in dreams.
Rolling skin to skin feels brand new every time, like the baby’s first cry at the first chance.
And your baby-face profile can be drawn with charcoals of reds and blue - somehow I forget too much, to say, that I love everything about you.
Waiting for a new moment, or just the same one again. Waiting brings me alive when it’s your thoughts I’m waiting in.
Waiting for the right second to steal looks or smiles.
Saving them for when your far away, many lonely miles.

throbbing loud and hard with fervor

Throbbing loud and hard with fervor
making risky ripples inside
Do we at once, turn and walk away
or stay and take the ride?
A risky endeavor
that cannot be measured
but in leaps and bounds of selfless action
feelings are crisp
like edges of aged leaves
poking through our feet, providing traction
certainly indescribable,
for lack of better or worser words
which seeking for would be as fruitless as the sinners' tree
and as isolating as Kafka's absurd
Writing in colors without definition
in books without binding or edges
filling it with songs absent their rhymes
hanging it off hundred-story ledges
On the tide of tricky desire
burning up gems of blue and gold
bars and flakes and hearts that break
riding as brilliantly as the bejeweled we behold
Swimming steadily in our emotions
through endless lakes, we wail and swallow
loving from belly to thigh, from drunken eye to eye
inciting physical sensations, within we wallow
Grasping the electric while we are able
leaving behind the stable but useless words that restrain
rather we ride the current throbbing cable
since what we are together, is what love is to pain

truth-less reality

For his project in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier asked his head engineer “What is the truth really?” Then he drew two parallel lines, with a wavy line in between. “Truth is like a river,” he said, “it flows continuously, changing course, modifying itself, without ever touching either bank”.

Hafez on Selflessness

A Persian poet once said...

"Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
You owe Me.'

Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky"

(Hafez)

soul feels older

soul feels older
while heart feels young
i crave your breath
to fill my lungs

winds push forward
loves sink west
burning in the suns set
feels like our very best

laughing is so easy
when secrets are concealed
between apologies and flattery
only in haste ever revealed

like paper through the wind
truth flows through the wicked lyre
steady paths will light the flame
and words set them on fire

backs turned to light
a hardened steel glow
still we press on with might
lingering only in shadows

big hearts or bust

Why is it that having a big heart is what always gets me into the most trouble?

So counter-intuitive.

Dionysus & Apollo

complex minds rotting with love
how they struggle to stay above
cursing while the world is burning
an eternal agon filled with yearning

deep red ocean - minds run free
in this obscurity both remain to be
driven by the dark roaming around
sometimes lost and sometimes found

and reason seems incongruous with passion
they move violently in a gallant fashion
together afflicted with so much pain
the lover loves to dream in vain

sometimes sex
sometimes fornication
undercover masters of imitation
lovers test their limitation
by somersaults of the imagination

inescapable doubles are
lovers who love to dream
in vain while every kiss
bleeds death the same

Build, Break, Bloom: Some Very Unorganized Thoughts About Architecture

(Written weeks ago)

Contingency itself is the only condition of life and all things in existence pivot around a point of contingency. I am contingent. You are contingent. Life is contingent.

Time and space are the constants under which we manipulate our reality and define things. Our physical environment sits unassumingly as the culprit of Apollonian violence. Quite literally, architecture is the pinnacle of the Apollonian-Dionysian struggle. The violence is unbearable sometimes. Existing within a vacancy of meaning while warped by a Dionysian chaos, this time-space experiment remains defined by mathematical boundaries, points and lines. Mastery of it is elusive in the sense that ‘truths’ are only as figured out as we determine them to be. It is only through formal manipulation that we build upon contingencies and thus assign definition and form.

Architecture, as a formal act of construction, is the wildest form of creative destruction, as well as the most tangible expression of the Apollonian and Dionysian struggle. As you build you are systemically assaulting nature and assigning meaning to the inherently meaningless. In the process of building you are destroying all else. Physically you destroy and create while conceptually you are deconstructing the definition of what it means to be and to dwell at one point in time and space. By virtue of its process, the language of architecture is an attempt to control chaos and grant form to the formless.

stillness

still as you were
watching for moving lights from down below
waiting
exhaling
above our heads leaves hang low
reach up to touch the sky-ceiling
but not too far off the dirt ground
in a state of limbo
incredible peace is found
cradling you like the
w i d e o p e n a i r
wrapping arms around
holding you even after you're not there
feelings still tightly bound
still as you were
i'm still as I was
still as you keep changing
be still just because

all things exist only in passing

All things exist only in passing,
nothing is truly ever-lasting
the impermanence of life
moves with dangerous quickness
always open
shifty swiftness

and as soon as we think that we can control
the thunders from above begin to roar
reminding us that freedom is a folklore
and life is just what we do while we wait for more

every object in space dives into our eyes
moving at an uncontrollable pace
aimlessly through the skies
paints for us the tragedy that we all die trying
waiting, rushing, wishing, pushing
never knowing that while we are living
we are just dying

instead of making life from flames
the fire that rages as we pour out our hearts
we douse with lies to keep it tame
so that we do not fall apart

and withholding our very own swells of breath
we slash throbbing hearts that are the soul
doing so, still burning
to find answers that will make us whole

paper into ashes
dust from coal
the fire lay weeping
at our weary core

time

move too slow
move too quick
as we fall
time will tick

closer to you
further from me
from your eyes
I can see

sometimes how you're
stuck inside
all the time how you
desperately try

still as we float
falling upwards
to pass the time I write
in frozen words

tomorrow is not far
when i can write
in scribbles of motion
waiting just to cross that ocean

The beauty that is Baba.

March 01, 1957.

The day Souhail Khalil Issa was brought into the world. My Baba. My Daddy.

I got my middle name from him. I also got a lot of my good looks from him. My hands-on attitude and wild love for exploration. Digging through the dirt, building and assembling, seeing and fixing, it's all from my Baba. My unassuming curiosity that leads me to try new things, I know it's also from him. My technical mannerisms, and my even more technical mind. In a strange way, even the creativity somehow stems from this man of practicality and simplicity.

With the good always comes some bad, and I certainly get my fair share of imperfection from him. The temper is my Baba. The feisty attitude, that is my Baba. But even those imperfections are what make the good so good. I get from him my ability to let it all go, to move the soul onwards and upwards, towards better things.

That is the beauty that is my Baba.

He's taught me to become infused with all that is meaningful, beautiful, and valuable in the world - to have the courage to know when it has all run it's course and the strength to know how to let it all go.

He is gracious and kind. A man who even if he wanted, wouldn't know how to use the word "no". He would never turn his back on the people he loves and never refuses a single friend. Even a stranger on the side of the road, he will go above and beyond to help. He always greets the world with a smile so big, no matter what he's been through. He is a man with enough heart that if captured and let out to sea, could overflow the oceans from here to India.

My father is an amazing person. A beautiful human being inside and out. He has so much love to give to the world, and like me, he also doesn't always know what to do with that love. It is in his imperfections that he is one of the most incredible people I have ever known. Not only because he is my father, and to whom I owe my life. But he has the ability to live his life with strength and courage, never letting the ups and downs of the external world change how much love he is willing to give back.