I've got nothing.

I haven't been blogging lately because I haven't had anything fun or interesting to write about. For the past couple of months, I've mostly been moping about my job and consoling myself with television and candy. It's bad enough that Ed has to put up with my constant whining about how boring my job is and how worthless it makes me feel. I don't think there's any reason to inflict it on the rest of the world.

However. Steps are being taken. I'm working on becoming more fun and interesting, but it's a process. I plan to have some thoughts that are worth writing down in the near to near-ish future.

I would like to recommend a fun thing!

Ed and I have frequently discussed the possibility of going to Burning Man, which I find really appealing in theory, but not so much once I consider the logistics and expense and dirt and wind and lack of plumbing. Burning Man seems so interesting and also so uncomfortable, I can't determine whether it would be a thing that is fun or a thing that is not fun.
On Wednesday night Ed and I went to see How to Survive the Apocalypse: A Burning Opera, which was very interesting and not at all uncomfortable, and so, so, so fun. It's a musical about Burning Man, so of course it's crazy and absurd and ridiculous. But it's also executed surprisingly well. It could easily devolve into a mess, but it doesn't, which is awesome and impressive. Plus it's in Teatro ZinZanni's antique Belgian cabaret tent, which is one of the most magical settings I have ever experienced. Out of a group of six people, five of us have never been to Burning Man. It didn't take long for us to be seduced by the performance. By intermission, we were planning our costumes. Since Wednesday night, I have managed to convince myself that I can handle the logistics and expense and dirt and wind and, most importantly, the lack of plumbing.

If you are in San Francisco and you enjoy things that are fun or cool or interesting, you should definitely go see A Burning Opera. As of right this second, there are tickets available for the last two performances, on Monday, October 19 and Tuesday, October 20. But since they have been selling out pretty quickly, maybe they will keep extending the run. And there are plans to take the show on the road, starting in Los Angeles, so if don't live in San Francisco you may still have a chance to see this show, which, have I mentioned, is really fun?

I changed my mind.

I tried so hard to convince myself that The Hills could still be magical, but it just isn't anymore. If the protagonist and narrator of the show can't even bother to pretend to care about anything that happens, neither can I. I'll still watch, but I'm not going to write about The Hills anymore.

And I'm never, ever going to write about The City because it's terrible.

The Hills, post-Lauren.

After much contemplation, I have decided to continue to watch The Hills, post-Lauren, although I feel certain that without Lauren as the centerpiece, The Hills will lose those fleeting, poignant moments of truth and poetry and genuine emotion that I so enjoyed.

Obviously, the world of The Hills has always existed within its own strange, artificial bubble, but Lauren's uncalculated authenticity set a tone that allowed the occasional genuine moment to occur. Lauren was the anchor that tethered the show to reality, the mutual friend or frenemy who provided the plausible, if tenuous, ties that bound the rest of the cast to one another. Now that Kristin has stepped in to take over as narrator, the show must inevitably twist and warp into an entirely new shape. I feel no affection toward Kristin, but I do find it serendipitous that she and Lauren happen to be perfect foils for one another. Lauren, the perpetual victim, took everything personally, and insisted, "The show is not fake and this is really my life." Kristin, "the bitch," says, "I pretty much do anything they have me do because I don't care. I mean, we're filming a TV show. Let's make it interesting. Let's have a good time with it."

Based on last night's season premiere, I think there's a palpable sense of relief to be rid of Lauren, although it is obscured by the more readily apparent apprehension and resentment toward the newly appointed narrator. As far as I can tell, the cast prefers not to be tethered to reality, and without Lauren, The Hills is free to float up and away, into a universe that's entirely free of substance or meaning or consequences. Now they can all collude to create as much drama as possible, without being hampered by any lingering concerns about cruelty or embarrassment or shattered relationships.

I think that The Hills, post-Lauren, still has the potential to be interesting, but it will be interesting in an entirely different way. The poetic banality will be replaced by surrealism, as the various cast members attempt to define this brave new world of pure artifice.

Audrina, Lo, and Stephanie are striving to create some form out of the nothingness by establishing the easy camaraderie of camp friends. At camp, you leave behind your real life and your real friends and, if you so choose, your real self. You make camp friends, who are different and separate from your regular friends. Camp friendships exist within an imposed, confined environment. Within that environment they may be imbued with meaning and power, but they tend not to translate well once removed from their original context. Audrina, Lo, and Stephanie are friends because it's more fun and convenient to be friends with one's bunkmates. Heidi is also free to transition into their klatch, now that Lauren is out of the way. But Kristin hasn't agreed to this unspoken arrangement. Just because she's moving into Lauren's old bunk doesn't mean she's ready to accept these girls as automatic friends.

Kristin, like most people who appear on reality television, isn't here to make friends. Her job is to be the bitch, and she has every intention of earning that paycheck. This attitude sets an entirely new tone for the show, highlighting its seams and its self-enclosed nature. She has two predetermined love interests to choose from: Brody, her ex-boyfriend, or Justin Bobby. (Of course, she could make a play for Spencer, but if she possessed that level of commitment to drama, she'd probably be a real actress by now.) Flitting from one to the other and back again is the most logical choice from her perspective, that of a confident, flirty actress who has been hired to instigate drama. It violates the girl code espoused by her new bunkmates, but at this point, Kristin has no incentive to commit herself to these girls or their code.

We'll see how it goes.

Books!!!

All I want to do is read. I want to quit my job so I can stay home and read all day. I wish that, as a (free) alternative to grad school, I could just move to some kind of hybrid of a library and a monastery. I'd take a vow of silence and dedicate myself to nothing but reading for one or two years. Lately, I am so overwhelmed with the desire to read everything all at once, I am finding it impossible to focus on one thing at a time.

I started reading a series of lectures on character archetypes. (Kindly provided to me by Scott, of Go Into The Story.) But thinking about character archetypes reminded me that I had been meaning to read The Portable Jung, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of months at that point. So I decided to read The Portable Jung before I finished reading Scott's lectures. But it's taking me forever because I keep getting lost in my own thoughts while I'm trying to read. So I decided to take a break from that and read The Journeybook instead. Since The Journeybook is a collection of fairly short essays and interviews, I managed to get through it without getting sidetracked. And then, before I could get back into The Portable Jung, I started reading "The Holy Grail of the Unconscious," from this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine. But for several days I was unable to get past the first couple of pages, because I kept getting the sense that I shouldn't read it until I was able to really give it my full attention. Last night I finally got a chance to finish reading the article and now, of course, I am frantic to read the Red Book. But it won't be available until December 4th and I probably won't actually get my hands on it until Christmas, so in the meantime I have renewed motivation to finish The Portable Jung.

Anyway, BOOKS, you know? This article about the Red Book sent my mind reeling in a hundred directions, but one thing I keep thinking about is how much I love books as physical objects. I am not completely opposed to the idea of e-readers, by which I mean, they're fine for other people but I don't have any interest in owning a Kindle or a Sony Reader. Nathan Bransford - Literary Agent blogged very enticingly about reading on his iPhone, which only intensified my iPhone lust. But I can't justify the monthly cost of an iPhone now or anytime in the foreseeable future, and even if I did get one at some point, I would definitely still buy a lot of paper books. Because I just love books. I love buying books and I love holding books and I love looking at them on my shelf. I love the way they smell. I have seen the Book of Kells at Trinity College in Dublin on five different occasions, and I'd gladly go see it again if I had the opportunity. The Red Book is going to be on display at the Rubin Museum of Art from October through January, which is so coincidentally perfect because Ed and I were already planning to go to the Rubin when we're home for Christmas, to see an exhibition of mandalas. Until a few days ago I had never even heard of this book but now I am beyond excited to go see it in person and then read my own copy immediately afterward.

To conclude this gushy, unfocused, maybe slightly insane blog post, here are some of my favorite books. Not my favorite literary works, but the books that I count among my most treasured possessions.

Aldous Huxley says...

"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large­­­­­— this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual."

Crazy shit.

In the past couple of months, nearly one hundred people have ended up at my blog after Googling some variation of the phrase "crazy shit." I find this kind of hilarious. What are these people expecting to find? Is my post about Salvia divinorum satisfying their yearning for some crazy shit? Apparently there is a CrazyShit.com, which hosts mostly pornographic video clips, as well as other video clips which, based on a glance at the thumbnail screenshots, seem gross and disturbing to me.

But if you are looking for some crazy shit that is neither pornographic nor gross and disturbing, I guess I can make a few suggestions.

Lately I have been reading The Portable Jung. I haven't been reading it very quickly, because every time I encounter a new concept, I get all excited and inspired and distracted and overwhelmed with ideas of my own, and I have to make a concerted effort to drag my attention back to the text. So far it seems like a pretty good introduction to Jungian psychology. I would say that it qualifies as crazy shit.

I would also recommend Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism to any casual reader looking for some crazy shit. Of all the books that I have read recently about psychedelic shamanism, I would say that this one is the breeziest and most entertaining.

Last month, Ed and I went to the San Francisco launch of The Journeybook, which is an exploration of consciousness, spirituality, and psychedelic culture through essays, interviews, and artwork. So far I have only flipped through it briefly, but I am certain that it contains a plenitude of crazy shit.

The other unread book lingering on my bookshelf is The Phenomenon of Man. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and Jesuit priest, wrote it in the 1930s, but the Roman Catholic Church prohibited its publication until his death in 1955. Teilhard's ideas about the evolution of consciousness sound totally crazy and also very appealing and exciting.

If you don't want a whole book's worth of crazy shit, you might be interested in the essays at Reality Sandwich. Some of them are a little too crazy, even for me.

Or, if you want some cinematic crazy shit, Ed and I have been getting into Hayao Miyazaki lately. We actually haven't seen Ponyo yet. But Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Kiki's Delivery Service, Howl's Moving Castle, and Laputa: Castle in the Sky are all very crazy and trippy and wonderful.

I think that's pretty much all the crazy shit I have to offer at the moment. If that wasn't what you were looking for...too bad.