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i've been in the house for the most part the last few days, filling my head with fiction. Battle Royale, V for Vendetta. Snatch. I'm more than halfway through The Things They Carried, after a few hours, and 3/4 through Geek Love. I'm surprised the pages have flown by as they have. I only hope they continue their flight when summer classes start tomorrow. Culture of the 60s and History of the Print. Hopefully they're as good in reality as they appear on the registrar.

[I've been getting up after most people on the east coast leave work for the day. I'm convinced my internal clock is still set to somewhere in the pacific, and always has. Maybe your body is always used to the place where it is born. I should be going to school in a place where jollyo is right now. I'm not really behind, just a day ahead. ]

Artists use lies to tell the truth.

It's not the norm for me to quote hollywood action flicks, but i was thinking about some things... something about artists and writers and fiction. I was staring at a book of Brazilian graffiti yesterday, wondering as i was leafing through the photos why the photos even existed. What is the point of reframing when all the world exists around us as we see it already? See it for yourself. But then I thought maybe, maybe we frame it again so we can see it with that much more clarity, removed from the location, the situation. Hindsight 20/20. Maybe we use the rule of thirds, the details of composition frozen to teach how to see. We all have our own natural way of capturing our surroundings, maybe seeing them beautifully, aesthetically pleasing is just a tool, to take with onto the streets and use again in reframing our vision until the world is only something spectacular. Maybe that's what artists do. Create a world of fiction, a separate sphere, on tripods and film, to show that our lives can look like this and do.

And then I was reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and the storyteller said this:

You can tell a war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, "Is it true?" and if the answer matters, you've got your answer.

For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

Is it true?
The answer matters.

You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen--and maybe it did, anything's possible--even then you know it can't be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man," and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead.

That's a true story that never happened.

It's not true, fiction and so much of the arts. Any story retold is a stretch from the truth, a shadow of what happened. Any painting made, story retold on film is nowhere near the truth but has been filtered through our minds, the artist and the audience. Zach had told me that in philosophy, the emotions are too erratic to be accounted for. I believe, she knows, he loves. They encompass a world that cannot be nailed down as solid truth.

So is truth a matter of fact or a matter of relevance? i think we pick the truth which suits us and our history best.











[I was staining the deck all afternoon and my arms and chest are currently "7480 Redwood"

I love this boy.]