something illusory

i am slowly, tentatively coming to terms with the fact that i am no longer an atheist. not a theist by any stretch of the imagination, no, but now firmly agnostic - finally acknowledging that i know absolutely nothing anymore. i realised some time ago that while i used to deride the way that religious people would find solace in believing that something else was out there, i was, in a funny way, comforted in my certainty that there was no grand mystery behind everything to decipher. i can't really explain why i have changed my mind so drastically over a fairly long period of time, but somehow i have. and while i'm not willing to concede the existence of, for lack of a better term, 'something' (and definitely not a specific, if any, deity), i just can't say that i believe in nothing anymore.

hello to never

it's just as well i had already committed to a life of sin before i read the chronicles of narnia, otherwise that beautiful writing would have converted me. example, the last paragraph of the last narnia book, after it was revealed to the children that they had been killed in a train wreck as they ascend into aslan's country -

"and, for this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. but, for them, it was only the beginning of the real story. all their life in this world and all their adventures in narnia had only been the cover, and the title page: now at last they were beginning chapter one of the great story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

a deeply superficial person

i don't understand when people say that andy warhol was a hack, that his work was meaningless. that's the idea, i thought. confronting the world with the lack of meaning, the purposelessness inherent in life itself, just its utter emptiness. you can look into marilyn's eyes but her gaze is unfocused and vague, a sort of thousand yard stare that goes on forever into complete nothingness. it's just the surface laid bare with nothing underneath. because that's what life is, isn't it? i think it's beautiful.

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"if you want to know all about andy warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there i am. there's nothing behind it."

- andy warhol

the stranger

"nothing, nothing mattered, and i knew why. so did he. throughout the whole absurd life i’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones i was living. what did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his god or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? everybody was privileged. there were only privileged people. the others would all be condemned one day. and he would be condemned, too.”

the stranger, albert camus

do you ever get the feeling while reading something, when all of a sudden you realise that something wonderful is happening, and with every word your life is changing? because i just got that.

deus ex machina

i saw this movie but i'm not sure if i like it

but every 13 year old girl and her myspace loves it

i think it was a fabulous mindfuck but my death-fear came back after watching it.

this death-fear is becoming very persistent and worrying, i hope i don't have clinical anxiety or something.

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i don't think i like benson & hedges as much as kents

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want to see dr. strangelove + a million gazillion other things

eg: american beauty

requiem for a dream

dazed and confused

mulholland dr.

candy

lost in translation

the science of sleep

less than zero (once i finish the book)
coffee and cigarettes

fight club (i STILL haven't seen it)

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i don't know how to write a blog that isn't self indulgent
because i am self indulgent

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can't stop listening to i wanna be your dog!

i think it might be the sexiest song i've listened to.

in a really weird way.

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tu veux ou tu veux pas

"yesterday's committee,

sticks, but a broken drum,

midnight in the city,

flutes in a vacuum,

shut lips, sleeping faces,

every stopped machine,

the dumb and littered places

where crowds have been: ...

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all silences rejoice,

weep (loudly or low),

speak - but with the voice

of whom, i do not know.

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absence, say, of susan's,

absence of egeria's

arms and respective bosoms,

lips and, ah, posteriors,

slowly form a presence;

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whose? and, i ask, of what

so absurd an essence,

that something, which is not,

nevertheless should populate

empty night more solidly

than that with which we copulate,

why should it seem so squalidly?"

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text from brave new world by aldous huxley

strawberry fields, nothing is real

saw the truman show today, it was excellent. normally i'm a sucker for anything existentialist but this was definitely a stand-out. it makes you think ~ not just "am i the unwitting star in an elaborate reality tv show ?" but of the wider implications.

we accept the reality of the world with which we are presented and thus we are all prisoners. we become attached to it ~ "ignorance is bliss". what makes this movie so thought-provoking is that it tells the story of the disillusionment of a man who crosses from one reality to another, which he comes to by himself.

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sometimes we, too, feel trapped in a familial and social world to which we try to conform but can't completely identify with. the world that we create for ourselves and others create for us ~ we can change it whenever we are ready.