我不知道你发生了什么事，跑来跑去中国所有酒店。

我不知道你发生了什么事，跑来跑去中国所有酒店。

I'm editing some cinéma vérité piece. I could not help but notice that my Chinese friends spoke better English than the average person on the show. And, these were people whom I randomly met who spoke English both due to previous education and, to me (and respectfully, at best), to speak to me in English, me being from that location. Abroad, people will attempt to speak your entire language when they are your friends, but here, the average person can't seem to conjugate verbs properly if they want to co-opt a cultural identity from certain regions. I've been tutoring native English speakers who are 2nd generation; and, it's meaningful to tell them what a "cat" or a "dog" is in this language. It's unfathomable when native speakers can't string together two sentences; it reflects a disrespect of their educators. 

So, I was thinking about my friend... and this blog and the nature of these posts. Not too long ago, I interviewed for a position. In a historic building in Detroit, I showed this blog as an example of my previous design. The first or second word that comes up is "love poem," which was a Chinese poem about a type of exchange that translates across nations and languages as utterly devoid of emotion. Yet, this young lawyer was absolutely insistent that he had discovered some sort of Live Journal of mine, or embarrassing skeleton in a remote fixture. He seemed to think that displaying this site as an indication of my web design, particularly in lieu of the word "love," was embarrassing and vaguely political. 

Well, I can't be intentionally political or apolitically predetermined. I sort of sat back this in an orthopedic chair after volleying questions, and was, like, "Well, I know it's out there." It's, meaning not the X-Files, or some potentially career-busting move at my own bequest, but rather this website. My second highest level of concentration in a degree-oriented program (which I completed) was Creative Writing, there being no available publishers, nor publishers who don't want to box my ears in relation to pithy comments I may have generated as a, sort of, static literary device completely incapable of unleashing itself upon the world -- I do not assure you that I am not a professional -- but, yes, the concept of my website being some type of personal iniquity was comprehensibility foreign to me. I have carefully linked all my sources, and nothing about poetry or owning a website shames me. 

lou reed

Lou Reed passed away recently. I have no interest in being dyslogistic. I saw him once at the Highline Ballroom, tickets were over $150. He played songs off his most recent release. A girl outside the concert was trying to buy tickets off the crowd, walking down the dark alley, and murmuring, "I have $400." I think he chastised the crowd a little for talking when he wanted to begin playing, like a teacher trying to commence class with their own oration. He played "Power of the Heart"; and, it was esse. 

I owe a lot of my personal style to him: jean jackets, denim, lyricism, and an appreciation for identity as a fluid entity. I used to walk around listening to Lou Reed on a gray Zune when I was a student in New York, and when I had friends in my rooms in the co-ops in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You could just drink amaretto, sit in arm chairs in the attic, talk, and listen to Lou Reed during the winter.  

There was something about Lou Reed's gravitas and song composition that appealed to me immensely, and beyond his quantification into Indie films. His best narratives are about New York street scenes, like "Dirty Blvd.," or some of the tracks where he talks about women (who could be Queens) and their pithy remarks ("Lisa Says," "Sweet Jane," etc.). He establishes his oral history and demiurge in song, writing about where he was when JFK was shot (the '60s equivalent of where you were when 9/11 happened). 

One of Lou Reed's acquaintances from his Warhol factory days compared him to Iggy Pop and said that Iggy Pop was aware of the trendy books, but it was Lou Reed who was an avid reader. The kind of topic might be nothing more than stale gossip from my parents' generation, a social milieu that ascribed homosexuality to a disease treatable with shock therapy (as Lou Reed was said to have been an analysand at the bequest of his parents), but his ballads attest to his engagement with literature. I wish I would have taken out my iPhone 3GS (my recording device of choice during undergraduate days) and gotten an interview. But, I had no gambit, no paper backing me, and no interest in hassling Lou Reed.