Lou

Sincerely,

I received a package today, mailed to me by my eighth grade teacher Mrs. Strand. (Who is as cool now as we all remember her.)

It’s my Journey Book, a thick class journal of all the year’s assignments, and one of the first pages is this letter everyone had written to themselves at the beginning of the first semester.

I’m framing a copy of this letter above my desk.

John Adams, I Love You

I’ve been a John Adams fan since high school, so of course I snagged a couple of good seats for his latest opera, Doctor Atomic.

It’ll be my first opera, so I’m a little anxious. I’ve heard it’s slow from veteran opera-goers, but my fingers are crossed for John Adam’s brilliant genius. He’s been repeatedly classified as a minimalist composer, but there is definitely a very strong vein of American Pop in even his densest, most repetitive compositions. I can’t stomach Steven Reich or even Brian Eno (I think I just need time, I swear), but works like Hallelujah Junction and Road Movies are as plainly accessible and irresistible as, say, Daft Punk.

The first I had heard of John Adams was his Shaker Loops, in Taipei of all places. A very soft-spoken DJ was reading poetry over the piece on a local radio station at three in the morning. I frantically found the station’s number online and called in to speak with him about the music. Then, after a long and frustrating series of attempts to search for the mispronounced name of John Adams’ piece, I found it—Shaker Loops, a half-hour long set composed for seven strings: three violins, one viola, two celli, and one contrabass. This work is strikingly beautiful because it sounds exactly as Adams had intended it to—a meticulous replication of moving water.

Anyway, not only does John Adams share the same name as a United States president (how cool is that) but the poster for the opera is also breath-takingly gorgeous. I’ve been caught on many occasions trying to peel one off the wall. If anyone knows of an available single one or set, please contact me immediately.

Tankut’s Mountains

I first met Tankut Can in sixth grade, when I had started attending Collins Elementary. Since then we’ve gotten close and drifted apart repeatedly. Tank was the star pitcher of our high school’s baseball team, and is now an avid handball player. He just completed his physics major at UC Berkeley. Though we’re flung far apart, I was still able to get his permission to post this essay he had written during sophomore year of high school. Of all of my friends’ writing, this is one of my most favorite.

When the World just doesn’t feel comfortable…

Existence begins with a little itty-bitty dot. A One-dimensional universe explodes and gives us multi-dimensions. This universe that has spawned our human race, that has let us evolve into such a dubiously superior species, has also forgotten some things. It has forgotten to give us each lots of money. The universe, in all its power and might, forgot to give us each cable television and a really nice car. While it was at it, it should have assigned every person a card that specifies who their true love is, so we could have been pimply and in love. And most important of these trivialities—one thing the universe forgot in its random evolutionary scheme, that goes deeper than materialistic wet dreams, is to give us a way to shatter mountains without shattering ourselves.

Whenever I want to go somewhere like Utah, the Sierra Nevada Mountains are there. When I want to visit new places, especially when they’re high altitude, I’m forced to overcome miles and miles of mountains. Mankind before me has made it somewhat easier to scale these steep hills by paving cement roads, but that only helps so much.

Driving through the range brings one to consider all that is majestic and wonderful about nature, all that is powerful and superior; and then it makes one feel how one possesses none of these character traits: that one isn’t majestic and wonderful, powerful or superior. One realizes, while admiring nature, that one is infinitely inferior to nature. As one’s car climbs these immense hills, one’s ego and self-esteem plummet into the deepest depths of earth. When one psychologically experiences this, one wishes to physically emulate the sentiment, and hide somewhere safe. Such a terrible obstacle it is to pass a mountain.

Thus, it seems only fair that evolution should have by now provided the superior human species with a means to bring these mountains down to size. Possibly a means to make these large pieces of rock many, many smaller pieces of rocks, each the size of maybe one’s fist. If this were accomplished, nobody would feel intimidated and belittled by foreign mountains: they would be nothing more than small little rocks that anyone could pick up and throw far away.

As it stands, the only real way we can reduce the immensity of these sentries of stone is by TNT, but this also can only do so much. Even if arbitrary mountain attacks were legal, an occasional explosion here or there on a mountainside would hardly affect the monster, let alone reduce it to a pile of rubble; so this method is essentially ineffectual.

Mountains are the real menace in society; and letting the human species randomly evolve to have no power or control over these massive monuments is evolution’s major flaw. It is power I demand now from the universe. I call forth to evolution, and the law of probability, to give me, in maybe a million years or so, the power, once and for all, to level these terribly oppressive mountains that make me feel so diminished.

Goodbye, Hello, Louise

Doesn’t Hello, Louise look a little different?

The new site is engineered to accommodate more graphic content. Posts that contain only a single image now span the width of the site when they are at the top. I’ve also ported the site to a new server. It’s now powered by Expression Engine and hosted on MediaTemple. You’ll see that posts are sorted by tags instead of categories.

If you’re wondering about all the writing on the old site, don’t fret. I will make a PDF of that outdated, embarrassing stuff available on here in the near future.